There is something captivating about destruction on an epic scale. The horror of it draws the eye and ear, pulling focus. Looking out across acres of scarred earth at the open cast lignite mine of Janschwalde near Cottbus / Chóśebuz in Lausitz (Lusatia in English) by the German-Polish border, the sheer magnitude of the anthropogenic change visited on the landscape is magnificent and catastrophic.

The problem with catastrophe in talking about today’s energy crises is that we’re not there yet. It’s too soon for catastrophe.

Weaving together a series of satellite images of the Athabasca oil sands each year from 1984 to 2016 as a kind of slideshow, the video documents the spread of activities by the agents and architects of Canada’s fossil economy over this thirty-two-year period.

It’s October 2022; I am walking along the Teltow canal in Berlin with a group of geography and design scholars and we are doing fieldwork. Our objective is to observe the ways in which the power grid shapes our everyday lives and constrains our ability to imagine and design for anti-catastrophic energy futures.

Catastrophe is a narrative that is structured around rupture: Before/After. Catastrophe is an overturning, an upending of previous meaning and order. To make climate change visible, comprehensible, we resort to catastrophe at quarter-speed, a slow catastrophe, wreaking slow violence.