Beyond ReasonActivism and Law in a Time of Climate Change

Introduction

Climate change activism is a complex topic, not least because, as performance studies theorist Baz Kershaw argues eloquently, ecological activism of any form is "inevitably riddled with paradox."¹ Does the paradoxical nature of this particular cultural phenomenon represent its most fundamental failing, ensuring that the many forms and facets of climate change activism are reducible to a well-intentioned but futile last-ditch stand against the inexorable march of climate change catastrophe? Or can the paradoxical nature of climate change activism be viewed in a different light? Climate change activism may be effective precisely because it is replete with paradoxes and these paradoxes mirror those of the global predicament of climate change and humanity's response to it.

In light of the inherently unstable and climate catastrophe–prone nature of our current geological era, which has been termed the Anthropocene, we need to question the way we reason, the way we process information and respond to it, the way we interact with and are part of the so-called natural world, and the fundamental limitations in our current thought systems and cultural and social structures, including our legal systems. It is not only paradoxical and irrational but patently irresponsible to cling to cultural patterns, forms of reasoning, and modes of performance which imperil the future of humanity. Our stubborn adherence to these patterns, processes, and performances is part of a phenomenon described as "the great derangement" by Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh. This term encompasses the cultural "patterns of evasion" and "modes of concealment" which cumulatively lead to "the broader imaginative and cultural failure . . . at the heart of the climate crisis."²

Climate change activism offers myriad possibilities for exposing and thus combating the dangerous complacency, inertia, and underlying contradictions that distinguish "the great derangement." Here I will consider the more playful forms of climate change activism, apparent in the activities of groups which seek to overturn cultural stereotypes, and climate change tricksters, who engage in dark play. I argue that these forms of activism have more radical and transformative outcomes than traditional protest spectacles.

I also look at the inherent paradoxes in the legal defense of necessity. The defense serves both a conservative function, as a legal mechanism for accommodating catastrophe, and a radical one, as a point of rupture for legal norms. When deployed by climate change activists, the radical dimensions of the defense become clear. Arguments of necessity highlight the subjective and, indeed, contingent nature of concepts such as reason and lawfulness, the extent to which these concepts contribute to and constitute part of the "great derangement," and the limitations of these concepts in the face of the climate change crisis.

Paradoxes of Climate Change Activism

Many forms of climate change activism engage with and deploy the same problematic dichotomies and metaphors which characterize agrilogistics. This term, devised by Timothy Morton, refers to the system of thinking which has developed around the logistics of agriculture since the introduction of agriculture some 12,000 years ago.³ It underpins the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and now global warming.⁴ Most notable of the dichotomies embedded in agrilogistics is the nature/culture dichotomy, or the idea that humanity, its social and cultural institutions, and its artifacts are somehow separate and distinct from "Nature." Kershaw writes that the "contradictions and/or paradoxes [of environmental activism] are generated because to take cultural action for an ecological cause is always to risk recreating the pathology—endemic denigration of the 'natural world'—that it is trying to eliminate. This will be the case so long as 'culture' and 'nature' are conceived in opposition to each other, as they are in the dominant ideologies of the so-called developed world."⁵

This particular paradox has caused Kershaw to argue that environmental activism is most effective when activists abandon the theatrical spectacle of large-scale, highly dramatized protest events, epitomized in Greenpeace protests, and instead engage with trickery and identity swapping, playing with and upsetting expectations. He himself plays with metaphor, using the paradoxical scientific concept of black holes, dimensionless objects in space in...