The twelve-year warning

Abstract

The frames that get put around “the climate crisis” (whether as imminent disaster or explanation for ongoing disasters) reflect how human relations and histories have been and are configured—and what (and who) is constituted as relevant, expert, and newsworthy in efforts to address such a crisis. The dominant ways of talking about and reporting on climate change rely on assumptions that don’t take into account colonial histories and varied frameworks for understanding ecological changes suggested by Indigenous scholars and communities that are grounded in interdependent, reciprocal relations between humans and nonhumans. This essay suggests that acknowledging settler colonialism and its structures, together with a consideration of diverse Indigenous knowledges, experiences, and histories, offers profound insight into the crises and disasters associated with climate change—along with a differentiated sense of how to consider what must, should, and can be done about it.