Climate Change and the Environmental Imaginary in the Middle East

Natalia Gutkowski
Issue 57 | Winter 2023
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This essay focuses on climate change, its interpretations, and its intervention programs as a result of an environmental imaginary. Challenging the Anthropocene discourse as one form of an environmental imaginary, I outline alternative imaginaries stemming from Indigenous Climate Change Studies, Ecological Marxism and Black Geography. According to their critiques, the climate condition manifests a continuity and an exacerbation of colonial-capitalist racism towards humans and nonhumans alike rather than a new political situation. Climate change is the current expression of centuries of exploitation and racism that was cultivated in the plantation and quarrying slave economies in the colonies. These new environmental imaginaries highlight that tackling climate change cannot be restricted to economic mechanisms and technological fixing of carbon emissions. Rather the climate condition requires intervening in an exploitative power dynamic which lies at the root of this crisis. Following these schools of thought I examine how climate change is imagined in the agrarian context in Israel/Palestine. I argue that changing the boundries of the environmental imaginary of climate change has important consequences for intervention plans: to tackle climate change we must overcome the nation state as our unit and think again like a region and like local communities, giving rise to new opportunities for manufacturing and solidarity. . Finally, expanding our environmental imaginary offers new possibilities for linking processes of decolonization and climate change adaptation as both require infrastructural transformations as well as a deep societal one.

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