In this blog, originally published as a ‘Snapshot’ in Environment and History, Rebecca Duncan, Eleonor Marcussen, Mike Classon Frangos and Emily Hanscam critically interrogate the semantics and usefulness of the concept climate ’emergency’.
The sense of emergency is palpable and real. But instead of naming this moment a ‘state of exception’, we should see it more as revealing pre-existing conditions.
(Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real, p. 8)[1]
In 2019, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) selected ‘climate emergency’ as its word of the year. This decision reflects a shift in the socio-ecological zeitgeist, attendant on mounting awareness of the danger now facing the planet. ‘Climate emergency’ can be defined, according to the OED, as ‘a situation in which urgent action is required’.[2] As an alternative to the pervasive language of ‘warming’ and ‘change’, the term is intended to provoke a concrete and decisive response – but what kind of action is called for? The question strikes at the heart of current debates around the semantics of political ecology, which collectively confirm that how the present is named determines the mode, object and agents of any response. For example, critics of the ‘Anthropocene’ have argued that this term turns attention away from the uneven distribution of climate breakdown across race, class, gender, and global geography, by locating responsibility with ‘the anthropos’, or human species. As a result, it frustrates efforts to arrest unfolding catastrophe, because it allows the structural drivers – interlocking colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy – to drop out of sight.[3]
If ‘emergency’ is to participate in arresting socio-ecological collapse, then it must direct climate action towards these systemic causes, though, as we will show, it does not always do this. Indeed, in certain formulations, emergency functions to eclipse the role of historical extraction and exploitation by emphasising the present and its relation to a catastrophic future situation. Emergency’s temporality of immediacy should therefore not be accepted without question, as Naomi Oreskes has cogently argued.[4] This is in no small part because such presentism may license responses that prioritise the (projected) effects of climate breakdown, but – as with Anthropocene discourses – leave its causes untouched. In what follows, we consider these difficult possibilities of climate emergency rhetoric. Our aim is not to dispense with emergency entirely, but to rethink its temporality in order to prioritise the roots of the present planetary situation.
Declarations
The rise of emergency discourse is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the growing movement among activists, scholars and governments to formally declare a state of climate emergency. In 2019, the ‘Club of Rome’ announced a ‘planetary emergency’,[5] while parties to the Climate Emergency Declaration (CED) currently include the whole EU and eighteen non-EU nations. Similar statements have been published in many academic disciplines, including in the hard sciences, where one example from William J. Ripple and colleagues represents 11,000 signatories.[6] These declarations unanimously invoke the sense of emergency outlined by the OED, leveraging the urgency of the term against future catastrophe.
This strategy is not, however, uncontentious, and has recently come under critique from scholars who note the military-juridical inheritance of the ‘state of emergency’ as a tool of governance.[7] Typically a ‘securitising’ manoeuvre, the state of emergency licenses governments to deploy military tactics in the name of neutralising an ‘existential threat’.[8] Hence, for example, the CED petition explicitly takes ‘war-time mobilisation’ as the model for climate action, because such transformations ostensibly demonstrate the arrest of ‘business-as-usual’, and the rapid reorganisation of society around the task of dealing with a condition of heightened risk.[9] There are good reasons to question this latter assumption: as Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben have demonstrated, the ‘state of exception’ which legitimates emergency measures cannot be separated from ordinary practices of governance, but is rather an integral part of their arsenal.[10] Legal history seconds their stance, challenging the judicial imposition of ‘emergency law’ as exceptional, instead revealing its function as a stabiliser of the so-called normal and legitimate law.[11] Security scholars David Moffette and Shaira Vadasaria build on this insight when they note that the epistemological framework within which ‘existential threats’ are constructed belongs to colonial modernity, and so such threats – though they may be presented as exceptional – are ‘intrinsically connected to the [pre-existing] project of race’.[12] A similar point grounds Robert P. Marzec’s study of militarised climate action, in which the author exposes the underlying logic of ecological reification that shapes the transformation of climate events into security issues.[13] This logic, entwined with the Enlightenment vision of human mastery over nature, precisely facilitates the commodification and exploitation of some humans and biophysical nature – the very processes out of which climate breakdown erupts. Viewed with these critics, the declaration of a climate emergency appears less a pathway to radical socio-ecological reorganisation than it does a mechanism for defending the socio-ecological status quo, the roots of which lie with the inseparable histories of colonialism and capitalism.
Managing the future
Issues of temporality are central to these difficult possibilities of climate emergency rhetoric. As Oreskes notes, the time of emergency is prospective; the term suggests ‘that if immediate action is not taken, serious harm will directly ensue’.[14] Notably, this formulation expresses in an urgent register the assumption underpinning what Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens – respectively – call the ‘risk society’: that is, the society of industrial modernity, where disaster is increasingly understood to be the unavoidable by-product of human activity and where, consequently, ‘the future becomes ever more absorbing’,[15] as social institutions organise around the task of averting otherwise inevitably impending catastrophe. The notion of the future as a domain of likely but manageable ‘serious harm’ – the notion implied by emergency rhetoric – needs to be contextualised amid the very forms of ecological extraction that drive unfolding climatic shifts. As Giddens points out, this future is the product of a society for whom ‘nature’ appears to have been transformed entirely into the object of human control.[16]
If the discourse of climate emergency stabilises, and ensures the replication of the existing socio-ecological system, then this can be understood in part as an effect of the temporality inscribed in this narrative – one that is rooted in the same sense of human mastery over nature that underpins (colonial) relations of extraction. The point is demonstrated by Marzec’s analysis, in which securitising strategies are shown to valorise the effects of climate change over its historical causes. Abandoning the possibility of forging ‘alternative ecological relations’, such measures are instead premised on the assumption that catastrophe is ‘unavoidable’, which in turn makes ‘adaptation’ to impending disaster ‘a more reasonable response than … sustainability’.[17] The ideological potentials of emergency time are here made explicit: by framing climate change as an imminent but manageable disaster, it becomes possible to bypass questions relating to where this disaster comes from, thereby licensing solutions that reproduce, and work in the interest of, the extractive (colonial) system. In this way, emergency functions similarly to the term ‘crisis’ in Janet Roitman’s analysis: as ‘an observation that produces meaning’ by making ‘certain questions … possible, while others are foreclosed’.[18] Emergency, like crisis, can therefore be understood as providing the conditions for a potential history – one that does not deviate from the existing socio-ecological pattern, but instead, is simply characterised by more of the same.
The emergency has already happened
Some value may yet remain in the language of emergency, and specifically in its ability to convey a sense of urgency. This must, however, be detached from the prospective temporality of ecological risk which emphasises climate effects, and be targeted instead at the historical drivers of climate breakdown. Emergency should be understood not, primarily, as a feature of the present that demands attention be paid to managing future disasters, but rather as a more protracted and uneven historical condition of threat. Such a view foregrounds how the current planetary situation emerges, or comes into being, and so establishes the conditions for interventions that address causes, rather than only effects. In this way, ‘emergency’ remains valuable in the historian Jo Guldi’s sense: it makes ‘possible a scholarly haste’, which takes climate change as an urgent problem, and therefore counterbalances the pervasive ‘politics of delay’.[19] A productive starting point for this reconceptualisation is provided by Walter Benjamin, who observed that ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’.[20] For Benjamin, emergency is not an extraordinary event, but rather a distribution of vulnerability, which, in the context of social inequality, disproportionately characterises the everyday lives of those excluded from privilege via various structures of dispossession and oppression. In this view, emergency is divorced from a present that is oriented towards a catastrophic future. Rather, it has already happened, and is still happening, for the majority.
The point brings to mind Rob Nixon’s formative theorisation of ‘slow violence’, in which he demonstrates how, by revising the immediacy with which violent acts are prosaically associated, it becomes possible to perceive the long colonial history of unequal socio-ecological degradation. For Nixon, a view of violence as ‘neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive’, [21] makes visible the plight of the global poor – concentrated in postcolonial nations across the Global South – for whom the threat of the changing biosphere is an established and concrete reality. A related argument is made by the Potawatomi decolonial scholar Kyle P. Whyte, who, like Nixon, emphasises that socio-ecological crisis is not a contemporary issue.[22] Whyte highlights how, from the vantage of Indigenous communities across North America, these ‘hardships’ have been encountered many times over. ‘[W]e confront climate change’, he writes, ‘having already passed through environmental and climate crises arising from the impacts of colonialism’, including ‘ecosystem collapse, species loss, economic crash, drastic relocation, and cultural disintegration’.[23]
Nixon and Whyte each demonstrate how a conception of socio-ecological destruction that shifts away from the temporality of immediate threat helps to centre those postcolonial sites and communities for whom catastrophe has been the historical norm, rather than the exception, since the advent of modernity. If there is a sense of emergency to be extrapolated from these accounts it is thus one that comes close to Benjamin’s own. Uncoupled from its associations with manageable future risk, this emergency would name the state of socio-ecological vulnerability that necessarily attends and underpins interlocking systems of colonialism and capitalism, founded as these always have been on the devaluation and exploitation of certain humans and biophysical nature. In light of such a notion, the current ‘emergency’ of global climate change calls attention not primarily to the future, but rather to prior, more localised emergencies, such as those to which Whyte refers above. The socio-ecological vulnerability increasingly encountered by populations everywhere becomes legible, not as a truly novel situation, but rather as an expansion of the challenges historically faced by those subject to colonisation, and related forms of dispossession, exploitation and oppression.
Emergency exit
What, finally, would action look like it if it were based on causes rather than effects? The foundation for one answer is laid by the philosopher Benjamin Bratton, who argues that current planetary transformations are exposing the limitations of the contemporary political imagination. In particular, Bratton shows how critiques of sovereignty in the tradition of Giorgio Agamben – critiques which condemn all modes of biopower as potentially totalitarian – failed in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. What is now required, he proposes, is a new kind of ‘biogovernmentality’, which is concerned with how life can be ‘repaired, reproduced, sustained and preserved’ in the context of unevenly unfolding socio-ecological breakdown.[24] In view of our above discussion this would mean a form of decolonial ecosocialism, which – in the words of Vishwas Satgar – mobilises state resources to deconstruct the ‘failing capitalist system, recognising that such a system is racist, patriarchal, exploitative and driven by imperial ecocide’.[25]
There is a sense in which the analogy between climate change and war may yet play a role in turning governmental institutions towards such a transformation, as Andreas Malm has argued.[26] Such a comparison would, however, be rooted in a conception of emergency that departs from the prospective temporality of impending disaster. For Malm, emergency is a ‘chronic’ condition, which dogs the history of colonialism and capitalism as a necessary effect of their extractive and exploitative functioning. The result of this temporal reformulation resonates with the conclusions drawn by Nixon and Whyte. Figured as a persistent and recurring historical condition, emergency calls attention to the structures out of which it emerges; it is thereby ‘convert[ed]’, in Malm’s words, ‘into a blow against the system that engendered it’, becoming the impetus for ‘turning crises of symptoms into crises of causes’ (ch. 3). It is with such a view, which takes emergency as the norm and not the exception, that, finally, the conditions for an alternative possible history – an exit – may flash up.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The essay is the product of the authors’ collaborative work in the Climate Emergency workshops organised by Rebecca Duncan and Eleonor Marcussen at the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.
[1] Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (London: Verso, 2021), p. 120.
[2] ‘Word of the Year 2019’, Oxford Languages:
(accessed 30 May 2022)
[3] See, for example, Jason W. Moore, ‘Introduction’, in J.W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), pp. 1–13; Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016); The Salvage Collective, The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene (London: Verso, 2021); Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right (London: Polity Press, 2022).
[4] Naomi Oreskes, ‘Metaphors of warfare and the lessons of history: Time to revisit a carbon tax?’ (Editorial Comment) Climate Change 104 (2011): 223–230, p. 225.
[5] The Club of Rome in partnership with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Planetary Emergency Plan: Securing a New Deal for People, Nature and Climate. Winterthur: The Club of Rome, 2019: https://clubofrome.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/PlanetaryEmergencyPlan_CoR-4.pdf (accessed 10 Jan. 2023)
[6] William J. Ripple et al., ‘World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency’, BioScience 70 (1) (2020): 8–12.
[7] See for example, Michael Albert, ‘Climate emergency and securitization politics: Towards a climate politics of the extraordinary’, Globalizations20 (4) (2023): 533–547; William Davies, ‘Green populism? — Action and mortality in the Anthropocene’, CUSP Essay Series on the Morality of Sustainable Prosperity, 12 (Guildford: Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, 2019). Available at https://cusp.ac.uk/themes/m/m1-1/ ; Mike Hulme, ‘Climate emergency politics is dangerous’, Issues in Science and Technology 36 (1) (2019): 23–25.
[8] Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), p. 25.
[9] ‘About: The climate emergency declaration and mobilisation’: http://climateemergencydeclaration.org/about/ (accessed 24 July 2023).
[10] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. D. Heller-Roazen) (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1998).
[11] Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 16–22.
[12] David Moffette and Shaira Vadasaria, ‘Uninhibited violence: Race and the securitization of immigration’, Critical Studies on Security 4 (3) (2016): 291–305, p. 293.
[13] Robert P. Marzec, Militarizing the Environment: Climate Change and the Security State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 15.
[14] Oreskes, ‘Metaphors of warfare’, p. 226.
[15] Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellchaft: Auf dem Weg eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986); English ed., Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); Anthony Giddens, ‘Risk and responsibility’, The Modern Law Review 1 (62) (1999): 1–10, p. 4.
[16] Giddens, ‘Risk and responsibility’, p. 3.
[17] Marzec, Militarizing the Environment, p. 2.
[18] Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 41.
[19] Jo Guldi, ‘The climate emergency demands a new kind of history: Pragmatic approaches from science and technology studies, text mining, and affiliated disciplines’ (Viewpoint), Isis 113 (2) (2022): 352–365, p. 364.
[20] Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins, 1982), p. 257.
[21] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge MA: Harvard, 2011), p. 2.
[22] Kyle P. Whyte, ‘Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crisis’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (1–2) (2018): 224–242.
[23] Ibid., p. 226.
[24] Bratton, The Revenge of the Real, p. 120.
[25] Vishwas Satgar, ‘Conclusion’, in V. Satgar (ed.), The Climate Crisis: South African and Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018), pp. 338–342, p. 338.
[26] Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2020). Ebook.
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