A Political Ecology of Extremes: Narrating Urgency in the Anthropocene

Global processes of environmental change, and our responses to them, can be understood as a domain of extremes. First, change is often manifest early, though ambiguously, through extreme events from heat wave to drought, from ice storm to typhoon. Second, our proposed solutions grow more extreme, as discourse and research in policy alternatives associated with some forms of planetary geoengineering start to gain traction. Third, our sense of global stewardship or indeed global emergency prompts calls for governance responses that involve some suspensions of juridical order. Here we describe a new framework to understand the governance of climate change in this time of extremes.