What do climate change, genocide, and ecocide have to do with each other? Perspectives from the Russo-Ukrainian War

Adrian Ivakhiv and Olya Zikrata will talk about the recent publication of Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in its multidimensionality, and the legacy of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, which reaches into the present war.

Terra Invicta argues that the Russo-Ukrainian War is an environmental war, waged between a fossil-fuel superpower and a people defending its land, and that this places it in a centuries-long history of wars fought by extractivist colonial-imperial powers against local populations defending their relations with land. The ecocultural trauma experienced by the victims reflects the precarity all of us stand to face in the wake of climate change, a precarity already lived through by generations of Indigenous and land-based peoples. Today’s wars are in this sense harbingers of climate wars to come — which makes Ukrainians’ surprising resistance a source of insight for the rest of us. What is it that makes land worth defending? What makes ecocide (as in the destruction of land and water systems) also a cultural fact, and therefore also genocidal? Why is this relevant in an age of multipolar neo-imperialisms?

Adrian Ivakhiv holds the J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Until 2024, he was Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont, where he co-founded EcoCultureLab.

Olya Zikrata is FRQ Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Communication at SFU, and Affiliate with the Center for Sensory Studies at Concordia. She is a co-curator of the exhibition UKRAINE: NO FILTER open at the Webster Library.

The event takes place in collaboration with Club Ukrainien de Montréal. We acknowledge support of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Concordia Webster Library, SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation, Fonds de recherche du Québec, and everyone who contributed to making this event possible.

Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters on which we will gather. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations.