The Ministry of the Future
The most surprising thing I found about going to university was the prominence given by academics to climate change. I had expected to find vigorously reactionary racial and gender politics; both were present but enervated and unpopular; clearly official churches on the brink of irrelevancy. When I heard numerous aged voices proclaim before powerpoints about "the anthropocene", present "green politics" as the next chapter of canonical history or eagerly reference hallucinations of "young people" engaged in climate activism I was baffled and ever so slightly unnerved. Environmentalism, for me, was something of childhood; of the 2000s; of a time before The Steam Workshop. Something that was declared no big deal once Obama won his second term. Something primary school teachers would reference in vague connexion to the Amazon Rainforest. Something Jeremy Clarkson took the piss out of. It was an issue considered important by my father.