Anni Pokela’s address at ArcticRepair2025
Doug Grandt
About four years ago, I was being escorted to a police van for protesting with Extinction Rebellion Finland. We had closed down a main road in central Helsinki, demanding that the Finnish Government hasten their climate action.
I had previously not been at all into the climate movement or environmentalism. As a teenager I felt like maybe that wasn’t trendy enough or punk rock enough – and then came Extinction Rebellion. They spoke about climate impacts in a way that I’d never heard before. They were really concrete about it – they talked about death tolls and diseases and the horrible violence we are facing. And so, to this day I think the fear of death is what inspired me into climate action. Pretty self-centred and grim, now that I think about it.
But my point is that I didn’t feel climate anxiety. I felt climate grief, and climate rage. I wanted to have a kid in the future, and I was so angry because I felt like that had been taken away from me. It wasn’t hope that got me to act. It was despair.
And then something changed. Me and a couple of my Extinction Rebellion friends decided to take a bit of a strategic break and think about what we should try to do next. We founded Operaatio Arktis because we realised that some devastating climate impacts were already on their way regardless of emission cuts, especially in the Arctic area.1–3We started looking into these possible techniques – climate interventions – that could perhaps help us in securing a safe climate and protect specific parts of the climate system.
We dared to look at the state of different glaciers for example, and what was currently actually happening in the atmosphere; what was the average global temperature right now, and what that meant for our Earth system elements. We moved away from this old, more general idea of “Let’s just cut emissions and hope for the best” to “Let’s cut emissions and triage: look for pragmatic ways in which we could intervene in specific collapses and changes in the climate system”.
And this work slowly ended up changing my perspective completely. I noticed that I wasn’t desperate anymore.
But here’s the thing: I wasn’t hopeful either. It was something better.
My favourite feminist theorist Donna Haraway says that, very basically, despair and hope are both rubbish perspectives.4 And if we look at the myriad of different crises happening around the world, it’s clear that hopelessness, clinging to a nostalgic past, and reaching for a utopian future where all suffering has magically ended are completely useless ways of thinking right now!
Instead, Donna Haraway calls on us to stay with the trouble – to act in the present reality and engage with it. Not reach for the past, nor reach for the future. Not to be hopeful, nor to be desperate. And this is exactly the same lens through which we should look at climate interventions.
If we’re not ready to just accept the damage that’s coming, that cannot be avoided by decarbonisation alone, we need to urgently research and develop climate intervention technologies. But how to do this the right way? That’s the question.
The discourse around geoengineering seems to be very polarised and, especially in the media, the perspectives seem to often fall into roughly two categories: either “This is a silver bullet that solves everything” or “Geoengineering bad”.
It’s pretty widely recognised that techno-optimism – the belief that new technologies will come along and solve most of our problems – is a pretty dismal philosophy for trying to solve the climate crisis.5 Research suggests that those who hold this belief are more complacent, failing to make the difficult choices needed to address climate change.6 And, perhaps most importantly, technology cannot solve the deeper issues with the status quo.7
But I think it’s just as arrogant to turn away from these technologies altogether, and to believe that we can somehow separate ourselves from them and from our growing need for them – to even think that technology is something “unnatural”, as if we haven’t been deeply entangled with it throughout our entire history.
I will hopefully soon have a degree in gender studies, and what I find interesting is that this latter perspective – let’s call it techno-pessimism – is one which a lot of my ecofeminist peers hold.
Much like most feminist academics nowadays, what I’m really interested in is blowing up false binaries. And for me, this sort of question of whether geoengineering is good or bad is just one of them. Man/woman, mind/body, nature/technology, pessimism/optimism; I really don’t think we need these false binaries. What matters usually lies outside of these divides.
I argue that techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and for that matter optimism and pessimism in general, are both, in the end, pacifying and conservative forces which act to suppress change.
So what happens when we allow change? When we dare to stay in the troubling present, with our economic, cultural, and societal crises and all their contradictions? What if we dared to step outside of our hubris and hopelessness, and tried to position ourselves in this reality in a new way?
We might just awaken to the fact that we are intrinsically entangled not just with technology but also with these ecosystems that are on the brink of collapse. We might just realise that these natural and technological entanglements are preconditions for our lives and the things we love, and that we have a responsibility to be active caretakers for them. That is the basis of being able to repair some of the damage that’s been done to the climate system – daring to feel that interconnectedness and that dependence, and also questioning our agency over the natural world.
There’s an idea: what if we saw these Earth system elements not as objects of engineering but as vibrant collaborators in our efforts to uphold the living conditions of this planet?
Today I am 24 years old, and I work in Operaatio Arktis to accelerate responsible climate intervention research. And it’s not because I’m arrogant enough to think I know how bad things are going to be or how good things are going to be, but because I want to stay active in this climate reality, not turn away from it.
Since we last evaluated our climate strategies, our reality has changed drastically. And if we want to respond effectively, those strategies and our solutions have to change with it. At its best, climate intervention research is not just about taking responsibility to understand the risks of these interventions, but also about having the ability to respond effectively to climate risks.
I still want to become a mother. Not as a protest or because I want to make my utopian dreams a reality, but because it is something more than reactive. It’s active. I want to be a mother because I have to make this reality here, right now, count.
There’s a lot to take in in our present – this reality where we have to, for one, talk about climate interventions in the first place. This is, in many ways, the belly of the beast.
And we need to find our power here, from here.
We need to make the present, with all of its troubles, count. Not turn away but towards: towards the collapsing Thwaites Glacier, towards the melting permafrost, and our shared reality. That’s how we’re going to be able to respond: by vigilantly positioning ourselves, again and again, into the difficult, messy present.
Jan Umsonst
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