Acting amidst: some concepts and practices

‘Climate activism is needed.’ This essay examines the dominant model of action often implied in that truism. Such a model tends to posit a self who, exercising a uniquely human power, ‘ takes action’ in a field or spatial locale that is not itself considered as having a comparable kind of efficacy. It imagines the actor as, ideally, acting from a perch above the fray, free from the strivings of other bodies and forces before the ‘intervention’ is made. But the Anthropocene is, among other things, a world of vibrant matter where human efforts are forces internal to planetary processes that include many, many other types and scales of effort. And this suggests the importance of exploring models of action and efficacy which take nonhuman agencies into account and which understand human action as radically entangled with them.