October 7, 2019 The Nation. 25
is no longer around them and therefore also not within them. When,
in RAPEN’s headquarters, I ask bluntly, “What is Bargny’s future?”
the room falls silent. After a moment, one man, an imam with an
intense glare and raspy voice, barks, “If it weren’t for the power
plant, we would have all rebuilt our houses over there. We could
have started a new life.” But the power plant has ended that hope,
and everyone there seems to know it. Fatou Samba shakes her head
and mutters, “Uncertain...uncertain.” And then Gueye: “The future
of Bargny—” He stops short. “Well, Bargny doesn’t have a future.”
And yet there’s a painful irony to Gueye’s words. “The future is
almost black. Right now we can’t see anything. Everything is dark.”
He says them in a field next to the wall of the power plant. Barring a
so far aren’t—combine that with the youth mobilization, you start
to build some pressure on the system to get more compliant with
the Paris program,” said Alden Meyer, the director of strategy and
policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a close observer
of international climate negotiations.
“From the scientific perspective, the atmosphere is not impressed
by speeches and plans. It’s only driven by emissions,” he continued.
“There’s a reason why this is so hard. There are tremendous vested
interests in countries around the world that benefit from the status
quo, and the fossil fuel industry is very active, as it has been for
decades on this issue, in trying to slow down and block meaningful
action.” The industry is betting against the Paris process because it’s
the easiest thing to do. That’s what the climate movement has been
working so hard to change—to make not responding to the climate
crisis impossible for industry and political leaders alike. Q
successful suit against the state or a radical and unexpected shift in
events, the plant is Bargny’s future. Gueye speaks his words while
standing at the site where that future is literally in plain sight. The
future is visible in Bargny—painfully so.
Gueye was saying something more profound and more frighten-
ing, something that cuts to the heart of climate injustice. The future
is visible, but it isn’t comprehensible. Yes, there will be a town called
Bargny in that future, perhaps with the same people I met there,
perhaps with those people’s children. But that will be a future in
which the identities and ideas that the community of Bargny uses to
make sense of the world will have lost their physical roots.
This is the kind of loss that we see in moments of extreme
trauma and devastation, like war or perhaps Améry’s exile. What
is happening in Bargny makes it clear that climate change causes
this kind of trauma, too. Gueye hints at this as we walk from the
power plant toward the ocean—back from the incomprehensible
future to the disappearing past. “Today, with all these threats,” he
muses, disconcertingly stoic, “perhaps the people themselves will
become disoriented. That’s the threat. Our social structure will be
degraded. That’s what’s dangerous. We will lose our values.” He
searches for the words. “A kind of shell shock.”
We have always had to change our lives. But to change so much
that is fundamental while the wick of time burns at both ends—
that is something different. What is happening in Bargny is a kind
of existential injustice, once rare but now increasingly common: a
loss of the places and environments that we use to hold our values
steady. The future continues, and we continue to live in it. But in a
more profound way, nothing makes sense anymore.
When we talk about justice in the era of climate crisis, this loss
is where we have to begin. Q(continued from page 21)