Continuing our exploration of terms we think with: Emergency

Thanks to environmental activists and scientific warnings, communities around the world have started to declare Climate Emergency. This declaration entails an understanding that there are only a few years left to radically reduce carbon emissions before environmental damage becomes irreversible. The declaration, moreover, seeks to pressure governments to take direct action through policy making, corporate regulation, and funding to ensure that this happens. 

The term "climate emergency" was first used in protests in Melbourne, Australia in 2010. Last year, the Oxford Dictionary included the concept, and defined it as "a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it." This is an indication of how prevalent the concept of emergency has become, and how much political action it has incited. 

However, while declaring climate emergency is a powerful demand, the very idea of emergency needs to be further unpacked. By asking, "What is the Emergency?" and "Whose Emergency is it?” 

Art historian T.J Demos has provided a critical interrogation of the term: In pointing to how broad the issue of emergency is, and by inquiring whose emergency it is really, Demos underscores different ways in which communities across the globe are subjected to climate violence. With this, he points out that the very notion of climate change varies across different communities for the multiple ways in which these relate to nature and it's destruction. One thing is the green movement in the west, others are radical different relationships to environment upheld by Afro and indigenous nations, and others still are the types of relationships that vast communities under extreme poverty can afford to actually have with climate crisis, even when they are often them most affected by environmental violence.