Relational Listening as Climate Action
After almost two decades of work on climate change, the most common question I’m asked is “What can I do?” Many people want to take action on climate change but don’t know where to start, in the face of such an unwieldy and overwhelming crisis. One solution we are constantly offered is to wield our consumer purchasing power and buy green: LED lights, efficient appliances, solar panels etc. However, voting with our dollars alone is not an effective strategy in the face of a problem caused by capitalist relations of power. Climate solutions are not as simple as green capitalist fantasies promoting the notion that new technologies will solve this problem. These logics need to be remade. Climate change is the result of broken relationships between us and our environment. We are part of our ecologies, and yet so dissociated from them. This keynote talk will discuss my ongoing journey to reconnect with the lands, places, people and more-than-human species that are also living and dying through the climate crisis—and how we can individually and collectively act.
Dr. Sheena Wilson is Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Alberta, Canada, co-founder of the international Petrocultures Research Group, and principal investigator of Just Powers, a multi-million dollar national research project on intersectionally feminist and decolonial energy transition and climate justice. Research highlights include “Gendering Oil” (2014), Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Cultures (2017); “Trafficking in Petronormativities” (2020); “Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial Futures” (2018); “Petro-Mama: Mothering in a Crude World” the story (2014) and film (2016); and Pîkopayin: It is Broken (2022), a documentary film co-directed with Angele Alook and created as part of a partnership between Just Powers and Bigstone Cree Nation. Wilson’s forthcoming monograph on deep energy literacy is called New Logics for the Climate Crisis.