Instability and adaptation

Acknowledging the importance and relevance of the questions on time that her critics raised, Naveeda Khan opts to not address them point by point, focusing instead on the larger questions they feed into. Climate emergency is one of them. In this framework, Khan notes that the eradication of poverty that was once the goal of development is now encompassed within the more urgent mission of climate resilience, and specifically disaster risk reduction, in developmental discourse. Her aim in River Life was to stress the amalgamation of the social and the natural to the extent that only by witnessing nature out of control can char dwellers grasp that something is wrong with society and vice versa. When it comes to End Times, Khan, in response to her critics’ questions, suggests it might be productive to see it as animated by the rhythms of char dynamics. Finally, while other theorists may seem to offer more capacious or flexible frameworks for analyzing char life and livelihoods, none, Khan argues, offer a concept of “nature naturing,” that is, of nature doing its thing, the way that Schelling’s conception of nature as unconscious does.