Climate Chaos and Cascadia: Place-Based Resistance to Global Catastrophe
A Panel featuring Scott Schroder + Friends
Anthropogenic climate change and the resulting mass extinction, drought, fire, flooding, and skewed weather patterns threaten the Cascadian bioregion, and any of our plans for rehabilitation, restoration, or reinhabitation, more profoundly than any other single industrial act of eco-assualt. Yet because climate change is not an immediately tangible act of destruction restricted to a single place and time, because we can’t see or hear climate change in the same way we can see and hear a dam or clearcut; a visceral sense of the threat of climate change is elusive. This panel breaks from abstract discussion of atmospheric greenhouse gases, and roots the issue in palpable and living things: wolverines, salmon, forests and in rapidly approaching catastrophic effects on the bioregion we call home. We will discuss the effects climate change has already had on the region–increased temperature, rising seas, more precipitation, diminished snowpack–and the landscapes and species that are threatened with extinction or severe alteration by the fossil fuel economy. We will discuss strategies and possibilities for human adaptedness and survival in the face of fundamental ecological changes. We will argue that effective resistance requires reconceiving a nebulous and global catastrophe as an eminent threat to this place and to any living thing who calls Cascadia home.
BIO:Beginning in the late 1990s, Scott Schroder participated in campaigns against industrial logging throughout the western United States with various Earth First! groups, as well as organizing large-scale resistance to clearcutting in the Sierra Nevada with Yuba Nation. Simultaneously, he succeeded in stopping numerous National Forest timber sales with administrative appeals. In 2008, he was a founding member of the Doom School art collective in Portland and later curated music and performances at the Hall of the Woods outside of Olympia, Washington. More recently, he has organized direct action against fossil fuels in California and Oregon and written on the climate policies of both states. He creates a blog and zine, Spring Speaks Truth, and is on probation for blockading tar sands equipment en route through Oregon to Alberta, Canada.
- KBOO