Ben Harris-Roxas

Maladaptation is usually understood as referring to the unintended consequences of well-meant measures to reduce climate vulnerability. But it also includes the fallout from decisions that favour technical fixes over more holistic approaches.

Climate adaptation is not a neutral or apolitical process. It can perpetuate problematic approaches, including colonial land practices and the exclusion of Indigenous voices. This can create tenuous resource distribution, erode democratic governance and compromise Indigenous sovereignty, exacerbating vulnerabilities. It can also subvert community-driven bottom-up adaptation, instead focusing on national agendas caught up in international politics.

Useful points in this Conversation article by Ritodhi Chakraborty and Claire Burgess:

Climate adaptation projects sometimes exacerbate the problems they try to solve – a new tool hopes to correct that

A small city in New Zealand plagued by “siren battles” – cars decked out in loudspeakers commonly used in emergency warning systems and often blaring Céline Dion hits – is calling on authorities to step in and end the noise.

The battles are part of a New Zealand subculture where music enthusiasts cover their cars in up to dozens of industrial speakers, loudhailers and sirens, then compete to have the loudest and clearest sounds.

Siren kings: New Zealand city terrorised by Céline Dion ‘speaker battles’

Jacob Reed asked 130 artists and animators to create scenes from the season 1 finale of Frasier My Coffee with Niles in different styles. The results are sublime.

Our Frasier Remake

This alchemic-like ambition to turn discarded plastics into new objects can also be seen at the hands of government agencies. One such example, is the efforts of the Indonesian Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing (MoPWH) to incorporate discarded single-use plastics into road tar for building national roads in the country. According to Danis Sumadilaga, the head of the Agency for Research and Development at the MoPWH, mixing plastic waste with asphalt will result in stronger and more stable roads.

While it is certainly better to have wild plastic discards sequestered inside a road, rather than scattered in the environment or buried deep inside animals’ entrails, this development undoubtedly erects a speed bump on the road towards the nationwide ban on single-use plastics. In other words, mixing single-use plastics with asphalt makes plastic appear as unproblematic. To return to the concept of Plasticene, the plastic road is representative of both the human alteration—the plastification—of the environment, and the blind assumption that the circular economy can coalesce economic growth with sustainability.

The plastipelago

During past mass extinctions there was no species with the power or interest to stop extinctions, and no conscious stake in maintaining biodiversity. Today there is a species that should know it is not able to wait millions of years for its life-support systems to be restored after a mass extinction. Ironically, the scale that species’ activities is the sole cause of today’s biological holocaust.

What is crystal clear is that the trajectory of the dimming future of civilization will be directed in part not just by the overall loss of biodiversity but by the pattern of our mutilation of the tree of life.

Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2306987120)