Michael DiRisio
This sixth broadsheet in the SDUK series rounds out a sustained engagement with climate change, environmental crisis, and resilience that has taken place across multiple sites in Mississauga throughout 2018–19. Concluding this series, though by no means ceasing the Blackwood’s work on climate justice, this issue reflects on how to reckon with, and move forward in, an age of ecological anxiety and accumulating destruction—with hope, but also with urgency. As in the return of fire to landscape conservation documented in Zackery Hobler’s cover image, FORGING looks to artistic, poetic, political, and scientific catalysts to re-enliven suppressed or waylaid knowledges in favour of a more liveable future.
Readers may begin by wondering what futures we inherit, forged out of extractive industries. Articles by Orit Halpern and Michael DiRisio explore the legacies and contemporary conditions of metals and mining—Halpern untangling the gold mining industry’s willful refusal to adapt to its own demise and corresponding turn towards datafication, and DiRisio narrating a social and environmental history of nickel. Thirza Cuthand confronts myriad extractions in an artist project that ties together trauma, uncertainty, and queer and Indigenous futurity.
Historically-minded readers may be asking: What strategies do we have for understanding how past(s) and present(s) may guide future action? Artist projects in this issue use tactics of observation to see a way forward: from divination at the shores of Lake Ontario in a Turkish coffee reading by Alize Zorlutuna; to studies of weather and prayers for collective healing by Erin Robinsong; to a meditation on the colonial apparatus of cartography and a call to re-account for territory by Bonnie Devine. Joy Xiang narrates a history of debt and climate reparations, advocating for an expansive and relational view of debt.
Those itching to take action but skeptical of individualistic approaches to environmental responsibility may be asking how can collectivity address the urgency of our contemporary environmental moment while accounting for the differential effects of climate change? An open letter from grassroots collective Wretched of the Earth calls for organizers of contemporary climate justice movements to commit to principles of inclusion, and to recognize established systems of oppression as the foundations for climate crisis. A profile of the Blue Dot Movement addresses environmental rights frameworks, while an interview between UTM student Sarah Pereux and Professor John Paul Ricco explores the complexity and necessity of imagining collective futures and afterlives.
Those interested in inventive responses to uncertain climate futures might wonder what new forms of value might assist us in encountering climate breakdown? Clean-tech engineer Phil De Luna explores promising developments in creating useful fuels from CO2 emissions, while the Bureau of Linguistical Reality propose that we need new terminology—language that can robustly account for diverse experiences of climate change—to nurture greater climate dialogue. D.T. Cochrane suggests that we explode the economic notion of value, and instead consider it as a function of power and social relations.
As in every SDUK broadsheet, this publication concludes with profiles of local organizations and a glossary of terms that illuminate, complicate, and enrich its contents. We urge readers to consider these pages as tools—devices to carry into conversation and climate action.