The intentional and reflexive use of futures in global environmental activism

This article analyzes the articulation of just futures within Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) and Greenpeace International (GPI) to seek out the historicities of global environmental activism, from the early 1990s to present-day. This is done by examining not only how justice was conceptualized and temporalized but also how historical time, speed, and temporal change were articulated. It demonstrates how FoEI and GPI utilized futures to shed light on, and challenge, historical and contemporary injustices that they saw as sources of environmental degradation and/or social and economic inequalities. Hence, temporal transition has not only been understood to occur from the present to the future but also in the opposite direction. However, to speak of just futures involves a process in which one's present concept of justice is temporalized into a time in which it does not belong. Naming futures is therefore an anachronistic practice, traditionally understood to take on one of two forms: retrospective anachronism or prospective anachronism. Both forms have, however, been argued to domesticate the future. In contrast, I suggest a third form: critical anachronism. While critical anachronisms may look like the traditional forms, I argue that it is an intentional and reflexive use of time that stands in stark contrast to the unintentional error that is usually associated with anachronisms. Drawing on ideas from the domain of temporality studies, I argue that futures are made present. Moreover, inspired by Austin's speech act theory, I argue that the use of futures as critical anachronisms should be understood as implicit performative speech acts. Thinking of articulated futures as critical anachronisms means considering the context and intention of the speaker; critical anachronisms are not uttered to describe but to effect.