Abstract
As communities around the world grapple with the impacts of climate change on the basic support systems of life, their future climate imaginaries both shape and are shaped by actions and material realities. This paper argues that the three globally dominant imaginaries of a climate changed future, which we call ‘business as usual’, ‘techno-fix’ and ‘apocalypse’ – fail to encourage actions that fundamentally challenge or transform the arrangements that underpin systemic injustices and extractive forms of life. And yet, to meet the challenges associated with food production, energy needs, and the destruction of ecosystems, people are coming together, not only to take transformative action, but in doing so, to create and nurture alternative imaginaries. This paper presents empirical findings about how communities in north and south India and south-east Australia are pre-figuring alternative futures, locally and in most cases in the absence of broader state support. An analysis of communities’ actions and reflections indicates that their praxes are altering their future imaginaries, and we consider how these local shifts might contribute to broader changes in climate imaginaries. At the heart of the emerging imaginaries are a set of transformations in the relational fabric within which communities are embedded and how they attend to those relations: relations within community, with the more-than-human, and with time.
Introduction
In the face of a rapidly and harmfully changing climate driven by fossil fuelled forms of life (Rockstreom et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2018), communities across the globe, particularly those most marginalised and damaged by systems of global capitalism, are confronting immediate and damaging impacts on their basic support systems of life. At the same time, those communities are being structurally forced to wait for promised interventions and forms of support that fail to come. The effect is both to leave them abandoned to the ravages of climate change and to a profound form of political disempowerment. Nevertheless, and as Varvarousis (2019) notes, crises can engender new or shifting social imaginaries; they are both a point of reflection on what has gone wrong, and, through generative meaning production, an opportunity for transition. Indeed, as promised global, national, and technological solutions fail to eventuate, many communities have begun to act, and not to wait; the effect is to create an alternative political flow, to make space for effective forms of praxis and, as we explore in this paper, to open the possibility of alternative, more empowering future climate imaginaries.
Observations and analysis of the failures, sluggishness, and recalcitrance of action at the macro (national and international) level can leave one with an overwhelming sense that both fossil-fuelled forms of life and the dominant imaginaries for a climate changed future are immoveable and impervious to transformation. For activists and communities witnessing failure after failure of the annual COPs to produce sufficiently robust agreements, and of states party to existing agreements to set or meet targets for mitigation or adaptation that are adequate to the scale of the ravages they are facing and will face, the stasis seems both dire and enervating (Burke, 2022). Nevertheless, across the world, communities, including those networked through the Transitions Network (Feola and Him, 2016) and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (Kothari, 2020), are pursuing a range of transformations that respond to, and anticipate the social and ecological impacts of climate change. Shifting perspectives from the picture of the global as seen from above, or from the point of view of the formal state and international institutional orders, to these more local, but nevertheless global responses not only affords a quite different image, but also contribute to shifting the dominant, problematic imaginaries for a climate changed future. In this paper, we present some of our empirical findings about how communities in India and Australia are responding, locally and in most cases in the absence of broader state support, to the effects of climate change on the basic systems that support their lives. We then reflect on how those praxes are altering these communities’ own future imaginaries, and how they might contribute to shifting climate imaginaries beyond those communities.
In the first part of the paper, we set up the theoretical background of the project, grounded in an analysis of current hegemonic climate imaginaries and possible alternatives, and describe our field-based research methodology. In the second part, we present some exemplary data from the field, focusing on how selected communities are practicing and imagining material transformations in everyday life. In the third and final part, we reflect on some themes emerging from our explorations of community efforts, and their implications for how communities’ praxes might alter future climate imaginaries.
Climate imaginaries and imaginaries as praxis
Our exploration in this project occurs within the context of three linked theoretical frameworks: First, the idea of social imaginaries; second, hypotheses concerning dominant climate imaginaries and their effects; and third, the idea that imaginaries can be formed and transformed through praxis. In this section, we briefly discuss each framework and then, building on the idea of praxis as the source of imaginaries, we set out our methodology.
Social and climate imaginaries
Individuals and communities make a vast range of choices about the types of actions they take and the objectives they believe worth pursuing. Such choices, both about particular actions themselves, and about the types of broader structural reforms for which they strive or advocate are, however, neither random nor arbitrary, but take place against the background, or within the context of their social imaginaries. Social imaginaries, as we understand them are the shared meanings and assumptions through which people experience themselves and the world, develop their values and form their expectations and projects (Castoriadis, 1998; Lennon, 2015; Taylor, 2004). 1 The theoretical invitation here is to shift the object of analysis from specific actions and choices themselves, to the implicit and assumed, but usually undistinguished, imaginary against which actions are taken and choices made. Understanding social imaginaries as a critical dimension of political change (or stasis) means interrogating how they condition, facilitate, and inspire some actions and choices, while rendering illogical and impeding others.
What then, are the extant and dominant social imaginaries concerning climate changed futures and how do they shape and constrain communities’ actions and choices? 2 While the dominant future climate imaginaries are neither universal nor static, we hypothesise that, approached at a very high level of generality, three imaginaries are currently hegemonic in global and national spheres (Celermajer, 2021). 3 The first, ‘business-as-usual’ imaginary is, as the name suggests, an imaginary of stasis. It involves a refusal to accept that the current modes of life associated with colonial and capitalist modernity are unsustainable, and a (more or less insistent) view that there is no serious climate or environmental problem to be addressed. What follows by way of action is that fundamentally little if anything needs to change in how politics, economics, social organisation or relationships between humans and the more-than-human are currently organised. The business-as-usual imaginary is best understood as existing on a scale, with complete denial at the extreme end, while further along, one finds increasing levels of acknowledgment that changes are required, but always falling short of recognising that the scale of the threats demands anything approaching systemic transformations.
Second is the ‘technological fix’ or ‘techno-fix’ an imaginary that acknowledges the links between the massive expansion in the use of fossil fuels, climate change and resultant pressures on planetary systems, but understands the problems as amenable to technological solutions produced and distributed through free market capitalism. The techno-fix imaginary remains committed to a narrative of growth, progress and humans retaining an instrumental, extractivist relationship with the more-than-human. Again, this approach is not singular, but includes, for example, the technical ecomodernists (Asafu-Adjaye et al., n.d.), geoengineering movements (Keith and Irvine, 2020), and the billionaire ‘tech-bros’, as well as more right- and left-oriented ecomodernists (Huber, 2022; Mol et al., 2020). Such an approach often includes well-meaning attempts to make ‘sociotechnical futures’ more sustainable (Upham et al., 2022). The theological fix, a variation on this second imaginary, shares its basic structure insofar as both are based on a logic where people believe that problems experienced in their everyday worlds will be solved through an intervention from elsewhere. 4 In this case, however, God (or some other metaphysical entity), and not technology constitutes the source of salvation.
The third dominant imaginary is ‘apocalypse' or doom. This one takes absolutely seriously the gravity of the climate problem, and the devastating impact it will have on human lives and societies. It insists, however, that there is nothing to be done: it is too late for action, other than attempting to preserve one's own patch, assuming you have one (Wallace-Wells, 2019; criticised by Heglar, 2019 and Mann, 2021). As the gravity and scale, as well as the impacts of climate change and other forms of ecological damage intensify, and the failure of international institutions established to address them become clearer, variations of such doomist imaginaries, coming under the names of collapse, eco-miseralibism and deep adaptation amongst others have proliferated (Bendell and Read, 2021; Servigne and Stevens, 2020). 5
As noted above, the occurrence or embrace of these imaginaries is not fixed, and even in the very last few years, the shifting landscape of climate-change driven disasters and systems breakdowns has had the effect of altering the hold that each has on different groups (Levy and Andre Spicer, 2013). As extreme weather events and the impacts of climate change become more tangible and immediate for more people across the world, business-as-usual imaginaries, which rely on denying the gravity of the problems, are increasingly giving way to techno-modernist or apocalyptic imaginaries. Importantly, these shifts are not mere passive responses to climactic events or shocks in basic systems; they are also the effects of the interventions of actors with an interest in ensuring the dominance of imaginaries most likely to impede or discourage social and political actions that pose a threat to their interests, such as the development of social and political movements advocating for as well as adopting alternative systems. In this regards, as Michael Mann (2021) has demonstrated, fossil fuel corporations have an active interest in promoting techno-fix and doomist imaginaries, insofar as these sure up a background context for more explicit arguments that actions to reduce emissions are either unnecessary (because technology will save us) or useless (because nothing will save us). Similarly, the rhetorical enthusiasm that governments with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry shows for technological solutions such as Carbon Capture and Storage or carbon offsets constitute an indirect, but nevertheless robust form of support for the persistence of fossil fuel extraction, justified by a yet to be successful technology, which – they seek to assure nervous populations – will address at least some of its worst impacts (Ogge et al., 2021). 6
Although apparently very different, what these three imaginaries have in common is that none provide backgrounds that support or encourage actions aimed at fundamentally challenging and transforming the arrangements that underpin systemic inequalities and extractive forms of life. 7 For communities living against a background of these imaginaries, it might seem that what makes sense, or what appears most rational, is to do nothing and wait: either for a solution to be found and implemented from within existing techno-modernist capitalist systems, or for the end or devastation of life. By contrast, if the onset and persistence of ecological destruction is framed in overtly political terms, specifically – as the effect of colonisation, or capitalist forms of production, or pathological relations with the more-than-human – then what is required are social, cultural and political solutions. 8 The problem is that what seem to be missing, or at least marginal at the macro level, are imaginaries that envisage a future characterised by transformative, creative, authentically democratic, and inclusive collaborative actions to address the causes and impacts of climate change at the level of communities themselves; imaginaries forged through everyday actions to transform destructive systems.
Given our hypotheses concerning the enervating effects of the hegemonic imaginaries and the potential effects of different imaginaries – ones that envisage community driven transformative action – the questions then arise: where would such imaginaries come from? And how might they be amplified? Within an ontology where ideas and materiality are understood as two fundamentally different dimensions of existence, imaginaries are likely to be understood as existing on the plane of ideas. Within this frame, imaginaries are created, sustained, and transformed through debates, the generation of discourses, and through cultural practices and products like stories or films. If one wants a new imaginary, tell a new story, ideally using media that have the greatest likelihood of reshaping fundamental assumptions about the world, humans’ place in it, and the future. We do not doubt that discourses, stories and films play an important part in creating and transforming climate imaginaries, as is evident if one reflects on the shaping effect that dystopian cinema has had on how a climate changed world is often imagined. From our perspective though, an over-emphasis on this approach obscures the role that material practices and actual forms of life can and do play in the production and transformation of imaginaries in general, and future climate imaginaries in particular.
In this regards, building on materialist or new materialist theoretical frameworks, and specifically materialist and relational understandings of environmental politics (Coles, 2016; MacGregor, 2021; Schlosberg and Craven, 2019), we argue that the ways in which people live, the forms of material flows in which they are involved, and the concrete relations with other humans and the more-than-human that comprise their forms of life are not mere reflections of existing imaginaries, but prefigurative sources of those imaginaries. Indeed, to fully break with the dualist ontology that continues to infuse much contemporary western political and social theory, it would be more accurate to say that praxes are themselves imaginaries – material, grounded imaginaries. As Nirmal and Racheleau (2019: 478) note, ‘Many less visible movements and peoples throughout the world are [already] engaged in resurgence as they reconnect to reach or to recover sufficiency and remake territories and worlds threatened by growth-driven development, neoliberal globalisation and climate change’. How people eat, how they produce, acquire and consume food and energy, how they live on the Earth and in relation to each other and the natural world can entrench or challenge existing imaginaries, and also engender new ones. Indeed, as the cases we consider will demonstrate, at the heart of the emerging imaginaries are a set of transformations in the relational fabric within which communities are embedded and how they attend to those relations.
Methodology
On the basis of this materialist theoretical commitment, our principal interest here is in how communities are transforming their practical forms of life in response to changing climate conditions. Similar to recent work on imaginaries of degrowth, our focus is on ‘the study of grassroots alternatives prefiguring a post-growth future’ (Demaria et al., 2019: 431). It is, we suggest, by learning about these forms and practices of life, and how they are changing, that we can come to understand the imaginaries that are being challenged and created, and hence discern the emergence of the types of alternative imaginaries that, if amplified, might provide a more empowering, action-orienting background for communities seeking to navigate their lives and forms of organisation in the face of a climate changed future.
Informed by this interest in emerging praxes, our research involved our spending extended periods of time embedded in, and conducting ethnographic research with a number of communities in north and south India and Australia. These communities were selected on the basis of a number of criteria, including their relationship with the impacts of, and responses to climate change, and the researchers’ existing relationships with the communities. All those selected are both facing serious challenges to their basic systems as a result of climate change, and adopting practical, even transformative responses to these challenges. At the same time, and in order to ensure the levels of trust and access required for this research, the communities selected either had prior relationships with the organisations conducting the research or with intermediaries would could assist in developing the relationships.
Researchers embedded themselves over a period of weeks and in some cases months in communities, sometimes formally interviewing and at other times, more informally talking with people about their challenges, how they understood them, and what they were doing, as well as immersing themselves and participating in community activities. Participant observation enabled researchers to have direct access not simply to what people said, but to what they were doing, to their forms of life, and to the material flows in which they are involved. It also provided access not only to humans but to the more-than-human worlds with which communities relate, in whose presence their actions occur, and in relation to which their identities form. Moreover, because we wanted to develop a deep, historically and culturally informed understanding of the communities, our research teams included members of the communities themselves. 9
Sourcing our data about the challenges communities are facing, the actions they are taking, and how they are making sense of their worlds represents a critical methodological choice. As Thieme (2021) argues, recognising the expertise of ‘those who navigate spaces and moments of breakdown most acutely’ does more than simply include the perspectives of those ‘often situated at the interstices, the margins, the peripheries’ (Theime, 2021: 1095). It also ‘opens up ways of seeing and listening to the “haecceities”’ (1094), where people who live with the reality of breakdown, and thus have access to ‘broken world thinking’ are not rendered insensible to their realities, seduced by the modernist presumptions of ‘coherence and modernist trajectory’ that continue to shape mainstream analysis, even as they are surely breaking down. Privileging such broken world thinking, she insists, following Jackson (2014), does not mean accepting narratives of doom, but rather allows for the tropes of modernity to be suspended, such that people might be alive to their failures and their dangers. As Jackson puts it, broken world thinking not only makes space for ‘an appreciation of the real limits and fragility of the worlds we inhabit – natural, social, and technological’ but also, and critically, for ‘new and better stories and orders’ that might replace them (Jackson, 2014: 221 quoted in Thieme, 2021: 1095).
Although we do not elaborate on this aspect of the project here, a critical part of the methodology that merits mentioning concerns the link between data collection on praxes and the development of stories about those praxes. As part of our research, the research team collaborated with communities to develop, produce, tell, and amplify stories about what was happening in the communities. 10 The data collected formed the basis for stories that the researchers, together with the communities themselves, told in different media – in film, in street art, in podcasts, and so on – with the objective of amplifying the more transformative imaginaries we discovered. This process illustrates the two-way or circular nature of grounded imaginaries. In place of a schema of unidirectional causality, from discourse to practice or vice versa, we see praxis and discourse as dynamically and cumulatively flowing back and forth. Thus, as we tell stories with communities about what they are doing, these stories illuminate for them the transformative nature of their actions, nurturing that very transformation. When communities receive a reflection affirming and celebrating their own capacity to bring about change in their lives, they become more empowered with respect to those changes. Moreover, and beyond the communities included in the study themselves, the stories that emerge from their transformative praxis will, it is hoped, flow into praxes elsewhere such that other communities facing the impacts of climate change encounter alternative – grounded and practiced – imaginaries that may inspire more transformative action. In this regards, the research does not pretend to be neutral or to stand outside what is being studied, but is itself a self-conscious intervention in both community empowerment and the replication of transformative grounded imaginaries. 11
Communities’ praxis
In this section, we present some of our findings from three communities or groups of communities, in western Himalayas, Tamil Nadu and south-east Australia. In each case, we briefly consider the challenges they are facing, the actions they are taking, and how their actions are producing alternative future climate imaginaries for those communities. What could be said about each far exceeds what we present here, but the data have been selected to provide a snapshot sufficient to draw out some of the qualities of the grounded imaginaries we discovered.
Western Himalayas
‘The government is busy in constructing roads. They should first focus on providing water. If there will be no water what will we do with road? People are abandoning their livestock as they can’t feed them well. Lack of water is making us commit this sin. That's the last thing I want to do’. (Tenzin, Pishu) 12
Located deep within the Zanskar Valley of Ladakh, Pishu Village, a close-knit agrarian community, sits at an altitude of 11,500 ft above sea level in the arid mountain desert region of the Trans-Himalayas. Generally cut off from the rest of the world for almost six months a year, the region is facing severe climate crises with unseasonal temperature rises, increasingly erratic precipitation, and receding glaciers. 13 In these communities, for whom herders’ seasonal movement with animals and tree planting have long been vital for food, clothing, and shelter, and who regard water sources as sacred grounds – with every water stream, spring and hill having its own deity – the resultant water shortages are dire. As sustainable livelihood options disappear, many villages are being abandoned.
Located in the Pindar River valley of Uttarakhand, Kewar is a small traditional farming village, surrounded by agricultural fields. Despite the historical benefits of dense vegetation, excellent soil, and good supplies of water for agricultural productivity, Kewar has for some decades been experiencing severe ecological challenges, including major landslides and the flooding of the Pinder River in 2013. This occurred during the same event that led to the Kedarnath (a revered place of Hinduism) disaster referred to as the ‘the Himalayan tsunami’ (Gupta et al., 2014), caused by road construction and torrential rains. The government has designated this area a natural disaster prone area. Also in Uttarakhand, Sarmoli village is located on a once a flourishing trade route with Tibet. The ‘Shaukas’ who live there were traditionally farmers and shepherds who became prosperous merchants, but when the 1962 Indo–China war led to the suspension of trade, the majority of households moved down to the more fertile valley region where they were allotted land by the government and made farming and raising sheep their source of livelihood. Climate change has made it difficult for the community to rely on agriculture alone, and as they turn to tourism and a growing population combine with climate change to intensity pressure on local resources.
For communities across the western Himalayas, changing climate conditions pose existential threats. Most direly, glacial melts combined with diminished and highly erratic rain patterns are leading to water shortages, biodiversity loss, and knock on effects for growing food. At the same time, animals such as monkeys and boars who had previously foraged away from human habitats are experiencing pressure on their food sources and so moving into human villages, intensifying human–wildlife conflicts.
To appreciate the gravity of these biophysical climate changes, their impacts, and communities’ capacities to sustain themselves, they need to be placed in the context of the social structures that create vulnerabilities and undermine communities’ capacities to respond. These include not only socio-economic, but also political factors such as the absence of political rights, government ineffectiveness and poor access to justice or ‘voice and accountability’ (Brooks et al., 2005: 157). In this regards, lack of access to climate information and limited institutional support from government agencies, which are remote from, and insensitive to community needs, intensify the vulnerability of mountain communities. Weak institutional links and the dearth of finance either in communities themselves or made available to them combine to hinder their efforts to develop adaptation pathways or introduce technologies that could aid their adaptive capacity (Agrawal, 2008). For poor and marginalised groups, impeded by deep and pervasive structural inequalities, adaptation is even more challenging. A graphic example of the interaction of natural and social structural factors is the impact of landslides on communities, which were exacerbated by the flooding of the Pinder River, itself caused by a combination of torrential rains and external authorities making decisions to construct roads without taking into account the effects on either the biophysical system or local residents in the context of a changing climate.
Nevertheless, even in the face of such massive challenges, communities have developed creative responses. Alongside introducing new crops better suited to the changing climate, communities in the western Himalayan region are adopting more systemic shifts in their food and land care systems, often involving the embrace of traditional practices. For example, women in Kewar village are leading their communities in moving away from chemical-based agriculture and returning to their traditional forms of regenerative farming. They are also resuming the ‘baranaja’ cropping pattern, where 12 cereal crops are grown throughout the year, both increasing resilience and protecting against the risk of drought. At the same time, they are protecting their farming future through the creation of seed banks and safeguarding traditional seeds. At one level, these adaptations involve pragmatic shifts in food production practices, but they also both entail and foster a deeper recognition of the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature and the value of nurturing this relationship.
With water shortages pressing upon them, communities are developing a range of approaches. One resident of Zanskar valley has, for example trained as a water conservationist, and introduced a solar pump to bring up water from the nearby spring, a technologically supported, albeit short term and partial solution, but one that other villages are organising to introduce. At the same time, communities are resuming more traditional practices, not only in relation to water, but of governance and community relationships. For example, in the hills of Uttarakhand, community-managed water sources have long been part of the community culture. Traditionally, local communities had rights of ownership and managed natural water resources, developing ‘Naulas’ – water harvesting systems that are productive, low maintenance, and managed at the community level. Again, shifting to such practices is not simply a pragmatic move, but involves a larger embrace of the life-giving force of the relationship between the community and nature, insofar as Naulas are also considered sacred sites by local people.
The Community of Sarmoli village came together under the leadership of their forest council head and worked on reviving the natural spring pond situated in the village that had dried up in recent years due to anthropogenic factors. The whole community played a crucial part in the work, with children and adults, men and women all digging up the pond and conserving their water resource. They are continuing the work today with reforestation of the area where the pond is located by planting native species. To make people more aware and build a sense of ownership, the community also holds a yearly fair in the village named after the pond itself ‘mesar kund kautik’ (kund means pond).
Similarly, communities have adopted numerous practices to sustainably manage and benefit from the forest ecosystems, seeking to safeguard their present and future. The Sarmoli-Jaiti van panchayat (or forest commons), for example, have been at work conserving and securing their forest, knowing that local biodiversity plays a critical role in sustaining the regional ecosystem. Through various measures such as demarcating their forest, planting native species trees, banning timber cutting, and intermittently allowing cows to graze in the forest, they have staved off the decline they were witnessing. As one resident put it, ‘Since 2011 we have been working to safeguard our forest. We realise the importance of having our forest conserved. This not only manages the ecosystem, but it also allows many animals to live. It is also important as the forest provides compost for farming and recharges our water springs’ (Pushpa, Sarmoli).
Tamil Nadu
‘…when you're there digging.. you often kneel in the earth …. you can almost hear the whispers of the earth. And what it has to say, I mean, it's been around for millions of years, and you can imagine what it has witnessed, what knowledge it has what, what it has to say. I can only not even begin to imagine; I don’t have that capacity, but I do, I am open to that there is something you know, and it is it is impressive, it is humbling, it is intriguing’. (Satya Auroville)
The characteristic red earth paths of Auroville today lead to human-made forests, deep kulams (water catchments), and canyons, spread across the experimental township known for its aspiration towards being ‘the city the earth needs'. It is hard to imagine that 50 years ago the area was barren, unliveable and close to being declared a desert. Today, Auroville is home to humans from 60 countries, diverse birds, bees and mammals and many species of plants and trees have returned (Blanchflower, 2005). For a passer-by, the toil poured into creating and maintaining this living laboratory and green oasis is less evident than the contrast between Auroville's fresh air and choking cities nearby.
Auroville was founded in 1968 on a dream (Fassbender, 2021) to prefigure an integral transformation of society, across fields, connecting inner and outer dimensions of life (Clarence Smith, 2019). Since then, people have worked collectively to create a place where humans could ‘live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities’. This aspiration has been operationalised not only through social projects aimed at living in a conscious human community, but also through a range of socio-ecological endeavours. These include soil regeneration, water conservation, saving seeds, preserving local tropical forests species, and learning to produce food under changing conditions.
The Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve (NBR) landscape, about 500 km to the west, has long been romanticised. The rolling grasslands, the stories of the Indigenous communities, the crackling drying bamboo of Masinagudi and Bandipur in summer, and the smell of rain in the earthy, rich soils are what the NBR is often known for. The entanglement of ecological diversity (native grasslands and sholai forest groves, monocropping of tea and eucalyptus, diverse animal species) and human diversity (Indigenous communities, colonial settlers, tea plantation owners and workers, and tourists) endows this place with a complex, interconnected socio-ecological fabric. As communities in each location face the impacts of developmental pressures and climate change, they are taking numerous actions, but our focus here is on the work in Auroville to restore and nurture decimated forests, and in the NBR, community-based efforts to create forms of cultivation more hospitable to earth and human health.
At the time Auroville was settled, over-development had resulted in massive erosion, decimating the fundamental basis for the forest – soil. The possibility of a different future to the one determined by this developmental trajectory underpinned communities’ praxis. As one member put it: ‘I just wish that we could have some framework in place to recognise the forests of Auroville as belonging to future people not even born today. That's their property. It's not ours. And we’re just safeguarding it for them and let them decide what to do’. (Anand) ‘Termites… cover the organic matter with a layer of soil, because they need that shelter, to consume, to work on the organic matter, and carry it down into their underground burrows. So that was what struck us, … How come there is now a layer of soil over the leaves, they go between the pebbles and grain by grain, they bring the clay that is stuck between the pebbles, they bring it to the surface. So, a job that we can’t do, it's humanly impossible to separate the clay that is stuck to the pebbles…. but they are able to do it’.
Through this practice, not only is the relationship recast but also people's conception of their own humanity and of time. As Krishna put it: ‘It is our friend, our guide, our colleague, our everything. … We have not imposed on nature, a plan, a design, but rather learn to become open to what nature has to teach us about beauty, rather than impose our beauty on it….[Green work] helps you develop the qualities you need to do your sadhana, perseverance, endurance, self-offering, nature is a fantastic thing to work on your ego, because it's slow. And the ego by nature is something that is fast, it needs results immediately’.
Travelling to the Nilgiris, Devan and Radhika, two local cultivators, decided to move into organic cultivation and are dedicated to preserving disappearing community practices regarding medicinal herbs and plants. They echo a sentiment heard across the Nilgiris, that the widespread use of pesticides is impacting human health. The combination of climatic changes and heightened demands for commercial agricultural production are resulting in increased use of pesticides, fertilisers, and hybrid seed varieties to prevent losses in food production, leading in turn to infertility of land and deterioration in food quality.
People recognise that moving away from standard industrialised forms of agriculture involves certain ‘costs’, of time and short-term efficiency, but it is not these criteria that shape their choices. As Devan says: ‘Even though people these days have awareness on organic farming, the shift from conventional agriculture to organic farming is practically difficult. Organic farming needs more time for cultivation and can lead to more losses as compared to conventional farming. The use of chemicals in agriculture has also increased in the last 50 years and people must be made conscious of chemical fertilisers and its ill-effects on themselves and their future generations’.
In the face of unpredictable rainfalls and seasons, tea has, for many, remained a reasonably reliable crop, but even then, growers face pressures to sell land to make way to development or to sell their produce into markets with ever diminishing prices. Arun from Summer Tea describes their choice to resist either option by turning to organic hand rolled flavourful teas. In making this change, he speaks about seeing more birds and fewer instances of insect infestation: ‘Everything has a balance. When you spray, you’ll get more (green) leaf. But it will be a tea that sells for a lesser value’.
Almost all tea estates across the Nilgiris are either rain fed or fed by the streams that begin in the shola forests, which are increasingly replaced by estates. To meet their needs, Arun has integrated rewilded shola forest patches, which he grows within the estate. Again, from one perspective this appears to be a cost, but as he says, ‘We may not grow as much tea because of the shola trees, but we choose to go ahead’.
Moruya (south east Australia)
‘We have a finite planet and our economic system is based on continual growth’. There is a reflection of the importance of being political …. With the understanding of the current governmental realities, it is important to take community action – not passively wait, but to continue to put pressure on the government to act’. (Ella, youth fellow).
On the south-east coast of Australia, within the heartland of the Yuin nation and home to the durga-speaking Walbunja and Brinja People, lie the misty flats of the Deua/Moruya River. Running into the Pacific Ocean along what is known as the emerald coast, the fertile land sweeps inland and the rich silt layers that have accumulated in the wide river basin bowl have been a place of food and medicine for tens of thousands of years. For the past 200 odd years of colonisation, these mutually nourishing relationships and foodways have been agriculturally suppressed, overwritten, and their riches extracted in the forms of ‘domesticated’ sup-plants and crops, syphoned out to other parts of the country and urban centres. In recent decades, the impacts of climate change in south-east Australia have dramatically intensified, with several years of devastating drought, followed by the worst wildfires in the history of Australia (the Black Summer fires of 2019–2020); and since then, there has been a succession of flood events marking the three successive years of a la Nina cycle. At the same time, the withdrawal of government support, particularly from rural areas as part of the intensification of neoliberal governance, has left parts of the community particularly vulnerable.
Although the region is a major food producer, the institutional environment is one that exacerbates food insecurity. The political and economic landscape of food production is one in which two supermarket chains dominate not only retail, but the production side as well, now forming symbiotic relationships with large (industrial) monoculture agricultural producers. Together, they have managed to capture government policy, with the effect of creating a regulatory environment conducive to their economic interests, but one that has incentivised ecologically destructive forms of farming and effectively eroded the conditions for local small scale food production and distribution. This in turn heightens dependence on industrial food systems in ways that are particularly deleterious for low-income rural communities. At the same time, industrial scale agricultural practices are the source of a range of environmental problems, including land-clearing and deforestation, soil depletion and erosion, soil and water toxicity, the destruction of river and aquifer systems through overuse and mal-distribution, and habitat destruction. More recently, the negative effects on local ecological, food and governance systems are being exacerbated by extreme weather conditions and breakdowns in global food supply chains. Through their impacts on soil, waters and forests, current systems of industrial food production and distribution exacerbate climate change, and correlatively, deepen communities’ vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.
In the face of these conditions, some inhabitants of the river valley in Moruya have come to confront the legacy of agricultural practices, choosing in 2009 to reimagine their collective, modern-day foodways as a protest and passion against industrialised agribusiness. Calling themselves SAGE (Sustainable Agriculture Gardening Eurobodalla), a slow-food community of eaters and growers has since supported and seeded less extractive gardeners and food producers through the development of a local farmers market, food economy, and ongoing educational programs and events. They have begun to rebuild soil, share food, and feed their local communities. Indeed, throughout the recent crises of fires, floods and pandemics, they have worked to provide a reliable source of food for their community, and begun equipping the next generation of growers to continue their work of feeding humans and the earth.
The provision of education has become particularly important, because it became evident that with the concentration of food production in large industrial agricultural systems and the segmentation of specialisations, fewer and fewer people were being been taught the basics of growing food. Here, we might note the presence of a larger techno-fix imaginary in which food production and the responsibility for it are outsourced to corporations claiming technological superiority, resulting in people becoming increasingly alienated from the conditions under which food production occurs. Locally driven educational strategies include training people at very small scales to grow food in their backyards, and at larger scales to create and sustain market gardens that can also supply the local community. In both cases, there is an appreciation of the constraints and impediments, particularly for those in the community with low incomes. To overcome these, SAGE provides free education, supports people to put in basic infrastructure for growing food at home, creates collective sites where people can both learn about growing and then continue to cultivate without having to own land and provides opportunities for locals to sell food locally through community markets.
People involved in the transformation of their community food system spoke about the importance of small practical actions. As one community member put it: ‘We are going to have a massive transformation. But that doesn’t mean you throw your hands up and do nothing. (…) This is what most humans are doing. ´I didn’t even know there was climate! Oh my God, we’re doomed!´ And then they just do nothing because they’re feeling fatally. What's the point? So, I try very hard not to get into that space. I say to people, ‘you know, we’re humans. We can do things well, we can do things positively’.… And that's probably what motivates me… because of the adaptation stuff, the community now has to really get on board because if we don’t have that… it’ll just hit us even harder’. (Caitlyn) ‘All these little bits come together. Program on Catalyst you watch, a podcast you listen to, some mate you talk at a party is just kind of all these little, tiny things that happen that eventually change someone's perception of what's normal and what is actually probably more abnormal’. (Frank)
While the actions may be small, they are not seen as atomised, but as taking place within the context of a larger community endeavour. A great deal of effort has been put into building relationships through shared activities and developing partnerships with private companies, other community organisations and government. On reflection, people commented that these networks have created exponential power, new links, extended the reach of their initiatives and allowed the message to get out further. At the heart of this approach has been an ethic of mutual aid and shared benefits rather than competition. Importantly, this ethic of collaboration is also driven by necessity. As one person put it: ‘one of the strengths of community groups is it's not just about the money, you know, it's about broader ideals, broader goals, you know, social whether it's social justice or environmental sustainability’ (Shawn)
Although it may seem that the attention on food is about meeting a basic need that is not being met within existing systems, and further threatened by climate change, the practice of creating local systems for growing, sharing and selling food is doing more than this. As one grower put it: ‘I would introduce the food to people. Then I felt like the food had a story, so I needed to talk on behalf of the food and tell them where they where it came from and why it was there on their plate. …I've just felt like if I just made the vegetable the hero, how wonderful would that be?’ (Sandy)
In this regards, the imaginary that is emerging from these praxes is very much one of community-based collective care and nurturing, with a keen attention to justice. At the same time, the practice of growing locally and eating locally grown food becomes a way of overcoming alienation from the material conditions of life and reconnecting with the necessary ecological conditions for humans to sustain themselves.
The character of grounded imaginaries
These stories illustrate the grounded nature of climate-generated reconstructive imaginaries. As more critical voices push their way into public and scholarly debates about climate change, imaginaries are starting to shift away from the narrow technological analysis that, as Erickson (2020) argued, depoliticises the problem analysis and solution matrix, and sustains the addictions to fossilfuelled progress and development. Relatedly, Whyte (2020) distinguishes between understanding the climate crisis in terms of ecological tipping points – a doomer norm – and understanding it in terms of relational tipping points. Attention to the latter means thinking about ‘how problems in qualities of relationships – especially not only consent but also trust, accountability and reciprocity – are factors heightening climate vulnerability and exploitation by carbon-intensive industries’ (Whyte, 2020: 4). What follows, Whyte argues, is that a just response to climate change requires repairing or reimagining social relationships in ways that restore those qualities. Critically, the understanding of social relationships he is articulating is a capacious, and grounded, one. As he puts it: ‘For Anishinaabe peoples, our oldest stories and political systems speak to a key philosophical challenge: how can societies be organized to be as adaptive as possible to seasonal and interannual changes? […] The practical and philosophical traditions emerging from these stories focus on understanding how the fabric of relational qualities in a society can guarantee the coordination needed to adapt as best as possible to constant change. Conceptions of society are inclusive of diverse beings and entities beyond humans, such as plants or water, who also participate in the relational qualities. Humans are often faulted for believing that they can achieve sustainability through violating consent, trust, accountability, or reciprocity, among other qualities, toward diverse beings and entities’. (Whyte, 2020: 5)
The breakdown of the relations that nourish the support systems of life is, though, a far more general phenomenon, exacerbated by neoliberalism. And, critically, especially for peoples comprehensively interpolated into the fantasy of autonomy as progress, the response to this breakdown may not be, as in the case of First Nations peoples, to insist on the value of, and to seek to protect relations. Looking across the imaginaries emerging from the praxes of the diverse communities with whom we conducted research, a thread that runs through all of them seems to be a double move. First is recognition that the climate crisis involves a breakdown in the relationships that have sustained their lives, and second – unlike the imaginaries of business as usual, technological fix, and apocalypse or doomism – a collective turn to caring for, restoring, and transforming those relationships. Rather than replicating the disconnect of colonial and capitalist modernity or the dominant imaginaries – the ‘broken world’ thinking noted by Theime (2021) – the views from the margins or interstices that we discuss, all address the crucial nature of relationality. Three types or dimensions of such relationality seem particularly important across the cases.
The first, and most evident, are relations within communities. More specifically, what is evident is a recognition of the need to recast forms of social organisation where asymmetrical power relations have created pathological or damaging forms of relationality. This includes attention to more careful and just forms of collective decision making, as we saw for example in the role women are playing as decision makers in the western Himalayas, or the attention in Moruya to ensuring that new practices of food production, education, and distribution are sensitive to the ways in which existing political and economic regimes marginalise certain people. It also includes an emphasis on collective learning and knowledge sharing, as we saw in Auroville and the Nilgiris, and in Zanskar valley, where villages are sharing learning about basic technologies to pump water in the face of glacial melts.
Second, in many of the communities there is an acute awareness that the climate crisis is a crisis of relations between humans and more-than-human, leading to concerted efforts to repair those relationships. This involves a number of practices that are rejecting relationships based on domination and extraction and recognising interdependence, as well as the unique and valuable knowledge of other beings. This was evident evident across all the sites in the return to traditional or embrace of organic forms of farming, in the recognition of the interdependence of human and earth health, in the openness to the more-than-human as a source of wisdom and a site of agency, and in some cases, in the re-embrace of more spiritual relations with the more-than-human.
The third and perhaps less evident form of relational transformation is the relation to time. This has two dimensions. First is the rejection of western modernist notions of ever forward-moving improvement through progress, and their dismissal of the value of traditional knowledges and relationships with ancestors, as well as their assumption that life will, as a matter of course, be better for future generations. Second is a rejection of the associated assumption that speed is superior, and a revaluation of what takes time and happens slowly. In the communities in the western Himalayas, Tamil Nadu and south-east Australia, such shifts in relationship with time are tied to the second relational shift, between humans and the more-than-human, insofar as they involve a type of humility towards the time of Earth processes, as distinct from the assumption embodied in fossil-fuelled forms of agriculture, energy production and travel, that humans can accelerate ourselves and other Earth beings and systems without cost.
What we can begin to discern then, is that in forging these new or alternative imaginaries from their praxes of sustaining themselves in the face of climate change, these communities are up to more than simply ‘coping with a crisis’. These imaginaries are also growing, or perhaps rediscovering or restoring, forms of life and background assumptions of themselves, their relations with other earth beings, and with time. Crises are indeed generative (Varvarousis, 2019). These are thoroughly grounded, if diverse, imaginaries that break from the norms of business as usual, technofix, or apocolypse imaginaries. This is of course not to romanticise the endeavours of the communities we discuss, nor to ignore the enormous impediments they face. They all remain embedded in pathological relations with the state, and more specifically with hegemonic political and legal systems that can, and do, sever the alternative relational flows they are seeking to nurture.
In this regards, both the sustainability and the capacity to act in these cases illustrate a robust prefigurative politics – a politics ready to be expanded, replicated and redeployed more broadly (Demaria et al., 2019; Monticelli, 2022; Yates, 2021). But translating that prefiguration into a broader application depends on the transformation of the broader relations within which they are embedded. In the western Himalayas, for example, as glacier melts worsen, temperatures continue to rise, and rainfall patterns become more erratic, the pressures on communities with few economic resources and who are largely abandoned by the state will intensify. In Auroville, if the state continues to put its weight behind interventions that literally break the new circulations of water, forests, and human life that are being created, they cannot be sustained. And in Moruya, although the transformative actions are highly local, there is at the same time a clear understanding that local action requires a larger infrastructure of support. As one subject put it: ‘And that's why I say to people there's only so much the community can do. We have to have the government in there doing stuff because they’ve got the resources to do it as a scale’. (Shawn)
What we see in these cases are examples of grounded, productive, and reconstructive imaginaries in the face of both climate change – and macro and systemic unimaginative responses. The problem communities’ face is not the integrity or potential of these imaginaries themselves, but rather the lack of sufficient resources and available support to carry out the imaginative, practical actions of sustaining life and repairing relations under worsening conditions. These grounded, prefigurative imaginaries still need a broader politics that values and provides such support, along with a decline in obstructive politics, to aid their growth and replication across the Earth.
Highlights
Theorises a materialist understanding of the emergence of climate imaginaries;
Presents primary empirical data on how local communities’ transformative actions are giving rise to alternative climate imaginaries;
Theorises how these new imaginaries involve transformations in relationships within the community, with the more than human and with time.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation.
