How Our Radical Imagination Can Save Us From the Climate Crisis
In our late-stage capitalist world, there seems to be no alternative. The overton window is so small that even supposedly communist countries must allow for increasing private accumulation, and they must also play by the rules of the many markets of our world. A lot of the time, on an individual level, people think that this is all that is left, that humankind is sort of at the end of history itself. Even as the neoliberal system makes people miserable in their daily lives, assigning worth to profit driven activities, while devaluing human lives, human interaction, and public spaces, there’s the expectation that we must participate in the system to live. Thus, as Mark Fisher says, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
In the era of increasing climate change, the concept of practicality also pervaded when speaking of actions to address it. All too often, the economy and costs were brought up as deterrents, so that radical climate action could not take place. In a neoliberal world, only neoliberal responses were accepted as practical solutions to address this wide ranging and serious issue. Profits could not be affected for the most polluting industries of our world, or at all, causing half-assed solutions to be proposed, or outright denial of the phenomenon itself. Obviously, at one point gradual action would have been fine, but that should have been when James Hansen testified before congress on the severity of this issue. Now, however, radical and drastic action has to be taken to stave off the worst effects of warming, a fact that I’ve been harping on throughout the entirety of my career.
Because it seems that any action taken to address this issue is small, or not effective at all, a new problem has emerged that replaced the usual problem of climate denialism. This problem gets heightened by the fact that the natural disasters that are happening now are much larger than before, and are occurring closer together, and are taking an increasing amount of lives. Climate doomerism has become a much more common problem than climate denialism, causing people to think that it’s much too late to act to mitigate the issue. Thus, people who engaged in climate denialism before, are using the language of climate doomerism to stop any real action now. Unfortunately, now, they’re able to reach a wider audience with the language of doomerism.
I think people fall into the space of doomerism because they’re not able to imagine a better future. The collective imagination of what’s possible is stunted, sort of to speak, and that causes them to think this is all that the world can offer. They can’t imagine the end of our rigid institutions, can’t imagine a better world with better policies, so they fall into a cycle of despair and doom. But, I will like to mention, doomerism is the death of movements, and acting on climate change is a massively important task to undertake. That’s why it’s so important to imagine a better world, and to understand that world is possible. A radical imagination is needed to save us from the climate crisis, and to save us from this increasingly fascistic and authoritarian world.
Radical Imagination
Radical imagination, if we think about it in its simplest form, is the ability to imagine the world not as the way it is, but as the way it can, or should be. Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish, writing in the Journal of Radical Theory, note that approaching the imagination entails “what is,” “what was,” and that all leads to speculating on “what might be.” They mention how imagination speaks to the ability of creating something else, and above all, creating that something else together — which helps to bring about hope. Myriad movements of the past aspired to use the radical imagination as a collective tool, inspiring solidarity among movement members, and hoping to bring about change in the collective consciousness of the people. This type of change is important and necessary because, all too often, we can get stuck on the narratives that are a fixture of our society. The radical imagination, however, can help pave the way to change those narratives, inspiring a different set of beliefs, and a different set of possibilities.
It’s important to mention, however, that the radical imagination is not a singular thing, and even as I attempted to define it in this video for context, defining the radical imagination can be more harmful than helpful. Petra Rethmann notes how defining the radical imagination as a singular thing can be paralyzing, for we are fractionary people, living in different reality compartments, each that require its own politics. Rethmann notes that answering the question of “what is the radical imagination” is worthwhile when it leads to the listing of many possible options, and not when it leads to a single, grand strategy. Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish further note that the imagination, and the process of thinking what is possible, is highly dependent on where people are placed at the moment; for instance, people who are placed in situations that harm their bodies and lives have a vastly different relationship with imagining what is possible than people who are placed in situations where they don’t fear exploitation. They thus posit that the politics of the imagination cannot be a one-size fits all alternative to the present order; rather, it must be fluid, and transversely bridge imaginations “to create common imaginaries of the way the world might be.”
In terms of the climate crisis then, the radical imagination can be useful to imagine radically different worlds than the world that we have today. Of course, many groups of people will imagine those worlds differently, along with different ways to arrive there. That’s why imagining the future, in my opinion, should be a collective exercise, so that people can understand that this world is not all that there is, and do so together. Additionally, the practice of imagining the future together can pave the way for people to understand that catastrophe and apocalypse aren’t the only endpoints of the climate crisis. Instead, it can point to how futures of revolutionary cooperation between nature and people are possible, and in so doing, garner hope. It should be noted, however, that not everyone experiences hope the same way, and as mentioned before, people’s circumstances can often impair them from imagining better futures for their people. Thus, it’s important to constantly fight back against reactionary forces, forces that might imagine futures that are destructive, and built on the subjugation of vulnerable people. Fighting back against those people is also necessary so that spaces can be garnered for marginalized people, so that they can imagine different worlds that are truly liberatory.
Personally, I seek to use the radical imagination in the realm of stories and narratives. I choose to do so because of two reasons. First, narratives are incredibly powerful, and the evidence of that is our world today. The status quo of narratives that prop up our neoliberal present is increasingly used to stifle any sort of radical action or movement that seeks to radically address climate change. Secondly, the left, in general, has forgotten the power of story, and seldom uses it, giving narrative power away to the right. As Patrick Reinsborough notes, “historic power relations wrap themselves in symbiotic mythologies of control that define the public discourse, justify the elite agenda, and maintain hegemony.” It’s increasingly common to see how fascists use mythologies to strive for an ideal past, a past that showed the strength of their identities, and the subjugation of vulnerable people. Even neoliberal voices use mythologies to maintain the status quo, and even hijack the future to steer it towards an “acceptable” place. This already happened, and is happening, with the climate crisis. As Patrick Reinsborough notes, the future imagined by the status quo is one of privatizing the atmosphere, of geoengineering the planet for our benefit, and merely waiting for the right combination of technologies that will come and “save us”. These futures come about because of narratives that seem like a fixture of this world, and those stories never seem to end or change. That’s why it’s important to tell different stories, and the telling of those stories should be accompanied by a radical imagination so that a revolutionary future can be established. One such story that we could tell, is a story of a solarpunk world.
Solarpunk
According to the solarpunk manifesto, solarpunk is a movement of speculative art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer the question of what a sustainable society looks like, and how we can get there. As much as it’s a movement, solarpunk is also an aesthetic that seeks to merge the practical with the beautiful. As noted by the manifesto, a solarpunk future seeks to aim for a future where society thrives off of fossil fuels, and equitably manages real scarcity, while sharing in abundance. This is an important point because our present society thrives off the prevalence of false scarcity of resources that justify inequity, whereas it also promotes false abundance that seeks to keep profit driven industries going. In a solarpunk future, that’ll not be the case, with the future paving the way for the best of humanity. Thus, solarpunk is an optimistic movement, seeking either utopia, or hope, or a deep understanding of the struggles that can get us to that better world. It’s not a dystopian vision for the world.
I was first introduced to solarpunk from a Saint Andrewism video that spoke about the genre/movement. What I found the most interesting was the emphasis on infrastructure as a form of resistance. Solarpunk doesn’t just call for “smart” cities, or buildings with “green” walls, but something much more holistic and cooperative with nature. It calls for architecture that centers people and nature, and fully embraces the cooperation between the two. Imagine urban gardens where the food can be harvested by anyone, and work is done by everyone in the community; imagine buildings shrubbed in greenery, with native plants giving way for native pollinators to thrive, solar panels and mini wind turbines placed on roofs and sides of buildings; and imagine public spaces that are accessible to everyone, fostering a sense of community that lets people make genuine friendships with each other.
The main thing that makes solarpunk immensely powerful is its insistence on justice and hope. Solarpunk futures strives for a future free from all kinds of oppression, be it the oppression of gender, of heteronormativity, of enforced monogamy, and of race. It doesn’t reject technology, instead it strives for low-carbon technologies to power the future — it strives to be low carbon, high life. Solarpunk also rejects many of the concepts and societal models that seek to do nothing but obstinately perpetuate the status quo — concepts such as infinite growth under capitalism, of corporatocracy, of private, individualized places that seek to alienate people from each other, and of unequal distributions of resources. It also extends the concept of justice to include international justice towards the people in the Global South, and towards indigineous people whose lands were stolen in settler countries. Justice will mean that the people who benefitted from the imperialism and dirty industrialization of the Global North will have to make amends, will have to transition away from their addiction to fossil fuels, and help the Global South industrialize sustainably along economic and ecological lines. Additionally, settler states will have to reckon with the reality of settler-colonialism, and actively strive to make amends.
Along with solarpunk’s emphasis on justice, it, above all, seeks to provide hopeful visions of the future. It’s a speculative genre, rejecting the concept of climate doomerism for the sake of all the people in the world, and for the Earth that we all call home. Envisioning better worlds is important because it helps to frame our demands, help generate movement, and helps people to understand that a better world is possible. Solarpunk worlds in stories and art can also help to fight back against the narratives that are steadfast in our society, and it’s a story that can fight against the reactionary imagination of fascists and the alt-right alike. Solarpunk also naturally calls on us to use our radical imaginations, to imagine what a solarpunk future looks like, and ultimately, to present us with a “new vocabulary in which to understand the present and the future.” Which, above all, helps to inspire action.
Conclusion
If the present condition makes it only possible to imagine the end of the world, rather than the end of the systems that continuously perpetuate it, then it calls on us to combat that form of nihilistic imagination. The best way to do that is for everyone to engage in using their radical imaginations, to imagine better and equitable worlds, to imagine freer worlds that are firmly climate neutral — worlds where anthropogenic climate change has been dealt with. One such world that we can imagine is a solarpunk world, a world where nature and humans live harmoniously and cooperatively, where all forms of oppression are fought against, and people are liberated from them. Imagining those kinds of worlds can serve as a way to inspire action, and create movements that have clear pictures of their goals. And the radical imagination can help us to do just that.
