The physical and psychosocial hyper-separation between extraction and loss: Insights from northern Australia

Description

There is a growing awareness of the link between fossil fuel use and climate-related losses and damages among the Australian public. Various national surveys and case study research document increasing concern and demand for mitigation and adaptation action. Nonetheless, in my ethnographic research across northern Australia, I found several tensions and contradictions in individual and collective subjectivities that problematise this discourse of growing concern and demand for action. In this paper, I will argue that apart from some specific groups (e.g., eco-socialists, Indigenous people), there is a hyper-separation between sites of extraction and fossil fuel use and the growing losses and damages. This argument goes beyond typical accounts of construal level theory, or psychological distance, by bringing materialist insights from political economy and wider critical theory. A complex mosaic of historical memory and relations to society, economy and climate strongly inform people’s environmental subjectivities, which conditions how people perceive and understand causality between extractivism and loss and damage. Even with concrete manifestations of climate change, such as the death spiral of the Great Barrier Reef or increased impacts from king tides, people remain physically and psychosocially distant from the root causes, differentiated responsibilities, and ongoing violence to human and more-than-human existences. I turn my attention to Povinelli’s concept of geontologies and other emergent critical theories that I have found useful to understand the limits of late liberal environmental subjectivities. I conclude by resituating this analysis in the political economy of climate change, suggesting ways to redress this hyper-separation.

Period	14 Nov 2024
Event title	Petrofutures 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Perth, AustraliaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International