The Climate Change Project, City of Mississauga
This SDUK broadsheet is the first to follow The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea, a ten-day contemporary art festival engaging with climate change, environmental crisis, and resilience which took place in Mississauga’s Southdown Industrial Area in September 2018. Taking BEARING as its theme, this issue turns our attention to alienation, affect, anxiety, and questions of responsibility and resilience. For curious readers of all persuasions—those new to the project and those who have been following its year-long unfurling—here are some places to begin:
If you are wondering how can we enact responsibility to humans and nonhumans in bleak political and ecological times, contributions by Alexis Shotwell and Joy Xiang provide productive starting points. Investigating kinship systems and relations that oppose regimes of whiteness, Shotwell’s essay highlights the urgency of anti-racist work in both environmental and social contexts, while Xiang explores how we might reevaluate pollution by better understanding the web of human relations that support its dispersal.
Those with an interest in economics may be wondering how fossil fuels structure our relationships to finance, media, and biodiversity. D.T. Cochrane’s recurring column examines the concept of “growth” by exploring what is left unaccounted for, while an essay by Jeff Diamanti highlights how media shape our blindness to ongoing fossil-fuel reliance, and an artist project by Marina Roy urges a reconsideration of the earth’s carrying capacity.
If this feels overwhelming, some might ask, how can we render visible the complexity of forces that shape our world? Imagining a chronology dating back to before the formation of our solar system, Jacquelyn Ross’s poem A Brief History of Feeling illustrates the impulses, tensions, cruelties, and moments of tenderness that have characterized cosmic time to the present. Malala Andrialavidrazana’s collage Airline Routes and Distances assembles a partial history of knowledge, globalization, colonialism, mythology, militarism, cartography, and natural resource extraction, told through the imagery of atlases, bank notes, stamps, and album covers.
For those who wish to explore climate change’s effects beyond the local level, an urgent question is: Who bears the effects of climate change? What does it look like to bear this weight? Amy Balkin’s A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting is an attempt to capture the varied objects and artifacts that represent the rapid shifts we are seeing in environments around the world. Meanwhile, in watercolours that articulate complex tensions between land, settler and Indigenous identities, alienation, iconographic traditions, and forms of power (political, mythological, capital), Joseph Tisiga builds surreal spaces that respond to social and environmental urgencies.
Those reading with policy in mind may wonder how systems of leadership and government can direct public action on climate justice. Sara Hughes outlines the capacity municipalities have in responding to climate change, while the third column in a regular series from Mississauga’s Climate Change Project describes local approaches the city has taken. Appealing to the federal government, an open letter from leading climate scientists urges greater and more decisive action in response to the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
Finally, as in each broadsheet, we include profiles of local organizations and initiatives dedicated to working on issues of climate change and environmental justice in the GTHA, and a glossary of terms designed to clarify—but also to complicate, question, and upend—common assumptions about the language we use to describe our current epoch.