Issue Nine features the essay After Midnight, by Alexander Etkind and Johanna Gautier-Morin.
Find here a reaction to the essay, by Frances Butler, who has recently completed her PhD in Geography at UCL (University College, London) and is currently writing a book about climate responsibility and justice.
Helpful hurricanes
Alexander Etkind and Johanna Gautier-Morin reflect on what nuclear power station disasters can tell us about the looming climate catastrophe. After a tight focus on Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the so-far near miss of Zaporizhzhia, they move on to the threat of climate breakdown, as the piece makes its way through policy failures and cognitive blockages towards more hopeful imaginings of new solidarities and connections. But the task of cutting carbon — and doing it in a way that promotes justice — can’t be done simply by people being nice to each other. So, what to do? The clues are in their article.
A key idea is that catastrophes are « matter » with political effects. As the authors point out, the Chernobyl explosion and its aftermath hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union and influenced Western European environmental politics. An understanding that material things are politically powerful underpins Alexander Etkind’s brilliant Nature’s Evil1 which shows how natural resources have shaped states and societies. « Matter », in this context, is everything that isn’t human: whether it’s nuclear explosions, hurricanes or oil wells. Matter isn’t inert and passive, but speaks as a dynamic sometimes dominant participant in the world.
Different matter produces different kinds of politics. As geographer Andrew Barry argues in his Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline,2 oil with its controlling corporate practices closes down politics, and thus we end up with useless climate policies. But other kinds of matter unleashed by the climate emergency — wildfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts — can be politically as well as physically forceful, opening up new and more unruly forms of politics.
The authors rightly point out that the « necessary responses will follow catastrophes rather than prevent them ». While it’s frustrating to be coming at the climate crisis backwards, their observation is a reminder that responses will emerge from multiple sites of catastrophe.
A good example comes from climate governance in Antigua and Barbuda. When political scientist Lisa Vanhala and colleagues asked a governmental official what finally persuaded politicians to take action, the interviewee replied, « Well, hurricanes have helped a lot. »3 The hurricanes forced the state to kickstart the kind of response that hadn’t been possible before. As wildfires, droughts and floods shout louder, these catastrophes have something interesting and useful to say. The message coming through is that responsibility lies with the state.
For years, politicians and Big Oil have managed to offload on individuals the burden of preventing climate breakdown by changing to LED lightbulbs and flying less. No more paper towels! We tie ourselves in knots trying not to cause climate change every day, while living in a carbon economy.
Climate catastrophes are dispensing with that deceit. When climate matter speaks and it’s time to bury the dead or rescue the barely living, politicians have nowhere to hide. Climate matter puts responsibility back where it belonged all along, with the government’s duty to protect its citizens.
In Au Temps des Catastrophes, philosopher Isabelle Stengers deplores how the state has been complicit in capitalism’s « right to irresponsibility. »4 She makes a bet that if nos responsable5 — who are not only in charge but also accountable to the rest of us — were addressed as if they actually are responsible, that « could have a certain efficacy ».6
Making demands on the state isn’t new. As abolitionist Frederick Douglass opined on the emancipation of enslaved people: « Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. »7 In the 1960s, Russian dissident Alexander Volpin reportedly got some opposition mileage out of demanding that the Soviet regime honour the rights guaranteed under Stalin’s Constitution.8 Sometimes it works better than other times. In the climate context, activism scholar Thea Riofrancos is sceptical: « How can the state serve both as executive committee of fossil capital and righteous protagonist for climate justice? »9
The answer may come from those helpful hurricanes.
As we pass the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina — described as the world’s first climate-change disaster — the state of Louisiana has much to teach us. A petro-state in hock to hydrocarbon interests, Louisiana suffers extreme environmental degradation from toxic pollution, destructive hurricanes and rising sea levels. Loss of land is occurring at the rate of the proverbial ‘football field an hour’. Despite the shocking history of state-perpetrated racism and violence that was exemplified in the aftermath of Katrina, these existential conditions have spawned both an engaged activist community and, significantly, a novel response from the state.
Emboldened to make a political link between greenhouse gases and the disappearance of his state into the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana’s governor in 2020 announced plans to cut carbon emissions. Big Oil saw the initiative as a way to promote carbon capture and storage and so maintain business as usual. But community activists with long experience confronting grotesque petro-chemical pollution successfully forced into the state’s climate action plan a requirement that any carbon capture be responsible, as well as a commitment to climate justice.
The balance had begun to tip. Big Oil was losing its monopoly of political power. Climate matter — hurricanes, flooding, and land loss — and the suffering it caused ever larger numbers of Louisiana residents, enabled activists to leverage their own influence on the state.
Climate matter tells us two important things: not only can the state accept responsibility for action when climate change wreaks devastation but, as it disproportionately affects the poor and disadvantaged, that creates a window to force social justice onto the political agenda.
Of course, the Louisiana story doesn’t end happily ever after. With the election in 2023 of a Republican governor who believes that climate change is a ‘hoax’, the future of the Louisiana climate action plan is uncertain. But this swing in the electoral cycle is unlikely to block change for long. Whatever the governor’s ideological preferences, Louisiana will remain on the front line of climate catastrophe. As hurricanes become more severe and the sea level rise accelerates, the state is going to find it harder to evade its responsibility.
Matter may speak, but matter isn’t destiny. Whether in Louisiana or anywhere else, getting states onside will take the right kind of organising and action. As I squelched through the Louisianan swamp with my boots full of water, planting cypress saplings with other volunteers in the hopes of helping to prevent coastal erosion, it was obvious that our efforts, while heart-warming, were futile.
Hurricanes, flooding and wildfires may be on our side in the battle to get the state to do its job, but collective targeted action is needed too. Taking a cue from Douglass, Volpin and Stengers, we should address the authorities as if they were responsible and demand that states not only take action to cut carbon emissions but also to provide for equity and justice in the response.
Focus on Big Oil’s capture of government and we lose our minds. If we think of the state only in Foucauldian terms of its power, all we can do is rail or march against it. With responsibility, we can get to work.
Frances Butler
1 Alexander Etkind, Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources, trans. Sara Jolly (Polity, 2021).
2 Andrew Barry, Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline (Blackwell, 2013).
3 Vanhala, Lisa, Michai Robertson and Elisa Calliari (2021) The knowledge politics of climate change loss and damage across scales of governance, Environmental Politics 30(1-2) pp 141–160, p 149.
4 Isabelle Stengers, Au Temps des Catastrophes: Résister à la Barbarie qui Vient (La Découverte, 2009) translated as In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism by Andrew Goffey (Open Humanities Press and Meson Press, 2015) p 9.
5 2009 p 20. Stengers’ English translator goes for ‘our guardians’ which I don’t think captures what Stengers means, 2015 p 29 footnote 2.
6 2015 p 33.
7 Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation Speech, delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857, University of Rochester, Frederick Douglass Project, https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/4398.
8 Robert Kaiser, Unraveling a Repressive Regime, review of Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, New York Review of Books, June 12, 2025
9 Thea Riofrancos, Organizing in and out of the state, in Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, ed, What is the State for? The Boston Review, 2024, Spring, pp 62-66, p 62.