Abstract:
It is a common (aspirational) refrain that climate change “changes everything,” and equally common to note that climate-related transitions seem to be changing very little at all. What climate-related changes are happening now? And how might we grasp emergent trajectories while we’re in the midst of these transitions? This talk gets purchase on these questions by presenting climate change as a form of macro-social change. With a substantive focus on the city-hinterland relationship and the American West, and based on five years of fieldwork related to renewable energy, conservation, and housing development on public lands in Nevada and Utah, I make three arguments. First, the infrastructural systems that climate change requires transforming helped create and maintain “infrastructural modernity” as a particular material, social, and ecological environment. Second, climate-related changes can be understood as breaks from or extensions of those patterns. I establish this by describing continuities in the shape, epistemology, and political economy of infrastructure in the West and options for adaptation in these terms. Third, I interpret protests against renewable energy development as responses to infrastructural modernity as a sociospatial situation, illustrating how old city-hinterland relations shape competing understandings of climate transitions in the present. I conclude by describing the implications of this framework for understanding contemporary climate politics, policy, and visions of a just transition.