More-Than-Climate Temporalities of Loss and Damage in Australia

I contribute to an emerging politics of loss through an empirical analysis of temporalities of climate change loss and damage in Australia. How people temporalize climate change informs their conception of causality, designation of losses and damages, and political response. By drawing attention to the diversity of onto-epistemological understandings and characterizations of climate change loss and damage, I illuminate some of the values diverse actors perceive as currently, or at risk of, being lost. I do this by unearthing and theorizing commonly identified temporalities held by a cross-section of social actors in regional Australia. These include the following temporalities: (1) anticipatory loss; (2) natural variability; (3) future perfect (e.g., climate catastrophe, human ingenuity); and (4) the longue durée (i.e., climate change as a historical crisis linked to colonial-capitalism). I consider the social, cultural, psychological, and political determinants of such temporalities and the implications for climate politics in Australia. I argue that recognizing the complexity of temporalities of loss and damage is crucial for both geographical research and climate politics. This nuanced understanding of difference can contribute toward the development of a progressive more-than-climate politics, which, I suggest, must be based on the longue durée temporality of climate change loss and damage.


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or geographers, temporality has been a central concern (Massey 1992;May and Thrift 2001;Anderson 2010;Ho 2021).Time is recognized as having ontological and epistemological properties.There is, for example, geological "deep time" (Chakrabarty 2018) and socially constructed time due to temporalities being a "state of existing or having some relationship with time" (Ho 2021(Ho , 1668)).Temporalities are historically and politically contingent (May and Thrift 2001).Within the broader field of time geography, there is a growing interdisciplinary literature investigating temporalities of climate change (Anderson 2010;Fincher, Barnett, and Graham 2015;McMichael and Katonivualiku 2020).Here I engage with geographical and wider social theory to empirically analyze Australian political actors' temporalities of climate change and demonstrate how they might help or hinder the development of a progressive more-than-climate politics.
In Australia, people have distinct climate subjectivities-how people perceive, understand, and relate to the climate-that determines temporal experiences of climate change.Temporalities inform subjects' conception of causality, designation of losses and damages, and political responses (McMichael and Katonivualiku 2020).Scholarship on wider environmental subjectivities highlights the complex ways in which place, culture, and identity (re)produce environment-society relations and interactions (Ford and Norgaard 2020).With climate change perhaps the most pressing societal challenge-demanding transformational changes to the global political economy down to the individual psyche-barriers to action are a common research theme.The contestations and roadblocks over progressive climate policies in Australia are suggested to be driven by competing social identities (Colvin and Jotzo 2021).Although true, this oversimplifies the sheer diversity of climate subjectivities and temporalities throughout the nation (Bryant and Garnham 2015;Bawaka Country et al. 2019;Nursey-Bray et al. 2019).
Although loss and damage (L&D)-impacts that cannot or will not be adapted to-is objective (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] 2022), how people experience it is based firmly on climate subjectivities and values.Therefore, understanding subjective experiences of L&D, I go on to show, helps to identify people's socioecological values and climate subjectivities, which then opens political windows for intervention.Much research reduces the complex socioecological entanglements of subjects to such superficial statements as "concern for climate change," which, intellectually and politically, means almost nothing.I suggest that this difficult work on understanding temporalities of L&D is a necessary step toward overcoming the current impasse in climate action.
Loss is an inherently temporal phenomenon.The designation of what is, or is not, a loss and the societal response to such losses are inherently political (Erickson 2020;Jackson et al. 2023).For example, only focusing on directly attributable climate hazards leads institutions or governments to ignore other experienced losses, which might or might not be linked to climate change (Jackson et al. 2023).Or, as Barnett (2017) warned, the normalization of inevitable loss, in which "prophecies of loss may be premature and potentially self-fulfilling" (8), could lead to inaction and acceptance of locked-in fates.Elliott (2018) suggested that sociologists should focus on investigating "how social actors identify evidence of loss, and temporally and spatially delimit loss, in pursuit of different objectives and claims" (319, italics added).Although speaking to sociologists, this research agenda is important for geography, too.For example, a climate crisis framing can lead to subjects' affective experience of loss of one's future or ontological security, but this might only lead to mitigation of fossil fuels.Fatih Birol from the International Energy Agency captured this sentiment by saying there must be a "laser-like focus on bringing down global emissions" (McManus 2019).Conversely, a historically contextualized understanding of climate change as a continuation of colonial-capitalist rationalities of unsustainable and violent development (Sealey-Huggins 2017; Saldanha 2020; Ajl 2021; Sultana 2022) could lead to concrete steps to address sociometabolic root causes and contribute to political and legal remedies.As Anderson (2010) highlighted, what we do now anticipates and contributes to producing a range of possible futures.Reducing greenhouse emissions without addressing the systematic exploitation and oppression of colonial-capitalism is not compatible with climate justice (Sultana 2022).
Going forward, I first introduce and develop the core concepts.I then outline the methodology.Next, I explore different characterizations of L&D among participants.The following sections explore four prevalent temporalities of L&D: anticipatory loss as the dominant temporality; a persistent perception of natural variability; several "future perfects"climate emergency and human ingenuity; and the longue dur ee.I conclude by reflecting on the political implications and some potential entry points for political mobilization toward more-than-climate justice.

Temporalities of Climate Loss and Climate Politics
Geographers have led the way in theorizing the social constructed nature of time and its spatial and political implications (Massey 1992;May and Thrift 2001).A common example of the socially and political mediated temporalities is the idea of capitalist time, captured by Benjamin Franklin's famous statement during the ascendance of capitalism, "time is money."Harvey (1990) rearticulated "time-space compression," where accumulation cycles of capitalism shrink from technological advancements with sociological effects such as reshaped spatial and temporal subjectivities.Indeed, neoliberal globalization has reshaped Gramscian common sense understandings of time (Massey 1992).The hegemony of capitalist time and the connected theories of scarcity (Smith 1982) curtails and limits relational and cyclical time, for example.These historically quite rapid transformations of temporalities indicate that people experience time differently at historical moments.Indeed, temporality is socially, culturally, and politically contingent (May and Thrift 2001).Different temporalities have material impacts on societies and enable or constrain different kinds of pasts, presents, and futures (Massey 1992;Anderson 2010).
Temporalities are recognized as being a fundamental part of environmental politics (Agathangelou 2021).Conservationists first projected timeless wilderness and pure nature to justify environmental protection, but this has shifted to a projection of ecological crisis and the threat to humans' life support systems since the 1960s (Nustad 2020).This shift is critical for understanding climate crises' temporalities.Temporality is also important in conflicts over history.For example, liberal elites' control over the narrative of history has inculcated subjectivities of a linear, Hegelian-like, progression toward human freedom (De Landa 2000).This obscures and erases the violence and losses experienced by poor people everywhere-especially Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC)-and more-than-human life (Davis and Todd 2017;Whyte 2020;Sakshi 2021;Sultana 2022).The prospective modeling of climate change, for instance, can contribute toward undermining people's agency to imagine and create better futures (Hulme 2011).Swyngedouw (2013) argued that climate change and sustainability have been central to the formation of "post politics," in which capitalism is taken as immutable, and problemfocused governance on specific issues like climate change or biodiversity loss becomes the limits of the political terrain of what is possible.This indicates that the control of the past, the dominant Western ontologies of time, and the delimitation of what is possible or impossible are all key aspects of the temporal politics of environmental and climate politics.
The IPCC recently defined L&D-scientificallyas "adverse observed impacts and/or projected risks and can be economic and/or non-economic" (IPCC 2022).Scholars have conceptualized L&D as impacts due to a failure of mitigation and being beyond the limits to adaptation (McNamara and Jackson 2019).Objectively, significant L&D is already occurring around the world, from loss of territory to loss of life and from loss of cultural heritage to loss of biodiversity (IPCC 2022).There are many knowledge gaps related to measuring and capturing experienced L&D, however, especially noneconomic L&Dthings of value not traded in markets.Barnett et al. (2016) suggested loss "arises when people are dispossessed of things that they value, and for which there are no commensurable substitutes" (977).Economic loss and loss of life can sometimes be measured numerically, but subjective experiences can only be explored qualitatively, as each individual experience is unique and must be considered relationally (Serdeczny et al. 2016;Tschakert et al. 2019;Jackson et al. 2022).Not to ignore the disproportionate responsibility of the Global North for climate-driven loss (Perry 2021), climate loss is a shared human condition.With climate change causing untold L&D to things people value, measuring and documenting L&D is an urgent task (Boyd et al. 2021).
No one has explicitly analyzed people's temporalities of L&D, but there are wider veins to draw from.Albrecht (2005) wrote "solastalgia is the pain or sickness caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of isolation connected to the present state of one's home and territory" (48).This temporality of loss is retrospective.The IPCC (2022) increasingly captures the temporality of ongoing L&D.Much of the L&D literature, however, foregrounds anticipatory loss (McNamara and Jackson 2019).This aligns with modeling of different emissions pathways that, for instance, lead to a range of potential sea-level rise scenarios (McMichael et al. 2020) in addition to the deeper governmentalities of prevention, precaution, and preparedness identified by Anderson (2010).Increasingly, however, people are experiencing the loss of things of value today based on perceptions of future climate change, such as the loss of ontological security and ecological grief (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018).Climate or eco-anxiety, defined by the American Psychological Association as "a chronic fear of environmental doom" (Clayton et al. 2017), is a growing field of research (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018), with many medical professionals now beginning to distinguish this from other poor mental health conditions.Climate change is leading to subjective experiences of, for example, lost futures (Kenis 2021), anticipatory loss due to existential threats (McNamara, Westoby, and Chandra 2021), or the perceived inevitable loss of Indigenous and local knowledge (Pearson, Jackson, and McNamara 2021).From growing solastalgia to foreclosed futures, climate loss is framed as retrospective, ongoing, and prospective.
Despite nonlinearity and uncertainty being key principles in climate science, future perfects are elicited.Kirsch (2023) wrote, "the future perfect refers to an action that has already been completed, and thus treats this aspect of the future as an established outcome rather than just a possibility" (4).Regarding climate politics, two conflicting, but equally problematic, future perfect discourses are evident.First, the "climate catastrophe" future perfect, in which, almost always an undifferentiated, humanity has failed to mitigate emissions and society will inevitably collapse soon (de Moor 2022).The doomsday clock captures this future perfect well. 1  Second, what I term the "human ingenuity" future perfect is based on a discourse of net zero and faith in technological progress, especially negative emissions technology, to fill the "mitigation gap" (Carton et al. 2020).Both future perfects embody escalating losses to socioecological systems, the latter More-Than-Climate Temporalities of Loss and Damge of which can be witnessed in ongoing green extractivism for renewable energy in addition to the losses that will continue to accumulate while awaiting techno-fixes.
The hegemonic discourse frames climate change as an emergency caused by externalities (Nordhaus 2014).Increasingly, though, climate change is recognized as a symptom of a deeper metabolic crisis linked to colonial capitalism (Davis and Todd 2017;Ajl 2021;Mahanty et al. 2023)

Methods
I undertook a ten-month, multisite climate ethnography in regional Australia in 2021.Field work took place in northern Australia, 2 with a focus on Cairns, Queensland, Darwin, Northern Territory, and Townsville (Queensland) and the hinterlands of each city.I was living in Cairns throughout 2021 and traveled to Townsville twice, totaling one month, and to Darwin once for one month.Additionally, I undertook Zoom and phone interviews with actors from across regional Australia (rural and urban settlements excluding Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane).There were participants from all states and territories apart from Tasmania.Individual and group interviews (n ¼ 115), active and passive participant observation (e.g., volunteering for environmental groups, visiting country with Indigenous contacts, involvement in conferences, institutional ethnography), and hundreds of informal discussions comprise the specific methods.I purposefully sampled a range of governmental (e.g., federal, state, and local government agencies) and nongovernmental (e.g., environmental groups, Indigenous people, nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], social service providers, medical doctors, community groups) actors using a snowball approach.Sixty-five individual and group interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and fifty others were recorded in note form either during or after the interviews.All data were analyzed in NVivo inductively to identify themes and then deductively in relation to specific questions relevant for this article (e.g., causality claims, future perfect statements, epistemological claims, experienced losses).I took a grounded theoretical approach and used Hajer's (1995) social-interactive discourse theory to understand the temporalities of L&D and their political determinants.I have anonymized the quotes unless they derived from publicly available works, such as the National First People's Gathering on Climate Change (NFPGCC) report, where participants are named.I have removed reference to gender throughout the article.
During field work key gatekeepers mediated access.For example, after attending the NFPGCC in Queensland in March 2021, I formed close relationships with Djungan Paul Neal and Judulu Neal, both Djungan people who live in the majority Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, Queensland.The participants who informed my writing on Yarrabah are supportive of this research and remain in contact with me.They encouraged me to "tell the truth," and although I cannot speak for them, I was honored to be able to write my interpretation, all of which has been vetted by Djungan Paul and Judulu Neal.Another example comes from gaining access to social service contacts through a relationship with Peter Gartlan of Financial Counselling Australia, who introduced me to their network around Australia.Without such relationships, this research would have been impossible.Finally, I write this article from the positionality of a British-born Australian settler, who is both, in different contexts, an insider and outsider of Australia and the United Kingdom.data, assumptions, and techniques" (322).In L&D science and policy, measurement of loss remains one of the key challenges (Tschakert et al. 2019;Boyd et al. 2021).Indeed, everyone-from climate scientists to bus drivers-subjectively evaluates phenomenon and holds particular values that influence what may, or may not, be considered L&D (Tschakert et al. 2019).
Three senior government marine scientists in Townsville, Queensland, reported that in their research on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) "loss is clearly defined."Loss is quantifiable and objective, it is the loss of "X percent of the entire system."They suggested, however, that the specific role of climate change in this purportedly objective, measurable loss remains uncertain.Therefore, they were building a historical baseline using geochemistry techniques to contextualize recent marine heat waves (e.g., 1997-1998, 2016, 2017, 2020) that caused major coral bleaching (see Hughes et al. 2021 for an overview of impacts).They warned of shifting baselines and the risk of extremes being used to manipulate discourse either for or against the role of anthropogenic climate change.One suggested they have witnessed much "cherry picking over temporal and spatial scales for a particular agenda."Despite their geophysical science knowledge claims of uncertainties regarding climate-driven loss, all subjectively experienced L&D.Guided by scientific rationalities and skepticism within the lab, outside they became worried for the future of the reef (regardless of specific causality), their insurance premiums, and their families in a climate-changing world.The tension between these two positions was noticeable but relatable, insofar as everyone holds thoughts that they would critique in others as being irrational and not grounded in whatever onto-epistemological knowledges we anchor our understanding on.
Several scientists explicitly acknowledged the subjectivity of loss, with a marine biologist saying: [H]ow much coral loss is important?For a lot of people, it will be when you can't find coral trout it will be really bad.For other people it is just the complexity of an ecosystem, and we don't understand how an ecosystem genuinely functions.… There's a whole bunch of different values about.We can go out and measure things to the nth degree, but we might say 10 percent change is huge, but others will say I can't see the difference at all.
Objective loss is happening but environmental subjectivities determine the experienced loss.During a group discussion in Darwin, Northern Territory, a climate scientist and emissions reduction policy specialist contested a claim I made about the subjective nature of loss.They were adamant that climate change is an objective phenomenon and loss can only be measured statistically; it has nothing to do with subjectivities.For many others-even those who recognized the material reality of climate L&D-this level of abstraction is meaningless and does not create more concern and encourage individual or collective action.
An NGO participant suggested that "scientists have kind of like dumbed us down, we're hearing it [unprecedented] so much that we're not listening anymore.And we're almost missing the face of it, where are the stories of the actual people?"This point refers to extreme events, but it also captures another theme related to the reporting of widespread L&D to natural and human systems being beyond a subject's experience and comprehension, therefore not particularly effective climate messaging.There is a significant, albeit contested (Br€ ugger, Morton, and Dessai 2016), literature on construal level theory (CLT), which argues that psychological distance from an object, climate change in this example, helps to explain levels of concern.During field work, climate change was often perceived as being out there, something linked to floods in Bangladesh and droughts in the Sahel, but not in participants' backyards.This was an unexpected finding considering the many climate-attributed events that had occurred in the years prior and during field work in regional Australia (see Jackson In press).
An emergency service official in Queensland said, "If people haven't experienced something, then it doesn't exist."Indeed, for some climate change only became "real" after a direct experience-as a present temporality-of perceived L&D to something they valued and had a preexisting relationship with.Most examples were of losses to biodiversity and ecosystem services, which affected subjects' mental health, sense of place, identity, and cultural heritage (Serdeczny 2016;Boyd et al. 2021;Jackson et al. 2022).For example, a Tasmanian working in Darwin said climate change was "very abstract, distant" from their everyday life.This changed when they went scuba diving in a familiar kelp forest in Tasmania More-Than-Climate Temporalities of Loss and Damge after some intervening years.Kelp forests are rapidly disappearing throughout the temperate waters of southern Australia and climate change is considered a major driver of this loss (Mabin, Johnson, and Wright 2019).After their latest dive, the scale of the loss had made the kelp forest "almost unrecognizable."This L&D deeply affected them and finally climate change became something real, tangible.They now attempt to center climate change in conversations with people and through their work as a medical doctor in Darwin.Indeed, several dedicated climate advocates shared such stories about a turning point in their "climate journey," as one put it.
Yet, the previous participant already believed in climate change to some degree.Those who were dismissive of climate change rarely reported experiencing any subjective L&D, even when they had been affected by climatic hazards, such as four participants who experienced major economic L&D during the devastating 2019 Townsville floods.Interestingly, two of these four were government workers, who through their employment were required to address different aspects of climate change risk.For example, during a group interview with council officers in Townsville, Queensland, one said that climate change "has been happening forever," drawing from a cyclical natural variability understanding, but they claimed they were "compelled to address it due to legislation."For them, it was just a job requirement and something that was only materially related to a paycheck, not something of personal concern.These participants drew from "alternative science" to justify their lack of concern about human activities causing climate change.They admitted, however, that land degradation was jeopardizing ecological stability around the world.They conflated climate change with Left politics and therefore against their political identity, which is a major hurdle to the development of a progressive more-than-climate politics in Australia.
Many others strongly believed in climate science but had very little understanding of the underlying science.They, like the literature has identified as a major component of climate belief (Cologna and Siegrist 2020), had faith in experts and institutions.Those who perceived climate signatures in all climatic extremes felt the most subjective L&D.Yet, few were aware of the nuances of extreme event attribution research (van Oldenborgh et al. 2021).
Indigenous participants often cited scientific evidence but connected causality far beyond CO 2 , with L&D being the physical manifestation of a breakdown of socioecological relations and responsibilities.Furthermore, there was a reported significant minority of environmentalists who remained highly skeptical of climate change, claiming it undermined efforts to arrest "real" impacts on terrestrial ecosystems such as development and extractive industries.Others used the term climate change as a form of boundary object to capture the wide-ranging violence occurring against the more-than-human world.
At the NFPGCC, 3 Indigenous people held diverse climate opinions and drew from many different sources of knowledge to make causal claims.Some drew from hegemonic discourses related to the IPCC or CSIRO, but many mistrusted such science-a science connected by them to harms done to their land, sea, and sky Country 4 -although still believing in climate change due to their lived experience.One NFPGCC participant stated there is "no evidence of how white science can help, my Country has been dramatically affected by white man's science" (Morgan-Bulled et al. 2021, 61).Although incredibly diverse, Indigenous onto-epistemologies are relational (Bawaka Country et al. 2019;Wright and Tofa 2021).Wright and Tofa (2021) suggested "weather and climate co-constitute both people and place in embedded, relational, more-than-human ways" (1127).At the NFPGCC many articulations of what the weather and climate change were or were not appeared.Country was changing, though, and this theme was omnipresent.Temporalities of L&D were typically historical, ongoing, and anticipatory, but, more important, more-than-climate.
The sense of responsibility to Country and the desire for enacting unceded sovereignty drew First Nations people to the NFPGCC, which was organized with the aim of bringing traditional knowledge and science together for mutual benefit.Djungan Paul Neal said: "We manage through one law, and that is respect.… As humans we have responsibilities, as we are the custodians and have never left.We need to pick up on what this country actually means.We want to help slow down and stop what's happening" (Morgan-Bulled et al. 2021, 19).This statement recognizes responsibilities as part of law, a need to reestablish relations to Country, and contribute to stopping further L&D from climate change.Merle Carter, a Gejerrong person, said: We think that the Country is sick.We need to look after the Country, need to visit and talk to the Country and it will heal both the Country and people.
[We] live in two worlds-but our old people are only few and heatwave kills many.We need to explain to old people what climate change is about.Country punishing us because we've done something wrong.(Morgan-Bulled et al. 2021, 35) Here due to the severance of relations with, and responsibilities to, Country, climate change is perceived as a punishment, something that is contributing to the deaths of Elders.Although seemingly fatalistic and apolitical, most Indigenous attendees assigned causal responsibility to settler society.
Part of the gathering was the capturing of experienced L&D from climate change and potential strategies to adapt, but the losses were expressed relationally.For example, Indigenous people spoke of the loss of species in relation to the loss of songlines, as captured here by Gudjugudju, a Gimuy Walubara Yindinji person: "Every time one species dies, we can't sing that song no more, and it's all about singing song for Country.… We can't let our totem species go, gindarji (cassowary), emu, freshwater turtle (bungaru) or saltwater turtle (njiwiju).We need them-they don't need us" (Morgan-Bulled et al. 2021, 13).Loss was always perceived relationally, which, although expressed differently, was common among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants in this study who felt high levels of subjective loss.
Sonia Cooper, a Yorta Yorta person, articulated a common concern among Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants in this ethnography: "We need a shared definition of climate change … Our Country, your Country is changing.The actual definitions of climate change are problematic" (Morgan-Bulled et al. 2021, 40).With such ontoepistemological diversity in Australia, a shared definition of climate change and experienced losses is likely unfeasible.Yet, the literature shallowly categorizes people as either deniers or believers, and, I argue, this dichotomy obscures existing diversity and hinders honest investigations into experiences of climate L&D.

Examples of Temporalities of Climate Change Loss in Australia
In the subsections that follow I detail four prominent climate change temporalities.

Anticipatory Loss as Dominant Temporality
Most participants perceived climate loss as a future concern.Many were aware that climate change is occurring now, but they perceived impacts as being spatially and temporally distant from their lived experience.This was not universal, however, with people from all political spectrums describing their personal experience of L&D (see also Jackson In press).Yet, even when participants subjectively experienced L&D, they would frequently project this more into the future and downplay the present "minor" experiences.This aligns with the L&D literature, which generally employs an anticipatory framing (McNamara and Jackson 2019).Although there was significant diversity within this anticipatory loss temporality, there was generally a limited understanding of the historical and ongoing more-thanclimate losses (Davis and Todd 2017;Mahanty et al. 2023).
Those who had not subjectively experienced L&D but anticipated it were often very concerned about climate change and considered their future directly in relation to it.Such statements that indicated this anticipatory loss temporality included "there's anticipated to be," "in the future," or "hazards are likely to increase," and so on.Several participants in the Northern Territory and Queensland, for example, said they knew that their hometowns would be unviable soon.Yet, the high levels of concern were rarely leading to politicization to address L&D (Jackson In press).Examples of anticipatory temporalities to action included environmental lawyers leading climate litigations, environmentalists undertaking door-knocking campaigns or protesting, and Indigenous peoples being involved in the NFPGCC.Most active and radical political subjects, however, were likely to perceive L&D as a historical, ongoing, and future temporality.
The limited connection between extreme events and climate change by participants was a key determinant of a lack of awareness of ongoing L&D (Jackson In press).Slow-onset processes (e.g., sealevel rise, changing seasonality) were more frequently linked to climate change and perceived as future (i.e., thirty to fifty years) problems.There was widespread agreement that Australia must act now to adapt to likely impacts to "preserve our quality of life," as one local government officer reflected.This quote captures what I believe is a major hurdle for a progressive more-than-climate politics.Anticipatory More-Than-Climate Temporalities of Loss and Damge L&D was framed in relation to preserving an increasingly unjust status quo (see also Anderson 2010).During a community climate meeting in Machan's Beach, Queensland, a participant captured the meeting sentiment by saying it would be "a win if we can just keep things not getting worse."Even more cynically, preserving house values was a common justification for coastal defenses in my ethnography, but only if they did not obscure coastal views, which is a key factor in property prices.

Natural Variability Temporality
Climate science is underpinned by an understanding of climate cycles of varying lengths, from Milankovitch cycles to seasons.With the rise of anthropogenic CO 2 emissions, natural cycles are no longer dominating climate change, despite massive fluctuations and changes historically (IPCC 2022).Alternative climate science often highlights these prehistoric fluctuations to argue recent climate change is part of a natural cycle, with many participants apparently finding some solace in this.
There is a tendency to dismiss nonhegemonic opinions of climate change as ignorance, conspiracy, or stupidity, which emerged in interviews with selfdefined "scientifically literate" actors.Yet, it is important to analyze why counternarratives, such as natural variability, remain so persistent, even among those who are being disproportionately affected by climate change.Fraser, Sharman, and Nunn (2023) found that the "natural cycle" argument was the second most common explanation for climate skepticism in their Australian survey research, just after "trust in alternative science."This conforms with my field work with many farmers and other actors either holding "natural variability" beliefs or identifying it throughout their communities.I will primarily draw from my field work with farmers in regional Australia to make my case.
A council drought officer from regional Victoria observed: There's the climate change that we're hearing on the media.And then when I talk to the farmers, I don't hear that terminology.When I talk to the farmers I hear changing climate as the terminology, and they are two different things.… Because one is very much fear and accentuated change and the other is managed, part of the cycle of life change.
This quote articulates the inductive finding that those people who were most concerned over the transformation of social and cultural norms held natural variability temporalities.In other words, fear of accentuated change (social, cultural, ecological), which was held by many conservatives interviewed, became reinterpreted as cycle of life change.A desire for stability and control in a world that is increasingly uncertain leads to the psychological protective mechanism of environmental change being natural.This subjectivity also justifies a continuation of energy-intensive industrial farming and lifestyles.
When asked whether they had noticed more extreme weather, an agricultural producer in Far North Queensland responded: "Australia has always been the place of droughts and flooding rains and bushfires."For Australian readers this response will be familiar, both as something that they have likely heard in a conversation, because of its similarities to the language used in Dorothea Mackellar's 1904 poem My Country, or both.I previously referred to this poem as a "foundational national myth" (Jackson In press), one that is connected to subjectivities of overcoming a harsh and unforgiving environment.Although the natural variability temporality was typically held by agricultural producers, even those that professed scientific onto-epistemologies-such as several ecologists in Queensland and one hydrologist in the Northern Territoryspoke of recent extremes as being within historical patterns of variability (Jackson In press).Regardless of causation, most were very aware of changes in seasonality and increasing heat.Yet, in the words of an agricultural producer in Queensland, "climate is just one of those risks" within a multitude of challenges, from market shocks to changing environmental regulation.Natural variability and social causality were emphasized by many people in North Queensland, for example, even emergency services members interviewed.Older people spoke of historical droughts and the cyclical nature of "good and bad years" and that "people were less resilient today" (Jackson In press).
Those with natural variability temporalities nonetheless experienced economic and noneconomic L&D, but responsibility was generally not assigned to carbon majors or their own emissions.Those farmers who recognized anthropogenic climate change accepted some responsibility in their land management or personal emissions but felt that responsibility was with carbon-intensive industries and the Australian government.Despite being a relatively straightforward point, this nuance is currently underappreciated in the climate opinion literature.With the increasing frequency of severe climatic hazards (IPCC 2022), it is critical to further investigate how those with different understandings of climate change experience these and assign blame.Different entry points for vulnerability reduction can be identified through such research.
Indeed, adaptation, I suggest, does not always require people to believe or disbelieve in anthropogenic climate change, especially with many perceiving changes through the natural variability temporality.I provide the following quote as evidence of this common theme.During an interview with a North Queensland academic, they observed that many "climate denier farmers" in the Burdekin Region, Queensland are still undertaking adaptation.One example was of a pastoralist who runs a farmstay business to generate off-farm income: He doesn't believe in climate change.We have dinner with them as part of the stay, it's super interesting.But the thing is, he's an absolute steward of that land with deep place attachment.He showed us all this permaculture and everything he has been doing to restore the land.And so, I guess for people like me who are not from the countryside, we peg farmers into certain brackets, but it is certainly not always the case.Barnett et al. (2021) summarized a study on social identities and adaptation in two vulnerable communities in Australia by writing: "Adaptation processes must recognize local identities and experiences and tolerances of risk, and work with communities to find solutions that provide confidence in continuity and which build on senses of self-efficacy."This, I believe, is critical throughout Australia.If people perceive natural variability or outright deny climate change, they might nevertheless be willing to support action that improves their communities, soil, water, crops, and animals.
More problematic, however, is that many, although not all, who hold natural variability temporalities are self-professed social conservatives.The social and cultural by-products of "time-space compression" linked to neoliberal globalization (Harvey 1990), such as increasing multiculturalism and shifting societal norms, were frequently raised as being destabilizing.Furthermore, one climate-concerned farmer from rural Victoria suggested that a deepseated belief in the view of "man's dominion over mother nature" is threatened by the Anthropocene understandings (see also, e.g., Chakrabarty 2018).Such examples taken together point toward some potential underlying determinants of natural variability temporalities.

Future Perfect Climate Politics
I now analyze two specific future perfects that were identified in the field work: "climate catastrophe" and "human ingenuity." The label of "doomer" has been affixed to people who "believe the world has already lost the battle against global warming" (Silva 2022).Within this category of climate pessimist, there is a wide spectrum of climate subjectivities ranging from those who have accepted the perceived inevitable collapse of complex societies to those who believe that focusing on the worst-case scenarios will hasten the climate action.Those subjects who tend toward the "collapse of society" enact a future perfect insofar as they are living as if this future is preordained.Those who focused on the most pessimistic scenarios to hasten action, although not truly projecting a future perfect as they believe with urgent action the catastrophe can be mitigated, held numerous contradictory positions.
The most common type of future perfect was captured by this response to a question about whether they experienced any grief from the coral bleaching events on the GBR: " … the reef was being bleached and then it was never going to come back.I remember seeing that, and yeah, it was like a physical reaction.The grief from that was very emotive."A participant from Perth, whose sense of place and identity was drawn from their local beach, spoke of inevitable climate change impacts from sea-level rise and increased erosion: " … when I watch this happening now, there is a little bit of angst as to what the future will be when there's no beach."A participant suggested that without climate change the Northern Territory "is a great place to live … but nobody sees the Northern Territory like that anymore, everybody is aware it is going to be pretty catastrophic in the next twenty years."These participants expected inevitable loss-nonfatalistically-but were the most likely non-Indigenous More-Than-Climate Temporalities of Loss and Damge participants to undertake individual or collective action to "fight"-as it was common phrased-climate change.
A senior social scientist in Cairns suggested the logic of predicting the future to arrest dangerous climate change: "The whole IPCC thing is really about constructing really scary scenarios so that people go, oh ÃÃÃÃ , and start doing things to avoid them.So, we're painting a scary picture … it's not a prediction, it's sort of a moral tale and only psychopaths would want to get there."Yet, there were participants who were living as if the collapse of society was assured.Two were "climate preppers" (see Oltermann 2022), both of whom were living modestly and off-grid.Both climate preppers self-identified as socialists, with one older activist in North Queensland claiming that "ecosocialism, that's sort of my cup of tea."I interviewed them at their residence with their partner while they were preparing for the School Strikes for Climate rally, which they had led for several years.They identified a significant barrier for collective action: "The rugged individual, the capitalists' narrative.You know as an individual we can solve anything we like on our own, we don't need help from groups, and we don't need help from anybody.All this sort of stuff."Despite this direct challenge to individuality, they said the following: We've got this little bit of land, we've got a good water supply … trying to grow the food.But my concern is that all these other people around us haven't done it.… And they're going to come here and say, we need water.How are we going to stop that because the planning that [my partner] and I have done is for ourselves, our two daughters and one family.This suggests that they anticipate a general collapse of society and although being self-described socialists, they also are autonomously adapting primarily for the benefit of their family.They, however, were trying to influence progressive societal change.
The two others who held "climate catastrophe" future perfects were fatalistic and told me they were "living it up" by leading high-consumption lifestyles because they knew "the world is going to end anyway."Neither were involved in any collective or individual action to address climate change Both were university educated and young.
Moving to the second human ingenuity future perfect, many participants held some variant of a belief that although deleterious impacts will continue, and might even increase over time, humans are adaptable enough to "solve" the climate problem in a way that allows Australians to continue to live in material affluence.This aligns with the temporality of a linear progression of history (De Landa 2000) and a continued rise of living standards, such as many had experienced within their life.From a joy ride in an environmentalist's Tesla to an interview with a director of a regional city's Chamber of Commerce about the economic benefit of the green transition, many thought that climate change will inevitably be solved through technological innovation driven by capitalism's many incentives for exploiting existing, or creating new, markets within a context of addressing climate change-the hegemonic global discourse.This conforms with various Australian governments' climate strategies.Green and blue hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and increasing efficiency and electrification of transport and energy are all dominant mitigation strategies in previous governments and indeed the new "progressive" Labor government.
Nonetheless, one environmentalist in Cairns caveated a relatively widespread subjectivity of climate ignorance and limited expressions of explicit loss by saying: "But I think a lot of people are pretending, you know, they know things are happening.They're just not looking at it directly.Yeah, and it'll snake in sometimes, and we'll go, yeah, but you know, someone would save us.You know, technology will save us."This statement captured a theme of people who dismissed the existential risks of climate change appearing to be more concerned than their language would suggest (Jackson In press).A future perfect where the problem will be solved with only minimal impact on their life and material affluence, as a kind of comfortable delusion, is prevalent throughout Australia.This is another major barrier to the development of a progressive more-thanclimate politics.

Longue Dur ee (Re)Production of the Metabolic Crisis and Vulnerability
Climate change is implicated in the increasing intensity and frequency of certain climatic extremes (IPCC 2022).Yet, climate change does not directly cause disasters (Jackson et al. 2023).The historical construction of vulnerability thesis emphasizes the processes that made people exposed and vulnerable to hazards, and it necessitates a deeply retrospective temporality.I, like others, argue climate change is no different, although responsibilities for increased exposure due to worsening floods, heat waves, and sea-level rise are influenced by unequal emission and resultant attribution (Boyd et al. 2021).The ways in which societal affluence produces particular vulnerabilities is less explored within a literature that is, understandably, focused on the Global South (Jackson et al. 2023).
Here I zero in on one empirical case study with Aboriginal people in Yarrabah, Queensland, to illuminate their temporalities of climate change, which are linked to a history of loss, the (re)production of vulnerability, and a perception of a metabolic and "spiritual" crisis that goes far beyond CO 2 .The response to such a temporality of L&D will be very different to other climate temporalities introduced so far.I argue this temporality must be centered in any response to climate change that seeks true climate justice.
During field work I formed close relationships with two Djungan Elders living in the Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, Far North Queensland.Through them, I was introduced to other people in Yarrabah.I observed that their temporality of climate change loss is a concrete example of what I call the longue dur ee temporality.Their lived experience of dispossession, exclusion, trauma, and political organizing against historical and ongoing harms from settler-colonialism contributed to a climate subjectivity that connected climate change to these processes.Not a distinct and temporally recent phenomenon, it was framed as an extension of the violence to Country by settler-colonialism, one that had led to "broken connections and obligations." During a group discussion with eight people in their "thinking group"-composed of people from different cultural and territorial groups who were politically active and advocated for empowerment and systemic change to the "material and spiritual conditions of Aboriginal people"-all voiced concerns about climate change.Some detailed ongoing noneconomic L&D to cultural heritage, mental and physical health-especially with rising temperatures-and biodiversity, specifically the animals and plants connected to the songlines, which cross their territories.However, they see their individual and collective vulnerability to, for example, coastal hazards and increasing heat as being produced by historical-structural processes.The massacres and forceful relocation of disparate peoples to Yarrabah due to the state-sanctioned resource frontier expansion into Aboriginal lands interrupted and their livelihoods, obligations, responsibilities, and connection to Country.Losses of language, stories, knowledges, and sovereignty (albeit never ceded) dwarf attributable climate impacts.Nonetheless, they recognize the threat globally and call for, like many other First Nations groups across Australia, mitigation and resources for them to adapt to ongoing and future L&D, in addition to helping non-Indigenous people.
One person from Yarrabah suggested the reason there was generally more concern about climate change was that "Aboriginal people and organizations get it because it's every day, you live in poor houses it's getting hotter.Those kinds of structural inequalities are quite evident."There were several non-Indigenous actors-from medical doctors in the Northern Territory to social service providers-who also acknowledged the historical-structural determinants of vulnerability throughout Australia, and particularly in Aboriginal communities.One politically active Indigenous advocate in Tennent Creek, Northern Territory, said: "I think, climate change has exacerbated those sorts of problems, and I think that is often what people say about climate change generally, it's not like these problems didn't necessarily exist before, but it's a multiplier."With a long history of forced relocations across Australia, one academic suggested that "all of those forced relocation communities were deliberately put in places where they would be marginalized from the economy."The doctrine of Terra Nullius, where Aboriginal peoples were classified as flora and fauna and were disbarred from social, economic, and political life until the 1967 referendum, continues to be felt today and is intrinsically linked to the (re)production of vulnerability to climate change and other economic and environmental shocks (Veland et al. 2013;Lyons et al. 2020;Nursey-Bray et al. 2020).
My Aboriginal interlocutors used such terms as "spiritual crisis," "law breaking," and "broken relations with Country" to describe the more-thanclimate violence of the settler society.A far deeper metabolic crisis connected to extractive and nonregenerative socioecological relations was highlighted.In Yarrabah, they spoke of balance, respect, and obligations to "care for Country."The problems with the modern world, one contact suggested, was that More-Than-Climate Temporalities of Loss and Damge "whitefullas take without giving."Gujugudju, a Gimuy Walubarra Yidinji person captured this theme, speaking these words at the NFPGCC: "The thing is that now, that lore has been broken again, but it's been broken by the colonized disruption of our environment.That disruption is causing catastrophic events globally" (Morgan-Bulled et al. 2021, 46).To address climate change and the "disruption" of responsibilities to Country due to settler-colonial capitalism, which has led to one the highest extinction rates globally (World Wildlife Fund 2022), it is not enough to change legislation or reduce emissions.From the perspective of many Indigenous participants a fundamental change in socioecological relations and collective cosmology was needed.Climate change, from many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, must be considered relationally.
Bawaka Country et al. (2020) wrote: One cannot separate out the clouds gathering today from gatherings past, the violences of today, from the violences past or ignore the ways that the violences of colonialism, of erasure and loss, are reasserted everyday.Neither, however, can one separate out the continuities and survivances, the ongoing relationships and protocols, or the ways those protocols are still here through the presence of ancestors and spiralling time.(302) This captures well the temporality of climate loss among the "thinking group" in Yarrabah.The fight they were continuing was the same one as their ancestors, and it was being passed down to the next generation.The same harms from forced relocations historically are connected to the rising sea levels of the present that threaten to engulf Yarrabah and force them to leave again.The changing seasonality from climate change, which affects Indigenous knowledge, cannot be separated from the killing of Elders and the missionization processes that erased knowledges and continues today.

Toward a More-Than-Climate Politics in Australia
The fight over the name, definition, and temporal marker of what is known as the Anthropocene is a key site of onto-epistemological struggle (Chakrabarty 2018;Erickson 2020;Saldanha 2020).Not only a fight over semantics or scientific objectivity, through a form of performativity, the naming and dating of the Anthropocene influences what actions societies should take, which, in turn, (re)produces different futures (Davis and Todd 2017;Erickson 2020).Climate change is a symptom of colonial capitalism and its inherent rationalities of extractivism-land, labor, life-and metabolic imbalances (Sealey-Huggins 2017; Sultana 2022).L&D is a symptom of climate change interacting with uneven geographies of vulnerability driven by the same historical-structural processes that created the conditions for the Anthropocene (Perry 2021;Jackson et al. 2023).There is relative consensus on the deleterious impact that "humans" are having on Earth (IPCC 2022), but hegemonic conceptualizations of causation are temporally shallow and spatially imprecise, and the proposed economic and political responses are typically more of the same processes that led to the Anthropocene (Swyngedouw 2013;Davis and Todd 2017;Saldanha 2020;Ajl 2021;Mahanty et al. 2023).I argue climate politics must aim to inculcate a longue dur ee temporality of climate change at the population level.Davis and Todd (2017) wrote: "This necessarily means reevaluating not just our energy use, but our modes of governance, ongoing racial injustice, and our understandings of ourselves as human" (776).
I identified a plurality of temporalities of L&D in Australia.Recognition of this diversity-from anticipatory to longue dur ee-is a crucial start, yet it is not enough.I have made the case that those who held the longue dur ee temporality, which was exemplified by the Yarrabah "thinking group" case study, recognized that climate change has a far deeper and more violent history and present than merely the increase in CO 2 due to fossil fuel use.Despite holding temporalities that correctly assess the root cause of escalating L&D, power imbalances and the continued exclusion of Indigenous people from political and economic life presents serious hurdles toward an emancipatory politics being scaled up in Australia (Veland et al. 2013;Lyons et al. 2020;Nursey-Bray et al. 2020).Wider sections of society need to relearn the current apolitical history of climate change and politically act to address the multitemporal entanglements with the colonial and omnicidal history of settler Australia (Bawaka Country et al. 2020).Yet, considering dominant temporalities are anticipatory, natural variability-with its reactionary connotations-and both the climate catastrophe and human ingenuity future perfects, much work is needed to create a more-than-climate politics in Australia.To conclude this article, I provide some suggestions toward this end.
Most held anticipatory L&D temporalities.These temporalities are potentially barriers to widespread mobilization toward addressing historical and ongoing more-than-climate harms.Although I disagree with climate emergency narratives for many of the reasons Swyngedouw (2013) emphasized, disseminating stories of historical and ongoing L&D, in a way that centers local concerns and values (Barnett et al. 2021), is important.Climate-as-future condition discourses need to be recast as an historical and ongoing temporality, including through the media and cultural texts (e.g., literature, cinema, art).Those who held anticipatory, or even actually occurring temporalities, of L&D and were mobilizing, were, however, not generally engaging with real power.Indeed, few, even those who spoke the language of climate justice, accurately identified the historicalstructural processes that lead to unequal vulnerability and disproportionate impacts.Nonetheless, from door-knocking campaigns to hold climate conversations to activist employees in government departments centering climate justice, many saw climate as the raison d'etre for their social and ecological advocacy, which indicates promising entry points toward mobilization.
For those who experienced L&D as a historical, ongoing, and anticipatory temporality, a combination of scientific onto-epistemologies, higher levels of ecological knowledge, and strong place attachment were common determinants of these subjectivities.Four "Black Summer" bushfire survivors who lost their homes were very receptive to ideas captured by the discourse of more-than-climate L&D.These four bushfire-affected participants were part of an activist and advocacy group called Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action, 5 and the visceral experience of the intense fire led them to become more politically engaged.Other groups such as Farmers for Climate Action and Doctors for the Environment are beginning to center social justice in their discourse.These examples suggest a growing, albeit imperfect, more-than-climate subjectivity, which can be leveraged by more radical actors.
As the examples of the natural variability temporality suggest, people of different scientific and political persuasions and cultural backgrounds can hold some variant of this temporality.That an ecologist and hydrologist considered recent impacts as within natural variability did not necessarily mean they denied climate change.They could not perceive or, for the hydrologist, measure the climate signal.Additionally, many farmers and other conservative actors were observing climate change, but they did not consider this as anthropogenic.Thereby some preferred the term changing climate.Skepticism of this kind would typically be considered a barrier to climate action.Farmers, though, as I reported, can be "absolute stewards of that land" despite being climate skeptical.Their conservative identity will likely limit their engagement with a more-than-climate social movement toward social justice.This is not unexpected but is a serious barrier going forward.Nonetheless, agricultural producers taking action to improve biodiversity on their land, which many informed agricultural stakeholders said they were, is crucial to climate mitigation and adaptation going forward.During recent interviews I undertook with rural Victorian farmers, for instance, a growing recognition of the need to address systematic disadvantage in fragmented and unequal communities was a major theme, even by self-professed conservatives (see also Bryant and Garnham 2015).Engaging with political actors through their own concerns and linking to broader historical and contemporary injustices is necessary (see Barnett et al. 2021).I do not naively assume this will lead to rapid transformational shifts in temporalities, but it is a feasible entry point to gain trust and influence such political actors, especially when they are feeling massive temporal destabilization and appear to be reflecting on their past and future.There is, of course, a tendency toward reactionary politics from such a cohort experiencing perceived losses to their identity and culture.
More positively, beyond Yarrabah contacts, there were other participants who held, generally, weaker versions of the longue dur ee temporality.Some connected social problems, such as inequity and racism, to uneven vulnerability and disproportionate L&D and even centered more-than-human justice-especially in the case of more radical environmentalists interviewed.I witnessed a growing eagerness by a range of nonradical political actors to learn about the social and political determinants of vulnerability.To mainstream such a radical temporality among the wider population, Indigenous people and other marginalized groups need a political voice and real More-Than-Climate Temporalities of Loss and Damge power in Australia, which they have been fighting toward for centuries (Morgan-Bulled et al. 2021).From fine-grained knowledge of the ways in which climate change is leading to L&D to the ability to enact transformational caring and relational responses-from social relations to ecosystem restoration-they, as the true custodians of this territory, must be driving the solutions going forward (Nursey-Bray et al. 2019;Lyons et al. 2020;Morgan-Bulled et al. 2021).Indigenous people at the NFPGCC argued as such and they are ready to take the lead, but only if it is focused on more-than-climate issues and contributes to social, political, and cultural determination, and real improvements to their sovereignty (Morgan-Bulled et al. 2021).
More concretely, Australian people are getting ready to vote on a referendum (late 2023) to say yes or no to a constitutionally recognized Indigenous Voice to Parliament-embodied in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.A National Voice "would provide the mechanism to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a direct say on legislation and polices that affect them" (Commonwealth of Australia 2021, 1).Although not all Indigenous Australians support such a process-even in the Yarrabah thinking group this process was contentious-it does indicate an emergent subjectivity of acknowledgment of harms and repair among settler society.This demonstrates that subject formation toward a more-than-climate temporality of L&D is possible, and my research provides an overview of potential barriers this long-term project might encounter.
To conclude, it is worth briefly reflecting on Davis and Todd's (2017) perceptive writing that "white people and people with power are now having to face what Indigenous peoples, Black people whose ancestors experienced the horrors of slavery, and others have faced for the past five hundred years-that could be considered some kind of perverted justice" (775).I hope to have conveyed through this work that although not always the case (e.g., those that are not perceiving L&D today), this statement is increasingly true throughout Australia, with subjects experiencing escalating L&D.At this critical juncture, the future and collective fates are not set in stone like some who held future perfects believed.The actions taken now to address the injustices of the past can repair our present metabolic imbalances and create futures based on morethan-climate justice, solidarity, and radical care.