Time and Place in Climate Activism

Abstract

Abstract While comparisons across space are rare in literature on climate movements, time has long featured centrally in it—albeit often implicitly. That is because the climate movement is fundamentally shaped by the temporality of its main concern: climate change will have irreversible consequences that will become inevitable as soon as tipping points are crossed. Against this background, urgency has become an essential driving force behind and challenge for the climate movement. Yet while this urgency is certainly based in physics, it is also a social product. This chapter discusses how the contested nature of time shapes at least three core dimensions of climate activism: strategy, politics, and goals. The chapter further argues that discussions of temporality should be attentive to the contextuality of time: what might seem a future threat in privileged parts of the world presents only one of the more recent ecological disasters to disrupt disadvantaged communities worldwide. Contextualized discussions of time should therefore inform the development of comparative scholarship on climate activism and vice versa.