🌊 Rewilding Seasian Climate Agency — A Seapunk Agenda For Bangkok Climate Action Week 2025
Join us in Bangkok (1-5 Oct) over Climate Action Week at a few public events and our weekend house exhibition SNOW SOCIETY, a new Seapunk cli-fi world of weird weather and wilder climate agency ❄
Ahoy! 🦜
Barely a week since a mind-bending Seapunk Proto-College (to be unpacked in an upcoming post 🛸), we’re heading to Bangkok for Bangkok Climate Action Week (BKKCAW).
Seapunk agenda at BKKCAW: public events (1-5 Oct)
Amid the hundreds of BKKCAW activities next week, Seapunk will be (co-)hosting or involved in a few public events:
Fresh Climate Imaginations panel and game workshop featuring sci-cli-fi writer Stanley Chen Qiufan, who’ll be sharing perspectives from his forthcoming novel Ocean Break (set on a Seasian artificial island!) — 1 Oct (Wed) 2-6pm
CEAL climate-education-reimagination workshop centered around real-world climate agency for Seasia and the global south (as detailed in our recent guest post) — 2 Oct (Thu) 9am-5pm
Creative Climate Futures BKKCAW main stage panel — 3 Oct (Fri) 5-7pm
SNOW SOCIETY cli-fi house introducing Seapunk’s newest fictional world of weird weather and wilder climate agency, presented as a pop-up exhibition, along with thematic library-lounge and weekend programming — 3-5 Oct (Fri-Sun) 10am-8pm
(Thanks to our collaborators, spanning Beijing, Bangkok, Bangladesh and more!)
We’re also planning a special closing party Sunday evening (5 Oct) to mark the end of both SNOW SOCIETY weekend exhibition as well as Seapunk Season One!
(Rumor has it there will be kava 🥥)
Feel free to join us if you might be in Bangkok this coming Oct 1-5. There’ll also be several ad hoc side events and hangouts (screenings, salons, etc.) so ping if you might be in town and would like to join (or co-host something).
Ok great. Any excuse for a party. But what does this have to do with climate action, Seapunk, or Southeast Asia?
In the rest of this (long) post, we’ll unpack the idea of Rewilding Seasian (Climate) Agency, and the broader search underlying the Seapunk agenda across both our BKKCAW program and Seapunk Season One more generally.
Seasia: a lexical (and imaginational?) update
But first, a fresh lexical update: Seasia.
At last week’s Seapunk Proto-College (SPC), we introduced and began using ‘Seasia’ and its variants as a lexical shorthand convention in place of ‘South East Asia’ and similarly long-winded variants, for both spoken and written forms:
Seasia, (pronounced similar to ‘seizure’, ‘ceasure’, ‘sea-sure’), instead of Southeast Asia / South East Asia
Seasian or Seasians, instead of Southeast Asian or Southeast Asians
Seasianist, instead of Southeast Asianist (a Seasian studies scholar or specialist)
Why?
Partly because it saves time, breath, and space — we were talking and writing about Seasia all week, and each spoken ‘South East …’ would have taken an average of one second more, which is a lot of added breaths.
But there’s also a re-centering, and even agentic, quality to saying Seasian.
Which ‘center’ were we both ‘south’ and ‘east’ of anyway? Seasia is mostly north of the equator, and west of the world’s largest ocean (which, as Arthur C. Clarke reminds us, is perhaps the real center of our planet’s surface).
How inappropriate to call this planet 'Earth’, when it is clearly 'Ocean'.
—Arthur C. Clarke
The phrase ‘South East Asia’ was itself only coined, exonymously, in the twentieth century in reference to a theater of war, for a war that Seasians had no part instigating. So whose ‘center’ is ‘South East Asia’ seen from, and seen for?
Also, as those of you who have been following Seapunk research and imagination over the past year will recall, what has really shaped Seasia’s history, culture, and peoples over the centuries, more than anything else, is not having been ‘south’ nor ‘east’ of something or someone else, but being next to, upriver from, or far upland from, the sea.
To say ‘Seasian’ is then in part to recenter upon the sea in our history, culture, consciousness, and inter-ness — and also to embrace a much more expansive, bigger-than-ASEAN notion of who might consider our neighbors and kin, along the vein of the ‘Nusantaria’ of Philip Bowring’s Empire of the Seas, which stretched from Madagascar to Yemen, to Yokohama, and even Easter Island. The seas, as they mediated, made Seasia, among many Seasias.
In our written usage and thinking, we’ve also begun to renormalize the capitalization. We’ve seen lots of use of ‘SE Asia’ or ‘SEAsia’ or ‘SEA-punk’ or ‘SEApunk’. That’s typical at an introductory stage. We used to also capitalize LASER, SCUBA, and SPAM. But now they’ve become normal, and there’s no more need to shout (beyond a single helpful introduction note maybe).
So we now simply write Seasia, Seapunk, etc.
You decide what you like and use. We’re punks, not language policemen. But at least you now know what we mean, and why, when we say Seasia(n). And if you have thoughts or better suggestions, please share them in the comments.
Rewilding Seasian Climate Agency: Our BKKCAW agenda
Let’s get back to BKKCAW and our agenda.
2025 is the inaugural year for Bangkok Climate Action Week, the first of its kind in Seasia, inspired by London Climate Action Week — about whole-of-society engagement in climate action from the bottom-up, a permissionless festival on the belief that the climate is everyone’s business.
That’s great, that’s welcome, that’s historic, and that’s exciting for Seasia. Kudos.
But what do we mean when we talk about climate action today?
Across the hundreds of public BKKCAW events so far we can see themes like:
Repurpose & Reuse
Responsible Travel
Plastic Waste
Zero Waste Life
Decarbonising Transport Systems
Flood Resilience
These are all timely, thoughtful, and well worth learning about and engaging with. But they also represent some of the breadth and diversity of possible courses of 'climate action’, which account partly for why public consensus and mobilization around climate action is often so slippery.
Now let’s consider these in light of three recent observations (which those of you who’ve been following the data probably won’t find particularly surprising):
Accelerating global warming, on course for 3 degrees by 2050. Earlier this week, the DPG (German Meteorological Society) released a statement noting that global average temperatures have already crossed the 1.5 degree threshold (made famous in the 2015 Paris Agreement) during the years 2023 and 2024, with the data suggesting we’re likely to exceed 3 degrees by 2050.
Even at 1 meter of sea level rise, Bangkok (and others) goes underwater. At SPC last week, we played with Seasian sea level rise projections and discovered that, even at a conservative 1 meter rise (very likely within this century), Bangkok (among other Seasian population centers) would fall below the new water level.
A single election in Nov 2024 did more for (or perhaps more aptly, against?) the direction and momentum of global climate coordination and action than almost all other efforts (especially those made by smaller players like, for example, basically all of Seasia and the global south) over the past few decades. Whatever you make of Donald Trump and US politics, the point is there are vastly different scales of action and impact at play.
With all these in mind, it’s clear some actions are more relevant, meaningful, and impactful than others. There are, in other words, different courses and different degrees of climate agency — what we can do, who ‘we’ act as, how we respond or prepare, etc.
So it’s not enough to just pursue climate action. We must also consider, own, and perhaps re-imagine, our forms and approaches of climate agency.
Punk players pick their games.
The ‘punk’ in Seapunk is almost by definition heavily interested in agency. Punk is less interested in being in control of big systems. Punk cares about what we might be able (to find) to do that matters for and towards what we care about. That’s agency.
At Seapunk, we believe it’s imperative, on the occasion of BKKCAW, to not just dabble in virtuous feel-good climate action, but to explore and confront, with eyes wide open, what meaningful Seasian climate agency might look like, and where it might lie.
And from what we’ve learned, we believe it lies (at least in part) in rewilding agency.
In the context of ecology, rewilding means to restore something like an area or region to a ‘natural’ uncultivated state. A state or pattern before domestication, typically shaped from first principles by the landscape, hydrology, climate, and underlying realities.
To map this to the context of agency, and specifically climate agency, is to ask: how might we seek out and build upon the first-principles, predicament-acknowledging, highest-meaningful-impact areas of imaginable climate action grounded in our (changing) climate, contexts, and realities?
As evoked in our inaugural Seapunk invitation last year:
Southeast Asia (SEA) isn’t usually seen as a frontier of curiosity, innovation, and experimentation. We’re more used to being on the back-end of supply chains, sending students to brighter futures abroad, and modest aspirations of becoming a regional hub.
But couldn’t SEA be more? We sit on both problem-spaces (like rising sea levels) and resource-banks (like megabiodiverse rainforests) that don’t quite resemble the ‘developed’ world, but might have much to offer the planet. We still have some access to indigenous traditions and intact ecosystems. We have a generation of digital natives and a flux of global digital nomads. We have among the world’s most fertile food systems and richest food cultures. What interesting ideas and innovations could come, first and fresh, from SEA?
What does flood resilience look like in the context of Seasian rivers, monsoon patterns, and the full stack of impacts of recent-modern urbanization and development?
What kind of scale and imagination for repurposing and reusing would meet the level of societal and infrastructural resilience proportional to a 1 meter sea level rise landscape?
How much of Seasia’s focus should be on mitigation vs. adaptation?
Who are the ‘we’s (nations? regions? conglomerates? races?) we might choose to act as?
How do we learn and share all of this?
These are some of the questions at the root of our Seapunk climate agency agenda.
At BKKCAW, we will be exploring these through each of our sessions (and more):
Imagination: Seeking fresh climate imaginations through games, fiction, and more in our panel and game workshop featuring sci-cli-fi writer Stanley Chen Qiufan, who’ll be sharing perspectives from his forthcoming novel Ocean Break (set on a Seasian artificial island!) — 1 Oct (Wed) 2-6pm
Education: Grounding tomorrow’s climate education in the key climate agency of our lifetimes in the CEAL climate-education-reimagination workshop centered around real-world climate agency for Seasia and the global south (as detailed in our recent guest post) — 2 Oct (Thu) 9am-5pm
Praxis: Reflecting and sharing on how to expand Seasian agency (climate or otherwise) through the imagination at Creative Climate Futures BKKCAW main stage panel — 3 Oct (Fri) 5-7pm
Society: Imagining a wildest-agency-possible-apocalypse-notwithstanding Seasian society through our SNOW SOCIETY cli-fi house which introduces Seapunk’s newest fictional world of weird weather and wilder climate agency, presented as a pop-up exhibition, along with thematic library-lounge and weekend programming — 3-5 Oct (Fri-Sun) 10am-8pm
If these questions resonate, come join us in our quest(s) 👣
We’re also planning a special closing party Sunday evening (5 Oct) to mark the end of both SNOW SOCIETY weekend exhibition as well as Seapunk Season One, and there’ll also be several ad hoc side events and hangouts (screenings, salons, etc.) all week, so ping if you might be in town and would like to join (or co-host something).
We’ll also have occasional updates via our Telegram announcements channel.
Reflection: Rewilding Seasian Agency as Seapunk Season One agenda
In more ways than one, we can now see Rewilding Seasian Climate Agency as the Seapunk agenda for BKKCAW.
But we’ve come to realize, over the course of Seapunk Season One, that it’s also emblematic and indicative of a broader 2025 theme: Rewilding Seasian Agency.
From researching and imagining wildly divergent (and delightfully haunted) Seasian distributed AI futures to observing and offering imaginary decolonization as a lens, our quest that began as a search for fresh Seasian and authentic solarpunk futures has found a core vector around the notion and frontier of rewilding Seasian agency.
Or in other words: as we approach our one-year milestone along the Seapunk quest (since our initial Playshop in Oct 2024), we’ve come to learn that what Seapunk is about is rewilding Seasian agency.
If ‘-punk’ is about genre and imagination, and ‘punk’ is about agency, then Seapunk is about researching and imagining fresher, wilder-agency, first-principles ideas, roles, stories, and futures for Seasia(s) and the world.
Not a bad island to land on, one year in 🏝️
Sea you in Bangkok — or beyond.
September Roundup
Media
Vanilla Club podcast with Sam Chua and Jules Yim — podcast appearance and interview with two of Seapunk Studios’ founding curators
Growing Sideways: The Seapunk Imagination — last month’s Balance magazine cover interview with Seapunk Studios’ founding curator Sam Chua is now online
Seapunk Proto-College Symposium — raw livestream of the final Symposium of Seapunk Proto-College, courtesy of our collaborators at ETHKL
Events
Seapunk Proto-College — a packed mind-bending week 15-20 Sep with 15 classes, 20 participants (an average of 12-15 most days), 40 Symposium attendees, and over a dozen writing projects seeded. More media and a longer retrospective over the coming months.
Informal Seapunk meetups in Singapore (3 Sep) and London (25 Sep) 💂🏽
If you’d like to join or help host a local Seapunk meetup, let us know!