Collective care and climate repair

Abstract

This engagement with Chantel Carr's article, ‘Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis’, considers possible organising structures of care and climate repair, and the ways this labour can work to reproduce or to challenge settler-colonial capitalist states. Drawing on critical disability studies and crip theory, this essay considers alternative imaginaries of mutual aid and care that can inform how we conceive of and organise the work of climate repair without relying on ‘emergency’ and ‘crisis’ to propel us, and while, at all times, centring justice.

Introduction and context

When I first responded to this work by Chantel, it was in a short speech during the (online) Institute of Australian Geographers conference in 2021. There was a chord chiming through that conference, played by Dr Chantel Carr, Dr Sophie Webber (see Webber et al., 2022), Blatman (forthcoming), and others, around how to navigate, think and strategise with and against capitalism when doing critical geographical work on climate change and settler-colonialism. There is tension here. We don’t want to concede to capitalist realism (Fisher, 2009) and its swallowing of the horizon. Complete disengagement with capitalism is also rarely tenable, and purity politics (Shotwell, 2016) can be harmful, stymie action and impede solidarity. And yet, climate justice is fundamentally inconsistent with capitalist domination, and indeed with the State as we know it. So how do we act – now, meaningfully, usefully – without reinvesting in, and reinscribing, the structures and systems that have produced the climate crisis? In my brief response to Chantel's work, I’d like to reflect a little on these tensions in how we, as critical activists and scholars fighting for climate justice and climate safety, navigate our relationships to the State – understood here as constitutive with and by settler-colonialism (Watego, 2021) and the political economy of racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Robinson, 1983). Further, I conclude by reflecting on what we can learn about care, repair and the work of it, from critical disability and crip studies.

Do It Collectively

As Carr (2023) argues, the material basis of the work of climate change, the labour of adaptation and survival, hasn’t often been in our range of view. Given capitalism's outsized role in producing climate change, it is critical that we understand the interactions between and co-constitution of capitalism, labour conditions and relations, and climate change. This understanding can help guide our praxis such that we might intervene in ways that contribute to both climate safety and climate justice, and the dismantling of the systems that have produced our current crises.

Carr draws our attention to the problem of voluntary climate labour – an invitation to think about how the ways we imagine the labour of climate change also reflects, imagines and reproduces a particular kind of state, the continuation of the wage relation, and how we organise acting in concert. Perhaps we don’t think enough about how approaches to climate action envisage the State, and normalise and perpetuate certain expectations of the State. This concern evokes conversations I’ve been having in the housing justice space, with people such as Anna Carlson, Libby Porter, David Kelly (see Porter and Kelly, 2022), Mo Chan, Jonathan Sriranganathan, Uncle Shane Coghill, Professor Chelsea Watego, Kevin Yow Yeh, Samantha Bond, and all the contributors to the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities project (Brisbane Free University, 2021) about the way calls for housing justice from the Left often comprise demands that would see a strengthening of the same State apparatus that we are deeply critical of, and work against, in other ways. Carr's work draws our attention to this in the context of the organisation of the labour of climate change and the State – how do we make demands for just and safe working conditions for climate workers, without inadvertently reinvesting in a version of the State, and a political economy, that is largely responsible for climate change itself?

With this question in mind, Carr's (2023) account of Tradies for Fire Affected Communities can be read in different ways. We can interpret the actions of the tradies as anarchist, DiY, tactical climate action, stepping into a gap left by the state, filling it with grassroots organising and re-creating sites for collective action within and beyond the State as we know it, de-centring the role of the State and colonial capitalist political economies in how we care for each other. We can also read it as a story about the ineptitude and incapacity of the State, reconfigured by decades of neoliberalism and the hegemony of capitalist realism, to meaningfully act to protect us. Of course, the ability to expect or hope that the State would intervene for our protection has always been unevenly distributed and totally unavailable to some, given the racist workings of this violent, colonial apparatus. In stepping into the gaps left by the ineptitude and/or unwillingness of the State to offer the conditions for climate justice and climate safety, we could also see how DiY – or rather, Do It Collectively work – can make okay, make survivable, the failures of capitalism and the capitalist State, thus softening the very contradictions we rely on to bring about the fall of capitalism. Or perhaps this is too cynical, too accelerationist of a take – perhaps this work can not only challenge and delegitimise the State but also give us confidence in our capacities to imagine and create other, more just, modes of organising ourselves.

Care against necropolitics

Chantel's pairing of work and care, care as work, work as care, and care in crisis, can be thought alongside work from critical disability studies and organising, which has long grappled with the tension between the imperative of care and survival without relying on, or reinvesting in, the necropolitical (Grunawalt, 2021; Núnez-Parra et al., 2021; Mbembe, 2003) structures that are themselves disabling, and that desire the death of disabled people. I’m indebted here to the Brisbane Free University crew and the Disability Justice Network (n.d.) for giving me grounding in critical disability studies, because it was that work that I kept reaching for in thinking through Carr's account of work and crisis. Crip, queer and anti-racist theories of care are especially important if we are interested in practices of care and survival by those who, ‘were never meant to survive, because this world was built against their survival’ (Hedva, 2020, drawing on Lorde, 1978).

Carr's account of tradie responses to the bushfires reminded me of a story from the book Care Work – Dreaming Disability Justice (Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018: 113–114). On the devastating 2017 bushfires in the north-west of Turtle Island (so-called North America), they wrote:

‘Everyone was coughing and stressed out…. And when the texts started to come in – Hey, is anyone else feeling like they can’t breathe, like they’re sick from all the smoke? Am I making a big deal out of nothing, or is the smoke making me feel super foggy? – who were the people who already knew about masks, detox herbs, air purifiers, and somatic tricks for anxiety? Yeah, you guessed it. Over and over, it was sick and disabled folks – particularly folks with chemical injuries, environmental illness, asthma, and other autoimmune conditions who had been navigating unsafe air for years – sharing the knowledge that being sick and disabled had already taught us.’

Here, Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reminds us that the work of care, community organising, community support, and the practicalities of living and surviving and beyond in a world not meant for you, that is hostile to your existence, is work already underway. This work is being done by First Nations Peoples, people of colour, disabled people, queer people and many others who have never been able to rely on the State to care for them, keep them safe, or keep them alive.

Queer, crip theory can also offer us something in how we think about the edges and boundaries of climate labour, and the work of climate crisis. In their essay Sick Woman Theory, Johanna Hedva (2020: p12) writes:

What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way.

Care, in this configuration, is only required sometimes. When sickness is temporary, care is not normal.

In this, I think there's a caution about how we use ‘crisis’ as a framing for climate realities here and to come – crisis evokes urgency and emergency, which climate change is, but I am concerned this framing can obfuscate the centuries-old antecedents of this crisis; a crisis which, as Chantel notes, is attributable to imperialism, colonialism and capitalism. Emergencies don’t lend themselves to this careful accounting; we typically understand them as temporary. Because we think of them as temporary, we may be more willing to tolerate or accept measures or policies introduced with little consultation and less accountability, and yet such measures may have very long lives (Carlson, 2022). Further, political responses to emergency can be expansive, enacting ‘opportunistic oppression’ (Birdsall and Sanders, 2022: 1) and reinscribing systems of racial violence and necropolitics (Anderson et al., 2020). Adapting Hedva, this framing positions both crisis (‘sickness’), and the care it takes to survive it, as aberrant. In fact, the climate crisis, the work of repair and the work of caring for wastelands and each other – as Violet Lee (2016) reminds us, no place is beyond care and healing – is, in fact, the work of our lifetimes, and of lifetimes to come.