closing reflections

As the class nears its end, I am still thinking about the question of how to cope with the present, every day, “slow violence” nature of climate change in ways that go beyond action items or small scale mitigation efforts. While I listened to Jetnil Kijiner’s spoken word piece, it also occurred to me that the death toll with respect to climate change will become increasingly difficult to categorize as being a result of climate change. Therefore, I think the ability to create representational or mitigation-based media will become equally complex as climate change becomes to define our social and cultural realities in ways that become harder to pin down. Drowning islands and loss of homes to wildfires are clear climate change catastrophes, but there have been and will be deaths related to specific complications of certain diseases that may or may not be more deadly as a result of climate change. Or deaths of already weakened people related to grief that is a couple of degrees removed from a climate-related crisis itself. This is not something Kijiner directly discussed, but when she spoke about her daughter, I thought about the phrase “intergenerational trauma,” to which people of color and diasporic communities sometimes refer when dealing with narrative or sometimes physiological effects of being a displaced or migrant people. The projected increase in climate refugees makes me wonder how many losses we will suffer as humans that are ripple effects of the climate crisis, to the point where counting climate-related deaths becomes unhelpful or unfeasible.

In fact, I wonder how much the impulse to enumerate climate change refugees or climate change deaths makes the climate crisis appear like a single event with a death toll, when in fact, it seems less like a single event and more like something that defines the next hundred years and more. I only remember a snippet of this interview, but I think the writer David Wallace-Wells said that climate change was going to be to us what modernity was like for people living during that time; a total restructuring of the way the world works for better or worse.

With this in mind, I am also interested in the point made in class about the communities that will get produced by climate change; by the same token, what new modes of media production, communication, and what new genres and disciplines, will be produced out of climate change? I don’t necessarily mean this a reason for optimism; in fact, I think many of these new modes of being and thinking will be forged out of loss and grief. But, as the class comes to an end, I am interested in studying what emergent cultural effects the climate crisis will have.