What if Climate Change isn't One Crisis?

Climate change is often described as the defining crisis of our time. It is understood as a planetary condition experienced collectively, even if those experiences differ. From scientific reports to political frameworks, climate change is frequently presented as a shared problem requiring shared solutions. It is a global emergency that demands coordinated action before it is too late.

These reflections led me to what I call elsewise. The term emerged from a certain discomfort with the language of alternatives. "Otherwise" always implies a distinction between what exists and what lies outside it.

Elsewise suggests something different. It is less a destination than a mode of attention. It is less a vision of an alternative future than an attempt to recognize the possibilities already taking shape in the present.

It invites us to inhabit the spaces between what presents itself as reality and to recognize that other ways of living, caring, and world-making are often already unfolding around us.

Rethinking Human Subjectivity

Thinking elsewise also requires rethinking the figure of the human subject. For a long time, much of Western thought has been organized around a particular image of the human being: autonomous, rational, and capable of standing apart from the world in order to act upon it. It is a subject imagined as largely independent of the ecological, social, and historical conditions that make its existence possible. Even now, as environmental instability intensifies across the globe, this image remains remarkably resilient.

Yet climate change has exposed the ways we perceive dependency in ways that such conceptions often obscure. Through flooded streets and polluted waterways, failing infrastructures and disrupted livelihoods, we are reminded that no one exists outside the relationships that sustain them. The subject is not separate from the world. It comes into being through it—through infrastructures, histories, economies, ecologies, and the countless forms of labor and care that make life possible.

Water as a Point of Departure

Such a world begins with water. In Ho Chi Minh City, flooding has become an increasingly familiar feature of urban life. Yet what struck me was not the water itself but the forms of engagement that developed around it. Storms certainly generated concern, but they were rarely described in the language of exceptional catastrophe. Rather than waiting for a technological solution or a large-scale intervention, people adjusted their routes, cleared drains, moved their belongings, exchanged information, and incorporated uncertainty into the practical rhythms of everyday life.

This is not to suggest that flooding is unproblematic or that I wish to romanticize adaptation. Instead, these encounters raise questions about what catastrophe actually means. Much of what is framed under the concept of climate governance is based on the assumption that disruption is a temporary deviation from normality and that the task of intervention is to restore order. Yet many of the practices I observed seemed organized around a very different understanding. The world did not appear as something that had fallen into disorder and therefore needed to be repaired. Rather, it appeared as something sustained through continuous acts of maintenance, adaptation, and care.

Repair, in this sense, was never simply about restoring what had been lost. It was about supporting a world.

This distinction may seem subtle, yet it transforms how we think about environmental change. A blocked drain, a flooded street, or failing infrastructure does not necessarily signal the collapse of a system waiting to be rescued. Instead, these conditions may reveal the ongoing work through which worlds are continually sustained. Repair becomes less a technical intervention than a collective practice of world-supporting—a way of carrying a world forward despite its fragility.

Solidarity in Waste

Questions of repair reappeared in a very different form among waste pickers in Phnom Penh. Walking through landscapes of discarded plastic, scrap metal, cardboard, and organic waste, it became difficult to maintain simple distinctions between destruction and creation, value and abandonment, waste and resource. What appeared from a distance as the refuse of contemporary capitalism revealed itself as a site of intense social and ecological activity. Materials were sorted, exchanged, repaired, and returned to circulation. Value emerged where others perceived only excess.

A waste picker whom I call Sophea became central to my thinking in this context. Her work took place under conditions that were undeniably precarious and shaped by inequalities that could not be ignored. Yet focusing exclusively on exploitation obscured something equally important. Day after day, waste pickers performed forms of labor that not only sustained their own livelihoods but also supported broader material circulations upon which urban life increasingly depends. They reduced waste, recovered resources, and contributed to more environmentally sustainable futures while remaining largely invisible within dominant narratives of climate action.

What emerged from these encounters is what I call salvage solidarity.

It is not solidarity in a heroic or romantic sense, but rather the quieter forms of community, obligation, and mutual dependence that make survival possible. Hope appeared less as a grand political vision than as something carried through everyday practices of enduring together despite uncertainty. Amid the ruins of contemporary capitalism, collectivity emerged not as an ideal to be achieved but as a condition of persistence.

The Role of the More-than-Human

Elsewise also became visible through encounters with more-than-human life. In the canals of Ho Chi Minh City, water hyacinths drift across the surface in dense green formations. They are often described as invasive pests that block waterways and disrupt urban management. Yet the time I spent within these environments complicated such classifications. The hyacinths collected, filtered, slowed, absorbed, and transformed. They responded to pollution, heat, and fluctuating water levels while simultaneously reshaping the environments through which they moved.

It became increasingly difficult to sustain the assumption that agency belongs exclusively to humans.

The hyacinths were not passive elements within an otherwise human landscape. They actively participated in shaping ecological and social worlds. Their presence complicated familiar distinctions between nature and society and challenged the understanding of urban environments as spaces organized solely through human intentions.

Nature, so often imagined as either victim or resource, instead appeared as a dynamic web of relationships through which different forms of life continually shape one another.

The Political Significance of Elsewise

Perhaps it is here that the political significance of elsewise becomes most apparent. Climate change is often narrated through the language of solutions. We search for technologies, policies, and interventions capable of stabilizing an increasingly unstable world. Yet the ethnographic encounters that informed elsewise repeatedly pointed elsewhere. They suggested that

political imagination might begin not with solutions but with attention: attention to relationships that exceed the individual, to forms of care that often go unnoticed, and to the everyday practices through which worlds persist despite uncertainty.

Elsewise is therefore neither an escape from crisis nor a promise of a better future waiting on the horizon. It emerges within the crisis itself—in the ongoing work of sustaining relationships, improvising infrastructures, supporting worlds, and carrying on. It invites us to look beyond singular narratives of collapse and instead attend to the many ways in which humans and more-than-human others navigate environmental change.

But climate change is not a single crisis and it does not come alone. Perhaps what we call climate change is better understood as a multiplicity of overlapping vulnerabilities, adaptations, histories, and forms of world-making that cannot be reduced to a single narrative.

Thinking elsewise does not dissolve these differences. It asks us to remain attentive and to recognize the possibility that futures are already being assembled in places too often overlooked by dominant climate imaginaries.

If you would like to read the full article, Elsewise: Speculative Landscapes in the Climatic Pluriverse, you can find it here: https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-7786-7/climatic-subjects/