Climate Change as an Existential Threat: Environmental Politics in the Shadow of Nihilism

Johanna Oksala, in her contribution, “Climate Change as an Existential Threat: Environmental Politics in the Shadow of Nihilism,” argues that climate change is not only a political problem in the obvious sense that it cannot be solved without profound transformations in political and economic practices and forms of global governance, but also a political problem in a deeper, existential, and ontological sense: responding to the climate crisis adequately requires a politics that is able to confront and work through the nihilism that this crisis generates. Oksala suggests that Veronica Vasterling’s reading of Arendt brings to the fore the specific meaning of “politics” at hand here. Considered through an Arendtian lens, climate change is a political problem in the sense that it fundamentally threatens current modes of life, and thus calls for the creation of new meanings which can sustain our world. Hence, environmental politics should not be reduced to pragmatic problem-solving; it should be understood as an existential project of safeguarding the stability and dignity of the common world.