What If Climate Change Isn't One Crisis? On Thinking in the Elsewise

Climate change is often described as the defining crisis of our time. The singular matters here. The climate crisis. A planetary condition presumed to be shared, even if unevenly experienced. From scientific reports to policy frameworks, climate change frequently appears as a common problem demanding common solutions, a global emergency requiring coordinated action before it is too late.

Yet the longer I worked ethnographically with communities navigating environmental uncertainty in Southeast Asia, the more this singular language began to feel inadequate. Not because climate change is unreal, nor because its impacts are not global, but because crisis itself seemed to take radically different forms depending on where one looked. What appeared as disruption in one place had already become part of everyday life in another. What was framed as breakdown in one context was approached as maintenance in another. The more closely I looked, the more difficult it became to speak of climate change as one crisis.

What if climate change is not one crisis at all?

What if the assumption of a singular crisis obscures the plurality of worlds through which environmental change is lived, negotiated, and understood?

These questions eventually led me toward what I call the elsewise.

The term emerged out of a certain discomfort with the language of alternatives. "Otherwise" always seemed to imply a distinction between what exists and what stands outside it, between this world and another, between the observer and the observed. The elsewise gestures toward something different. It is less a destination than a mode of attention. Less a vision of an alternative future than an attempt to remain attentive to possibilities already taking shape within the present. It asks us to inhabit the interstices of what presents itself as reality and to recognize that other ways of living, caring, and world-making are often already unfolding around us.

Thinking in the elsewise also requires rethinking the figure of the human subject itself.

For a long time, much of Western thought has been organized around a particular image of the human being: autonomous, rational, capable of standing apart from the world and acting upon it. It is the figure I have elsewhere described as the "carefree fluttering butterfly"—a subject imagined as largely independent from the ecological, social, and historical conditions that make its existence possible. Even now, as environmental instability intensifies across the globe, this image remains remarkably persistent.

Yet climate change has a way of exposing dependencies that such imaginaries tend to conceal.

Through flooded streets and polluted waterways, through failing infrastructures and disrupted livelihoods, we are reminded that no one exists outside the relations that sustain them. The subject is not separate from the world. It emerges through it. Through infrastructures, histories, economies, ecologies, and the countless forms of labour and care that make life possible.

One such 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 floodwaters themselves but the forms of engagement that emerged around them. Approaching storms certainly generated concern, but they were rarely framed through the language of exceptional catastrophe. Rather than waiting for a technological fix or a large-scale intervention, people adjusted routes, cleared drains, moved belongings, exchanged information, and incorporated uncertainty into the practical rhythms of everyday life.

This is not to suggest that flooding is unproblematic, nor to romanticize adaptation. Rather, these encounters raised questions about what disaster means in the first place.

Much climate governance continues to be shaped by an assumption that disruptions represent a temporary deviation from normality and that the task of intervention is to restore order. Yet many of the practices I encountered seemed to be organized around a different understanding altogether. The world did not appear as something that had fallen into disorder and therefore required fixing. Instead, it appeared as something sustained through continuous acts of maintenance, adjustment, and care.

Repair, in this sense, was never simply about restoring what had been lost.

It was about supporting a world.

The distinction may seem subtle, yet it transforms how one thinks about environmental change. A clogged drain, a flooded street, or a failing infrastructure does not necessarily signal the collapse of a system awaiting rescue. It may instead reveal the ongoing work through which worlds are continually sustained. Repair becomes less a technical intervention than a collective practice of world-support, a way of carrying a world forward despite its fragilities.

Questions of repair resurfaced in very different ways among waste collectors in Phnom Penh.

Walking through landscapes of discarded plastic, scrap metal, cardboard, and organic waste, it became difficult to sustain simple distinctions between destruction and creation, value and abandonment, waste and resource. What appeared from a distance as the detritus 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.

One waste collector, whom I call Sophea, became central to my thinking here. Her work unfolded 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 collectors performed forms of labour that sustained not only their own livelihoods but also broader material circulations upon which urban life increasingly depends. They reduced waste, recovered resources, and contributed to environmental futures while remaining largely invisible within dominant narratives of climate action.

What emerged through these encounters was what I came to think of as salvage solidarity.

Not solidarity in any heroic or romantic sense, but in the quieter forms of companionship, obligation, and mutual reliance that make survival possible. Hope appeared less as a grand political vision than as something carried through everyday practices of continuing together despite uncertainty. In the ruins of contemporary capitalism, collectiveness emerged not as an ideal to be achieved but as a condition of endurance.

The elsewise also became visible through encounters with non-human life.

In the canals of Ho Chi Minh City, water hyacinths drift across the surface in dense green formations. They are frequently described as invasive nuisances that obstruct waterways and interfere with urban management. Yet spending time with these environments complicated such classifications. The hyacinths gathered, filtered, slowed, absorbed, and transformed. They responded to pollution, heat, and changing water levels while simultaneously altering the environments through which they moved.

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

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

Nature, often imagined as either victim or resource, appeared instead as a dynamic fabric of relations through which multiple forms of life continuously shape one another.

Perhaps this is where the political significance of the elsewise becomes most visible.

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 may begin not with solutions but with attentiveness: attentiveness to relations that exceed the individual, to forms of care that frequently remain unrecognized, and to the mundane practices through which worlds continue despite uncertainty.

The elsewise is therefore neither an escape from crisis nor a promise of a better future waiting on the horizon. It emerges within crisis itself, in the ongoing work of maintaining relations, improvising infrastructures, supporting worlds, and carrying on. It asks us to look beyond singular narratives of collapse and attend instead to the plurality of ways in which people and more-than-human others negotiate environmental change.

Perhaps climate change is not one crisis after all.

Perhaps what we call climate change is better understood as a proliferation of intersecting vulnerabilities, adaptations, histories, and forms of world-making that cannot be reduced to a single story. Thinking in the elsewise does not resolve these differences. It asks us to remain attentive to them, and to the possibility that futures are already being composed in places that dominant climate imaginaries too often overlook.

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