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Today, concern about population displacement triggered by climate change is prompting some sovereign states to tighten security measures, as well as inciting ethically and politically motivated calls to relax border controls. This paper explores resonances between the current climate predicament and events in the mid-Holocene. Paleoclimatic and archaeological evidence is reviewed suggesting that an abrupt turn to cooler, drier weather in the 4th millennium BCE triggered high volume migration to fertile river valleys – most fully documented in Mesopotamia but also visible in other regions around the world. This unprecedented agglomeration of bodies has been linked to the emergence of intensive irrigated agriculture and the rise of city-states. In conversation with the ancient Sumerian Gilgamesh epic, the paper draws upon archaeological research to conceptualize urban wall building and emergent practices of graphical notation as different forms of mediation. Both city walls and early writing, it is argued, deal with the interplay of mobilism and sedentarism, and both `media’ entail tactile, plastic use of local materials - namely riverbank clay. The paper addresses the paradox that the underpinning of `civilization’ by these once experimental media may now be fundamentally restricting socio-political, cultural, cognitive and embodied capacities to engage effectively with climate-driven upheaval.

The Anthropocene hypothesis proposes that human impacts have nudged the Earth system into a novel operating state. Despite the explicit focus on human geological agency, the idea of a planet with multiple states is part of a broader move in geoscience away from gradualism towards recognition of planetary variability, volatility and multiplicity. Human geographers and other critical social thinkers have taken issue with Anthropocene science for what they see as its universalistic view of humankind, its failure to account for different human voices, and its technocratic framing of Earth system change. But there are questions about whether geography’s current prioritizing of socio-spatial relations permits it to fully confront the provocations of planetary dynamism and multiplicity. In an important new turn, some geographers are exploring new ways to rethink human politics, subjectivity and identity through the forces and potentialities of Earth processes – which effectively complements the critical task of `socializing’ geological thought with a new `geologizing’ of social thought. Such willingness to work creatively with insights from the Earth sciences also raises difficult but promising questions about how to engage with indigenous and other marginalized ways of knowing - or what we might see as the imperative to `decolonize the Earth’.

What if one of the definitive strengths of `classic’ ANT – the idea that humans and nonhumans are constitutively entangled – also serves a limitation? And what if there is more to `relating’ than networking, interconnectivity and co-enactive exchanges? Focusing on the work of Latour and setting out from the examples of microbial life and climate change, the chapter identifies some tensions between the depiction of worlds that are co-constructed by humans and other actors – and the idea that nonhumans are fully capable of composing worlds by and for themselves. These tensions, it is argued, have much to do with Latour’s aim to bring together questions of epistemology – how we know things, ontology – what we believe to exist, and politics – how we seek to compose common worlds. However, in his recent work on climate change, Gaia and the Earth system, Latour appears increasingly willing to view the `critical zones’ where humans can make a real difference as a subset of much broader and more fully inhuman domains. In this way, his concern with carving out regions of political `possibility’ can usefully converse with ideas of `extremity’ or `impossibility’ that philosophical `thinkers of the outside’ have long been exploring.

When engineers drilling geothermal boreholes in Iceland’s volcanically active Krafla region in 2009 unexpectedly struck a magma body some two kilometres down it opened up the possibility both of studying magma in situ and of using heat from magma directly as an energy source. Recognizing the novelty of this event, I explore some of the ways that magma might become politicized over the coming years—using a conceptual framework that involves three distinct, though related, approaches to the political geology of magma. The first, drawing on political ecology, looks at how power from magma fits into Iceland’s recent energy-intensive, capital-attracting development strategy. The second, taking insights from relational materialist thought, considers how the specific properties of magma might trigger new political mobilizations. The third, more speculative and philosophical in tone, reflects on how we might see magma and other geological forces as the very condition of possibility of the political—as forms of ‘geopower’ that antecede, subtend and energise all social and political formations. Taken together, these three approaches suggest an open, experimental approach to the formation of new political issues and subjects in which new kinds of ‘becoming with magma’ defy prediction.

—National and regional governments are responsible for the development of public policy for volcanic risk reduction (VRR) within their territories. However, practices vary significantly between jurisdictions. A priority of the international volcanological community is the identification and promotion of improved VRR through collaborative knowledge exchange. This project investigates the role of knowledge exchange in the development of VRR. The theories and methods of policy mobility studies are used to identify and explore how, why, where and with what effects international exchanges of knowledge have shaped this area of public policy. Analyses have been performed through the construction of narrative histories. This project details the development of social apparatus for VRR worldwide, depicted as a global policy field on three levels - the global (macro) level; the national (meso) level; and at individual volcanoes (the micro level). The narratives track the transition from a historical absence of VRR policy through the global proliferation of a reactive 'emergency management' approach, to the emergence of an alternative based on long-term planning and community empowerment that has circulated at the macro level, but struggled to translate into practice. This is explored using five case volcanoes: Merapi, Indonesia; Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia; Mount Rainier, USA; Popocatépetl and Volcán de Colima, México. These cases demonstrate that policymakers at active volcanoes do not always deliberately access knowledge curated at the 'core' of the global policy field and use it to rationally develop 'best practice' VRR policies. More frequently, the transient topologies that carry knowledge between volcanoes, the assemblages of mobile knowledge with evolving local politics, culture and volcanic activity, and resulting mutations have produced unique and unpredictable results at each volcano. Mobile policies may encounter local resistance, ideas may go unused for deca

The current literature on Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) is split between two camps regarding their potential to transform the food system: the ‘progressives’ and the ‘radicals’, or ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’. Likewise, China’s concept of Ecological Civilization has prompted a polarised debate, with scholars arguing Ecological Civilization is either an authentic ecological ethos or a form of greenwashing. Exploring AFNs in China, this PhD suggest that these differing camps regarding AFNs overlap more than previously supposed and that the current debate regarding Ecological Civilization is the wrong debate to be having. By intertwining AFNs and Ecological Civilization, this thesis argues that the pragmatic approach Chinese AFN actors adopt in response to three core tensions of AFNs, reveals how radical change does not necessarily require a radical form of politics. It is this pragmatic approach that allows China to begin navigating the emerging cosmological rift of our times, namely that between human development (i.e. global capitalism) and the immovable ecological limits of this development. Based on qualitative fieldwork of Chinese AFNs (Guangdong), this thesis suggests that Ecological Civilization, as a pragmatic approach, can be characterised in three different ways. First, through the expectations participants have of the material (sensory and aesthetic) qualities of an Ecological Civilization. Second, through Chinese middle class subjectivities, which are both pragmatic and idealistic in form. Third, through forms of (rural) cosmopolitanism, which suggest that Ecological Civilization has the capacity to ‘ruralise’ global capitalism as a distinctive Chinese form of ‘cosmopolitanization’. Together, these three insights indicate that AFNs have a transformative potential despite their internal tensions, and that Ecological Civilization is a productive and mobilising concept, not just an ambiguous slogan of an authoritarian government.

We set out by noting the preference for circular flows in ecological thought, and the related abhorrence of inefficiency and waste that western ecology shares with mainstream economic thinking. This has often been manifest in a shared disdain both for uncontained, free-burning fire and for `unmanaged’ sexual desire. The paper constructs a `pyrosexual’ counter-narrative that explores the mutually constitutive and generative implication of sex and fire. Bringing together the solar ecology of Georges Bataille,feminist and queer thinking about sexuality and reproduction, and a range of ways of theorising biological life and fire, we explore how fire mediates between organismic desire and the energetic dynamics of the earth and solar system. The first section takes a genealogical approach to fire and sex that traces their entanglement from the initial `assembling’ of fire through to the emergence of a fire-handling creature. The second section looks at how fire has been contained and intensified by human actors, and the role that heat-driven transformations of inorganic matter have played in the incitement and channeling of desire in urban spaces. The third section addresses the development of industrial `heat engines’ and the implications for desire and reproduction of tapping vast reservoirs of subterranean solar energy. We round off by beginning to consider what alternative possibilities might lie in the re-negotiation of sex and fire on a planet undergoing rapid change.

The scientific consensus on climate change is strong, and evidence points to the need to take action to drastically reduce emissions of greenhouses gases. At the Paris summit in 2015, 195 world leaders set a clear goal to limit climate change. Yet the means to achieve this goal remain firmly at the level of the nation-state, with each country assuming responsibility for its own national plan. Thus national administrations, run by elected politicians, have a crucial role to play. It is the role of politicians to put in place the strategies, policies and incentives necessary to facilitate emissions reductions. How does this commitment at the level of the nation-state fit with a politician’s mandate as a democratically elected representative? What role do national politicians think they can and should play in responding to climate change? The study explores these questions empirically, seeking to understand how Members of the UK Parliament (MPs) understand climate change and its implications for political and social life, and their deliberations about whether or how to act on the issue. The work is informed by an interdisciplinary literature including science and technology studies, sociology, political science and environmental governance. It uses a mixed method approach, comprising corpus analysis of political speech, a focus group with climate advocates, and two sets of qualitative interviews with MPs. The study finds that, whilst politicians understand, to varying degrees, the need for action on climate change, it is not straightforward for them to make a case for action. There are three main reasons for this. First, the literal and metaphorical scale of climate change in comparison to the procedures and preoccupations of daily politics. Second, politicians consider the climate issue in the context of their professional identity and the cultural norms of their workplace, and report that climate action does not ‘fit’ with these norms. Third, UK politicians feel very

In 2009, exploratory drilling of geothermal wells in Iceland’s Krafla volcanic caldera unexpectedly struck magma. The fact that the encounter didn’t have catastrophic consequences has excited considerable interest - and an international research facility is now being set up to explore energy generation and other possibilities of closer engagement with magma. We take this event as an incitement to explore how the Earth-changing `violence’ of volcanic or igneous processes might be seen not simply as happening in time, but as both generative and destructive of time itself. We approach volcanism through the construct of a `speculative geology’ that draws on a recent return to metaphysical themes in philosophy as well as a growing interest in geological processes in the arts, humanities and popular culture. In this way, alongside cause-effect relations, we explore the more enigmatic processes through which subterranean geological forces offer an excessive potentiality from which humans and other life forms select and actualise a narrower range of creative or generative possibilities. The paper explores three significant volcanic episodes: a series of massive magma extrusions around 1.9 billion years ago linked to the ascendance of multicellular life, volcanism present in the East African Rift during pivotal phases of human evolution and the volcanic activity of the early-mid Holocene viewed as a contextual factor in the emergence of ancient practices of artisanal pyrotechnology. Our reading of the dynamic and violent interchange between the inner and outer Earth in these examples points to a non-self-identical planetary condition, on which the very structure of temporality emerges through a play of destruction and generativity. In this light, we circle back on the Krafla project to consider questions of risk, uncertainty and responsibility that attend the potential new interface with the underworld of magma.

We set out by noting the preference for circular flows in ecological thought, and the related abhorrence of inefficiency and waste that western ecology shares with mainstream economic thinking. This has often been manifest in a shared disdain both for uncontained, free-burning fire and for `unmanaged’ sexual desire. The paper constructs a `pyrosexual’ counter-narrative that explores the mutually constitutive and generative implication of sex and fire. Bringing together the solar ecology of Georges Bataille,feminist and queer thinking about sexuality and reproduction, and a range of ways of theorising biological life and fire, we explore how fire mediates between organismic desire and the energetic dynamics of the earth and solar system. The first section takes a genealogical approach to fire and sex that traces their entanglement from the initial `assembling’ of fire through to the emergence of a fire-handling creature. The second section looks at how fire has been contained and intensified by human actors, and the role that heat-driven transformations of inorganic matter have played in the incitement and channeling of desire in urban spaces. The third section addresses the development of industrial `heat engines’ and the implications for desire and reproduction of tapping vast reservoirs of subterranean solar energy. We round off by beginning to consider what alternative possibilities might lie in the re-negotiation of sex and fire on a planet undergoing rapid change.