Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Elemental narratives in Iceland frame climate interventions like carbon mineralization as natural processes, yet also provoke unease. This ambivalence shows how elemental storytelling endures in the Anthropocene, complicating distinctions between nature, technology, and risk.

Paper long abstract

In Iceland, proponents of climate interventions frequently mobilize elemental narratives to present new technologies as analogues of natural processes. Carbon mineralization, for instance, is framed as harnessing Iceland’s distinctive geology to accelerate the “natural” bonding of carbon with rock beneath the surface. Such framings seek to capture the positive associations of how elemental forces have contributed to Icelandic society through renewable energy, tourism, and climate responses. They also resonate with studies of geothermal and wind power as elemental forces shaping Icelandic life, and with scholarship on infrastructures as more-than-human assemblages or naturecultures.

Yet Icelandic elemental narratives have long been ambivalent, marked by both reverence and fear—whether of advancing glaciers or erupting volcanoes. Contemporary climate interventions inherit this ambivalence. While carbon mineralization is cast as natural, residents express unease at tampering with elemental forces, raising concerns about induced earthquakes, damage to lava formations, or water contamination. These anxieties point to how elemental tropes both naturalize and destabilize emerging climate technologies.

In this sense, the Anthropocene has not displaced elemental imaginaries with purely modernist notions of controllable nature. Instead, climate interventions intensify awareness of the elements as lively, indeterminate, and entangled with human infrastructures. Icelanders’ responses reveal how narratives of earth, fire, and water continue to structure ecological imaginaries, while simultaneously unsettling boundaries between nature and technology, reverence and risk, the classical elements and modern chemicals like carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other pollutants.