17 February

What if our mistake with climate change is to think it’s about climate? We’ve used fossil fuels for several centuries to ‘free’ ourselves from the usual constraints of life - our connections to our landscapes, to our territories. We travel at whim to anywhere in the world and export and import goods similarly. We became the people of no-place, of every-place, at once. Fossil fuels contain millions of years of captured solar energy, which we’ve burned in only a handful of centuries. We’ve been burning time. Before them there was a natural limiter in things, we had to manage with the contraints of the energy and resources in our bits of territory. Fossil fuels massively deterritorialised humanity, stripped it of its territories. From this point of view, maybe the populism we see and are horrified by in politics today *is* the political response to climate change. We keep wondering why the public aren’t interested enough in climate, but actually they’re passionately interested about the root cause of climate change - the loss of their own territory. Their connection to place.