Responses

Department of Anthropology, Rice University, Sewall Hall, 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005, USA ([email protected]). 20 II 24

First of all, credit and thanks to Myles Lennon for producing another superb piece challenging the salvationist overtures of “cleantech” and its efforts to solution away the climate emergency. Though the extractivist tendencies of energy transition are no longer news to many—especially in the global south (Boyer 2019; Cross and Murray 2018; Howe 2019)—Lennon’s exploration of the “progressive dystopia” at the heart of the American cleantech sector is immensely effective in spotlighting how the forces of racialized capitalism and neoliberal corporate culture combine to disperse a needed project of civilizational reinvention into a series of modest technical interventions. These technical problem-solution clusters often seek to maintain every other aspect of the present trajectory other than carbon emissions. The net effect, Lennon argues, is to defang politics and the focusing of contentious civil power on energy transition in favor of an “anti-politics machine” of pragmatic “technologically mediated improvement.” Meanwhile, any notion of change that is not willing to stay within the guardrails of markets and profits is dismissed as utopian and thus a waste of time and energy.

“Solution” comes across in Lennon’s ethnography as a kind of default corporate indexicality, much like the vague yet equivalently ubiquitous pursuit of “excellence” in universities. But Lennon shows how solutionism works as effectively as it does because it also allows people to feel themselves into a more inclusive “we” beyond the specific corporate form, a public defined by its commitment to environmentalism and work to help address climate change. Yet one of the great ironies of the climate emergency is that for many in the global north—responsible for 92% of excess climate emissions according to Hickel (2020)—the best thing they could do to help the climate struggle would be nothing at all. I mean that quite literally. Take the CEO of SunLight, for example. I am guessing that regardless of his environmental commitments, his work and lifestyle place him within the top 10% of carbon emitters who are responsible for roughly 50% of total carbon emissions today. What if, one day, he were not to show up for work, not to create any new workflow or emails or PowerPoints? What if he decided to spend that day refraining from driving, from flying, from running his clothes dryers, streaming Netflix, playing around with an artificial intelligence image generator? What if he did not use a single appliance that day but rather picked up a book and spent the whole day lying in the grass outside? It is almost certain that he would have done more to combat climate change than a day spent fervently generating “environmental solutions” at the office. And yet powering down violates the core conceit of American liberalism and capitalism that constant work and productivity cures every ill.

Although I agree with Lennon’s overall diagnosis that the spread of solutionism is deeply tied to the past four decades of neoliberal hegemony, I also see much classic liberalism in its valorization of technology and labor as the only credible means of progress. I also think that we can name the beast that lurks in the cave of neoliberal corporate culture: finance capital. As Karen Ho (2008) has explained with great precision, the social imagination of the corporation underwent a massive shift in the 1970s and 1980s, transitioning from organizations rooted in communities, employment, and production into organizations that existed solely to produce shareholder value. Although a lot of ideological work went into marketing this reinvention as a “democratic” process (by equating institutional investors with everyday citizens), civil power had nothing to do with it. Wall Street catalyzed this reinvention of the corporation through leveraged buyouts that could be resisted only through high stock prices. Yet the resulting financialization of corporations institutionalized an extractivist ethos of conceiving corporations as bundles of financial assets to be plundered. Then, since the 1990s, digital information infrastructure has granted finance capital massive political leverage over not only corporations but also nation-states (LiPuma and Lee 2004). It has come to the point that there is serious discussion now of the end of the mode of capitalism that the twentieth century knew, focused on productivity, innovation, and even profits. Yanis Varoufakis (2023) argues, for example, that we have exited capitalism and entered an era of technofeudalism defined by “cloud capital” and “cloud serfs” and above all by financial rents paid to the “cloud fiefs.”

Personally, I am enough of an old-school Marxian to view money rent as one mode of capital accumulation among others. But I think the point is that it might be intriguing to consider more directly how solutionism emerged sympoietically with financialization in the context of eroding “the contentious divisions between industry and environmentalists,” as Lennon shrewdly observes.

My final question for Lennon is what a postsolutionist politics might look like. If we want out of the trajectory of progressive dystopia, what are our options? It is clearly time to get confrontational again. Juan and Rick may already be there. But is there any hope or place for the white-collar environmentalist in that struggle too? Or is the best we can hope from them is to sit this one out? I was surprised, genuinely but not unpleasantly, to see the enthusiasm generated by Andreas Malm’s (2021) book-turned-film How to Blow Up a Pipeline last year. Sabotage is now emerging as a new front line in the climate struggle, one far removed from cleantech. As Fanon (2004 [1961]:34) once said of the colonized, they “have run out of patience.” But I think Lennon is sharing the open secret that white-collar environmentalists are still by and large comfortable in the status quo. What would it take for them to run out of patience too?

Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom ([email protected]). 1 III 24

Lennon has, in the style of Raymond Williams (2014), captured the essence of the “cleantech” industry in the United States by unpacking one of its keywords. Keywords have fuzzy referents, tracing the emergent, dominant, or residual “structures of feeling” within any given historical moment (Williams 1977). If an earlier era in US environmentalism—say, from the muckrakers to the Environmental Protection Agency—was defined by protection or alternatives, then the post-1980s moment has been defined by “solutions.”

It is fitting that Lennon draws on Savannah Shange’s (2019) account of “progressive dystopia” in postgentrification San Francisco. Cleantech, on my read, comes out of a “Californian ideology” (Barbrook and Cameron 1996) that merged a white middle-class countercultural idealism with market informatics. In the 1970s, new communalists abandoned organized politics and took up a kind of “tool globalism” (Sadler 2015), exemplified in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. They paired hands-on libertarian experimentalism—outfitting one’s house with solar panels, for instance—with a sense of “wholeness” that integrated the social and ecological into a single cybernetic system (Sadler 2008). This sensibility was a key force in early internet and start-up culture, culminating in the “polished, professional affect” of millennial Apple products and Silicon Valley (Steve Jobs famously quoted from the Whole Earth Catalog in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech). Design and data would save the world, and one could do well by doing good—a win-win. I found this breezy postpolitical sensibility rampant at Yale as a graduate student in the late aughts (as, perhaps, did Lennon).

An important element of this sensibility is the long march of progressives away from durations and institutions. Disillusioned by “sanctimoniousness … [of] social justice work,” Martha rolls up her sleeves and does something, not unlike the unremitting pragmatism of the first generation of Doctors without Borders expertly chronicled by Peter Redfield (2013). The impatience, the iconoclasm, the immediacy of acting in the now, of solving the puzzle in front of you and bureaucracy be damned—these are powerful, even liberatory motivations, and Lennon persuasively shows that we should take them seriously.

Yet like Protestants unwittingly locking themselves in an iron cage, action can become an end in itself. In part, this may owe to the pleasures of problem-solving. As Andrew Sanchez (2020) has shown, work can be satisfying, even morally intuitive, if it allows you to exercise powers of transformation. This is why it can be enjoyable to work in an applied physics laboratory even if you abhor drones and bombs, or why, like Martha, you might devote yourself to market solutions during the workweek and to democratic socialism on the weekends. A solution solves a puzzle. Whether it is the right puzzle to be solving, or whether there are other, more wicked kinds of problems that are not puzzles at all, is a different question.

Whether one takes a pragmatic stance toward the market like Martha or is a true believer in it like Marissa, the hegemony of environmental solutionism breeds a self-reinforcing myopia. A recent, brilliant bit of Twitter ephemera calls this “spreadsheet brain” (Hezier 2023). It is spreadsheet brain that can lead one to confidently declare that lab-grown meat is more efficient than animals as a protein delivery system, without stopping to think about all the immunological functions, ecosystem services, and energetic inputs that must be clumsily recreated in the lab. This is the same bleak comedy of expert development projects and efficiency audits familiar to anthropologists. People tie themselves in knots fixing specific problems and their inevitable side effects, such that the entire social field metastasizes into an unbearably “proactive” exercise in problem-solving. Real answers are often simpler but more difficult. To just give people money is a remarkably effective development intervention (Ferguson 2020), but it sits uncomfortably close to redistribution. It may just be that there is no way to harvest protein at our current scale without serious ecological violence or biological suffering. Some problems gesture to our limits and finitude and cannot be engineered away.

It is the same sort of spreadsheet brain that “thinks” commercial solar panels. It solves the problem of decarbonizing energy consumption but says little about whether they will be affordable or whether massive solar plantations will deepen colonial dynamics of dispossession. Most profoundly, to my mind, it says little about the fact that “greening” economic growth in this way will only increase material throughput. It solves narrowly and in so doing induces a carbon tunnel vision. Lennon brings out the racialized textures of this carbon tunnel vision, the way it must externalize the conditions of Black and Latinx installers, prison labor manufacturing, anti-Indigenous extractivist landscapes, and fossil fuel supply chains that get the product to market. But he also shows how that vision might even be taken up by people of color themselves, the way it provides, if nothing else, a sense of orientation and purpose.

One question I have for Lennon concerns emergence. It strikes me that the “mask-off” reactionary shift of American politics over the past decade makes the breezy confidence of managerial solutionism harder to sustain—a shift already intimated in the prompt union busting that concludes the piece. To be sure, solutionism remains a dominant structure of feeling, but other dimensions are accelerating—in tandem, it would seem, with melting glaciers and megafires. As Amitav Ghosh (2024) described so eloquently in his recent Tanner Lecture, robber barons like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are anticipating a climate collapse to which there is no solution but grim, militarized adaptation. Extraction and fossil fuel burning will continue apace, gilded by a few faux-decarbonized industries such as electric vehicles and numbed by reckless solar geoengineering. Instead of win-win, it is us and them: those ensconced in self-sustaining bunkers and private jets and those on call to be sacrificed to war or weather. What kind of environmentalism or self-making is possible in such a world? What are the keywords for such a moment?

Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, Silsby Hall, 3 Tuck Drive, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, USA ([email protected]). 6 III 24

From contaminated drinking water to devastating floods to deadly wildfires, environmental problems seem to be all around us. And they can appear to necessitate solutions. Yet Myles Lennon helps us to see that “environmental solutionism” also does much more than just try to solve environmental problems. Lennon traces the genealogy of environmental solutionism through twentieth-century environmentalism and corporate ideology and practice. He shows us ethnographically how environmental solutionism has enabled diverse “corporate subjects” at a sustainable energy corporation in New York City “to imagine themselves as environmental stewards.” Building on the Foucauldian analysis of James Ferguson (1990), Tania Murray Li (2007), and others, his analysis offers key insights about contemporary environmentalism and corporate dominance. It shows how environmental solutionism has facilitated an environmental-corporate convergence and how this convergence makes a corporate-led energy transition seem apolitical, inevitable, and even preferable, including to many of those who are critical of market-based solutions. For those of us studying such market-based environmental solutions, this exposition is timely and illuminating.

The most compelling part of Lennon’s article for me, though, was its attention to affect. He is not only interested in solutionism as a usefully polysemous term, as he shows, or as a depoliticizing discourse but also interested in it as a “neoliberal sensibility that has transformed contemporary environmentalism over the past several decades.” In other words, he points us toward how neoliberal environmentalism “creates an affective common ground” that enables diverse and sometimes antagonistic corporate actors to work together to advance a corporatized version of the energy transition. Lennon thereby allows us to see through simplified stories of neoliberal capitalism as affectless in ways that, to me, recall Andrea Muehlebach’s (2012) analysis of neoliberalism’s morality. Lennon’s exploration of environmental solutionism as affect reveals part of what makes it so powerful, what makes it capable of integrating environmentalism and corporations: the way it can work through diverse people’s everyday experiences, emotions, and inner lives.

Lennon’s attention to environmental solutionism and affect also raised questions for me about other affects—affects that the article hinted at but did not fully engage (understandably, of course, given how much the article already does). In particular, I wondered about the affective experiences of living through and with “environmental problems” including climate change, experiences that seem important to a number of Lennon’s interlocutors. I wondered whether the reasons that these interlocutors were compelled by environmental solutionism might exceed its “transformation of ‘the environment’ into an object that humans can act on and improve” and its ability to “animate a sense of environmental expertise among corporate subjects”—as important as those factors are. I wondered how environmental solutionism’s power might also relate to people’s affective experiences of the changing climate and other forms of environmental degradation.

For example, Lennon writes how, for a corporate employee named Martha, the company’s environmental solutionism “enlivened her day-to-day work at the office” through the “‘feeling’ of identifying solutions and of doing something ‘pragmatic.’” The “affect of improving the world” that Martha values may be about more than a depoliticizing “will to improve” (Li 2007) that enables her to do corporate work. It may also be about a growing underlying sense of a world in trouble. With so many people now negatively impacted by climate change or at least feeling some version of “climate anxiety” (see, e.g., Moench 2023), this may be an increasingly potent affect of these times.

I get some sense of this affect in the article, but I also wanted to know more. To me, it indicates something that includes but also may go beyond the Foucauldian reworking of the self and cleantech habitus that Lennon so powerfully explicates, beyond Martha’s use of “solutionist discourse to recuperate the optimistic sensibilities of a foregone era of liberal activism and uplift.” It speaks too, perhaps, to Martha’s sense of unease about environmental change. And it suggests that, as much as we can and should understand environmental solutionism within the history of neoliberalism and the longer nature-culture dualism of Euro-American culture—an understanding that Lennon’s article enables—we also need to take seriously the environmental degradation reshaping the worlds in which we live. This includes people’s affective experiences of that degradation, whether those people inhabit disappearing coastlines or corporate offices.

In turn, this set of concerns raised another one for me: how can we both elucidate the genealogies of concepts like environmental solutions within neoliberal racial capitalism and explore their “immanent force,” as Kathleen Stewart (2007:1) puts it, and how it might contribute to the “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) of the search for corporate solutions to our pervasive environmental problems. Although Lennon does not address these questions in this excellent article, they are ones that his focus on environmental affect helped me to ask.

Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, Brooks Hall, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4120, USA ([email protected]u). 9 III 24

Myles Lennon’s ethnographic investigation of corporate environmentalism engages the multifaceted and complex ways in which workers in a clean energy corporation come to experience environmental solutionism as commonsensical, turning as it does on pragmatic approaches to socioecological problems that seem to offer a unifying purpose to a wide diversity of actors. Notably, solutionism is also foundational to curricula at colleges and universities around the world. It is likewise a guiding ethos for government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), foundations, and private for-profit companies putatively dedicated to securing our planetary future. Therefore, Lennon’s analysis here is timely, crucially important, and has relevance well beyond the corporate context that he explores and analyzes throughout the piece.

Lennon’s insight that solutionism operates as a matter of common sense will resonate with those who have faced criticism for questioning green capitalism without offering full-fledged alternatives on the spot. Reflecting on his ethnographically grounded arguments, I am convinced that solutionism began, as he suggests, as a specialized common sense of experts and bureaucrats. I am thinking specifically of Antonio Gramsci’s (1971:322–333) formulations of common sense (also see Crehan 2016). Drawing from these, Nidhi Srinivas (2022:189) succinctly characterizes common sense as “incomplete efforts of perception on the part of interest groups, where some of these perceptions become naturalized within knowledge groups as perceptions of the world,” arguing that “when these perceptions are acted upon, and attached to epistemic foundations that gain purchase within powerful networks of actors, they become hegemonic.” Particular common sense thereby becomes general common sense.

Documenting and analyzing how particular ideas and affective dispositions become hegemonic are essential to understanding their circulation and operation within and across contexts. It may also illuminate openings and possibilities for radical transformations of common sense toward more just and equitable futures for humans and other than humans, as well as for ontoepistemological justice that exceed Gramscian formulations of common sense and counterhegemony (Shilliam 2015:4–8). Accordingly, I particularly appreciate Lennon’s engagements with Savannah Shange’s (2019:12) conceptualization of “progressive dystopia” as a “perpetually colonial place that reveals the possibilities and limits of the late liberal imaginary,” which he extends to consider neoliberal environmentalism.

Lennon’s discussion of how solutionism conceals and discounts violent contradictions of neoliberal environmentalism and racial capitalism prompted me to think across the related contexts that he invokes in this piece. At SunLight, there is apparently little “friction” (Tsing 2005) around solutionism and related progressive neoliberal commitments (cf. Fraser 2017). The maldistributed contradictions of “clean energy” are always seemingly elsewhere (cf. Checker 2009). In Shange’s (2019) ethnography, by contrast, Robeson Academy is a site of struggle and contestation. Colonial dispossession, anti-Black violence, xenophobia, and gentrification are ever present, and an imposed common sense of shared progressive commitments is in constant danger of disruption. In my work on neoliberal biodiversity conservation, I have joined others in highlighting the role of Western conservation NGOs in mediating contradictions between protected areas as sites of dispossession and a variety of corporate and consumerist spaces (Igoe 2017; see also Corson 2016; MacDonald 2010; Milne 2022).

As a more fulsome comparison of these contexts is beyond the scope of this commentary, I will limit myself here to some observations and thoughts that warrant further consideration and inquiry. A distinctive element of Robeson Academy is its intersection with grassroots social justice movements and abolitionist struggles. Although some workers at SunLight express solidarity with such movements and their ethics, the green solutionism that unites them with their colleagues and bosses is almost certainly derived from strains of “mainstream environmentalism” (Dowie 1995) and “mainstream conservation” (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008), which have neglected environmental justice movements and aligned themselves increasingly with corporate interests and neoliberal policy agendas.

A related consideration is the central, though often contradictory, dynamic of trade unions and class politics at Robeson Academy. Notably, it is precisely along these lines that the unifying common sense of solutionism breaks down at SunLight, as the corporation discontinues solar installation services rather than deal with the unionization of its solar system installers. As I read Lennon’s accounts of these events, I was simultaneously thinking and writing about the relationship between the “professional managerial class” (PMC) and the growth of the transnational NGO sector (Igoe, forthcoming). Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich (1977:7), who first proposed the existence of the PMC, argue that it consists of “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production, and whose primary function in the social division of labor may be described as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations … as managers of capitalist enterprises [such as] corporations, government agencies, and universities.” PMC identity, by these formulations, revolves around the acquisition of valuable skills and knowledge, professional autonomy, and success (Forsyth 2023).

Two aspects of the PMC are particularly relevant here. First, PMC habitus aligns significantly with “cleantech habitus” and solutionism, as outlined by Lennon, particularly with regard to individualistic upward mobility, technocratic virtue, and a deep orientation to generalized positivism (cf. Ehrenreich 2009). Second, and increasingly, while consistently associated with progressive politics, the PMC’s ability to join social movements and class coalitions is hampered by a sense of inherent superiority and competence vis-à-vis other classes (Ehmsen and Scharenberg 2013), which seems constituent of PMC habitus. In spite of its supposed unifying virtues, solutionism is unlikely to mend this divide. So, sadly, I was not surprised by the fate of the rooftop workers in SunLight’s solutionist assemblage, and I still have to wonder about their take on solutionism following their experiences of this union busting.

Relative to these concerns, Myles Lennon’s “The Problem with ‘Solutions’” generatively extends Savannah Shange’s conceptualization of “progressive dystopia” to illuminate the possibilities and limitations of environmental solutionism in a corporate setting. Although I share Lennon’s commitment to alternative modes of environmental care, coexisting with hegemonic solutionism, his article reinforces my convictions that such alternatives depend in large part on the effective building and maintenance of democratic decolonial coalitions. To the extent that social scientists have a role in all of this, it will be necessary to reflect reiteratively on our relationships with other classes and social formations, including how our interactions may be influenced by acquired class habitus. Beyond the limits revealed by “progressive dystopia,” there is, moreover, a need to attend to situational affordances (and lack thereof) for diverse and potentially articulable systems of thought, practice, and relationships, some of which are emergent and others of which are long-standing and largely underappreciated.

Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA ([email protected]). 13 III 24

In “The Problem with ‘Solutions,’” Myles Lennon invites us into the sustainable energy industry through a vivid ethnographic account of the labor and expertise tasked with the curation of environmental discourse and the implementation of novel renewable energy technologies. The solar panel is at once an infrastructure made up of its constituent parts—of metals, polymers, and minerals—and a semiotic object that portends specific orientations to environmental crisis and the decisive action it portends.

If we heed Brian Larkin’s (2013:329) injunction to tend equally to the “politics” and “poetics” of infrastructures—as “concrete semiotic and aesthetic vehicles oriented to addressees”—we should ask how the semiotic icon of the solar panel buttresses the affective register of solutionism that Lennon compellingly theorizes. In Lennon’s account of solar installation technicians, for instance, the sharp, reflective surfaces of the solar panel are contrasted with the remnants of earlier industrial and postindustrial epochs, namely, “wires, plastics, and detritus” that pepper New York City rooftops as visual reminders of waste and obsolescence.

This calls to mind, too, the divergent labor politics of the oil century and the epoch of renewable energy that we are told awaits us. On a recent trip to St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands for the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Caribbean Studies Association, I marveled at the behemoth Limetree Bay oil refinery on the island’s southern coast. The refinery, one of the largest in the hemisphere, sat idle, as it had since its shutdown in May 2021 because of toxic chemical runoff. As a scholar of oil and gas politics in the Caribbean, I knew the St. Croix refinery indexed a generational attachment to heavy industry and masculine work that recurs elsewhere in the petroleum-exporting state of Trinidad and Tobago and the refining hubs of Aruba and Curaçao as drivers of upward mobility and indexes of national development (see Bond 2017; Guadeloupe 2009; Jobson 2024; Schields 2023).

I did not know, however, that a former plantation ground adjacent to the refinery estate plays host to a large solar farm operated by the Richard Branson–owned BMR Energy. In operation since 2015, the solar farm incurred damage after Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, causing the farm to run at less than 45% capacity for more than a year thereafter (Pickerel 2018). By the time I arrived in St. Croix, any visible cracks in the facade of this renewable energy icon had been remedied. The solar farm operated smoothly and silently to capture the abundant energy of the Caribbean sun. This visual and sonic landscape of the solar panel projected an energy future unburdened by the detritus of petroleum—its polluting by-products and unruly labor force. The necessity of specialized labor to provide regular maintenance and occasional repairs remained hidden from view for the moment, at least.

Where the silence of the solar farm signaled progress and stability, the silence of the oil refinery conversely conjured anxieties of industrial abandonment and declining prospects for gainful employment among a new generation of Crucians. As a fellow conference attendee recounted to me from her childhood in St. Croix, the Hess truck was the signature gift for Crucian boys every Christmas. These semiotic and aesthetic vehicles, to wit, indexed a generational attachment to the Hess-managed Limetree refinery and a banal instruction in the logics of gendered labor and development.

Indeed, if midcentury icons of modernity remained sutured to the heteropatriarchal family and heavy industry, Lennon alerts us to a novel repertoire in which “solutionism” portends a postwork utopia of abundance, automation, and leisure. This dream of a self-perpetuating industrial motor to liberate humans from the perils of work, of course, has been with us since at least Karl Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse (see Marx 2005). Lennon demonstrates, though, how the language of solutions and solutionism serves not to remedy underlying social inequities and antagonisms—of class, race, heteropatriarchy, and imperialism—but as “abortive rituals” that defer their resolution with the promissory notes of solarpunk aesthetics and technocratic fixes (Trouillot 2000). And this is where the preeminence of solutionism proves deeply insidious. What are the consequences of a solution to an “energy problem” that merely substitutes one energy matrix for another—such as the striking contrast of the Limetree refinery and solar farm in St. Croix—without a sincere evaluation of the other problems that inevitably surface in their wake?

The solar panel, in this respect, is an icon befitting our political present. In its ideal form, it is clean, quiet, and unobtrusive. It conjures fantasies of a world beyond work even as we remain dependent on less abundant and increasingly gig-oriented work for survival. If the highly imperfect icon of the Hess truck indexed a future of household wages, masculine breadwinners, and abundant hydrocarbons, what future does the affective regime of the solar panel evoke? What future must it evoke?

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore, Shaw Foundation Building, Block AS7, Level 5, 5 Arts Link, Singapore 117570 ([email protected]). 23 II 24

In this article, Myles Lennon accomplishes the rare feat of giving us a grounded description of a nebulous concept—one that, in all its “conceptual plasticity,” does tremendous ideological work on the ground. “Solutionism,” the approach to work that formulates social ills as a series of external problems to be solved by corporate actors, pervades workplaces like the sustainable energy industry. Benefiting from positive associations in daily language, solutionism may serve as a convenient umbrella for people with divergent social priorities, from reducing carbon emissions to achieving diversity in the workplace, to gather under. But, as Lennon shows, there is enough substance to it to sign its advocates up for a particular road ahead. This is not only a semiotic deduction; people like Jasmine and Martha speak of their solution orientation as fundamentally different from other ways of addressing social ills. Leveraging the semblance of value neutrality, solutionism closes down possibilities of noncorporate pathways outside “market-based collaboration”—disables, for instance, conceptualizations of carbon-mitigating practices as “entitlements or public goods.”

There seem to be two prerequisites for solutionism. The first is the performative belief that thinking and doing are opposites. Here, thinking may include analyzing or critiquing a situation, when doing maps onto enacting change for the others who share our world. This rhetorical opposition between “reactiveness of grassroots activism with the proactiveness of private sector ‘solutions’” underlies views of activists as killjoys who only know how to criticize but not how to fix. Of course, this is an understanding that reeks of anti-intellectualism and rests on a Cartesian mind-body duality that anthropologists can all too easily challenge. But that would be missing the point—the point being understanding where solutionism comes from and what it does. And when we follow that through, solutionism leads us, not necessarily to people who favor doing over thinking, but to modes of thinking that have been empowered enough to consistently result in corresponding action.

Who can fault Jasmine for wanting to put up solar panels here and now? It is, after all, not that exceptional to want to see one’s intellectual and moral priorities through to a tangible difference in the world. And that is precisely the point. Jasmine’s “doing” is not a function of her personal drive; the obstacle to her doing is not superfluous thinking otherwise imposed on her, like red tape. Jasmine’s doing, instead, speaks of the fact that she has been empowered to follow her thoughts to action to the extent that those thoughts correspond to market-based and corporate-friendly acts. Like Lennon, I struggled with what can be called the “Martha dilemma” in my work—that people of otherwise progressive conviction seem at ease perpetuating market logics at work. The smart-grid researchers I studied could only conceptualize a better grid in the image of a market despite their otherwise nuanced personal politics. I landed on an explanation of how the tool kits at their disposal gave them a certain limited repertoire of action (Özden-Schilling 2021). As a result, I am convinced that progressive thinking must be equipped with progressive tool kits to turn into nonmarket pathways for action—that it is urgent to give someone like Martha a richer repertoire. As Juan and Rick know firsthand, corporate spaces’ tolerance for progressive “doing” is all too fleeting.

The second prerequisite for solutionism is the formulation of the corresponding problem as an object external to the actors solving it. This becomes most apparent in Lennon’s exposition of how the lot of environmental solutionism rose at the same time as that of the conceptualization of the environment as “an object that humans can act on and improve,” outside of “webs of mutually dependent life.” Solutionism functions similarly in other areas marked by segregation, where the problem solvers think of themselves as fundamentally separate from their purported problem objects and problem people—as in histories of racialized oppression. This is brilliantly illustrated in Louise Erdrich’s 2020 novel The Night Watchman, which chronicles the 1950s’ catastrophic Indian termination policy by which the US government sought to strip Native Americans of the last of their recognized tribal land and rights. The chairman of the Turtle Mountain Tribe contemplates: “Every so often the government remembered about Indians. And when they did, they always tried to solve Indians… . They solve us by getting rid of us” (80).

Painting the problem as external to themselves, problem solvers shield themselves from accountability. The sustainable energy industry downplays the role of “capitalist growth as the cause of human-induced climate change,” which eliminates the possibilities of true reckoning and participatory change for our energy use patterns. If we are critical of solutionism, it is not because we revel in the status quo but because we know that change with no such reckoning is scarcely change for the more equitable. In Erdrich’s (2020:80) novel, the tribal chairman sees his job as “a struggle to remain a problem. To not be solved.” It is a refusal to think of Native American dispossession as outside of the US government’s history of oppression, as well as an exposition that solutionism is highly selective in whose problems it fixes. A corporation like SunLight, after all, is a perpetual motion machine that does not even bother to define problems before presenting solutions. If we want to transcend dressing profit opportunities as meaningful change, there is reason to struggle to remain a problem.

The question that Lennon’s rich work here leaves me with is how to create alternative tool kits, pedagogies, and repertoires of action. How do we get to the point where Martha reconsiders her predilection to default to the market form of organizing society? How can she be given something else to mobilize when faced with social ills? As I read Lennon’s conclusion about the need to multiply venues of change beyond one’s source of livelihood, I wondered about the implications for those of us (lucky enough to be) gainfully employed in academia. It is pressing to consider what venues our progressive thoughts find themselves in, beyond our source of livelihood.

Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology and Art Practice Building 335, Berkeley, California 94720-3710, USA ([email protected]). 1 III 24

“The Problem with ‘Solutions’” traces how the environment becomes both a site of intervention and a (re)source for expert subject formation. Specifically, Lennon is interested in the corporate cultures of start-up firms that pitch cleantech as not only the wave of the future but also the agent for directing market investments. Cleantech “‘[spans] a wide range of environmental technologies and processes, including renewable energy, nanotechnologies, energy efficiency and storage’” (quoted from Caprotti 2011:370). The hope of cleantech aficionados is to offset carbon emissions while rallying “alternative” consumer approaches to energy use, boosting sustainable and ethical corporate supply chains, and engineering more cost-effective research and development in design. One might offer the critique of cleantech as simply another instance of greenwashing and a climate-friendly version of market fundamentalism, wherein free markets are positioned to address socioeconomic problems related to fossil fuel consumption. Yet, as the recent pushback by financial institutions around (inter)national environmental, social, and governance regulatory regimes suggests, there is no one-size-fits-all model for what might entail a corporate culture of accountability.

This conundrum is arguably the starting point for Lennon. If there is a diversity of thought within the cleantech sector, then what exactly do its practitioners view as achievable, and how and under what conditions do they ever achieve it? Ultimately, Lennon argues that at stake for anthropology is less a diagnosis of what cleantech markets are doing than how practitioners view themselves as facilitating solutions that address climate change. Tracking solutionist discourses offers one important perspective into the complex—and often contradictory—logic of corporate environmentalism. By “solutionism” Lennon means the individual and collective aspirations of cleantech practitioners to identify an environmental problem and work toward solving it.

Lennon details that, at least in the United States, the corporate turn to solutionism was a late twentieth-century invention. In response to the demands of civil rights activists, environmentalists, and the rise of federal environmental regulatory frameworks, corporations became beholden to the idea of “branding their work” and “lobbying” the legislative branch of government to address “environmental problems.” Solutionism is as much about leveraging data and information for the sake of resource extraction or conservation as it is an effort to create a corporate image. This point about the utility of data and information is perhaps fundamental to the start-up spaces of cleantech, given that many of the practitioners Lennon interviews never visit the sites where they install solar panels. Instead, they present the value of solutionism as inherent to its continual abstraction—as asset price, technology, and consumer demand. The inability of cleantech practitioners not to envision an endpoint to achieving renewable energy is striking. And if their efforts, aspirations, and dramas about cleantech unfold on the margins of economic theory, then the term “environment” (just as much as “solutionism”) needs a “corporate genealogy.” That is, different types of corporate environmentalism might also have an investment in different concepts of the environment, as recent work by David Bond and Etienne S. Benson illustrates.

Lennon also suggests that cleantech practitioners’ commitments to solutionism rehearse a modernist preoccupation with technological progress. But they also tend to voice “pragmatism,” or at least an appreciation that at some point in their careers they will fail to contribute to societies and make them better. Lennon tends to read this pragmatism as related to varied expressions of affect. Whether it is “sanctimoniousness” or a “passion” for cleantech, a theory of affect animates corporate management. The feeling of working toward a solution, however, is not without risk.

In place of a real concern for improvement, Lennon contends, is an antipolitics that allows start-up firms to churn away without fear of retribution from their consumers, investors, the law, or even their employees. While this may be the case, cleantech could also be read along the lines of John Dewey’s pragmatism, to unpack the varied ways in which its practitioners curate and contribute to processes of experimentation. Through such efforts—markets, technologies, energy forces, data, the law, and politics—all come into play, helping to illuminate what Dewey recognizes as the constant adaptation of bodies to environments and environments to bodies.

There is, of course, much more to the story of cleantech than practitioners’ uneven commitments to corporate environmentalism. Throughout the article, I wondered what cleantech expertise would look, feel, and become in other parts of the world and corporate sectors. This is perhaps an issue of scale as much as ethnographic specificity. Does cleantech warrant a different way of reading corporate environmentalism beyond the global logics of markets, finance, and capitalism? What of the planetary? And if so, how does a planetary perspective of cleantech reconstitute the politics of accountability that Lennon suggests and remain undertheorized within the industry? I also appreciate Lennon’s efforts to think with cleantech while offering the challenge to anthropology to follow the affective entanglements of corporate environmentalism.

But to what extent does anthropology ask too much of its field interlocutors? Tracing the self-reflexive gaze of market practitioners has long been a cornerstone of the anthropology of finance and, more broadly, studies of the epistemic cultures of experts. What is fascinating about the cleantech case is that not only have its practitioners’ critiques, in Latour’s words, “run out of steam” but so too have those of their critics—including government and financial regulatory bodies, ethical investors, technologists, and even environmental justice activists. Everyone Lennon encounters seems to be aware of their vulnerable positions within the cutthroat world of climate advocacy and corporate environmentalism. To this end, Lennon offers a starting point to begin to trace these complex arrangements of self-reflexivity and perhaps steps toward a conceptual roadmap for what accountability looks like in anthropological practice.

Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, 116 Aaron Burr Hall, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA ([email protected]). 29 II 24

Like the comforting warmth of sunshine, environmental solutionism has become ubiquitous in late liberal responses to all manner of environmental crisis. Myles Lennon’s careful historical and ethnographic work tracks the notion of a “solution” as it mediates the institutionalization of environmentalism as a professional pursuit that has become ethically and institutionally bound with the corporation as an inevitable and ready-made site of environmental action. At the center of the notion of the solution is its vagueness. It offers a generally agreeable, decidedly vibe-y affective scaffold through which environmentalism, first, becomes institutionalized as corporate labor, bound up with the rosy promise of self-actualization even as such work doubles down on its abandonment of workers, and second, creates the affective conditions through which workers spread across rooftop solar installation sites, office bros, and disillusioned former nongovernmental organization and investment bankers find themselves in a curious version of the forms of community solidarity that company mission statements and CEO all-hands meetings invoke, working generally toward a shared goal that never has to be hashed out too concretely.

The solution, that is, is ubiquitous in its migration from an explicit earlier strategy of greenwashing to a flexible technology of corporate governance that now suffuses not only corporate environmentalism but also other arenas that express, earnestly, an interest in problem-solving “the environment.” Lennon crucially argues, then, that the “environmental solution” cannot be dealt with only as ideology to be demystified but as a generative and increasingly ubiquitous formation that, though deeply tied with corporate histories and deeply implicated in binding environmentalism to the taken-for-granteds of corporate sociality and its antipolitics, is nonetheless not dispelled through the work of critique.

The vague and self-evident desirability of “environmental solutions” facilitates the elevation of a technical understanding of an environment increasingly uncoupled from “politics” as a domain of social action. Such an observation hits hard and close to home as solutions-oriented academic units default to an understanding of that vague field, “environmental humanities,” as essentially an appendage to technoscientific work. I do not mean, here, a redux of an old conflict between humanistic and other modes of inquiry, but, following Lennon, a sense that under the obligatory optimism of “the solution,” the work of critique, now in its nth decade of losing steam, is a buzzkill and a violation of the social quietude that “solutions” make possible and subtly enforce. What environmental humanities worth its salt would, in this setting, not appear incongruous to the happy work of saving the planet?

What this centers is how the work of “environmental solutions” is, following Lennon, not simply ideological obfuscation. Rather, part of what it offers (and demands) is a foothold on an optimism that has lost its very grounding. The solution appears both as an affective anchor amid existential distress and as a more or less tacit pressure to insist on hope when messier feelings and planets might seem more pressing. Corporate environmentalism (a phrase that may or may not be redundant and clearly does not excuse anthropologists) in its liberal-carceral mode follows the logic of “the win,” to borrow from Savannah Shange. Here it seems that an abolition of the antipolitics of liberal environmentalism might raise the more difficult question of making sense of a progressive dystopia in which we are all losing differently.

In the elevation of solution seeking, what comes to be valued is proactiveness per se, as an overcorrective to mere reaction. Jasmine, Lennon’s interlocutor, evokes corporate optimism as a reaction to the “more reactive work” of her earlier work, for instance. What is moving to me here is that corporate optimism here appears less as an insistence to the will to improve a faulty planet than it seems one among very few lifelines to make sense of worlds and planets shaped in a pervasive sense of dread. The solution, then, is itself a reaction to a lingering sense of existential precarity occasioned at the nexus of actual and anticipated changes in the Earth system and the endurance of racial capitalist violence. Lennon then might offer us something in thinking about corporate optimism as itself a reaction to the feeling that one is only ever able to react, in a personal and professional context in which waged work (livable or not) doubles as an arena of both psychic erosion and self-actualization. That is, the solution might be understood, postideologically, as something that offers psychic, affective grounding against the discontents of a capitalism in which labor must align with values, not only because of the corporatization of morality but also because of the demoralization of work. I would ask: If environmental solutions fall short because they claim an agency that no longer really feels tenable, then is there a possibility of thinking about environmental response? Response, in the sense of a slower, less certain encounter with worlds and planets as they unravel? What would a politics of response look like against the antipolitics of both solutions and reactions?

Second, I wonder, thinking from outside liberal genealogies and strategies of environmentalism and its capture, whether neoliberalism and capitalism come to stand too strongly as concepts or as theories of history and action. What if “the planet” hailed by appeals to the “material impacts of sustainable energy technologies” is not a singular geophysical space? The achievement of Earth as thinkable geophysical unit has a history that is stolen into the environmental solution, also, with its pretentions of scalability. This question, of whether there are multiple Earths at stake on Earth, matters for thinking about the different possibilities of contemporary environmentalism by recontextualizing the inevitabilities of a neoliberal antipolitics grounded in the universal history of liberalism as one of many ways in which the problem of environmental intervention is figured. Perhaps, then, we might respond from within a field of disparate possibilities for the multiple Earths in this one and not simply be compelled to reaction. There may be space in these Earths for affects other than corporate optimism.

I deeply appreciate Dominic Boyer, Michael Degani, Maron Greenleaf, Jim Igoe, Ryan Cecil Jobson, Canay Özden-Schilling, Sarah E. Vaughn, and Jerry C. Zee for their insightful responses to my article. I am hopeful that their brilliant commentary presents an opening for us anthropologists to think more comprehensively about the insidious reach of a solutionism that is no less a part of our institutional habitus than that of the corporate world, as Igoe and Özden-Schilling point out. Indeed, the sustainable energy corporations that I explored in this article are but a single instantiation of not only a corporate-friendly environmentalism but also a broader affective arrangement that cannot be reduced to the capitalist hegemony that gives it form and purpose. When I consider the other offshoots of solutionism that my respondents raise—from spreadsheet brain (Degani) to the professional managerial class (PMC; Igoe)—I am reminded that the mode of environmentalism that I account for in this article is symptomatic of a way of being that is not particular to the so-called environment.

This prompts me to ask: Is “the environment” really a primary character or just a supporting actor in the argument I am trying to advance? Is solutionism, as I ethnographically uncover it, simply a particular formation of progressive dystopia (Shange 2019), late liberalism (Povinelli 2002), rule of experts (Mitchell 2002), or other conceptions of neoliberal governmentality? Although the solutionism of my interlocutors can certainly be situated in these and other frameworks, Greenleaf reminds me that the environment does in fact affectively anchor the “solutions” that I document, giving a particular emotional texture to the technocratic art of solving problems. As she aptly puts it, “environmental solutionism’s power might also relate to people’s affective experiences of the changing climate and other forms of environmental degradation.” Although the realm of environmental professionalism that I explore does not have a monopoly on the apolitical optimism and problem-solving ethos that I encountered in New York City’s sustainable energy industry, what Zee helpfully theorizes as the “pervasive sense of dread” that accompanies a burning planet is notably compatible with solutionism. Of course, the PMC that Igoe calls attention to—regardless of whether they harbor an environmental ethos or not—is well suited to “a capitalism in which labor must align with values, not only because of the corporatization of morality but also because of the demoralization of work,” as Zee puts it. But the point here is that this capitalism is especially affective for moderns encountering “a lingering sense of existential precarity occasioned at the nexus of actual and anticipated changes in the Earth system and the endurance of racial capitalist violence,” as Zee further observes.

I want to suggest, then, that those of us who are concerned about both what we could crudely gloss as the corporatization of everything and a precariously altered climate must tend to solutionism as a generalized habitus, on the one hand, and solutionism as an environmentalist orientation to the world, on the other. Such a dual line of inquiry could more fully address the ways in which the environment, as an imagined stratum of life, emerges from both the very real lived experiences that Greenleaf alludes to and the structures of financialization that Boyer rightfully calls on us to interrogate.

This broader framework also invites us to explore the many affective textures of solutionism that my narrower analysis overlooks, sustaining ethnographic curiosity beyond any particular engagement with self-identified problem solvers. Vaughn’s insightful provocation that “cleantech could also be read along the lines of John Dewey’s pragmatism” is a reminder that there are other generative—and generous—ways to contextualize what I more cynically gloss as “apolitical optimism.” Put differently, Vaughn’s reframing helpfully illuminates the complexity of my interlocutors—the fact that they are not antipolitical dupes. Indeed, she is right to point out that “adaptation of bodies to environments and environments to bodies” is an ongoing negotiation and that solutionism is one set of practices through which subjects enact this process. Seen in this light, solutionism is less a matter of corporate mystification and more a matter of everyday people making sense of their place in the world—an essential corollary to any analysis that situates solutionism in the obfuscatory grip of neoliberalism.

A broader line of inquiry can also elucidate how solutionism evolves (or dissolves?) amid the drumbeat of twenty-first-century cynicism that has only grown louder in the seven years since I completed the bulk of my fieldwork for this article. As Degani incisively notes, “the ‘mask-off’ reactionary shift of American politics over the past decade makes the breezy confidence of managerial solutionism harder to sustain.” Although we could note no shortage of political developments that instantiate this claim, one that strikes me as particularly relevant to this article is some environmentalists’ critiques of the landmark environmental legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act—critiques that refuse the solutionist pragmatism that stockpiled the bill with, for instance, oil and gas leasing on federal lands. Yet I do not believe that this antisolutionist sentiment has undermined the hegemony of solutionspeak among environmentally oriented subjects or its technocratic apprehension of the world. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Subjects of the Sun: Sensing Solar in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism, many radical environmental justice activists have adopted the managerial logics and everyday comportments of corporate solutionism even as they espouse sophisticated structural critiques of racial capitalism and corporations, which is to say that solutionism oddly sits side by side with its unapologetic counteraffects, pointing to a muddled political project that at once wants to solve the world’s problems and burn it down.

This critical analysis, though, does not heed Igoe’s call to think and move through “democratic decolonial coalitions” that resist the esoteric musings of the academic strand of the PMC. What might my critique of solutionism look like if it were intentionally and thoughtfully situated in such a coalitionist effort? For starters, it would not be stuck behind a paywall (or even downloadable via Open Access). But beyond the fundamental matter of how we (anthropologists) disseminate our ideas, part of the difficulty in imagining how a countersolutionist politics might foment cross-class coalitionist work is that such solidarity often requires a shared North Star of sorts—a broadly palatable end goal that often effortlessly translates into the language of solutions. Put differently, “solutions” is arguably a coalitionist grammar—its consensus-building affordances rendering it an odd subject of critique.

This is where Özden-Schilling’s insights become incredibly helpful. Citing a protagonist in Louise Erdrich’s novel, she reminds us that an effective counterhegemonic politics often entails “a struggle to remain a problem. To not be solved.” Saidiya Hartman (2019), James Scott (1985), and countless other scholars have demonstrated the myriad ways in which refusals to be legible, productive, or assimilated not only frustrate the status quo but also comprise the everyday rhythms of subaltern life. As such, countersolutionist coalition building can tap into the routinized practices through which so many of us “struggle to remain a problem,” as Özden-Schilling puts it, reminding us how solutions are often at odds with the most mundane forms of survival.

Embracing struggle in this way can also counter the facile techno-utopianism that Jobson diagnoses. Although I did not encounter imaginaries of a “postwork utopia of abundance, automation, and leisure” in my fieldwork (my interlocutors instead imagined a world of seemingly endless work as they sought out opportunities for perpetual innovation), the industrious solutionism I document in the article is like a sibling to the leisurely solutionism that Jobson calls our attention to. In both instances, technological optimism undermines a more radical vision for a just energy transition—one that rejects the growth-oriented architecture of fossil-fueled modernity. Conversely, a just transition committed to the “struggle to remain a problem” could align energy innovations with the political spirit of movements that privilege ongoing organizing over solutionist teleology, for there are important congruities between “the beautiful struggle” and the forms of subaltern imperceptibility that Özden-Schilling (via Erdrich) gestures to—the sense that freedom is a contested practice, not a finite resolution. This temporality has poetic resonances with the intermittency of renewable energy production. Although cleantech solutionism is intent on developing “energy storage solutions” that overcome this intermittency (partly through the extractive economies of cobalt and lithium), the ephemerality of the sun and wind can also remind us of the everyday ways in which people stall, slow down, and impede structures of power that they do not intend to overhaul. Perhaps, then, in response to Boyer, solar-powered stalling is what a postsolutionist politics might look like: work that does not shy away from the technological innovations that solutionists continue to improve but that also recognizes the punctured temporality and incomplete projects of survival at the margins.