Description
Climate change presents not only a policymaking problem, but also a fundamental challenge to the way we make sense of the world. One of its many effects has been to upset our experience of time. The seemingly eternal geophysical world is now changing before our eyes, creating a permanent sense of urgency about ever-smaller windows of opportunity, while modernity’s notion of continuous progress is no longer tenable when “the end of the world” is a genuine possibility. But what does it mean to live in times of global climate change? How does awareness of climate change affect the human condition and our visions of politics? To answer these questions, this paper draws on philosophical existentialism’s insights about the experience of dread and the search for meaning. Empirically, it investigates the temporal imaginaries underpinning visionary projects aimed at safeguarding humanity, like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the “Billion Year Archive”. It finds that apocalyptic visions of the future clash with the human inability to imagine one’s own non-being, making it difficult for most of us to fully face up to the threat of climate change. This illuminates one of the psycho-philosophical challenges posed by climate change, explaining why so much of our contemporary politics rests on fantasies of survival.
