Avoiding Climate Change: “Agnostic Adaptation” and the Politics of Public Silence

What does it mean to adapt to climate change without talking about climate change? The term agnostic adaptation has emerged to refer to actions that address climate change’s effects without acknowledging its existence or human causes. Although prevalent, agnostic adaptation has yet to be the focus of significant empirical research. Most studies of climate silence and denial examine the absence of action rather than its paradoxical presence. This article, by contrast, explores how action and silence coexist and even serve to reinforce each other. It draws on fieldwork in Staten Island, New York City’s most politically conservative and only predominantly white borough, where residents mobilized after Hurricane Sandy in favor of government buyouts of their damaged homes that would pay them to relocate rather than rebuild in place. The areas that received buyouts have been lauded from afar as exemplary sites of community-led climate adaptation in one of its most radical forms, managed retreat. On the ground, however, those who participated in the push for retreat were largely silent on the topic of climate change, which was not seen as politically enabling or efficacious to discuss. Agnostic adaptation minimized conflict, made for more tractable claims, and maintained relations of power but in so doing offered protection to only a select few. These findings point to the practical effects of climate silence as it exists in relation to climate talk, both of which share omissions, erasures, and forms of agnosticism that narrow the space for transformative action. Key Words: adaptation, climate change, denial, disaster, environmental politics.