Climate Language Is Only Sold in Jaksel Cafés
One afternoon, only a few months after I had started working as a junior researcher, I was smoking with one of my professors. The sky was overcast, the ashtray was full, the coffee had gone cold, and at that moment I threw out a question that, at the time, felt terribly naive. "Prof, the ones most hit by climate impacts are villagers. So why is the language around it so elitist? Who actually understands it, and who is supposed to act on it?"
He took a slow drag of his cigarette, then answered with a sentence that has stayed lodged in my head ever since. "Language is power. The more sophisticated a language becomes, the fewer people own it. And the fewer who own it, the more elite the issue grows, even though those carrying its weight are the ones never invited into the conversation." I think he was talking about Foucault, The Discourse on Language.
I only truly understood what he meant a few months later, after going down to several villages in Central Java and East Kalimantan and sitting for hours, listening to people tell their stories. Farmers whose harvests came two months late, mothers whose wells had dried up before the dry season had even begun, fishermen returning empty-handed from seas they used to know by heart. Indigenous communities whose traditional farming methods have been outlawed. None of them ever used the word "climate." But one sentence I heard there was more accurate than any scientific report: the seasons no longer recognize them.
That is not a scientific sentence. No acronyms, no figures, no baseline period. But say it slowly and it holds the entire IPCC report inside it. The relationship between people and climate is breaking. The rhythms that once could be read are gone. What is being lost is not only the weather, but the capacity to plan a life. What these people lack is not experience. What they lack is the bureaucratic label that makes that experience, in the eyes of the state, "counted and measured." Scott, in Seeing Like a State (1998), calls this process legibility: the state can only manage realities that have been simplified into standard categories, while whatever falls outside the grid, administratively, never exists. The climate crisis, in that sense, is not only ecological. It is a crisis of legibility: the state cannot respond to what it cannot read.
Meanwhile, the same crisis is being discussed elsewhere in a very different vocabulary. Reading an IPCC report is roughly like sitting in a Jaksel café where the menu is plant-based and gluten-free, the espresso is single-origin, and the barista talks tasting notes. All valid, all precise, all world-class. But you need a dictionary just to order coffee. Annex VII of the Working Group I report runs about forty pages, with entries from Atlantic Multidecadal Variability to Zero Emissions Commitment. That excludes the separate glossaries for Working Group II, Working Group III, and the Synthesis Report, plus an online glossary at apps.ipcc.ch holding thousands more. Imagine: a scientific document that has to ship with its own dictionary. That is not a mark of academic refinement. It is a red flag that the language has drifted far from the inhabitants of the earth it claims as its subject.
Now move to a warkop on the outskirts of Yogyakarta. The menu is handwritten on a laminated piece of cardboard. Nasi kucing for three thousand rupiah, black coffee for five. No barista, no tasting notes, no single origin. But sit there long enough and you will hear talk of strange rains this year, of harvests running late, of wells shrinking before the dry season has even arrived. Not one person uses the phrase "climate change." They do not need to, because they are living it. In Jaksel cafés, people discuss carbon capture and storage while ordering a dirty latte. In Yogyakarta warkops, people say the seasons no longer recognize them while lighting up a kretek. Both are talking about the same thing. Only one is counted as data by the state. That is where the problem lies.
It is not the Jaksel café that is at fault. Not the barista, not the dirty latte, not the people hanging out there. What is wrong is when climate language can only be ordered in those places, and has no version that can be spoken in a warkop, in a lapau Padang, in a coastal stall in Bone, or in a warung at the edge of a forest now ringed by mines. The consequences are concrete. Local governments can honestly report that "climate impacts are not yet significant," because the indicators they use were never designed to capture local experience. Adaptation budgets pile up in projects that are easier to report in COP language. The losses of vulnerable communities never enter the books, because they carry no name the system recognizes. No language, no claim. No claim, no politics. No politics, no budget.
This, I think, is the work that has not been done: translation. Not one-way translation, from IPCC reports into outreach posters pinned to village halls. That has been done for years, and the results are minimal. What is needed is two-way translation: from scientific language into everyday speech, and from everyday speech into the formal language of government. Making a mother's sentence about seasons that forget to come home enter regional planning documents, not only the field notes of researchers. Making a fisherman's experience of fish migrating hundreds of kilometers count as data, not anecdote. Making the villagers around mining sites and the farmers living through scrambled seasons more than mere spectators in policies that claim to be made for them. This is not public communication work. It is policy work, political work. What is being contested is not diction, but who has the right to name reality.
My professor was right, and I think I am only now beginning to see how right he was, after sitting in many warkops and many village halls. Language is indeed power. The consequence of that is not to nod in resignation or lament the arrogance of global vocabulary. The consequence is to take it back, so that Indonesia's climate language stops belonging to a small few and begins to be spoken in warungs, in rice fields, in harbors, at the edges of forests now under siege by mines. Because as long as climate language is sold only in Jaksel cafés, the crisis will keep looking distant from the desks of officials. While in the warkop next door, the seasons have long stopped recognizing us.
Author: Muhammad Maulidan
This article also appears on whatisupindonesia. Read the original here.
