Toxic Politics of Climate Change w/ Betsy Hartmann, Anne Hendrixson, Max Ajl, Fikret Adaman, and Kasia Paprocki

Anita Fuentes: The crisis of climate change is widely recognized as one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity. The term Extinction Rebellion has been coined to describe the urgency of the movement fighting for governmental action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse. As with any global issue, the impact will not be equal. The ways in which the climate crisis is experienced differs by class, race, and geography. At the same time, the urgency of addressing the climate crisis has created strange politics, particularly in the Global North, where it has given rise to narratives of fear, xenophobia, and militarized responses that are more often than not directed at populations in the Global South. Sectors of the climate movement in the Global North often erase colonial and neocolonial legacies, or whitewash imperial policies that are often deeply implicated in environmental destruction. This episode will explore both of these issues, which are frequently hidden or marginalized in discussions about the climate crisis. First, how the impacts of climate change will be unequally felt, and second, the negative side of the politics of the climate movement in the Global North. A truly progressive climate movement must both confront climate denialism, which is real and destructive, but it should also address and undo the many toxic aspects of the mainstream environmental movement. Welcome to Security in Context, a podcast aimed at promoting new thinking on security from a global perspective. I'm your host, Anita Fuentes, and today's podcast will investigate the ways in which the discourses and debates surrounding climate change affect the policies developed to address the same issue now and into the future. For this episode, I got to interview 5 amazing authors whose work brings very different and much-needed perspectives to the issue at hand today. They are Betsy Hartmann, Professor Emeritus of Development Studies at Hampshire College.

Betsy Hartmann: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Anita Fuentes: Anne Hendrickson, Senior policy analyst at Challenging Population Control.

Anne Hendrixson: Yes. Thank you for having me today. I'm really happy to be here.

Anita Fuentes: Max Ajl, associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment.

Max Ajl: Thank you very much for inviting me onto the program.

Anita Fuentes: Fikret Adaman, professor of economics at Boğaziçi University.

Fikret Adaman: Well, thank you very much for having me.

Anita Fuentes: And Kaja Paprocki, Associate professor at the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics.

Kasia Paprocki: Thank you.

Fikret Adaman: There are enormous numbers of deaths, millions of deaths, in fact, around the world from air pollution, much of it resulting from fossil fuel combustion. The basic question here is adaptation for who? Who is going to be protected, and who's going to pay for it? The conclusion is that it makes economic sense to dump toxic waste in the poorest countries. The money doesn't disappear. It's not shot to the moon. It's not buried in the backyard. It doesn't go to oil suppliers overseas. It's money that consumers are paying that's going to be captured by someone within the economy.

Anne Hendrixson: Who?

Anita Fuentes: One of the perspectives of climate change we were looking to explore in this episode is the securitization of social, political and media narratives surrounding climate change, which often go hand in hand with population control discourses and policies. In order to get an in-depth understanding of such narratives, I talked to Betsy Hartmann and Anne Hendrickson. Anne Hendrickson is currently a senior policy analyst at the Challenging Population Control program at the U.S.-based NGO Collective Power for Reproductive Justice.

Anne Hendrixson: Challenging Population Control was formerly the Population Development Program, or Pop-Dev. And so, this is a new iteration of the program that was formerly at Hampshire College. And since— through the last 30 years, since the heyday of population control as an imperialist international development imperative, we've been resisting it. So in this vein, at Challenging Population Control, we monitor and resist current instances of population control. And at the same time, we support comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services that decenter fertility reduction as the primary goal and champion contraceptive safety alongside access. We champion environmental and climate justice through recognizing the complex causes of environmental problems and continually debunking overpopulation myths that maintain that population is the primary reason for environmental degradation. And finally, we promote the free movement of people across borders and boundaries and fight xenophobia, militarism, fascism and white supremacy by challenging overpopulation narratives that paint migrants, incarcerated people and people living in poverty as excess dangerous groups. So, in this work, we really try to make cross-movement, cross-border connections with scholars and activists from multiple movements, multiple disciplines, who take a critical stance on population and the multiple manifestations of population control.

Anita Fuentes: Betsy Hardman, Anne Hendrickson's predecessor at BOPDIV, is a professor emeritus of development studies at Hampshire College. Her most recent book, published in 2017, entitled The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War, and Our Call to Greatness, tackles the intersections between population, migration, environment, and security issues.

Betsy Hartmann: I came to write this book for several reasons. First of all, personally, I grew up during the Cold War and also during the '60s, and I had this kind of Twin pole in my personality of apocalyptic thinking, you know, doomsday thinking, and also millennial thinking that, you know, we could create a perfect utopian socialist society. So I saw these 2 strains very much mixed in my own self, and I was just trying to understand where does this all come from, you know? And then secondly, on a more political level, I had spent most of my career working on population issues, and I came to see that the idea that, you know, overpopulation is going to destroy the world, the population bomb's going to explode, et cetera, et cetera, I saw that it was fed by and also feeds doomsday thinking, that apocalyptic thinking was very central to the kind of Malthusian view of the world. So I kept kind of running up against that doomsday thinking and thinking, there's more to this than meets the eye, and I need to go back in time and kind of study the history of apocalyptic thought in the United States, particularly. And so it was kind of a journey into my own history and into the history of the country. Seeing the way of discourse of the Puritans was really important, too, this kind of use of the Jeremiad speech that we are sinners, but if we repent and kind of rebuild We can, you know, lead the way again to the millennium, and we are the chosen people. So that was one thing. And then I came to see from, you know, early American history and throughout to the present day, the absolute importance of kind of war, violence, and in building this sense of doom, doomsday thinking, very much linked to a long history of militarism.

Anne Hendrixson: Right. Mm-hmm.

Betsy Hartmann: Colonization and later imperialism, and that this continued, of course, to this day. And many Americans, for example, believe when they're polled that the war of Armageddon is going to happen, right? It's literally going to happen. And I began to think, why is war so ingrained in our psyches? And that that must have some psychic impact in terms of our predilection towards apocalyptic thinking. So I kind of explore that in the first chapter of the book, this long trajectory of violence and war and imperialism and domestic, also the militarization of domestic policy and the domestic police within the US as feeding into this apocalyptic syndrome. And then I look at climate change and the current moment when obviously climate change is a very urgent problem, and there are emergencies associated with climate change. But is it a climate apocalypse? Is it helpful to look in terms of the climate apocalypse? And how apocalyptic thinking in all these fields actually can boost our militarism. And that is, I think, one of the take-home messages of the book, is that we have to really look closely at what some of our ideas might be doing in terms of actually supporting the national security state. And in the case of climate change, allowing the national security state to militarize climate change.

Anita Fuentes: So when were these narratives of populationism born, and how did they become intertwined with environmental issues?

Betsy Hartmann: During the Cold War and '50s, '60s, there began to be growing concern in the United States kind of foreign policy and national security establishment of the threat of overpopulation. In the Global South, you know, at a time of revolutionary movements in the Global South, particularly. Also in the kind of environmental field among conservationists, there had been this streak to, again, you know, a fear, fear or, you know, blaming overpopulation for disappearance of forests and wilderness, et cetera. So it was kind of coexistent and came together. And the early conservation movement, you know, was very linked to eugenics.

Max Ajl: Right.

Betsy Hartmann: Also, so this idea of kind of certain people should have children and certain people shouldn't, and kind of racial and class inferiority, genetic inferiority, was very present in the early environmental movement. It still remains in some sections today. So the population bomb really took off. It started taking off with small— with private foundations in the US. And then the US government became involved, especially in the 1960s, in funding worldwide population control. And concurrently, domestic efforts to curtail the fertility of especially Black women, Native American women, Puerto Rican women were also occurring. Also, Right. White poor women were occurring at this time too. So there was a domestic kind of eugenics almost conversation and then— or not conversation, practice. And then you had also population control in the Global South where poverty, political instability, and later environmental degradation and migration are all blamed on too many people. Women are having too many babies and we've got to immediately kind of curtail their fertility through contraception delivered in population control programs in a way that actually often flew in the face of reproductive health or forced sterilization in many cases, and supporting countries that took those— who created those kinds of programs.

Anne Hendrixson: And how did these narratives evolve into what they are You know, it's an interesting moment because the population trends have really shifted, and so have fears about population. So, whereas before there was a real concern about an overall global population bomb, now there's concerns about aging and the dynamic of an aging Global North and a still youthful Global South in general. And a lot of the population politics that we're concerned with are around this aging population politics. One of the most pervasive overpopulation concepts in security discourses right now is the youth bulge theory. It was developed in the early 1990s as a predictive military intelligence tool. And it has variations, but it typically says that a large proportion of young people in the population correlates with an increased risk of political unrest. And so really this is a theory about, quote-unquote, too many young men, the over-and-over population. Most of the theory's proponents agree that youth bulge violence is not inevitable, but it's a result of population stress coupled with a lack of resources like employment, Right. Employment and education for young people. And now that— where it's also coming in, you know, climate change as a stressor that is removing people from their livelihoods. But the idea is that states can mitigate or harness the impact of bulges through providing increased social and other resources. And through the theory, youth— young men are painted as both a source of danger and as a point of intervention. And so critics of the youth bulge theory maintain that it does not bear out in many geographic contexts. It's too simplistic and it doesn't take into account how social, economic, and security dynamics at different scales can impact people's lives and contexts. And perhaps because it is so simplistic, it has contributed to stereotypes of volatile, dangerous Black and brown male cohorts.

Fikret Adaman: Right.

Anne Hendrixson: That are threats both to their homes and to other nations and bordering nations as they spill over borders. This dangerous youth of the Global South is often held against the image of a weak and aging Global North. In economic, security and media analyses, aging populations are problematically framed as a global burden. Right. Security discourses specifically paint aging nations as weakened militarily, with fewer young people to join the troops and less money to put into militaries, reinforce borders or heighten borders, and protection of national interests in other countries. And putting these two together contributes to a really dangerous population politics that pits a Stagnant, aging, white North against an overly fertile, volatile and mobile Black and brown youth in the Global South. And add into this the so-called risk multiplier of climate change, and it only heightens the stakes. The dangerous young men of the youth bulge can become, quote-unquote, climate refugees of climate security narratives, who are forced to move because of environmental stress. And this only heightens false ideas of a literally burning Global South versus a safer, cooler, and highly desirable Global North.

Anita Fuentes: And speaking of quote-unquote climate refugees, what are the implications of using terms such as climate refugees or climate wars, which seem to blame phenomena like conflict, migration, or displacement Right.

Betsy Hartmann: Well, in terms of climate refugees, I prefer the term, and I think most people who work in the climate migration field prefer the term climate-related migration, because seldom is it just climate change that is forcing people to move, and that there's usually a constellation of other things. For example, if you think of people who had to, you know, leaving Honduras for the United States, who are facing, you know, drought in rural areas, if the government were functioning and able to, you know, help people get through that drought, they wouldn't be forced to migrate, right? But the migration problem is also much deeper. It's about violence, government and narco-terror, US support for right-wing militaries in that region. So, it just— to call it just climate, it naturalizes profoundly political and economic processes. Also, the word refugee usually, or is supposed to officially, pertains to political refugees seeking asylum. So there have been arguments that to use the word climate refugee actually waters— could potentially water down asylum processes for people. Now, I think people on the left or liberals started to use the term because they thought it might bring more sympathy for people who were forced to migrate because of climate-related reasons. But, you know, again, And they're— it's very problematic. You know, during the 2015 COP in Paris, you know, when there was a big migration influx and crisis in Europe, and it was mainly refugees from wars in the Middle East, right? But they were called climate refugees by some of the climate activists. And I thought, no, you know, those are—

Max Ajl: Yeah.

Betsy Hartmann: War refugees. Refugees from war. Also, most climate-related migration, people believe, and again, this could change, but it's likely to be inside national borders and not over national borders, across national borders. And some of it may be temporary, you know, not permanent. And often the worst places that face climate emergencies may be places where people don't have access to migration or temporary migration to survive a particular storm or whatever. So that would be one thing I would say. In terms of climate wars, the same thing. I don't think we're going to have wars over climate, particularly. Climate issues could induce potential conflicts between people. And there's this whole idea there are going to be water wars. There's always been this idea there are going to be these big water wars that was kind of Yeah. And we heard this in the environmental security days too. Oh, water wars are coming, water wars are coming. Now, there are water conflicts between countries and people, but do they have to become full-scale wars? And often water actually becomes a source of cooperation with people. And I guess one other point I'd just like to make here too is the absolute importance of the idea of scarcity. You know, this degradation narrative Yeah. These ideas of climate war and climate refugees often are based on this idea that resources are going to become scarce. There's scarcity with a capital S. And when resources are scarce, people fight each other over them. So, if there's a drought in a pastoral region, farmers and pastoralists are going to fight over water resources. You know, the automatic assumption is poor fight with each other in times of scarcity, when actually the historical record shows, lots of anthropological research shows, that in many cases people cooperate during times of scarcity, right? And this whole idea of tragedy of the commons, well, it turns out that many people manage communities, manage the commons collectively. And it's not perfect, It's not again one of these millennial situations, but we have to build on those kinds of forms of cooperation and understand them and see them rather than fear that oh my God there's a drought and all those people are going to fight with each other. You know, it's it's so simplistic. And again, I think part of an American myopia really American exceptionalism, American ignorance of the rest of the world, and also ignorance of our own. You know when People don't, you know, wildfires in California have not led to, you know, people taking up arms against each other yet. So there may be other reasons for people taking up arms, but anyway, we don't want to naturalize conflict and migration in those ways.

Anita Fuentes: So how do these apocalyptic and Malthusian ideas tie into movements like eco-bordering and eco-fascism? which are now gaining a lot of momentum in Europe and the United States?

Betsy Hartmann: Right. Well, those are very good questions. And I'm not an expert on the European scene, but I think there are some differences, and I'll speak to those in a minute. But I think the more you paint this into a security issue or the migration or blame, you know, migration of war refugees, call them climate refugees, things like that, you are building up this situation where building stronger borders becomes the solution to this crisis, right? And then the far right can build on that in terms of, you know, we've got to keep our country for ourselves, You know, we have the most respect for nature, purity, the kind of great replacement theory, the white race is being replaced by these, you know, heathen immigrants. And all those ideas find more fertile ground if within a context where this kind of national security fear of the climate apocalypse is being bandied about by the media and also, you know, Seriously part of the discussion among, you know, some of the government leaders. So it becomes— it helps create that militarization, helps create a fertile ground for the far right to spread these issues. And climate apocalypse more generally too, and Malthusian ideas, you find in those far right manifestos of the Christchurch killer and the killer What is Malthusian thinking? Well, Malthusian thinking has many forms, but, you know, Malthus originally said that, you know, human population growth was exponential, food— growth of food production was linear, and that ultimately you'd always have this kind of War between population growth and food supply, or scarcity was inevitable, and that poverty, starvation, war were in a certain way checks on overpopulation. But Malthusianism also can mean that it can spin off into this idea that there are too many of a certain kind of people and too few of—

Fikret Adaman: Right.

Kasia Paprocki: Right.

Betsy Hartmann: And so, or, and in the case of these manifestos, it's more like, okay, overpopulation is this huge problem. And it's mainly overpopulation of the wrong kind of people then who are threatening us, and our population's going down, right? So they're going to take over. But kind of employing this view that the world is overpopulated And that is kind of going to be— that's part of the new normal. And, you know, we have to protect ourselves against that violently and closing our borders. So Malthusian ideas, the interesting thing about them is they can appear kind of soft at first, or, you know, many, many, you know, neo-Malthusians believe, you know, there's too many people, people are having too many children in certain regions.

Max Ajl: Yeah.

Betsy Hartmann: But contraception will save the day, right? But then there are people who are really saying, in a more violent form of population control, that we need to keep these people out or we need to wipe them from the face of the earth. And that's very frightening. So if that's around, if these ideas are floating around and getting kind of more steam in this moment of purported climate apocalypse and also the rise of right-wing populism. You can see how far-right interests would take this up and be into eco-bordering, right?

Anne Hendrixson: It's a moment in which these heightened politics of fear and of population are really resonating in anti-immigrant rhetoric, and it's happening on both the left and the right. The far right brings it to an extreme, and the politics warn of an anticipated demographic great replacement as a threat both to— a threat to whiteness. Great replacement conspiracy repeats the argument that white populations will be overtaken by the mass migration of Black and brown people. And such dangerous calculations of population worth have pushed xenophobic agendas. There's been anti-Muslim persecution and increased Islamophobia in Scandinavian countries. And in the U.S., Republican lawmakers, conservative news pundits And white supremacist groups go so far as to suggest that the Great Replacement is a Democratic Party conspiracy to replace white, quote-unquote, real Americans with left-leaning Black and brown immigrant voters. At the same time, far-right political parties in Europe keep— suggest keeping out immigrants to protect European environments. Literally, the the environment as a place of purity and pure nature and a place for pure race as well. So it's white environments that need protecting from Black and brown immigrants. And so these eco-bordering arguments literally suggest that heightened borders will protect environmental landscapes. And similar arguments have been made in the U.S. as well. And these are really eco-fascist arguments about the threat of immigrants to white spaces and nations, and really reinforce and harden ideas of race and belonging, and are particularly damaging in this time of climate change.

Betsy Hartmann: And unfortunately, then, you know, there are ideas— because people are concerned about the environment, They're trying to reach kind of more mainstream liberal people to kind of join forces with them on these issues. So that's dangerous. And, you know, these ideas are being deployed in France, Switzerland in particular, UK. They've been around the UK for a long time, mind you, but— and they're gaining ground. And I think younger generations like the AfD in Germany You know, which has been into climate denial generally. Younger generations aren't so much into climate denial. They can see the reality of climate change. And I mean, that is the kind of sad irony here is that as climate change gets worse, the denial decreases. But then there's a new politics of blame on the far right that, or on the right, that it's, you know, poor people who are to blame, right, or to blame for the bad consequences of climate change, and we need to shut our borders against them. You know, they're going to be set on the loose. So, the retreat of denialism doesn't necessarily lead to good politics. I think that's one thing people on the left have to, you know, really step up to the plate on, because we need a positive politics around climate change. I'd say one of the differences between the far right in Europe and in the US is that the US had this starting in the '70s and '80s. You have this and into the '90s and continuing this kind of greening of hate, which was the strategic use of population arguments by certain environmentalist. There's a guy named John Tanton, who was a Michigan ophthalmologist who got money, lots and lots of money from the far-right Scaife family in Pittsburgh, and used that money to finance anti-immigrant groups that used green arguments. And so, this is way back when. This is before, you know, You know, climate's a big issue, right? And set up really a very powerful network of groups lobbying in Washington, Center for Immigration Studies, which is, you know, has the look of a think tank. It's quoted even in the mainstream press a lot, but which is very much part of this Greening of Hate network. So it's a long-established, and there's kind of, interests mixed in. It's a long-established network in the United States that continues. So that's slightly different from the European situation. But I also think there are links between, you know, Nazi groups in this country, far-right groups, and European far-right groups that may, you know, I don't know enough to see how they're all connected, but— I think there's a lot of overlap. I think we're going to see more cooperation between American far-right and European far-right groups. And that might be slightly outside of the greening of hate. I don't know. Or will those groups also converge more? It's not clear. But certainly Tucker Carlson's picking up these ideas on Fox News. And, you know, so there's going to be, in a way, the greening of hate networks may supply some of the narratives, information, kind of fake news, fake evidence to bolster the far right, even if it's not done intentionally. It may be done intentionally sometimes, but even if it's done unintentionally, you could see that trajectory emerging.

Anne Hendrixson: It's a moment in which these heightened politics of fear And of population are really resonating in anti-immigrant rhetoric, and it's happening on both the left and the right. The far right brings it to an extreme, and the politics warn of an anticipated demographic great replacement as a threat both to— a threat to whiteness. Great replacement conspiracy repeats the argument that white populations will be overtaken by the mass migration of Black and brown people. And such dangerous calculations of population worth have pushed xenophobic agendas. There's been anti-Muslim persecution and increased Islamophobia in Scandinavian countries. And in the U.S., Republican lawmakers, conservative news pundits and white supremacist groups go so far as to suggest that the Great Replacement is a Democratic Party conspiracy to replace white, quote-unquote, real Americans with left-leaning Black and brown immigrant voters. At the same time, far-right political parties in Europe keep— suggest keeping out immigrants to protect European environments. Literally, the the environment as a place of purity and pure nature and a place for pure race as well. So it's white environments that need protecting from Black and brown immigrants. And so these eco-bordering arguments literally suggest that heightened borders will protect environmental landscapes. And similar arguments have been made in the U.S. as well. And these are really ecofascist arguments about the threat of immigrants to white spaces and nations, and really reinforce and harden ideas of race and belonging, and are particularly damaging in this time of climate change. And one of the reasons I think that they are finding particular resonance is that, again, there's this mirror of similar conversation on the left. And it's, while not as explicitly racist and in many ways different, more nuanced, but still embracing the notion that population pressures coupled with climate change will drive immigration from Africa to Europe and from Central and South America to the U.S. And these discussions do contribute to heightened borders, to the idea of invasive force coming in this time of climate change, and really could contribute to false solutions to climate change, to the militarization of climate change, which could contribute to hasty You mentioned climate change, right? The military is one of the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases. And so what does it mean when we're looking at people as threats and people as a threat specifically to environments in general? The population discourses have long sort of emphasized poor people as environmental degradators, and that that idea is consistent through climate change, the idea that growing populations are one of the reasons for climate change.

Betsy Hartmann: So instead of looking at the historic and current main contributors to climate change, they're looking to future population This kind of worst-case scenario thinking then takes off because the media loves worst-case scenario thinking, right, and drumming up fear. And unfortunately, you know, I was— I even saw sometimes that liberals and progressives would cite these kind of reports coming out of the intelligence agencies and the military as to like, this is what's going what to happen. And I think that's where the the problem comes in. future's going to look like. So we need to be really careful of the colonization of the imagination as well, of the future, and to come up with alternative imaginaries of what's possible in terms of solving climate change.

Anita Fuentes: I also had the chance to talk to Max Ajl, an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. And postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. His most recent book, titled A People's Green New Deal, provides precisely a critical overview of the Green New Deals pushed in most cases by progressive parties and leaders in different countries of the Global North. These mainstream Green New Deals, he argues, Fail to address issues that not only intersect with climate change, but lie at the heart of climate justice. The alternative is a Green New Deal committed to decommodification, working-class power, anti-imperialism, and agroecology, or, in other words, a people's Green New Deal.

Max Ajl: So the book was, in some ways, an accident. I've been writing about climate issues for a very long time. And about agricultural issues for a long time, and about issues of Third World development for a long time. And quite by accident, I wrote something in response to the 2018 IPCC report urging widespread social transformation at 1.5 Celsius, etc., that was critical of some of the iterations of a Green New Deal. And that was released practically At the exact same time that the Green New Deal legislation from Ocasio-Cortez dropped. And it was clear that if you read the Ocasio-Cortez legislation, that it was not a very transgressive piece of legislation, despite a lot of marketing hype to the contrary. And I say marketing in a slightly barbed way because I'm Unfortunately, that's what happened. It was marketed rather than read. Now, in fact, it should be said, I tried to place a few— a large number of articles and book reviews that made kind of critical reference to what Ocasio-Cortez had actually written, how it was being received, how it was being hyped, the social forces behind it, and the larger kind of project of a kind of rebooting of imperialist Keynesianism under the aegis of green reconstruction, green Great Transition, and so forth. I could not get anything published on the topic, oddly enough, or not oddly enough. So I pitched a book to David Schulman at Pluto, and he said, sure, make this, that change. And I wrote a book, basically. That's what happened. So why did I think it was important to write the I mean, so my intellectual work is about Southern development, basically, especially and also Arab agrarian issues. And my political work tends to be around anti-imperialism, especially coming out of the support work for Palestinian national liberation, anti-Zionism. And of course, I've been, like I said, I've been interested in climate.

Anne Hendrixson: Yeah.

Max Ajl: Ecology since I was a kid, really. And so I wanted to say, okay, how to bring these things together, right? Because it seemed obvious to me. But of course, what's obvious to us is obvious to us, and it doesn't mean it's obvious to other people, because everyone's coming from different places. But the amount of disinterest and hostility that I encountered when starting to say, okay, any movement needs to be, kind of use the current jargon, intersectional, right? So therefore, if you want a climate movement, it should pay attention to Palestine. And if you want a Palestine movement, it should pay attention to climate. And it shouldn't just be moral affirmation. You should say, okay, how to suture these theoretically? And this is saying, okay, we need to pay attention to anti-imperialism, self-determination, national liberation. These are the frameworks within which ecological popular development, North and South, fits. So that was what I was trying to accomplish. Intellectually, politically, and theoretically with the book, to kind of start the conversation, or restart, really, 'cause start is too arrogant. It's to really restart the conversation about those topics within the North, where the, in my opinion, the kind of ecological discourse was kind of overwhelmed by a tidal wave of Eurocentrism, Workerism, economism, reformist opportunism, imperialism. And I would go so far as to say some of the iterations have a white nationalist edge, even on what passes for the North American left.

Anita Fuentes: All movements should indeed be intersectional, including, of course, climate justice movements. In A People's Green New Deal, Max holds that rhetorics of pragmatism and objectivity are often pushed both on the right and on the left for identifying sacrificial victims for a great society that is only capacious enough to hold so many. This made me wonder if there could be a connection between apocalyptic discourses and pragmatist rhetorics.

Max Ajl: Yeah, yeah. So, in fact, I think— Betsy Hartmann's work is very valuable. And I really think of these rhetorics of pragmatism and the rhetorics of apocalypse as two sides of one coin. The rhetoric of apocalypse is saying, okay, if you don't do this, the apocalypse will come. And if you don't take immediate action, the apocalypse will come. And that is why we have to accept— Right. These pragmatic reforms of this, that, or the next thing in order to avert the ultimate crisis, right? So it's kind of used, or it can be used, to scare people into saying, OK, if you don't carry— if you don't accept to sacrifice those people over there, then the flood will come. Right. And so the apocalypse is kind of the stick, and the reform is the carrot. But the carrot, you know, there's not enough carrots for everybody in this case. That's the problem. So, you know, the urge for what I think— for basically an opportunist reformism is— I mean, first of all, it's kind of— it's inbuilt into both liberalism, right? It's liberalism is this idea that the system is fundamentally reformable. It's saying you can reform the existing system. This is part of the mythology of contemporary American liberalism, is the system is essentially reformable and fixable. And it's also saying, okay, the existing institutions, including especially the Democratic Party, are vehicles for the type of reforms that we need. And this kind of extends its tendrils almost everywhere You see it. So now, this issue of collapse and catastrophe, I mean, has 2 faces, I think. I mean, on the one hand, for people in Mozambique, they're already living in a climactic catastrophe, right, with the cyclone and so forth, and the hurricane that hit Puerto Rico and the earthquake that hit Haiti. And the people in Yemen are already living under a different kind of catastrophe, which is a catastrophe created by the US and then contracted out to Saudi Arabia. And no one even knows how many people have died because of— because actually I was just reading a report from one of the coalitions, and of course it never gets circulated in the US, these human rights reports from the Yemeni Human Human rights coalitions. Now, you know, and people say, you know, people throw around the number 350,000. There's no actual serious death counts of how many people have died in Yemen. I mean, they don't even have— there's not technologies available. Now, these catastrophes are already occurring for those people. So why aren't their catastrophes reflected in our schedule of priorities in the North?

Anne Hendrixson: Right.

Max Ajl: When, in fact, the day-to-day of accumulation and also social reproduction in the North are intimately connected with the catastrophes that are inflicted on Mozambique, Yemen, and Haiti, right, including continuing debt load, ongoing— the huge history of U.S. neocolonialism and colonialism in Haiti, the outsized carbon emissions per capita of people in the U.S., and the need to secure the petrodollar in the case of Yemen. I mean, these are catastrophes that are intimately related to the U.S. system of accumulation, a centered system of accumulation on a world scale. Yet those catastrophes are not the mobilizing catastrophes that Edward Said— are usually not the mobilizing catastrophes that are wielded to bully people into accepting these kind of reformist pragmatic approaches about what is reasonable and what must be done and what ought to be done in the short term in order to begin to move on climate change. I mean, we saw this very blatantly, I think, in this case. There was a kind of minor blowup in the United States related to Jamaal Bowman and the Democratic Socialists of America, related to whether or not he would be expelled for violating the BDS picket line, demeaning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, even though he's a member of the organization. And, you know, you basically saw, okay, you saw the reformists, opportunists in the organization saying, okay, we are going to accept Bowman, and then including people who advocate Keynesian Green New Deal, people like Who are well-known public intellectuals, like Danielle Dana Cohen, who advocate a Green New Deal, and saying, okay, like, the best thing that could happen for the prospective Palestinians is to implement a Green New Deal. Like, no, the Palestinians are actually underground in the Gaza Strip trying to, you know, trying to not get destroyed by Israel and get incinerated by Israeli munitions. Like, the Green New Deal is not doing anything for them at all, unless the Green New Deal also includes an anti-colonial plaque. Why not include it? Then it's a different story, right? So the rhetoric of catastrophism is then mobilized on a domestic scale, but sometimes with a kind of faux concern for the South, in order to mobilize people into support for any form of kind of cretinous domestic electoral opportunism in the North, be it Syriza, be it Podemos, be it support for the justice system in the United States and so forth. And so the end result is actually to foreclose the project, the collective political project of saying, okay, what is the future we would like and how are we going to organize to get there? Like, without relying on someone who doesn't want to get to that future, right? You can't— without relying on someone else, what do you— what kind of world do we want to live in? Right? Who is we? What kind of world do we want to live in? How are we collectively going to decide to get there? And how are we going to do it without saying, okay, we aren't— how are we going to do it without trotting on the present and future of the majority world? Right? That's a different way of framing the question than I think the predominant approaches to framing the Green New Deal in the United States, which don't engage that question. And what I think is most productive is to say, okay, these are different ways of approaching the project of politics. I mean, these are different politics. These are not shared or commensurable politics. These are different ways of acting and being in the world and thinking about how we want to change the world. Just accept that they're different. Stop trying to bridge them. Stop calling one of them divisive, because they're both divisive. They each want to divide from one another.

Anne Hendrixson: Right.

Max Ajl: Right? And say, okay, what do you want to do? And that's the political question at hand, right? It's not like I have any sort of real answer to it, right? I mean, I think it needs to be— it's a collective answer by people in the North and in the South. But at least we need to be able to pose the question clearly.

Anita Fuentes: And this is what I was trying to do in the book, in talking about the role of discourses, of pragmatism, The common thread of opportunist, reformist, and social democratic approaches is a blind faith in technology, a kind of magical catalyst, stardust sprinkled on the current system and capable of transforming it into a just and sustainable world ecology, reads an excerpt of A People's Green New Deal, in which Max Ajl, the author of The Green New Deal, argues. discusses the Green Modernization Theory, which he defines as the myth of progress— that is, the idea that things overall have gotten better and will continue to get better. But before reading the book, I had myself been thinking about this widespread blind faith in technology Max was referring to. Does it make sense to rely so much on technological solutions when it comes to climate change? I asked Max what his thoughts were on this issue. His answer made me realize that this myth of technological progress is, in fact, very much linked to the pragmatist rhetorics that we had just discussed.

Max Ajl: I mean, in order to understand the question, right, we definitely need to break it out into whose blind faith in technology, right? By which I mean that there's blind faith in technology of the right and of the left. Now, in both cases, of course, we can view it in much the same way that we view liberalism, right? I mean, what liberalism tries to do in general is to deny its ideological status, right? It presents itself as the world as it is.

Betsy Hartmann: Right.

Max Ajl: It says this is the world geoculture, and it isn't a geoculture in Wallerstein's terms. It's just, that's how things are, right? Now, technology is just the— I don't want to say material, because it's all material, including our thoughts, but it's the concrete reflection. It's actually the physical reflection of liberalism in a certain sense, what it's seeking to do. Is to say, okay, it's only natural, uh, that these technologies are— can be assumed to be neutral, um, and that we can consider them as— our considerations or our mullings, our conjectures of the conjecture should basically be focused on how we can assimilate and use, uh, these technologies, which are actually bourgeois physical artifacts of bourgeois property relations. But that we can— how can we just grab ahold of these technologies and turn them to our own uses? And then, of course, the kind of resort is to say something like, oh, what about fire? Are you against fire? Are you against wheels? Are you against Kalashnikovs? Are you against the printing press? Now, and most people would say no. I mean, I might say, actually, well, I don't know. It depends on which wheel, right? The wheels that are attached to cars, I mean, mass automobile culture developed specifically in the— but not only in the United States, and it was actually part of a ruling-class corporate monopoly offensive against public transit systems that are much more socially rational, right? Now, some of those public transit systems did indeed have wheels, but we can't just like— we say, which wheels, right? Now, So, already, this— asking questions like that puts not us on the back foot, but should put people who are assuming categorically the categorical neutrality of technology on the back foot and say, no, this is a technology that was developed by the ruling class for its own purposes.

Anne Hendrixson: Right.

Max Ajl: Can you, in this specific case, justify it? Now, of course, people aren't used to having to justify it. That's the first thing. In the second case, for the most part, it cannot be justified. I mean, take carbon capture and storage. Now, carbon capture and storage is a technology that does not exist at scale. And there are— it was basically the idea that you can either capture the carbon burned from incinerating coal, gas, oil. You can suck it out of the atmosphere, A, or B, you can capture it at the point of production. Now, there's a couple carbon capture and storage units going on that are used for enhanced oil well recovery in Texas, I believe. So they're actually owned by the oil companies, and they're used to extract more oil. Now, Could these be brought to use on a large scale? Anyone who's run the numbers in a serious way, anyone who's run the— and this is just one example, right? The number of the examples multiply. Anyone who's run the numbers about carbon capture and storage in a serious way sees immediately that you need to use something between 10% and 50% of current human final energy use. And Disregarding the actual infrastructure and technology and other material load of implementing this technology, even— and discounting the fact that you would actually have to use huge portions of the currently existing industrial plant to implement this technology, and also discounting that it's very likely that the oil companies would basically use this as an alibi to keep pumping out oil and saying, okay, we don't need to stop pumping out oil because there's this technology coming online. And also discounting that it is being used as kind of moral hazard to justify continued emissions of carbon dioxide on the basis that we can get to net negative emissions later in the century and we'll pull it out later, so we shouldn't engage in expensive infrastructural investments now. Even if you bracket all that, you say, okay, we're going to use 10 to 50%— 50%, 50% of current energy use, when actually there's structural energy apartheid already in the world.

Betsy Hartmann: Right.

Max Ajl: Massive energy poverty across Africa and South Asia. We're going to use 10 to 50% of current world energy use to do this project. And, of course, so it collapses the— it's an ideology. And as a program, it collapses as soon as you breathe on it, right? It's very clear that it is a cockamamie idea. So we need a popular, working-class, Third World-informed and respected— respectful program for dealing with climate change. And, you know, I have traces of it in my book. It's far from a complete anything, nor should it— and it's definitely not definitive, but it's hopefully influenced by it to a large degree. You know, so we know more or less what needs to be done. What needs to be done is not carbon capture and storage, yet suddenly that's on the agenda. And if you reject that and you reject the institutions that are pushing it, there's a— you suddenly— people— the reaction is within the sphere of ideological production, people say, oh, But it's actually a very debated and it's a divisive issue on the left. Okay. Well, okay, Zionism was also a divisive issue on the left for a long period of time. One of the positions was correct and one of the positions was incorrect. And it being divisive did not mean that there was an equal correctness attributable to each of those positions. One was right and one was wrong. It was never okay to support Zionism. I use this example because I know The podcast that I'm going to be on is people who are very clear on this topic. So, and that's an example of saying, okay, like, this idea that something— there's multiple opinions on the left about something is not an alibi for actually sustaining the legitimacy of those multiple opinions. Still, one's right and one's wrong. And it's the same with carbon capture and storage. That's just an example of this phenomenon where we are to accept this idea that it's legitimate to debate in a serious way the technological claptrap and the technological gee-jaws that are imposed upon us.

Anita Fuentes: Our next guest, Fikret Adaman, also brought up what he calls technological optimism in our conversation. While Max Ajl exposes the false neutrality of technological, In his book, Green Growth: Green Solutions to the Climate Crisis, Fikret highlights the contradictions of green growth. Green technology can help reduce the ecological footprint, but we can't solely rely on it when facing a climate crisis. The key to solving our ecological problems involves, in his view, a significant reduction of our production and consumption levels.

Fikret Adaman: I think there is a kind of technological optimism. In the sense that you know we should rely on technological improvements to deal with the climate crisis. I mean, certainly, technological improvements will help us with the problem, but we should at the same time be thinking of reducing the size of our economic activities because the the concept of green growth. I think is a concept that has no correspondence in the actual economic life. We want to keep growing, we want to keep consuming as we used to do, but we should do all these in a greener way. But there are boundaries in the ecology and You know, even if you rely on green technology, that doesn't mean that you will have zero ecological footprint. You will certainly have a smaller footprint compared to the brown technology, but still you will have some footprint. And people somehow, you know, think that or wish to think that with technological improvements we can solve all our ecological problems.

Betsy Hartmann: Right.

Fikret Adaman: Which is unfortunately not true. We should at the same time start thinking in reducing, especially rich countries, especially European countries, and to some extent Turkey as well. We should start seriously thinking in reducing our economic activities, our our consumption levels. We should reuse. Yes, we should recycle. Yes. But we should at the same time reduce our consumption, our production, because at the end of the day, whatever we do and whichever way we do, we come with an ecological footprint. Let's assume that we have switched to electrical cars. We may say, aha, you know, there is no greenhouse gas emitted. And so, you know, why not have 2 cars for our family? One for myself, one for my wife, or whatever. You see, you increase your consumption thinking that, you know, you would have no impacts over the environment. Whereas, yes, electrical cars are better than current cars fueled by gasoline, but still they have their ecological footprint. Footprint. So if I think that this is green, I may think that, you know, I can easily increase my consumption level. And at the end of the day, you may end up with a huge number of electrical cars in Europe. So this is a paradox, and we have a technical name for that. It's called Jevons' paradox, after the famous British economist of the 19th century, Jevons. So we should— I mean, that aspect is somehow put outside the picture. When you look at the Green Deal of Europe, you would see that the main message, the main sort of motto, is to keep growing but in a greener way. I would argue and I would claim that green growth would have its own problems and we should be very careful about believing in technology. I am not an anti-technology person, let me make this clear. But on the other hand, this sort of optimism is to be retaught.

Anita Fuentes: Fikret Adaman is a professor of economics at Boğaziçi University. His research covers a wide range of issues, including environmental economics, Fikret is in fact a senior fellow at the Istanbul Policy Center, where he investigates the relationship between transformations in the agricultural sector and the climate crisis, as well as the food regime and policies.

Anne Hendrixson: But let's get to Let's the interview.

Anita Fuentes: Thank you. hear from him.

Fikret Adaman: Well, I have been dealing with a major question, which is that Turkey happens to have a very detailed legislative structure with regards to environmental issues, and also has a quite strong administrative power. Turkey is one of the early countries that established a ministry on the environment, to give an example. But when you look at the environmental performance, it's quite bad. So therefore, it seems there is a dilemma. On the one hand, you have a very detailed legislative structure. Your administrative sort of power capacity is quite large, but on the other hand, you don't do well in terms of protecting the environment. So therefore, why we are observing this dilemma was and still is a major problematic in my research. The second question is the fact that social movements with regard to environmental issues are quite widespread in Turkey. But on the other hand, there is an element of randomness in the sense that given you have two similar and even you know. Identical cases, and in one you would have a social movement, people getting organised and protesting and so on and so forth. And in the other one, you don't observe anything. So, I mean, why on the one hand you have a case here and you don't have a similar case there? Why you observe a social movement in one geography and not in another. And in a related manner, when you look at the social movements in Turkey, you would observe that people would have quite a different range of reasons for protesting against projects that will come with environmental degradation? Well, I mean, in some you would observe that, you know, people object simply because of the NIMBY type of attitudes, not in my backyard kind of attitude. In some other cases, it turns out that people are very environmentally sensitive. They're protesting simply because of protecting the environment itself. But you can easily observe in another case that people object on the ground that the company that runs the project happens to be a foreign company. And these people object on nationalistic feelings. So if it were a Turkish company, then they would be pretty happy. So you see, you have different reasons for observing a social movement. So I'm— myself and my colleagues, Murat Arsel and Bengü Akbulut, I should give their names as well, we have been trying to understand the political economy kind of reasons behind the emergence of social movements on ecological issues. And lately, as you have already mentioned, I have been dealing with the relationship between the food industry and ecological problems. That's the, relatively speaking, recent area that I got into.

Anita Fuentes: I was curious about this environmental dilemma that Turkey was experiencing, according to Fikret. So I asked him to elaborate more on the country's position on climate change, as opposed to its performance. And here is what he told me.

Fikret Adaman: I think it's a very, very good question in understanding the case of Turkey, and especially in understanding the incumbent government's position vis-à-vis the climate policy. The Erdoğan regime has been in power since 2002, so nearly 20 years. And looking at the AKP government's performance, you would observe the appetite for growth coming mainly from the construction sector. Well, Turkey has managed to reach high growth rates under Erdoğan's regime, and when you decompose the sectors that were behind the growth, then the construction sector would emerge as the main sector that sort of pushed the economy forward. But as we all know, the The construction sector may be a very environmentally degrading sector, and we must acknowledge that the construction sector's activities were conducted in such a way that brought huge environmental degradation. And, you know, given the appetite for growth, and given that growth was mainly fueled by the construction sector, is the key in understanding the dilemma that I've mentioned at the very beginning. Although Turkey has a legislative structure and administrative capacity with regards to environmental issues, by and large, the government does not want to execute these regulations simply because of the fact that her main objective was to achieve high growth rates, and high growth rates even if that would mean a huge environmental degradation. So that basically explains not all, but sort of a larger part of the picture in the last 20 years. And perhaps I should also say a few lines with regards to the relationship between the food industry, the agricultural sector, and the climate policy. Well, as in many countries, the transportation sector, the energy sector, these 2 sectors are, you know, have been playing an important role in the emission of green gas— green gases. Right. But in the case of Turkey, the agricultural sector is quite important. Important not only in terms of employment, not only in terms of value added and so on and so forth, but important in terms of greenhouse gases as well. A large portion of greenhouse gases in Turkey comes from the agricultural sector. And if you include the food processing sector, you should also make an adjustment for that matter. So therefore, it's quite an important sector. And at the same time, the sector itself will get affected by the climate crisis. And therefore, you have to look at the relationship between the food sector and the climate crisis in a sort of double ways, because one affecting the other, but the other affecting the agricultural sector causing the climate crisis, one of the—

Anita Fuentes: It's a cycle, right?

Fikret Adaman: Yes, exactly. So that's something that's That needs to be paid attention, especially in the case of Turkey.

Anita Fuentes: I wanted to ask you, actually, regarding the 2 fields that you have already mentioned, which are climate change and issues of food insecurity, what are some recent projects that you've been involved in?

Fikret Adaman: Well, in understanding the relationship between the climate crisis and the food sector, You should also pay attention to the effects of neoliberal policies that have been enforced in Turkey and the effects of these policies on the food sector and especially on the agricultural sector. So therefore, we are here talking about 2 dimensions that are also affecting each other. Together rich, providing a detailed picture. On the one hand, as the first dimension, we have the impacts of neoliberal policies, which, well, basically come with policies that favor monoculture, subcontracting, and so on and so forth. And basically, that's why we We have been observing the end of the traditional agriculture in Turkey, like, you know, we have been observing in other parts of the world. So that's one dimension. But the other dimension is the effects of the climate crisis over the food industry. But these 2 dimensions need to be taken together so as to get the full picture. And that's what we have been trying to do in the case of Turkey. We have conducted 2 years ago a very detailed field study in Turkey, visiting different types of farms, observing different farming techniques, and conducted in-depth interviews and focus groups in the rural areas of Turkey with an aim to understand to what extent farmers had knowledge about the climate crisis, and if so, you know, what kind of measures they were taking to address these issues. And also, we were trying to understand to what extent They were happy or unhappy with the neoliberal policies imposed upon them. So, you know, we got a detailed sort of, a very detailed picture coming from the field. So we now know that, you know, in the mapping, With regard to these 2 dimensions that I have mentioned, we can locate farmers of different geographies, of different sizes, and so on and so forth. And doing as such, we can better understand their problems, their perceptions, their knowledge levels, and so on and so forth. Usually it is said that the agricultural sector is acting in this way or in that way. And when you are making such a statement, you are making the assumption that, you know, you have one type of farmer. But in reality, that's not the case. You have different types of farmers, and it's very important that you should be able to look at each type in order to get a fuller picture. That was the aim of the project. And we are hoping to run a second round and get, you know, another set of information. And, you know, we are expecting to do so in the coming summer.

Anita Fuentes: So what are your findings so far, if you can share them with us?

Fikret Adaman: Well, on the one hand, it's important to observe that farmers had already started to feel the impacts of the climate crisis in Turkey. You know, perhaps the extent of the feeling, you know, was varying from one side to another, but each and every farmer with whom we conducted an interview very clearly, explicitly stated that they were suffering from the results of the climate crisis, and they were also trying to take measures. Sometimes they were improvising, you know, solutions. Sometimes they were relying on their local knowledge, tacit knowledge. Sometimes, you know, they were relying on high technological solutions. But at the end of the day, the impact of the climate crisis was felt by these people and was felt in terms of economic losses, was felt in terms of their decreased life quality. And, you know, they were very worried about their futures because So, you know, they were quite aware of the fact that the climate crisis, you know, would continue to increase in terms of its impacts and so on and so forth. And therefore, you know, they were very worried about their future. And many of them also stated that they got affected by the neoliberal policies imposed upon themselves starting So basically we are talking about, you know, 2 factors affecting these people. And we are basically referring to something like 6 million people living in the rural area. It's quite a large number. So on the one hand, you have the neoliberal sort of regime that basically destroyed their traditional lives. And then secondly, you have the climate crisis that started to impose a cost onto them. So a double crisis, if you wish.

Anita Fuentes: Our last guest is Kaja Paprocki, a professor at the London School of Economics and author of the book Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh, which actually just came out in December 2021. You should all read it. The book is a product of over 2 years of ethnographic and archival research in South Asia and Europe, and it examines the political ecology of climate change adaptation in coastal Bangladesh. Being a researcher myself and a huge fan of ethnography, I loved listening to the story of how Kasia came to write the book.

Kasia Paprocki: I worked in Bangladesh for about 15 years with primarily alongside a social movement called Nijarakori, which means we do it ourselves in Bengali. And Nijarakori is sort of— it's a collective of autonomous peasant movements that are spread out all over Bangladesh. And I was really sort of excited about and inspired by the work that they do. To kind of demand their rights from the government and to organize themselves within their communities to pursue agrarian equality in a lot of different shapes. And so when I started thinking about doing a PhD, I asked them what they wanted me to study that would be helpful to them. And they told me they wanted me to go and look at the production of commercial shrimp aquaculture in Bangladesh's coastal region. And so the work really started as just kind of a basic agrarian political economy of shrimp cultivation. And I did some participatory research with movement members, and it was significant to them because the movement has really actively opposed shrimp aquaculture for about 30 years. It has been Yeah. A really violent process to sort of take over former agricultural lands for shrimp. And it was something they were really opposing, so they wanted help thinking about it. And as I started to study it, I realized that development agencies are— have been and continue to promote shrimp aquaculture today as a climate change adaptation strategy. And That was really interesting to me. Why is it that, you know, you can call this a climate change adaptation strategy? What's your understanding of climate change? How does climate change create different kinds of imperatives for, you know, older development visions? How does it create new imperatives? And what does that mean for rural communities?

Anita Fuentes: A common term used in connection to climate change is, as we discussed with Betsy Hartmann, the word apocalypse. We see apocalyptic discourses on television, in newspapers, in books, in official reports. But instead, Kasia chose to use the term dystopia, which carries a very different connotation. I found this word choice quite intriguing, so I asked Kasia about it.

Kasia Paprocki: You know, I think that the key difference between an apocalypse and a dystopia is that an apocalypse is necessarily fictional. It doesn't exist. It's like something that could happen in the future and that functions as sort of an epistemic threat but is not real. It doesn't exist. And dystopia is different from that because it grows out of existing social relationships and imaginaries. So I think what makes dystopia so powerful as an analytic is that it allows us to see how development agencies and sort of popular imaginaries of, in particular, of Bangladesh's sort of climate-changed future as sort of already existing dystopias. So a lot of development agencies understand the way that people in rural communities in Bangladesh live today and what it means to have an agrarian livelihood today as existing conditions of dystopia. And that sort of way of valuing existing livelihoods shapes both their understandings for the future of those livelihoods and also their understandings about sort of what's demanded in the present. And so I think that that really does a lot for us in terms of connecting the political work that future imaginaries do in the context of climate change with politics in the present of the way that planners and policymakers also think about and value the ways that certain people live today and whether or not those livelihoods are worth saving. I understand the adaptation regime as a way of organizing life today in the face of these threats that climate change presents for the future. And I think that What's important to understand about the adaptation regime is that it really builds on existing development regimes that already are shaping the political economy of Bangladesh and other communities all over the world. And I think that what thinking about the adaptation regime helps us to do when we're sort of trying to understand its work in Bangladesh and then also what it does beyond Bangladesh as sort of a global politics is that the impacts of climate change and adaptation are imagined really unevenly in different communities around the world. And so I have a lot of colleagues who do similar work on adaptation in New York City, And I really like to think with them because I think that the comparison of how any kind of planners imagine the future under climate change for a community like coastal Bangladesh versus a community like New York City is so starkly different, even though in a lot of ways they face similar kinds of threats about coastal, deltaic, And storm-vulnerable coastal regions. And I mean, the key difference obviously is that Bangladesh in a lot of these imaginaries is not thought of as worth saving. And everyone thinks that New York City is worth saving. And so I think that thinking with the adaptation regime helps us to—

Max Ajl: Yeah.

Anne Hendrixson: Hmm.

Kasia Paprocki: See that really profound unevenness globally of how the impacts of climate change and the impacts of adaptation are understood. And then the ways that local communities are confronted with the need to negotiate those impacts differently. A lot of the work, existing social science on climate change is focused on thinking about Yeah. The impacts of climate change as something that will happen in the future and not on thinking about the sort of political dynamics through which we negotiate how climate change will be experienced in the present as also really important. And to me, that's what the social life of climate change is, That political work today to understand what the threats are and then to figure out how we're going to live with them. And I think that is just as important as thinking about climate change as some kind of future threat that we naturalize as kind of inevitable. There are no impacts of climate change that are inevitable. They are all being negotiated.

Betsy Hartmann: Right.

Kasia Paprocki: right now in the present. And it's those politics that I think are most important in understanding climate change today.

Anita Fuentes: Our guests helped us identify some of the ways in which the climate change debate can be framed in favor of an increased securitization and disregarding the needs of the Global South. Betsy Hartman and Anne Hendrickson brought light to the dangers of apocalyptic and populationist narratives of climate change. Max Ajl provided a critical view of non-revolutionary Green New Deals in Global North countries. Fikret Adaman spoke to the contradictions between Turkey's position on climate change and its environmental performance. And Kaja Poprocki talked about the global But it's important to remember that even in a world full of apocalyptic messages, the impacts of climate change are being negotiated today, in the present.

Betsy Hartmann: I do remain hopeful. I mean, it seems to me that the climate justice, you know, politics and narratives and are very important in fighting off this securitization of climate change. And that, you know, there are many activists around the world and advocates around the world who are just serious about real climate policy. What do we do practically and politically to mitigate climate change and to adapt to it in ways that are just?

Anne Hendrixson: Right.

Betsy Hartmann: And that build equity as opposed to, like, you know, support ever-widening gaps in wealth and access to resources. So, I think there's a real opportunity here. And I guess the thing to remember too is always to look back in history for examples where popular movements really made and still make a difference. And I'm thinking here maybe of the anti-nuclear bomb movements, anti-war movements of the '50s, '60s, '70s, where people really— and '80s— there is around the world huge popular opposition to nuclear war. And, you know, so, and it had an impact. You know, historians are really, are saying this movement had an impact, and we shouldn't forget that. And I think the Black Lives Matter movement recently had a, you know, has a huge impact. So, and then I think, too, we're just going to have to get real practical, you know, on a community level, state levels, national levels, about what How do climate policies work? Where do we want to put the solar fields? Where does it make the most sense? How will people, you know, what kinds of energy, renewable energies will best serve people? How do we price carbon in order to, you know, reduce carbon emissions? How do we do that equitably? There are so many questions. I think we're all going to have to get very, very literate in climate policy and very engaged.

Max Ajl: Yeah.

Betsy Hartmann: And I think once you're engaged, literate, and active, you start feeling less apocalyptic because you win some battles. Even for 30 years, 40 years, God knows how long I worked in population politics. I worked as part of an international women's health movement, and we had some victories. And kind of that collective working together and coming, it's not always perfect, But coming up with some, you know, making some changes, reforms, victories gives you hope. And, you know, we can't lose hope. And I think we're also going to have to concurrently fight, I think, you know, at least in this country, you know, Trump-style politics and the possibility of real, you know, fascism. In Europe also. So, in a way, we need to take those issues on board and understand that as we fight climate change, we do not want to create the conditions that will— or the kind of narratives or the media or the entertainment that will give succor to the far right, because they're going to be less in denial. And they're going to be more strategically using climate change as a weapon. So that's something else we have to take on board, that we can join those fights together as well.

Anita Fuentes: You were just listening to Betsy Hartmann, Anne Hendrickson, Max Ajl, Fikret Adaman, and Kasia Pawlowski. Thank you for listening to the Security in Context podcast. Security in Context is a transnational research initiative focusing on peace, conflict and international affairs. Our goal is to critically examine paradigms and practices of security and produce alternatives based on collaborative research. If you want to keep up to date with our latest news, publications and events, you can follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. For more information about the Security in Context Media Roundup, check out our website. We'll be back with more news updates in the next episode of the Security in Context podcast. Until then, stay tuned.