Notes on Opacity

In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Sylvia Wynter asserts her concern with climate crisis formulations and solutions as being encapsulated under the thinking and categorisations of Man (McKittrick, 2015). As climate discourses have evolved over the ensuing decade, the resultant scientifically ordered sedimentation or layering of the ‘human’ and ‘environment’ continues to frame the ‘optimal’ relationship humanity should facilitate with the environment. This project endeavours to demonstrate how the logics of Man frame and establish sustainabilities as killing space. By unsettling sustainabilities through opacity, I demonstrate how the practices of sustainable development are representative of white geographies’ long-standing ‘transformation of land to profitable site of racial-sexual regulation’ (McKittrick, 2006). I argue that sustainabilities encapsulate a system of valuation (whiteness’ understanding of environments and the animal) that defines what is natural, significant, and real or relevant at the epicentre of the climate change discourse. Sustainable development then imposes ‘waste’ or the toxic on Black and Brown bodies as environmental exhaustion and exposure to excess. I outline the mechanisation of environmentalism, law, and time in venerating sustainabilities to reveal the relationship between climate discourses, particularly emergent rhetoric and the logics of Man.