The aesthetics and multiple origin stories of climate activism

ABSTRACT

The goal of climate activism is to tell the story about the connections between the local and planetary effects of climate change on people. Ethnography of its narrative devices and visual images helps get after the struggles and sometimes missed opportunities in making these connections possible. Such analyses are only more critical in a moment when what looks and feels like climate inaction has been recalibrated by unanticipated risks such as pandemics. While early Covid-19 travel bans and quarantines provided a well of antidotes and images of 'nature coming back and recolonising human environs', they also revealed the systematic ways in which climate activism is linked to health, food and housing activism. The political potential of climate activism may therefore be in its capacity to tell stories that emphasise those earthly politics and its gatherings, once seemingly on the fringe but central to its future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)