Notes

To see this is to recognize the persistence of the political in natural history, and vice versa; it is to say that climate change is an event in our natural history. As Marx argued and many geographers have reiterated, the relations between humans and nature always reflect the prevailing relations between humans.12

Indeed, this point remains fundamental to any political ecology worth the name. It should be paired with a second analytical point concerning the temporality of the political, one more closely associated with Gramsci. To grasp the adaptation of the political we would need to read as conjunctural our strange presentconditional politics, in which what might happen in the future seems to determine the present. The concept of conjuncture defines a moment, emphasizing its existence as a complex of pasts and futures. Our hypothesis is that the adaptation of the political that we might anticipate with climate Leviathan is defined by the furtive way the future bends back into the now. Just as money guarantees its social power in the present through a never-yet-realized futural promise to be worth something-to be more than a dirty scrap of paper or useless lump of metal-so will climate Leviathan secure its existence by structuring a present that realizes a certain future, one worth living. The result is a politics of emergency, one where politics is deferred. This deferral arrives from, or is premised on, a future that, increasingly, many await only with fear. This peculiarity might explain why the era in which we live, saturated in struggle, could nonetheless appear to some as postpolitical, a world in which we seek institutional and industrial technologies through which we might avoid a future necessarily presupposed by the world in which, however reluctantly or unjustly, we are all condemned to live. In sum, what we are experiencing is less after politics than other politics;