By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
In a recent article for the American think tank Council on Foreign Relations, senior fellow for energy and climate Varun Sivaram proposed a new doctrine for climate policy: climate realism. This seemingly pragmatic approach argues it’s impossible to avert climate change completely. Instead, it claims the US should favour more profitable and geopolitically strategic ways of managing climate consequences.
In truth, climate realism is anything but realistic. This elitist discourse cloaks inaction, securitization, and racialized control. For example, Sivaram weaves a story of how carbon emissions from “emerging and non-advanced economies” are threatening the survival of American society to justify penalizing countries in the Global South that use fossil fuels. Behind this facade lies an unsettling truth: climate realism is a luxury afforded only to those distant from disaster. For Indigenous communities around the world, this “climate apocalypse” is a long-lived reality. For many of us, the dystopia is now.
But even on capitalism’s own terms, climate inaction is a losing game. In 2022 alone, climate-related disasters cost the global economy over $430 billion CAD in economic losses. Rising sea levels could add another $550–715 billion CAD per year by 2100, along with 250,000 more lives lost annually from 2030 to 2050.
Yet, what this so-called realism sidelines holds our greatest hope: Indigenous communities across the world embody models of climate resilience based on reciprocity, relationality, and collective care. The Anishinaabe, for instance, find resilience in their heritage of fluid governance systems. These systems shift with seasons, mirror the dynamic rhythm of their ecosystems, and exist in conversation with the land, ancestors, and descendants.
For Indigenous communities around the world, this “climate apocalypse” is a long-lived reality. For many of us, the dystopia is now.
The Menominee tradition similarly shifts our idea of space and identity, breaking down the human/non-human binary. When elder maple trees become our guardians, the forest is no longer a resource to be exploited. Confronted with settler colonialism, the Menominee ancestors chose kinship with the non-human, imagining sustainable harvesting practices that ensured the land’s long-term health. In doing so, they transformed the forest into a space of mutual learning, where Indigenous knowledge can be practiced alongside ecological science. The forest, then, is not only a source of economic sustenance but also a living, breathing archive of Menominee cultural endurance and wisdom.
What might climate responsibility look like if we learned from such intergenerational accountability? If we followed environmental professor Robin Wall Kimmerer in integrating traditional ecological knowledges into conservation and began to ask not only “How do we return the gifts from our ancestors?” but also “How do we become good ancestors ourselves?”
These are not just peripheral climate strategies but living embodiments of the 4Rs at the heart of many Indigenous knowledge systems: respect for all beings; relevance rooted in lived, localized experience; reciprocity as a fundamental ethic; and responsibility to care for what we inherit and leave behind. Climate realism, by contrast, is top-down, neocolonial, and ultimately nihilistic. And while despair, exhaustion, and grief are valid responses to a world built on organized greed, activist and prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba reminds us that “hope is a discipline.” It is a daily practice, a refusal to surrender, and a commitment to imagine otherwise. It is organizing, remembering, dreaming.
Kimmerer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, explains that reciprocity is not a metaphor — it is a political imperative. We find ourselves in a profound contradiction where decay and delusion coexist with radical potential. We face stagnation and suffocation. And we also face a moment of rebirth: of resistance, of relational thinking, of decolonial worldmaking. The question isn’t whether alternatives exist, because they do. The question is whether we have the courage to learn from and live with them, for the world pulsing beneath our feet.
