Green billionaires participate in ‘world building’ – an ultimately harmful method that entrenches settler logic
Oxford 22 Oxford is a doctoral student and instructor within the CJ department. She earned her BA in Environmental Justice and Citizenship from Beloit College in 2020 before receiving her MA in Communication from UNM in 2022. Her research focuses on settler colonialism, climate change discourses, environmental rhetoric, and spatial/place-based perspectives within the areas of critical intercultural communication and media studies. Through her research, Hannah explores settler colonialism as a cultural formation that instructs, reproduces, and maintains orientations towards settlement within mainstream environmental communication. Her most recent research looked at settler colonial formations within the climate narratives of U.S. green billionaires with the goal of elaborating on anti-colonial climate mitigation efforts. (Hannah, “Un-Earthing popular climate narratives: maintenance and prophecy In Settler World”, UNM Digital Repository, 7-15-2022, https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1157&context=cj_etds, DOA: 7/15/24)//LFS – LMH
These green billionaires participate in settler worlding as they narrate the future in relation to dominant climate change discourses. In each piece of media, it is clear that these billionaire’s vision for the future are all framed around notions that climate change is something of concern and that changes to society need to be made in order to move 52 away from an apocalyptic future and towards a utopic one. Looking at these narratives from the lens of settler colonialism, each piece of media indicated that these billionaire’s narratives were not self-contained projects but rather were all oriented around maintaining and reproducing a settler world. An essential idea that united each piece of media into an archive is expressed in the following quote by Veracini: “whether they envisage a progressive movement or identify a degenerative tendency, settler narratives structures remain powerful, reproducible, and mobilizable whether in relation to reconstructions of the past or imaginings of the future” (Veracini, p. 102). Starting with this idea that settler narratives are world building projects (physically and imagined) each of the six artifacts were analyzed for the ways in which settlers develop a sense of place that orient the individual towards and justifies the mission of the settler collective. My notion of settler colonialism is that the various mechanisms of settler worlding (from the development of media to the development of landscapes) occur via the creation of a spatiotemporal schema (a kind of mental terraforming) coupled with an inherent sense of individual sovereignty that tethers the settler to the schema.