The Irrecoverable Earth: The Promise and Peril of Climate Engineering Technologies

This research project is concerned with discourses of recovery in the context of climate change – “recovery” thought as political buzzword, as ecological aspiration, as scientific and technological endeavour, as populist demand, and as utterly focal to the array of climate discourses operative today. Each chapter, and the project as a whole, is framed by the concept of the “recoverability” of the earth in the context of environmental decline. I introduce a historical trajectory that sees climate history according to three epochs: the “Resilient Earth” (pre-industrial), the “Destructable Earth” (post-Industrial Revolution), and the “Recoverable Earth” (active today). Recovery not only encodes an aspirational orientation with respect to ecological recuperation – blotting out feasible apocalyptic alternatives – but expresses a temporal relationship to the earth organized around the notion of return, a reversion to an edenic or pastoral pre-history since squandered by the dawn of mass industrialization. What are the consequences of this retrospective proclivity, and the logical predispositions it animates, for the project of constructing radical climate futures?

Research conducted during the summer of 2022 will be focused on the question of climate engineering technologies (especially carbon capture and sequestration) as one of the most active “recovery fronts” operable today. Indeed, as confirmed by the 2021 IPCC report, without investing in and scaling negative emissions technologies, we stand little chance of curbing lethal impacts of climate change whether or not we reach net zero emissions. And yet, many leftist and humanist scholars see climate engineering as inherently aligned with technocratic capitalist initiatives or else as philosophically synonymous with problematic forms of techno-utopianism – rather than as a potentially useful piece of a larger approach to climate recovery. I historically recontextualize climate engineering by arguing that it is not an emergent phenomenon but a continuation of centuries of anthropogenic climate intervention. In the process, I deconstruct “geoengineering” as a catch-all term, an alarmist slogan, and a rhetorical monolith that conceals radically different climate de-escalation stratagems under its banner. This techno-scientific hesitancy results in the humanities being left behind in the public and expert debates around the ethics, politics, and plausibility of such interventions – and must be set aside. There is a need for the environmental humanities to urgently engage this issue and to critically contribute to the equitable development and deployment of these technologies. Following feminist scholars like Holly Buck and Anne Pasek, I work to envision climate technologies as a form of local infrastructure – with ecological benefits, social value, and even an appreciable aesthetics of their own.

Keywords: recovery, climate change, environmental humanities, climate technologies, political ecology, green architecture