To Be Repaired

  • Joy Xiang

Debt isn’t new. As a relational bond⁠, it began with trade, or barter, the idea of an exchange, something owed within something shared. Rather than an immediate trade, debt drags time, the knowledge of what’s to be owed later, and not forgotten.

Over time, debt—which is not always financial—came to imply either a possession or lack of power, instead of a promise to be kept. What’s mine is yours, for a cost.

What’s the status of that promise now? Instead of perpetuating exploitative bonds, can debt be reframed as a way of being responsible to each other and the world, especially in times of climate and other crises?

If climate change will be felt in parts of the world least responsible for the crisis and least able to respond to its worst effects—including loss of life—how do we urgently rethink social relations within and outside of debt, capital, and aid?


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Debt, as a method of control, arises from the twin machineries of colonialism and capitalism: when nature was first given a price on a global scale, it was gouged for resources and fossil fuels.1 Regimes of land theft and dispossession, slavery, trade, colonization, and nation-building viciously demonstrated that something doesn’t come from nothing; wealth accumulated onto itself and made debtors out of those it took from.

When the world was costed out, the Global North came out on top—those who were best able to prey on other nations, polluting freely over the last century to develop infrastructure and build industrial, economic prosperity.2 The predation continues through bad-faith lending programs—policies by the World Bank and IMF that loan money to indebted nations at the cost of deep cuts to social programs and removal of basic food subsidy controls. The idea of debt also links to a history of wrongful indebtedness inextricably bound up in racism, structural or otherwise3—when Fred Moten and Stefano Harney talk about debt, they speak about marginalized people that are always in debt, bad debt, the kind that can never be paid off and was never meant to be.4

As early as 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognized that countries contributing an estimated third of greenhouse gasses to global warming will suffer seventy-five to eighty percent of its effects, especially small island states in vulnerable locations.5 Restorative justice attempts led by affected countries have brought the idea of climate reparations to the fore, highlighting climate debt.6 At the 1991 UN climate conference, a group of small islands proposed, for the first time, financial support for disproportionate climate devastation. Articles by Naomi Klein and Maxine Burkett in 2009 hastened the talk of climate reparations, and that same year 254 organizations signed the declaration “Repay the Climate Debt” as a call-to-action directed at the Copenhagen UN climate conference.

The notion of climate reparations illustrates that wealthy countries and former colonizers are actually the ones in debt—far more than could be quantified in monied terms—for over 500 years of resource exploitation and extraction from other countries (resulting in air and water pollution),7 labour exploitation, and emissions displacement, essentially off-shoring the production of their energy-intensive products.8 Financial compensation and support are necessary as concrete actions, but these cannot be our only mechanisms. We need to forge new relations and systems of exchange between the exploited and exploiter. In providing support, a new system must also move beyond the dangers of a “charity” mindset that reproduces existing, paternalistic power relations and avoids addressing historical and systemic oppression. An ethical-relational change is absolutely vital: one that prioritizes the self-determination of the formerly indebted.

Consulting firm Moody’s Analytics, in a recent economic impact assessment, finds that there are “winners and losers” in climate crisis. Moody’s describes how Canada, along with a handful of wealthier countries, stands to gain a slight net positive in economic growth by factoring in crop yields, a longer growing season, and “tourism demand”9 (all seeming euphemisms for food availability, and the necessity of migration due to catastrophe). This is the wrong way to frame climate crisis, as if there are impermeable borders around nations and there are winners in an interconnected system during the unpredictability of life at the end.

To adjust the thinking of debt and reparations—to repair—requires conceptual and emotional shifts around finance, progress, and the deep wounds of historical (and contemporary) colonialism. Flipping the usual script, a notable example appeared in 2007, when then-Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa attempted to raise $3.6 billion from the world to prevent drilling into the crude oil beneath the biodiverse rainforest of Yasuní National Park.10 The funds were to aid the country’s lost revenue from the crude oil, valued at about $7 billion, and prevent the potential release of 410 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. (Unfortunately, the plan drew scepticism from wealthier, oil-dependent nations, but the move was precedent-setting.)

If debt is a promise, the financialization of that promise doesn’t replace meaningful human connection or care, but does mark how deeply co-dependent all systems of life and non-life are in a world that has been thoroughly shaped by the idea of capital.11 As Saima Desai, editor of Briarpatch, says succinctly in their most recent issue, “capitalism pours gasoline on the flames of the climate crisis.”12 The rethinking of debt, then—who owes whom, and for what—represents a rethinking of ethical relations that is crucial to approaching the environmental crisis. To Burkett, reparations are an agreement between “victims and perpetrators […] that their futures are best served through collaboration.”13

Though the case for climate reparations reverses the assumed poles of debtor and creditor, this crisis is not a zero-sum game. Structural policies enacted to address climate change must cease to prioritize overall capital gain or think that a purely economic framework is enough to redress deep historical and current injustices. The timeline of possibility for making and keeping new kinds of promises and relations—ones based not on destruction and competition but mutual accountability and survival—increasingly shrinks into a singularity that means right now. When structures of debt dissipate, the freed remnants will draw new matter to bond us.



Joy Xiang is a writer, arts worker, and perpetual late bloomer living in Tkaronto. Her work engages desire, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She prioritizes collective and collaborative processes, and learning ways of being together in complication and intimacy. Her first zine cold blood used cold-blooded creatures as a metaphor for creative and survival-focused adaptation strategies. She has been on the editorial team of Milkweed, re:asian, and Canadian Art; written for Mercer Union, Ada X, and Hamilton Artists Inc.; and held positions at Blackwood Gallery and Vtape. She is a member of the feminist working group EMILIA-AMALIA.

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