Podcast Episode: Possibility and Climate Change (Talking Culture Podcast)

Writing, spoken aloud.

This is an episode of Talking Culture, a podcast fully thought-up, created, produced, written, recorded and edited by McGill University Anthropology graduate students. In this episode, I take up Season Two’s theme of “Possibility” along with a focus of my research, climate change. It’s about (cheap) hope and eco-anxiety and the individual + systems and the enormous potential of climate change, the possibility inherent in all its complexity & uncertainty. Based loosely on the Introduction and Chapter 3 of my PhD dissertation.

Written and recorded by Adam Fleischmann

Excerpt:

In this day and age of hyper globalization, the 24-hr internet news cycle, the group chats and Zoom calls with friends from all over the city, or the world; in this day and age of monoculture factory farms and failing soil productivity, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plastics in our food, feces, face wash and placenta; in an era of global anthropogenic climate change that will see a Planet Earth increasingly uninhabitable for human civilization as we know it by 2100, a year no longer out of reach, a year when babies born two, three, four years ago are now your grandma’s age; and, as writer Dan Zak once wrote in the Washington Post, even today as we sit here listening, deep in the southern Indian Ocean, blue whales (the largest animal to ever live) are calling to each other at lower and lower pitches, to be heard over the crack and whoosh of melting polar sea ice: What do you even do with all that?

And yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. The cry from Seattle, 1999, that “Another World Is Possible,” still rings true among those of us who’ve seen its seedlings sprout up in our lives, in our work. These last couple of years, I've been thinking a lot about "the possible" and "possibility" and what they really mean when we invoke them in talking about climate change.

In this episode of Talking Culture, I’ll discuss to the notion of possibility as it has appeared in my fieldwork and my thinking for my PhD research project in the anthropology of climate change.

Thanks to Meghan McGill for producing me and editing this episode. Thanks to Alejandra Melian-Morse for the conversation and writing support. And thanks to Andrew P. Jones and Climate Interactive for putting up with all my wondering over the years.

Episode website: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Talking Culture Website.

Listen to and learn more about Talking Culture: here.

Republished here with permission.