2025/07/01 by Charlotte Kate Weatherill · 2 voices
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration #Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature #New Zealand Economic and Social Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/geo2.70037
ABSTRACT How climate change is narrated matters. Every story that is told of climate change contains its own causes of the problem, its own solutions and its own vision of the future. This article juxtaposes two stories: the dominant story of climate change as represented by the IPCC and a counter‐story of climate change as ‘imperial mess’. This language comes from Alice Te Punga Somerville and her book Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay About Captain Cook (2020). In this book, Te Punga Somerville writes about colonialism in Aotearoa and the Pacific as a story that can be told in endless different ways, with each story drawing out different elements. Number 223 of her project, ‘In Montebello Islands’, discusses the British nuclear weapons testing programme. The tests were called ‘Operation Hurricane’, and Te Punga Somerville writes that the whole imperial mess of the past five centuries could be called “Operation Hurricane”. This article takes this claim as a prompt, both methodologically and theoretically, in order to argue that climate change needs to be understood in a historically and geographically informed way, where the colonial history becomes the present, coloniality and resistance entwine and the ‘way out of the mess’ has to be found in a fight against the entirety of Operation Hurricane. The contribution of the article is twofold: First, this article contributes to literatures that understand climate change as a historical process of imperial violence, by directly addressing what this changes about an analysis of climate politics. Second, it contributes to critiques of the IPCC by showing how its approach depoliticises climate change through the way it narrates and communicates climate science as separate from historical and structural processes.