Climate change as experience of affect

Dubbed a “wicked problem,” climate change is exceeding our ability to agree upon any of the modern repertoire of responses available to us, perhaps most notably a market for carbon trading. Scientists are calling on social scientists and humanities scholars for radical approaches to social transformation. Responding to this call, in this paper we stage a conversation between two scholars across the humanities and social sciences on how new possibilities of political-ethical action might emerge from within the current environmental catastrophe. The site of our philosophical exploration is an agricultural assemblage in New South Wales, Australia, which we examine through the story of a farmer affected by landscape degradation. We are particularly interested in an encounter between a farmer, the landscape, and other species from which new possibilities for agricultural action emerged. Our conversation focuses on the affective formations and fluctuations accompanying this farmer’s experience of “rapid [environmental] degeneration and collapse” in the here and now. Extending from this case study, we develop a way to theorize the profound sense of sorrow experienced by those confronted with the direct and immediate manifestations of environmental degradation and how this sorrow can become a source of political-ethical action. Through the conversational style of our paper we offer an experimental approach to collaboration that aims to create and maintain space from which new thinking can emerge. Such an approach may be exactly what is needed in response to the wicked problem of our time, climate change.