These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  Now we had to say good-bye to it, because it could no longer sustain us.

  I turn away from the house and toward everyone else. Dad is barefoot. Mum has Dunlop slippers on, as do Tito and I. Mum whispers to us that we have to find a way to the embassy, where she promises we will be safe. Our bodies are shifting restlessly. The sky is crackling with the energy of apocalyptic endings. If we weren’t in it, what we just experienced the night before could make a great adventure movie. We are scared, but we cannot stay here. Outside these black gates, beyond this poor facsimile of a barrier, on the streets littered with corpses, thick columns of black smoke and yelling, are men with guns, who would take our lives given the chance. How do we make our way through the lot? What lies beyond this fence?

  As incredibly pressing as it may sound, the story of humans going out to fix the world that they are destroying still feeds a politics of binaries and tells a story of nature being the vassal of culture, of mind preceding matter, of “thought” being an alien brooding over the deep, and of man rearranging the whole world with language. This isn’t to deny what we feel in our bones to be urgent: the need to address poverty, to create governments that truly exist for people (and not for big corporations), or enact radically different political imaginaries that sidestep the biased distribution of suffering made possible in nation-states.

  The “problem” is that thinking in terms of agential loneliness, or thinking of the human as a homogeneous block of agency, has powerful material effects, and—in my reading—often leads to more sameness and disenchantment. Until we see activism as a politics of encountering the unsaid, of meeting the abject “other,” of sticking with trouble, of noticing how entangled we are with a world which the language of fixture and solutionism presumes is external to us—until we see difference-making as a becoming-with, instead of a coming-through, the violence and rudeness of the familiar will hinder us from the bold and risky “newness” that lingers on the edges of awareness.

  In short, “saving the world” is sweet tongue for sidestepping not only the troubling discernment that the world is more complex than language or thought or story (and therefore, “solutions”), but the confounding realization that the world is not a dormant palette for our most austere dreams or best intentions. Atlas shrugs, and the world shrugs back.

  Perhaps, dear, nowhere is the world’s wayward shrugging more apparent than in most institutionalized attempts at resolving our many troubles. From SDGs to carbon emissions trading and microfinance as a way of tackling poverty, our globalizing crisis-response imaginary has at its core the sticky idea that we can—if we put our backs into it—rise above the fray and create the world we want. Again, I hesitate to wield the easy brush of generic statements that lend themselves to sloganization: I cannot rule out that there are situated practices that call for institutional action; neither do I presume to have arrived at some new onto-epistemology of activism that supersedes and makes irrelevant our best efforts at creating “a better world.” If I am learning anything critical through this ongoing journey that an old shaman back in Nigeria inspired, it is that the world is too preposterous to be decided in one neat framework.8

  And yet, while admitting that there is no “successor regime” dynamic at work here, the case could be made that when one pays attention to the material-cultural practices that create modernity’s understandings of time, history, and our place in the world, we meet a deeply anthropocentric-mechanical notion of change and causality.

  The figure of the tinkering human, cleanly abstracted from his environment, with power of foresight and the agency to marshal the world to his beckoning, still casts its shadow across our landscapes. It is the archetype of the one who must find his way—who must brave strong winds to find sanctuary. The prospects of arriving, of coming to definite solutions, are central to this myth of the sole human agent.

  This “human” has consciousness inside with which he can change the world outside. Like Le Guin’s wretched child, what is excluded in this framework is not only the idea that the world outside is doing something and is not “outside” at all, but that what we do on our own is actually what the rest of the material world is doing. If our assumption of a “reality of continuously intermingling, flowing strands of unfolding, agential activity”9 is correct, then journeys are not dead things you travel. They shape you just as much as you shape them.

  Journeys are not the tame servants that bear you from one point to another. Journeys are how things become different. How things, like wispy trails of fairy dust, touch themselves in ecstatic delight and explode into unsayable colors. Every mooring spot, every banal point, is a thought experiment, replete with monsters and tricksters and halos and sphinxes and riddles and puzzles and strange dalliances. Every truth is a dare. To travel is therefore not merely to move through space and time, it is to be reconfigured, it is to bend space-time, it is to revoke the past and remember the future. It is to be changed. No one arrives intact.

  We have our life and derive our being from a flow of activity. The continuity between the human and the nonhuman asserts our more humble place in a never-ending tide of entanglement. To “sever ourselves” from this flow (which is to deny its significance) is to lose our porosity and thus adopt “one-size-fits-all conventional meanings” that reinforce the same realities we try to escape. In this sense, how we are already responding to crisis is part of the crisis. It is not a case of something yet to be done (as contemporary narratives about the benefits of constant innovation indicate).

  So let me tell you a story as best I could. Keener people than I have told it, but you can trust your dad to try.

  Climate change is believed to be the single most threatening phenomenon facing humankind today. All around us, the ineffaceable marks left by how much we’ve fundamentally altered the planet’s climate and environmental systems have inspired scientists to contribute a new word to our lexicon of dread: the “Anthropocene.” It was coined as a label to signify a new geological epoch sedimented from human activity—and as an ethical imperative, to rally attention around the destruction brought upon the planet by our seemingly ravenous species.

  The elementary argument of climate change theorists is that the planet is getting warmer—and this warming phenomenon is causing adverse weather conditions that have multiplier effects on the ways we organize our lives and on the places we call home.

  From melting glaciers in the Arctic regions and the pronounced risk of flooding, to rising sea levels as a result of warmer waters, and fragile ecosystems due to imbalances brought about by the loss of biodiversity, the untoward effects of climate change are well known and widely published. As a result of these observations, scientific leaders have raised their ram horns over the cliffs, urging a concerted political effort to counteract a global phenomenon that doesn’t respect national boundaries. In response, a new climate politics—a dramatic sequence of global actors and data accumulation set against the ticktock soundtrack of eventual apocalypse in a sure future—gained ground.

  A year before you were born, in 2012, a volcano in Iceland—with a name I can only write out but couldn’t possibly pronounce even on pain of death—called Eyjafjallajökull, spewed 9.5 billion cubic feet of ash six miles into the air over the course of a few months. Larger volcanic eruptions have taken place, and scientists believed Eyjafjallajökull’s tantrums were a small event. However, that eruption disrupted flights across Europe, and affected the entire world. The effects weren’t just limited to travel disruption: with no air freight heading for Europe, perishable consignments like flowers and fish exports from African economies rotted at airports. Asian car makers canceled production of units due to delayed parts. Sports events were canceled, and movie premieres had to be relocated. One might say the geological bled into the economical, the political, and the cultural.

  The volcano’s eruption, like Cyclone Vardah’s mutinied ransacking of our home city, Chennai, underlined just how susceptible civilization is to natural hazards. Long
before Eyjafjallajökull, many scientists had long held a consensus view that—barring an extinction-level event by nuclear warfare—the world as we know it will end as sea levels rise up to two hundred feet higher than today, submerging cities underwater. Noah’s flood repeated—unless we did something about it.

  Today’s conversation about climate change insists that the only way to stop our certain demise under towering pillars of water—the foretaste of which has visited Chennai in recent years—is by adopting policies that discipline the otherwise unregulated market production effects on the environment, and by investing in developing cheaper green technologies that remove dependence on extracted fossil fuels—the black oil that poisons the skies in millions of internal combustion cars across the planet.

  A new transnational imaginary grips the planet—spilling out in talking points, haunting conscientious travelers worried about overdrawing from their carbon wallets. Like the hand of God on the wall announcing the end of an era, this new myth inscribes new parameters of responsivity in the sky, infecting everything with its logic, and folding itself around the new enemy: carbon emission. Everyone is in on it. The new ethical imperatives that have seeped into mass culture enlists celebrities, funds research (and therefore determines research imperatives), inspires new initiatives and nongovernmental organizations that desire to tackle climate change, and even spawns disaster movies that capitalize on fears about climate catastrophe. New terms have come into the rapidly developing field dedicated to advocating for and spreading awareness about climate change—terms such as climate justice, climate ethics, carbon literacy, and ecocide.

  In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol emerged from this social milieu as an instrument of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), engaging states to adopt standards and practices designed to reduce the effects of anthropogenic activity on the environment. As a way of enforcing pollution control, policy makers convened around an idea for a carbon tax or emissions tax, the seed of which initially blossomed in twentieth-century English economist Arthur Cecil Pigou’s proposal to levy a tax on market activities that had negative externalities.

  Basically, carbon trade “assigns monetary value to the earth’s shared atmosphere,” forcing businesses—especially those in participating nations where carbon emissions are high—to pay attributed fines that are proportionate to the damage done. With the recent ratification of the complementary Paris Agreement (in 2015), additional measures—such as capping carbon dioxide emissions so that they eventually fall to preindustrial levels—are now in force to fight the scourge of carbon. The new watch-term is “negative emissions,” which conceptualizes the next logical step from merely planting our feet in the ground: pushing back against the enemy and reclaiming lost ground by removing the excess of carbon in the atmosphere with new sequestration technologies.

  All these timelines collide at a single nexus of measurement practices: carbon metrics. It is what allows us to measure how well we are doing; it sits at the heart of the big puzzle set of popular climate discourse.

  So, are these practices any good? Are the innovative varieties of offsetting strategies drawing attention to a planet in peril? Are they “working” at mitigating climate change? Is the earth getting warmer, or have we successfully turned the tide on carbon? Are we winning the war? Global climate reports say the year 2016 was not as warm as its predecessor, but that isn’t necessarily good news. We are in a tense gridlock that shows no signs of easing up in our favor. Cars are still produced. There is no cheap ecologically sensitive energy alternative on the horizons. And, with the rise of radical identitarianism blowing across the United States and Europe (I write this as France is about to go through its own electoral baptism of fire—choosing between a nativist politics that would build walls to chase out foreigners, and a globalist politics that trusts in neoliberal determinism), what with its distrust for climate change science, stringent environment policies are likely to be repealed. The prognosis isn’t looking good. The voracious hordes of orcs—if orcs are escalating numbers in carbon emission data—still press hard against the gates and, without the provision of even stricter measures to slow down carbon emissions and the philanthropy of deep-pocket billionaires like Elon Musk, our house of cards will eventually fall.

  But this story of my time’s most captivating civilizational myth—this great and powerful parliament of world forces—wouldn’t be complete without its own inflections and plot twists. Today’s politics of climate change hinges on the confidence that carbon emissions are the main drivers of global warming, that the science is largely accurate, and that one mustn’t allow fools to slow down our hurried pace to shore up our walls against the outside.

  The problem with accuracy, however, is that it comes with costs. Scientific accuracy isn’t about how well the world “out there” is represented, it is about how well other possibilities and accounts about the world are excluded from mattering or hardwired out of view. Remember waves and particles? Don’t fret, I won’t go there. Just keep them in mind! Especially the idea that the world is an ongoing series of co-becomings that matter in terms of what is cut out simultaneously.

  Climate change politics is not so much the practice of depicting the truth about climate dynamics as it is the multiagential co-production and maintenance of an abstraction—carbon metrics—with which a particular worldview sustains itself to the exclusion of other complementary accounts of the ways climates matter. In the same obstructing way that economic measures like gross domestic product force us to privilege monetary transactions, income, and corporate/industrial activity by discounting the nonmonetary practices of caring that happens in small places or the contributions of trees to weathering the planet and our well-being, carbon metrics reduces climate change to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and the ability of emissions markets to meet sustainability goals. As part of a climate imaginary that is produced by a neoliberal agenda of progress, linear time, anthropocentric control, separation from nature, and technological optimism, today’s carbon discourse and activism obfuscate other ways of thinking/acting with weather.

  First, “the myth that human bodies are discrete in time and space, somehow outside of the natural milieu that sustains them and indeed transits through them”10 denies the ways bodies are already entangled with weather—in other words, weather is what “we” are collectively doing with each other. Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker say that what we are called to respond to in climate is not something “outside” or faraway, but something as immediate as the operations of our between-bodies. We do not observe climate or weather as if it were happening outside of us; instead bodies are constantly betweening with the elements: the sun leaks its rays on plants, which furnishes the atmosphere with oxygenic depth that fills our lungs. This is not a sequence of independent objects mechanically influencing other independent objects in domino-like fashion. It isn’t a mere interaction when the effects of the sun only arise and derive their agency in the context of other effects—that is, the orifices of my body, the bacterial contributions to cloud formation,11 atmospheric effects, and even the discourse on the sun are the condition of its materiality. The climate is not an externality, because we intra-act with it. We are weathering bodies.

  Even “natural disasters” are specific intra-acting arrangements and collaborations between bodies that a molecular attribution of cause does not appreciate. If we think of the world as a container for discrete, autonomous bits of things that have effects on each other, then we end up with a notion of causality that is blind to the “viscous porosity,” animation and betweening of bodies. This is why Barad speaks of queer causalities, echoed by Neimanis and Loewen:

  Although our traditional mechanisms of understanding retroactively search for causes and effects (seed plants cause hay fever), in a world of intra-activity the hay-feverish body cannot be traced back. It was not once an autonomous body whose borders have been breached, but rather an expression of transcorporeal collaboratio
n as plant and human orifices together weather a season’s change. The body (a human body, a gust of wind, striations of rock) can no longer be understood as an autonomous entity, unaffected by (and ineffectual in) its environment. Instead, the very conditions of its possibility rely on its entanglement with a dynamic system of forces and flows.12

  This is a sensuous reframing of causality and time and climate: tracing back to find an active cause for, let’s say, the chicken pox that swarmed over your little body recently might imply that bodies move in time, or that time is static … a container for things rubbing against one another. But that would be another instance of essentializing or absolutizing “time” and bodies. New materialisms challenge the constancy of time, showing it to be out of whack, queering befores and afters, sprouting more tentacles than thin linear progression allows—hence its “thickness.” Time and bodies and poxes do not have any independent reality of their own; it is only within the porous relationships they are already part of that their materiality/meaning becomes evident. Our conventions of speaking find it difficult to express the idea that the operations of pox on your body were not in time; instead, your body intra-actively produces time with the pox. A firmer collaboration is made—there is no “before” to return to, since an entirely new history is produced in the collaborative intra-mingling of pox and body, or pox-body. As such, the pox did not cause the rash on your body, the rash-itchy-body is a co-emergent phenomenon, a “new” ontology altogether that seemingly makes it seem that has always been the state of affairs.