Saving Time

by Jenny Odell

WHEN WE ALLOW the climate crisis a moral dimension, certain things lost in the haze become clearer, including its relationship to other fundamental injustices. For example, the seemingly utilitarian reasoning of energy companies and investors can be compared to that of the apologists for slavery in nineteenth-century America, who also saw it as an apolitical, economic issue with technocratic solutions. Only by viewing enslaved people as nonsubjects could someone like Henry Lascelles, Second Earl of Harewood, have spoken plausibly of a “progressive state” of “improvement in the slave population”95 at an 1823 meeting about his West Indian plantations. Amelioration was technical, a question of how to use objects better; abolition was moral, a question of who was a subject. Energy companies cannot imagine a future without the objects of extraction and, therefore, must promote and fund a worldview in which earth remains an object. Plantation owners could not imagine futures without the objects of slavery and, therefore, promoted and funded a worldview in which enslaved people remained objects. This connection is more than an analogy: Multiple scholars have emphasized, for example, the role of plantation cotton in the textile factories that drove the Industrial Revolution.