‘There Must be Decision’

Later, climate change will also bring with it problems to do with political time and historical time in particular, and in a political culture that has now spent several centuries defining its aims in historical and narrative terms, this will be a revolution, a painstakingly slow one, but a revolution none the less. Given the importance of the concept of justice-whether defined in terms of constitutional legitimacy, institutional legality or social equality-in orienting the way that political aims are defined, the question becomes how will justice be defined and explained in a world where the conditions of physical, social, economic, national and global life are being radically re-configured into something altogether different? This is one of the questions Nigel Clark explores in his book Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet specifically in a chapter entitled 'Justice and Abrupt Climate Change'. Clark's general argument is to challenge recent deconstructions of the human/nature dichotomy which do not show sufficient awareness of the 'radical asymmetry' of the relationship between the human and nature (see chapter 2). It is too simple to see the material future we now face as one in which various integrated or hybridised natural/human complexes will recondition everything. The future will not simply be post-human in the sense that everything will have been radically mediated by human definition, representation, exploitation or pollution. Our physical context will always remain in massive excess of our actions in ways that we have only been dimly aware of for half a century. Clark writes

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