Composing climate change as a matter of everyday living: Thinking against displacement

Abstract

In light of societal pushback against climate policy implementations and in response to the call for imaginations of (alternative) futures beyond the cold numbers of climate projections, this article considers how climate change urges us to rethink our relationship with the future. Drawing on feminist perspectives on living in times of climate intrusion, we theoretically explore a contrast between attempts to master futures and attention for futures as generated in everyday living. Attempts to master climate futures, we show drawing on focus group conversations that took place in the Netherlands in 2021 and 2022, tend to displace climate change from the here and now of lived experience, thereby depoliticising it in specific ways. Thinking against the four displacements traced throughout our data, this article makes the case for relocating climate change in the here and now. In so doing, we advance conversations on how to continue living in presents marked by (disruptive) climate change and engage the question how climate change can be made public and imagined otherwise.

Learning to compose will need many names, not a global one, the voices of many peoples, knowledges, and earthly practices. It belongs to a process of multifold creation, the terrible difficulty of which it would be foolish and dangerous to underestimate but which it would be suicidal to think of as impossible. (Stengers, 2015: 50)

Introduction

In Rotterdam as in cities worldwide, living bodies navigate altering urban conditions. Human residents experiment with new routes to bike safely during summer storms, ways to cool down their apartments during heatwave nights, and places that may give their young families some shade and room to move around in. While figuring out ways of living increasingly unfamiliar conditions, these experiments shape subjectivity in times of climate intrusion (Stengers, 2015). They embody physical, social, and political exposures and differences (Alaimo, 2016) and enact ecological relations between beings, and between beings and environments (Irigaray, 2015; Weston, 2017).

Such everyday experimentations may however seem insignificant in figuring out how to ensure liveable conditions for future generations. They may seem trivial in comparison to achieving the necessary and agreed upon GHG-emission reductions that are essential for global climate efforts. For these well-known climate discourses, aimed at bringing about particular futures via the control over or management of specific resources (be it lithium, greenhouse gasses, or pollutants), are attempts to master futures. That is, they conceptualise climate change in such a way that it becomes a puzzle that we, humanity, may solve (Read, 2023: 112), thereby positing humanity as masters of their environments. Despite the mobilising effect many such (and similar) academic and policy-futures have and/or aim for, there is a growing call to develop depictions of climate futures that make them imaginable beyond the cold numbers of emission reductions and the (infrastructural) transitions they require (Bina et al., 2020; Tyszczuk et al., 2019). Moreover, governments see themselves faced with ‘unwilling’ residents countering and questioning the placements of wind farms and solar fields, or the development of green hydrogen projects and sustainable housing, ‘even’ in sustainability-minded neighbourhoods and by sustainability-minded entities (Beauchampet and Walsh, 2021; Van der Horst, 2007). To us, this societal pushback signals that something is missing in current approaches to climate futures.

In this theoretically driven article, we thus aim to compose climate change as a matter of everyday living, delineating the ‘here and now’ from which we write and in which our qualitative study took place (section 2). Drawing on this study for our critique of mastery approaches to climate change, we point out – in a more empirical section of the article – four depoliticising displacements in our data (section 3). Thinking against these displacements, we draw attention to the ways in which seemingly banal or trivial actions generate climate futures differently, pushing forward questions on what our role as climate researchers may be (section 4). Throughout this piece, mastery is understood as an imaginary of subjectivity, relationality, and knowledge: in mastery imaginaries, the Subject is thought in terms of master-slave dialectics (Singh, 2018) and imagines himself to be disembodied, autonomous, and detached (Read, 2023: 111), looking to take control over their environments and others. This taking control, or managing, signals the hierarchical relationality that Subjects thought this way engage in, even as they take on ‘ecological’ approaches (Irigaray, 2015). Last, knowledge to this Subject is something that may increase control, it is sought to in the end be able to master the subject matter at hand (Singh, 2018).

This article is informed, in empirical philosophical vein, by a qualitative study done in Rotterdam, in 2021–2022. During this study, we conducted in-depth conversations with diverse Rotterdam denizens about where, when, and how they could ‘sense the change’. We held 7 focus groups and one workshop, looking for a range of different relations with, or exposures to, climate change in the city. ¹ In this article, we draw especially from four focus groups: the precariously housed (PH) and sustainably active neighbourhood residents (SN), the residents with vulnerable health (VH), and lower-class migrants learning the language (ML). The focus on sensed exposures of climate change was part of the set-up of our study. Meant as a strange provocation – how can you sense something that is often portrayed as something exceeding your local and embodied modes of registration – this question probed the tensions and uncertainties people faced when trying to link the abstract and the concrete and the big and the small. It also productively opened up conversations about where and when climate change proper is taking place, and – as we found out – was often met by four displacements. Standing out in particular was people’s concern with ‘the future’, or rather with the way they were crafting particular relations with the future.

For research on climate futures, Rotterdam is an interesting setting because of its diverse (segregated) population, large industrial footprint, and relatively ambitious climate policy goals. Rotterdam is located in the more climatically temperate regions in Western Europe, enjoying their economic and other (historical) privileges, but which are increasingly facing more destructive effects of climate change. The city’s climate vulnerabilities lie especially in heat entrapment in neighbourhoods lacking greenery and regular flooding of low-lying shores and outdated sewage systems (Molenaar et al., 2013). Rotterdam furthermore houses the second largest harbour in the world and the most polluting one in Europe. Despite its branding as a muscular, blue-collar city for ‘doers’ (van den Berg, 2017), Rotterdam has lost a lot of jobs due to outsourcing and digitisation over the last two decades. Coupled with the rise of right-wing, racist imaginaries of belonging, this has further marginalised racialised populations.

In the following section, we start by composing climate change as a matter of everyday living.

An intrusion?

I did notice that some people can just live a normal life at certain temperatures, and I just couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t doable for me, it didn’t feel ok for me to walk on the street at all. So that did strike me... And how do you avoid that? Well, I really felt like I cannot avoid it, what should I do? Go home, try to find the coolest place and just do nothing anymore. (VH) ² ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

We sleep just under the roof, but we’ve had it a few times in recent years that we moved to the living room because it was just way too hot in the bedroom, despite the screens we have, despite having taken ... well... measures to keep it cool. (SN)

The city being located as it is, the question whether climate change intrudes (Stengers, 2015) upon the lives of different groups of people in Rotterdam is an interesting one. Based on the conversations we had in our focus groups the answer seems to be both yes and no. Yes, because most participants recognised and recounted experiences of climatic exposure and felt unsettled by them, feeling especially resourceless in what to do about them, but in the meantime sometimes even enthusiastically sharing stories about how to alleviate, live with, or navigate them. And no, because – as many participants remarked – they were unsure whether what they were experiencing was indeed climate change and their everyday experimentations with changing conditions surely do not affect climate change as such (see also Van Oorschot and van Balen, 2024). In other words, what we understand climate change to be, how we epistemologically and experientially relate to it, and what kind of response(s) it requires are intimately connected. To make sense of the duplicity of being affected by ‘climatic exposures’ while feeling agentially and experientially disconnected from ‘climate change’, in this article we explore the political implications of two ways of conceptualising climate change.

Drawing attention first to the climatic exposures that participants recounted being affected by, we take these as invitations to compose climate change as a matter of everyday living. That is, rather than conceptualising climate change in an alternative manner, with our study we took up Stengers’ call that it is necessary to learn – as scholars, scientists and policymakers – to compose the many different stories and voices that together tell us something about climate change and how to respond to ‘it’. By composing climate change as a matter of everyday living, we pay attention to the ways in which climate change comes to matter as it intrudes upon our lives as living beings that constantly metabolise with their environments, becoming with what surrounds and permeates them. By focusing on how climate change comes to matter, we continue a feminist science and technology studies line of thinking which pays attention to the ways in which ‘things’ materialise, become matters of concern or care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Doing so takes us away from trying to conceptualise climate change as a whole or from above, and instead invites us to take these moments and places of materialisation as ways into the matter.

More so than the sociological and anthropological concern with ‘everyday life’, we furthermore approach everyday living as it involves the body, the senses, environments and relations (Alaimo, 2016; Irigaray, 2015; Weston, 2017). We suggest using this notion to bring into view the being alive of living beings and among them human beings, and their everyday interactions with one another and their environments. Here, ‘living’ thus signals the ecological as well as the phenomenological: It brings together the level of bodies vulnerable to heat and the ways in which we navigate and make sense of changing conditions. This way, we follow Luce Irigaray (2015) who contends that thinking and acting ecologically requires first that we ‘situate ourselves as living beings among other living beings in an environment that allows life to exist and develop’ (101). As we turn to ourselves as living bodies, senses and sensations come into view as registers of being exposed to and (metabolically and otherwise) exchanging with the environments in which we move around (Alaimo, 2016). The ways in which we ‘make visceral sense’ (Weston, 2017) of these environments comes to the fore in practices of relating and navigating with others in the everyday.

Everyday living is not thereby meant as a conceptualisation of harmonious co-existence in and with natural environments or nature. Although Irigaray et al. (2016) at times seems to suggest that living or nature is inherently pleasurable or balanced, with Kath Weston (2017) and Stacy Alaimo (2016), we are rather interested in everyday living as it takes place in, shapes and is shaped by, ecologically and otherwise troubled worlds. To attend to the level of everyday living in disruptively changing climates means to bring into view how living bodies experience these (or not), are exposed to and co-productive of them (or not) and respond (or not). The everyday experimentations with sensations of and exposures to urban heat islands, newly unpredictable storms, recurringly overflowing sewers, and industrial and traffic pollution signal such responses.

We are not the first to look at climate change (politics) in relation to daily urban lives and activities (e.g. Broto et al., 2020; Ruiz-Mallén et al., 2022), nor to everyday exposures and metabolisations. In a recent article akin to our argument here and elsewhere (Van Balen, forthcoming), Blanche Verlie and Astrida Neimanis, for instance, write that breathing is a mode of witnessing climate change, such that ‘to breathe is to witness one’s own body-in-and-as-part-of-climate change’ (2023: 118). It may therefore be worth noting that the experiences and activities we are looking at are highly differentiated and often disregarded practices and experiences that result from living in and with something big, that is, climate change (see also Ourabah, 2023). The practices and experiences, we argue, are political in the sense that they give shape to specific worlds and not others, including specific relations between beings, and between beings and environments. These practices and experiences figure and give rise to political contestations beyond but not excluding a focus on language (i.e. discussion and debate).

Relationally, this politics of everyday living is interesting because we think it may offer an alternative to common political subjectivities based in mastery. That is, as Weston, Alaimo and Irigaray argue, climate scientific as well as many ecological approaches often bear ‘the imprint of a certain way of imagining the human subject – namely, as a seat of awareness, bounded by the skin, and set over against the world’ (Ingold, 2002: 305, cited in Weston, 2017: 8). This Subject endeavours to manage (Weston, 2017: 9) or master (Alaimo, 2016; Irigaray, 2015; Read, 2023) the environment, thereby not only dreaming himself to be exceptional – situated outside and above nature – but also grossly overestimating his agency. It is this type of subjectivity, this understanding of our human relation to nature or climate change, that underlies scientific and policy imaginaries of doing something about climate change, or stronger, of resolving it by managing its components. This is not to say that all climate action is mastery, but that ‘non-mastery’ or mastery in non-mastery may better guide us in our responses in these troubling times (see e.g. Van Oorschot, 2024). In response to ‘ecological’ approaches that keep with the mastery imaginary, Irigaray (2015) suggests that

‘[b]efore willing once more to be the masters of the world, it would be advisable to wonder about what being alive signifies, and whether we are really living, or how we could be or become living’. (101)

In this article, we pick up on these authors’ critical stance towards ‘mastery approaches’ by tracing four depoliticising displacements throughout our data. In an attempt to turn attention to ‘what being alive signifies’ in times of climate intrusion, we continue by considering what we may learn from everyday experimentations about climate futures.

Where we live and breathe

Since the brunt of our critique regards the displacement of climate change in mastery discourses, it may be fruitful to take a moment to consider the situation and place from which we write. ³ Where do these experimentations with everyday living take place, both theoretically and in the concrete examples from the focus groups? And how does this place relate to climate futures?

Thinking with Peter Sloterdijk (2016: 458–459; Van Balen, 2021), we approach the ‘here and now’ of climate change atmospherically as comprising simultaneously our lifeworlds and biotopes. These local and multiple permeable ‘bubbles’ are the spaces we live and breathe, literally, but also socially and politically. They are the spaces of lived experience, of interactions with known and unknown others, of exposures to rain and wind, and of figuring out how to shield your bedroom from heat. They are, therefore, also the spaces in and from which denizens shape and imagine futures. As Arjun Appadurai (2004) suggests, the ‘capacity to aspire’ is a navigational one, asking from denizens to find or figure out their way to possible futures. Such navigation is dependent on orientations (Ahmed, 2007) that extend the reach, voice or freedom of some while inhibiting others (see section 3.3). Conversely, our lifeworlds and biotopes are also shaped by imaginations of the future: (apocalyptic) depictions of climate futures (or distant others) impact how denizens, for instance, relate to their environments as potential sacrifice zones, including their own place in those.

As introduced above, the focus groups we held took place in the city of Rotterdam. Most experiences and practices shared however concerned specific streets, routes, and bridges, the insides and surroundings of participants’ houses and workplaces (which range many neighbourhoods, from Noord, city centre and Charlois, to Vlaardingen, a small city just outside Rotterdam), and several parks (which in turn were considered more as public spaces or as extensions of the living room). Especially in the focus groups with (international) students, elderly people, and lower-class migrants learning the language, countries of origin were frequently referenced. For instance, in the migrant group when speaking about heat, a participant from Turkey explained how different 42° was in Turkey compared to here. In the conversation held with elderly people, Turkey also surfaced, but then as the setting for vacations, where the heat was undoable and air conditioning necessary. As we will return to briefly in section 3.2, other places or regions were also called up in more abstract terms, when discussing them as frontier places of climate destruction and as places from which people might flee to become climate fugitives ‘here’ (in the Netherlands or North-West Europe). The extent to which participants felt a sense of connection to these other places and beings varied significantly among participants. The city itself, then, mainly figured when municipal policies and histories were discussed, or stories typical of living in Rotterdam.

In (human) geographies of the future, several scholars have theorised the relation between the spaces of daily life and the future. As Bunnell et al. (2023) show, these theoretisations include individual, collective and institutional futurings, but especially the discussion on prefigurative politics is relevant to us here as it concerns alternative futures imagined and generated in activities by often urban residents. In their paper on the processual production of ‘new’ counter-spaces, Asara and Kallis (2022) consider how the prefigurative politics of Indignados moved from occupying squares to the ‘creation of alternatives’, which turn out to be specific spaces such as community centres. In their characterisation, prefigurative politics consist of enacting the change you want to see, behaving ‘as if’ the future democratic society already exists, and ‘building alternatives’. Prefigurative politics, therefore, are ‘generative’ of futures in a similar manner as the experiments with everyday living we consider here, with two important differences. While Asara and Kallis (2022) describe conscious prefigurations of alternative worlds aimed at structural change, the politics of everyday living we seek to chart here do not necessarily involve conscious designs or reasoning, nor do they necessarily involve demands or visions of structural change.

Four modalities of displacement

So, how does all this relate to what we’ve introduced as mastering futures? Picking up on the mastery imaginary of subjectivity, we draw together a variety of scientific and governmental approaches to climate change as ‘mastery approaches’. By doing so, we highlight their common treatment of climate change as something in need of solutions, and importantly, that ‘we’, understood in terms of humanity or the scientific community, may manage or steer.

Indeed, climate change is in most governmental settings, policy-related research, and in many scientific reports approached in terms of what may be done about, for instance, GHG emissions, so as to steer climate futures. ⁴ These studies have the immense benefit of being able to bring together large amounts of data, providing some form of overview in what would otherwise be a great mess. They are valuable for making these (quantitative) analyses possible and they rely on solid and sound scientific work. At the same time, their specific way of conceptualising climate change comes with its own problematics. That is, by endeavouring to master climate change, we argue that it is displaced (Honig, 1993): moved away from the here and now of differentiated lived experience. Honig conceptualises displacement to signal when political questions are taken out of those places and settings in which contestation may take place, to instead treat them as institutional puzzles that can be solved rationally or procedurally (Honig, 1993: 3). Displacement is thus a depoliticising move facilitating political management rather than democratic contestation or public issue formation (Marres, 2005). Extending Honig’s analysis of displacing the political, in this article we mobilise her work to think about the displacement of a specific subject – climate change – in need of political engagement. In this section, we trace four modalities of displacement encountered in the focus groups.

Epistemological politics

The first modality of displacement is through questioning who can gather knowledge on climate change and how. In our focus groups we encountered a clear tension between relying on climate science and locating climate change in people’s lived environments. Especially one type of doubts recurred frequently among participants: those concerned with the relation between the temporality of climate change and the potential for knowing it, or making sense of it, experientially. In response to the question whether they could feel the climate changing, a participant in the group with sustainably active neighbours, for instance, responded:

I think it’s a very difficult question, because I can remember that 40-50 years ago I lived somewhere in the polder in a village. And there the roof tiles flew around you with storm. You just talked about storm. And, well, we did have that storm from not so long ago: last week, we had a really bad storm. So yes, I notice that difference ... I can’t quantify that, tell whether it was worse than now. So, I can’t point out climate change in terms of wind. Nor in terms of temperature, because I happen to know that in 1976 the asphalt melted and people had to keep the bridges wet with large fire hoses, otherwise it would go completely wrong. Well, we had that too 2-3 years ago. So, I can’t say that difference either: whether it was worse then, or it is worse now. But when I read the newspapers, I think yes; it’s getting worse. But I can't experience that. [...] How am I supposed to perceive that change as a person in the short life I have? (SN)

This participant recounts past extreme weather events to explain that, firstly, they cannot from experience tell or know whether the climate is getting ‘worse’. This ‘telling’ for them is related to the ability to quantify and compare, both of which are inaccessible to them when depending on their individual experiences and memories (which do register ‘the difference’), but which they do find access to in newspapers. In the last sentence, the epistemic question is made explicit: is an individual life not too short to discern or even perceive the gradual, long-term change that concerns the climate?

Another participant in the same focus group makes the connection between experiential and scientific knowledges and their validity in making sense of climate change even more explicit:

I do think you need to go consult scientific stuff, they can simply register what really happened. I also find it very difficult [painful to experience, red.], also with storms and such, […]. But I notice that I find it difficult to connect personal experiences. (SN)

As opposed to experiential knowledges, scientific instruments and scientists can ‘register what really happened’ (emphasis added). This participant likewise experiences the extremities in the weather, even considers these ‘difficult’, but how to connect these personal experiences to climate change is troublesome. What is interesting in the accounts of both these participants is that they relate the duration and temporality of climate change to an inaccessibility of the phenomenon for experiential ways of knowing. Highlighting the tension between these modes of knowing, Kath Weston (2017: 111–115) traces how twenty-first century bodies have scientifically come to be considered unreliable instruments for knowing changes in the climate. Their assessments are after all ‘fleeting, impressionistic, imprecise, and limited to the life span of the observer’ (2017: 114). Illustratively, upon being asked whether their living room heated up much in summer, a participant from the precarious housing focus group responded by referring to the air quality sensor they had bought to keep track of it. Even when the location is limited and familiar, participants often elected to draw on quantified and thus more authoritative sources of knowledge rather than their own physical experiences.

This distrust of the body interlocks with a presumed ‘category error’, where what bodies are able to perceive is weather and that should be clearly distinguished from, and thus not confused with, climate (change). But as Weston (2017: 120–121) argues, the distinction between weather and climate change is not as clearcut as it is made out to be, and both practically and in sensation, weather is often studied as part or expression of climate. The distrust of what Weston (2017: 114) calls, after Wolfe and Gal (2010), embodied empiricism, may therefore also be indebted to a more general call to ‘trust the scientist’ and to trust (and seek) scientific knowledges over other ways of knowing. Alaimo (2016: 98ff) points out the connection between this call for specific expertise and the notion that a ‘view from nowhere’, only attainable through scientific methods, is what is needed in dealing with climate change. In this light, and as argued by Weston, people who doubt climate change basing themselves on ‘feelings’ or sensations rather than ‘facts’ can be alternatively understood as trying to figure out their relation to climate change, instead of taking someone else’s word for it.

Readers may discern here the epistemological politics involved with what we see as the displacement of climate change: away from the here and now in which we as living bodies are exposed to and would be able to – to a certain extent – sense and make sense of climate change as part of our environments. By presenting climate change as something only knowable to scientific instruments and understandable through calculations of abstracted data, climate change is placed outside of these lifeworlds/biotopes. As a result, the call to trust the scientist comes with technocratic tendencies (Harding, 2006; Stengers, 2015), neglecting those quotidian epistemological questions and practices of figuring out the relation between weather and climate, and foreclosing other approaches to responding to climate change.

Positional politics

Climate change, secondly, keeps returning in the data as a concern for the future, or as something that will really become relevant in the future. One participant, for instance, referred to the expected amount of climate immigrants in the Netherlands due to expected uninhabitability elsewhere, which they truly found a case to worry about ⁵ :

I see climate as a problem that is emerging more and more, because we don’t want to do enough about it. […] People will all come here, I sometimes say. We really have to worry about that migration, because we can't all live here either. (SN)

This participant warns us, as they did others, that ‘people will all come here’ and that ‘we can’t all live here either’ (we refer readers to Baldwin (2017) on the racialisation of the figure of the climate migrant in climate futures). Without wanting to dismiss their worries, clearly, we know that not ‘all’ people will come here. And yet, this phrase is indicative of what we call positional politics. That is, thinking in terms of climate change as something that only really takes place in the future – when we hit 2° warming, for instance – makes way for generalisations that not seldom present black bodies as a threat to white cultures and societal integrity.

This racialisation of (future) climate catastrophe coincides with the generalisation of specific perspectives. As Elizabeth Povinelli (2021) points out in Between Gaia and Ground, placing climate change in the future not only concerns a temporal dimension but also a geographical one. Povinelli argues that to see climate change as a ‘coming catastrophe’ is to place it just beyond the (temporal and geographical) horizon, from where we might see it coming our way, or where a saviour might appear to tell us how he heroically solved the threat (Povinelli, 2021: 37–38). This understanding of climate change thus depends on a rather privileged perspective. That is, it is available to those who can choose to disregard present and past (lived experiences of) exposures to climate change and ecological degradation. In her analysis, these are the middle and upper classes in Europe, the US, and Australia.

One of our participants, for instance, does not register climate change at all and instead experiences it being forced on them:

I myself do not experience climate change, but I observe it from the newspapers. It is forced on me. (SN)

Like Povinelli, Pulido (2018) criticises global efforts to stay below 2° warming by pointing out the racism that is involved in how these goals and reports come to be and the aims set out in them. ‘Frontline communities’ among which many indigenous peoples that have (for centuries) been exposed to ecological degradation and constituted the extractive and racialised ‘frontiers’ at which racial capitalism was invented and perfected, in these efforts, remain unconsulted nor compensated. The notable differences between current and expected deaths related to climate change in ‘darker nations’ (Pulido, 2018) versus the Global North are moreover left unproblematised and addressed. Humphreys (2023) adds that ‘future generations discourse foregrounds mitigation’ (1067) and marginalises adaptation as well as loss and damages, to which we might add with Povinelli (2021) reparations for the ‘ancestral catastrophe’ including not only ecological destruction but also dispossession and slavery. The focus on mitigation, according to Humphreys (2023), shows that future generation generalisations are used to push for specific strategies of response that are especially interesting and above all affordable to those countries and regions that have benefited from the historical and ongoing plunder of the Global South’s recourses, and have had the particular geographical luck to be exempted from the most disastrous effects of climate change.

Bringing this together, we suggest that seeing climate change as a ‘coming catastrophe’ thus entails placing climate change temporally and/or geographically over the horizon from the perspective of the (white) Global North generally, thereby disregarding the plurality of perspectives that comes from differentiated past and present lived experiences with and exposures to climate change. Here, we thus recognise a second political modality: instead of including different perspectives and as such opening up the question of climate futures to public contestation, thinking climate change as a ‘coming catastrophe’ amounts to a positional politics that generalises privileged, white, perspectives.

Situational politics

The third political modality, which we call situational, regards the question to whom climate change comes to matter (or not), or in reverse, to whom climate change as a subject matter is within reach. For, as many climate researchers and policymakers are well aware, for some (if not many) people climate change seems to remain a topic out of their scope. In the Rotterdam study, we especially encountered this in the focus groups with elderly people and with lower-class residents with a migration background learning the language. In these groups, climate change felt like something at great distance from their lives. This, as aptly noted by a precariously housed participant, is political in a third way:

That’s that “if you cannot think about tomorrow you cannot think about the future” situation. So, you can’t start thinking about climate change’. (PH)‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

That is, certain groups – those with steady income, good health and secure housing, for instance – can concern themselves with such concerns at a distance whereas others – with financial problems, aggregating care demands, or precarious positions – cannot. Appadurai (2004) describes this as the radically uneven distribution of the capacity to aspire, due to ‘rich people’ generally having more opportunities to practice navigating from direct needs and wants to further away goals or values. But whereas opportunities to practice certain capacities place the brunt of the work with ‘the poor’ (in Appadurai’s terms) themselves (i.e. they can practice to get better at it), Sara Ahmed’s (2007) notion of orientation connects the navigational with the spatial:

What comes into view, or what is within our horizon, is not a matter of what we find here or there, or even where we find ourselves, as we move here, or there. What is reachable is determined precisely by orientations we have already taken. […] ‘[W]e inherit the reachability of some objects, those that are ‘given’ to us, or at least made available to us, within the ‘what’ that is around. I am not suggesting here that ‘whiteness’ is one such ‘reachable object’, but that whiteness is an orientation that puts certain things within reach. (152, 153, 154)

What is reachable, argues Ahmed, is the result of (inherited) orientations of bodies as well as the spaces they navigate. To white bodies, environments that match this whiteness (white oriented spaces), much more is in reach than to other bodies. This is not an essential characteristic of bodies or places, but rather, spatial orientations are shaped and maintained, and reachability of objects is inherited through histories, habits, and expectations.

In the case of displacing climate change, the spaces and objects in need of reaching are abstract: they are temporally and/or geographically distant ‘scenarios’ without any clear genealogy to lived presents. For those bodies occupied with everyday demands in the here and now, whether social, political, physical, financial, or otherwise, such exercise in abstraction can be too much and too little relevant. In other words, some people cannot ‘reach’ such abstract places and generations, not because they are unintelligent or disinterested, but because of the orientations in place and the demands (or possibilities and impossibilities) that come with them. Again, this suggests a different reading of people’s supposed disinterest or unwillingness. By framing climate change as something that does not ‘matter’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) in everyday living, but rather as an abstract, challenging puzzle for some bright minds to figure out, climate change is placed out of reach for a lot of people that find themselves occupied with demands in the here and now. By the same token, it shows that framing climate change in terms of mastery invites some to join the conversation on climate futures while making it almost impossible for others to do so.

Projective politics

Connected to this, the question comes up who is included in mastery depictions of climate futures. In his article on future generations, Humphreys (2023) points out they often ‘reflexively mirror’ the present (for instance, by projecting a continued belief in globalisation and international trade) as well as inevitably repeat current conflicts by neglecting ‘current “inequity”’ (1080). With Luce Irigaray (1999), we add to this that the who that is projected forward also reflexively mirrors a specific imaginary of subjectivity: that of mastery. In The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, Irigaray (1999) theorised this Subject as someone who does not breathe, or does not breathe physical, actual air. The Western Subject instead is a rational, bounded, and disembodied individual ‘forgetful of’ his ecological existence as a living being interacting with actual, changing environments and others. By displacing climate change to instead work with abstract scenarios inhabited by generalised human beings this bounded, unliving being is projected onto the future.

This projecting forward is visible in the story of a participant, who narrated their pride and identification with regard to the resilience of Rotterdam’s high rises in catastrophic futures:

Yes, I think it’s cool that Rotterdam is actually very resilient in that way, I mean it will probably be 5% of the population [who can stay here]. And there is a lot of suffering involved, but it is a steadfastness that suits the city, I think. (PH)

Noting the mere 5% of people that may be able to stay in Rotterdam and connecting that to (their) suffering, this participant identifies with the steadfastness of the city’s concrete towers and shares their expectation to be (able to choose to be) among the remaining few. As a healthy, young individual with practical skills, they expect to end up at one side of those who may stand tall and weather the storm.

In contrast, two participants in the group with vulnerable health expect to inevitably need to flee:

Px: We can all go and flee to other places, but I do have objections to that, […] if we are going to do that now, then this is actually already a sacrifice zone.

Py: And in addition; who can leave and who cannot, that’s that dichotomy again. (VH)

Here, the participants relate on the one hand fleeing to giving up on Rotterdam, to sacrificing it to the waves, and on the other they signal the privilege of those who can leave and who cannot. Instead of drawing a simple distinction between two groups, the questions about the ethics or politics of sacrificing places like a city and the necessary conditions for leaving in time reflect their considerations for differences between bodies and exposures, access to knowledge, and resources. This signals that the conceptualisation of subjectivity as it can be found in mastery discourses is not only factually false (we are living, bodily, beings) but also politically discriminatory on a fundamental level. As Irigaray (1999) argues, the subject of ‘sameness’ in this type of climate thinking is a traditionally male subject, undisturbed by such bodily experiences as menstruation, giving birth, feeding another being, intimacy, or the male gaze. With Povinelli (2021), Baldwin (2017) and Alaimo (2016), we would juxtapose this subject of sameness with difference thought in the plural. Just pertaining to the examples already included in this article, at least age, race, geographical location, health, and housing seem to figure in here. As Baldwin (2017) writes to connect the projection of the subject of sameness to climate racism, ‘[c]olonizing the future in this way […] amounts to a […] racial subordination that re-inscribes a naturalized (i.e., climatized) hierarchy onto planetary population survival’ (300). The subject projected into the future thus is not only disembodied and bounded, but also white, male, in good health, and most likely heterosexual and liberal. By projecting these existing norms onto climate futures, many alternative ways of being – of everyday living – are made invisible.

Generating (climate) futures

In the previous section, we showed that mastery approaches to climate futures rely on placing climate change outside of the here and now. This placement had considerable depoliticising and exclusionary effects, which is why we consider this displacement a misplacement of climate change. In this section we return to climate change as it registers on the level of everyday living.

One of the most valuable insights we derived from the focus groups was how participants struggled with us and each other in formulating and making collective sense of physical and ecological experiences and relations. Struggling, here, must be read in a twofold way: on the one hand, participants were often struggling to piece out – on our request – their experiences of instead of their opinions on climate change. The unfamiliarity of this request was especially pertinent in groups and among participants that were better acquainted with climate discourses and projections. ⁶ Experiences and experimentations were also shaped by such discourses, such as for the participant who wanted to stand tall with the high rises: they felt depressed by the global prognoses and had ceased any individual and activist attempts to contribute to change. But struggling also took place in the sense that participants at times struggled to see the relevance of their experiences or relations and to find words for them as they touched upon the banal, such as this participant’s description of their encounters with heat in their DIY-insulated apartment:

Sometimes when the sun shines it shines on my windows. Then my house is getting all hot. So that's why I don't actually have to put the heater too high. […] Sometimes the heat bothers me. Especially when I go outside, my lips get dry right away. I didn't have that before. (SN)

What we think deserves our attention here is how climate change comes to the fore as part of the everyday environments we live and breathe, and how our living bodies cope with, register, and find ways of living with that. Sensations, emotions, habituations, and practices run through one another. A warming climate is both convenient, because it saves heating, and a bother, both an environmental factor wherever we go, and a concrete physical exposure. This multiplicity and intersection of climate change with other concerns that are just as much part of everyday living are also clearly reflected by another participant:

Well, […] I have a small garden... There’s no grass anymore because since I’m retired I wanted less maintenance […]. And I think that’s still pretty good as far as coolness is concerned, but indeed there are days when it’s too hot under the sunshade. So, you find a place in the back, under a tree. (VH)

Here, we find an ageing body longing for less work in the garden but encountering the heat capture of tiles vis a vis a cooler place under a tree. Being exposed to a warming climate, the participant narrates looking for and finding a place where conditions are better. For two other participants, this place is outside of their homes, in a park or under a specific tree nearby. As one of them explains:

I have there, next to home, I have there evening summer, I live on the top floor. Evening summer in the living room, that’s why not we eat, is take the stuff and under the tree, next is close by. Evening is eating there. Kids play a bit. Is day different, is better at home, but evening I do not want to in the living room, no sitting. (ML)

Reading these excerpts, we can see how climate exposures lead different people to navigate these conditions in varying ways. This is what we mean when we say that climate change as a matter of everyday living makes it public: even though some of the experimentations with everyday living take place in private, many concern the use and navigation of public spaces (parks, bike roads, busses, places of shade, or shelter from heavy rain) and interactions or coordination with others (there). And even though they may come across as trivial, in these experimentations new publics are engaged in the what and how of living with climate change: publics for whom climate change as an abstract challenge for the future may well be out of reach or who are, as a result of their positionalities, not invited into the category of the mastering Subject. Yet everyday living goes on, and people improvise solutions, fixes, different routines, and alternative care practices.

Of course, the recognition of differentiated climate exposures is not the same as opening up who gives shape to climate futures. Since (re-)politicisation demands plurality, it is not enough to collect stories of exposures as scientists or policymakers (see also Tuck and Yang, 2018 on the dangers of extractive research), but these stories and the people sharing them must themselves be taken seriously as generating climate futures. Here, we refer back to the parallels with prefigurative politics: in experimentations with climate exposures, denizens act ‘as if’ climate futures are already here – because in a real way, they are - giving shape to ways of living that help them and their surroundings navigate these conditions. By doing so collectively if not as a coordinated group, their experimentations are – in small ways and on small scales – generative of futures in which diverse denizens figure out how to live with changing conditions.

That leaves the role that may be played by conversations such as the ones we had in Rotterdam. The shape they took in 2021 made them especially suitable for collective forms of sense-making and attunement to climate change as it registers in the city. As one participant furthermore told us, they appreciated but also longed still to hear from others with similarly seldom heard experiences:

Rotterdam is a city where you have to work hard to live, it’s […] quite debilitating […]. I’m actually curious what other people who may not always walk super smoothly, or who also suffer from [chronic pain] think, because I think about it more often now: maybe I just have to leave the city at a certain time, where everything is a bit easier. (VH)

Listening to one another about everyday exposures to changing and challenging conditions and trying to make sense of unfamiliar or unsettling situations together may, we believe, strengthen the generative potential of everyday experimentations. It is because of the duality of the discursive, that is, its being part of the here and now, while being able to imagine and discuss beyond that, that we think our task as scientists, philosophers, and denizens in times of climate change lies here. How can we meaningfully attune to climate change as part of the here and now in which living bodies – always partially – register changing climates? How can we make sense of those observations and the ways in which these are reflected in practices and ways of navigating our environments together? And how, lastly, do we take these experiences and conversations as starting points for thinking and speculating more consciously about climate futures, that is, forging connections explicitly between already existing experimentations and further away climate futures, paying attention as scientists not only to stories of suffering but also to pleasures and desires (Tuck and Yang, 2018), and without giving in to the tendency to master those futures? As always, the focus groups in Rotterdam were only a start.

Conclusion

In this article, we theoretically explored the contrast between attempts to master climate futures and paying attention to how these futures are generated in everyday living. Drawing on data from our Rotterdam study, we traced four modalities of the displacement of climate change that seem characteristic of what we call mastery approaches: epistemological, positional, situational, and projective. These displacements have strong depoliticising effects because they place climate change outside of the here and now of lived experience and everyday ecological relations. As a result, many ways of living do not find their way into mainstream imaginations of climate futures.

Consequently, we argued for the importance of opening up climate futures by countering its displacement. Placing ‘back’ climate change amounts to a threefold challenge to mastery approaches. First, it entails (a process of learning) to attune to ourselves as living beings exposed to and co-productive of the environments in which we live our lives, challenging the mastery imaginary of subjectivity. Second, it retains a much stronger relation between climate futures and life as it is experienced in the everyday, challenging the distancing and abstraction inherent to mastery approaches and the exclusionary effects thereof. And third, this generative approach to climate futures makes climate discourse and imagination public, challenging the devaluation of diverse knowledges and perspectives traced in mastery approaches.

Some questions will however need continued engagement. For, won’t this replacement give rise to quarrels about subjective experiences of climate change or the lack thereof? Or what about those who can ‘fend for themselves’: how do we persuade them to recognise and act on the urgency of climate change on a global scale? And lastly, what will the work of composing all these different relations and practices consist of, and how democratic and/or effective will that be? For now, we reiterate that placing climate change in the here and now of sensed experience and ecological relations is not meant to be a solution for climate politics. We do not think that composing climate change as a matter of everyday living will automatically lead to more inclusive or less dangerous futures. The work of communicating the urgency of a warming planet, extreme weathers, and ecological destructions will therefore not cease. Instead, what this shift may do is break with the idea that climate change is a challenge to solve, a call for further trying to master nature, an opportunity to safeguard unsustainable living standards. Locating climate change in our everyday metabolisations, interactions, and experiences with the environments we navigate calls us to rethink ourselves and our positions vis a vis this terrible complex of destructions. It invites us to listen, not as passive recipients, but as active composers in the midst of, and as part of, contestations over the shaping of different, better, worlds.

As climate scholars, we thus think there is work to be done in finding ways to talk about ourselves as situated living bodies among others, and as exposed to but also co-productive of the environments in which we live. The emphasis placed throughout this piece on everyday living is not meant to suggest that everyday living is a somehow more authentic or real phenomenon than the (real!) abstractions that shape our world. Nor is our everyday living unmediated: precisely because everyday living is ecological and phenomenological living with others and within particular environments, everyday living is shot through by and textured with history, materiality, and difference. Rather than reifying everyday living, we sought to bring the messy business of getting on with life as a phenomenological and ecological being into analytical view so as to finetune a broader critique of mastery approaches. In finding ways to talk about, exchange, and make sense of everyday living in changing climates, a plurality of climate futures being generated in everyday experimentations may come together to form alternative depictions of climate futures grounded in what we know and yet reflective of difference. This work will entail acknowledging the long history of having learned to distrust our bodies and distance from ‘nature’ in western societies and figuring out together how to meaningfully turn this around. Learning to attune to the level of everyday living, and with that to our bodies, senses, and ways of registering temporally and spatially limited conditions of climate change, is part of that.