Whose Climate? Post-Apocalyptic Reflections on Climate Justice

Word Count: 290

by Mihir Sharma
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In December 2019, Stillpoint Magazine visited Stillpoint Spaces Berlin to host the symposium event Racism & Ecology: An Afternoon with Stillpoint Magazine. Below is a recording of Mihir Sharma’s presentation “Whose Climate? Post-Apocalyptic Reflections on Climate Justice”, which coincided with his contribution to Stillpoint Magazine Issue 003: FALLOW.

“Following Nick Estes’ insistence on the post-apocalyptic predicament of indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, I ask: why is it still impossible to imagine the end of capitalism, when there are several worlds which have already been eclipsed by the racial capitalocene, e.g. by settler-colonies in the wake of planetary necropolitics? What does a new “climate crisis” mean for the always already catastrophic present? In exploring these two questions, I examine contradictions emerging from transnational social movements – against pipelines on Lakota lands, against coal plants in Germany, and in and propose questions which take seriously the urgent contestations of the long struggles of Black, indigenous, and dispossessed beings of the majority world.”

~ Mihir Sharma


MIHIR SHARMA speaker

Mihir Sharma has (co-)taught seminars on social movements, race, political economy, and decolonization. His writing experiments with ethnography, essays, and letters as forms. He attempts to re-center oral traditions of expression and community-building as askesis/praxis. He lives in Berlin, Bayreuth, and St. Louis, Missouri.

For more information on Racism & Ecology, you can download the event leaflet here.

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