​​Events

20.04.2022, Christopher Kelty (UCLA): Fixing the Future in Los Angeles or, Why Johnny Can't Problematize

This talk reports some absurdities of environmental governance in a particular place: Los Angeles, California. It focuses on three urban ecological and wildlife controversies: the environmental impact of feral cats cared for by humans, the secondary effects of anticoagulant rodenticides on predatory and scavenging birds and mammals; and the restoration of a wetlands sacred to local Native American peoples, degraded by both oil drilling and conservation. Central to all of them are techno-political tools: environmental impact reports, mitigation bank and credits systems, pesticide registration review. Each of these tools fix the future by defining the present and testing the impacts of different futures--evidence-based policy making. Yet as a pragmatic form, they do much more: they slow down the future in some ways, and speed it up in others; they instantiate certain pasts over others, and they become intense affective fields around which the possibility of argument unfolds. I argue that this does not always happen along predictable lines, serving as a bulwark against a damaging future in some cases and a roadblock to a desired change in others.