Climate Change and Philosophy: Transformational Possibilities (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Climate Change and Philosophy Continuum Studies in Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at...

Author: Ruth Irwin

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Climate Change and Philosophy

Continuum Studies in Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the whole field of philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Aesthetic in Kant, James Kirwan Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion, Aaron Preston Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus, Christopher Brown Augustine and Roman Virtue, Brian Harding The Challenge of Relativism, Patrick Phillips Demands of Taste in Kant’s Aesthetics, Brent Kalar Descartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature, Justin Skirry Descartes’ Theory of Ideas, David Clemenson Dialectic of Romanticism, Peter Murphy and David Roberts Hegel and the Analytic Tradition, edited by Angelica Nuzzo Hegel’s Philosophy of Language, Jim Vernon Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, David James Hegel’s Theory of Recognition, Sybol Cook Anderson The History of Intentionality, Ryan Hickerson Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory, Alison Assiter Kierkegaard’s Analysis of Radical Evil, David A. Roberts Leibniz Re-interpreted, Lloyd Strickland Metaphysics and the End of Philosophy, H.O. Mounce Nicholas Malebranche, Susan Peppers-Bates Nietzsche and the Greeks, Dale Wilkerson Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Delbert Reed Philosophy of Miracles, David Corner Platonism, Music and the Listener’s Share, Christopher Norris Popper’s Theory of Science, Carlos Garcia Role of God in Spinoza’s Metaphysics, Sherry Deveaux Rousseau and the Ethics of Virtue, James Delaney Rousseau’s Theory of Freedom, Matthew Simpson Spinoza and the Stoics, Firmin DeBrabander Spinoza’s Radical Cartesian Mind, Tammy Nyden-Bullock St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War, John Mark Mattox St. Augustine of Hippo, R.W. Dyson Thomas Aquinas & John Duns Scotus, Alex Hall Tolerance and the Ethical Life, Andrew Fiala

Climate Change and Philosophy Transformational Possibilities

Edited by Ruth Irwin

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Ruth Irwin 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: 978-0-8264-4065-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

For Val Plumwood

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Contents

Abbreviations

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List of Contributors

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Introduction Ruth Irwin

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Part One:

Questioning Modernity

Chapter 1: Field, Being, Climate: Climate Philosophy and Cognitive Evolution Martin Schönfeld

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Chapter 2: Nature in the Active Voice Val Plumwood

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Chapter 3: Reflections on Modern Climate Change and Finitude Ruth Irwin

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Part Two:

Transforming Global Politics

Chapter 4: Changing Worldviews to Cope with a Changing Climate Leo Elshof

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Chapter 5: Education at the End of Nature: Learning to Cope with Climate Change Timothy W. Luke

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Chapter 6: Education against Climate Change: Information and Technological Focus Are Not Enough Edgar J. González Gaudiano

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Part Three: Chapter 7:

Contents Global Environmental Justice Climate Change Education in a Context of Risk and Vulnerability Heila Lotz-Sisitka and Lesley le Grange

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Chapter 8:

Myths of Climate Change: Deckchairs and Development 162 Trish Glazebrook

Part Four:

Liberal Responsibility

Chapter 9:

Mediated Responsibilities, Global Warming, and the Scope of Ethics Robin Attfield

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Chapter 10: Transforming Resource Use in the Light of Climate Change Murray Sheard

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Abbreviations AR4 ETS IPCC UNFCC

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Emissions Trading Scheme Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

List of Contributors Robin Attfield is professor of philosophy at Cardiff University, where he has taught philosophy since 1968. He has also served as visiting lecturer in philosophy, University of Ife, Nigeria (1972–1973), Inter-University Council visiting lecturer in philosophy, University of Nairobi, Kenya (1975), and National Research Council (Republic of South Africa) visiting research fellow (July/August 1999). He has written the following books: God and The Secular: A Philosophical Assessment of Secular Reasoning from Bacon to Kant (1978 and 1993), The Ethics of Environmental Concern (1983 and 1991), A Theory of Value and Obligation (1987), Environmental Philosophy: Principles and Prospects (1994), Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics (1995), The Ethics of the Global Environment (1999), Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century (2003), Creation, Evolution and Meaning (2006), and The Ethics of the Environment (Ashgate, 2008). He is the joint editor of “Values, Conflict and the Environment” (1989 and 1996), of “International Justice and the Third World” (1992), and of “Philosophy and the Natural Environment” (1994). Recently he was a member of the UNESCO working party on Environmental Ethics, contributing to the volume Environmental Ethics and International Policy (ed. Henk ten Have, UNESCO, 2006). ([email protected]) Leo Elshof, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Education at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Leo has worked in the fields of science, engineering, and environmental education for over twenty-five years. He holds degrees from the University of Waterloo, McMaster University, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of Toronto. His current work focuses on the themes of transformative learning in sciencetechnology-society-environment (STSE) education, climate change, and environmental sustainability. Leo is also a founding fellow of the Canadian Wildlife Federation’s Learning Institute. ([email protected]) Trish Glazebrook received her doctorate from the University of Toronto. She is the author of Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science (2000). She has two new books in press with SUNY – Eco-Logic: Erotics of Nature and an edited collection called Heidegger’s Critique of Science – and many articles on Heidegger, ecofeminism, and environmental philosophy, ancient philosophy, and


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philosophy of science and technology. She is currently professor of philosophy and chair of international development studies at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, with cross-appointment in the College of Sustainability, the School for Resource and Environmental Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies. ([email protected]) Edgar J. González Gaudiano holds a PhD in sciences of education. Currently he is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences in the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon, member of the Commission of Education and Communication of IUCN, and regional president for Mesoamerica (2001–2006). He has been a member of the board of directors at the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE). He also worked with WWF and the UNESCO in projects related with national strategies for environmental education. He has written nine books and more than one hundred articles in several specialized journals about EE. He is a Latin American liaison and a member of the UNESCO Group of Reference for the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Now, he is also former president of the National Academy of Environmental Education, an NGO that seeks to foster formation and research in this field and member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. He is the main editor of the Iberoamerican journal Topicos en Educacion Ambiental. ([email protected]) Ruth Irwin is a senior lecturer in ethics with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Business Studies at Auckland University of Technology. She has a BA and first-class honours MA from the University of Auckland and a PhD from the University of Glasgow. She won the Commonwealth Scholarship, Bright Futures, Ryoichi Sasakawa, and William Georgetti Scholarships. Between 2005 and 2007 she was the University of Auckland post-doctoral scholar in the Philosophy Department. Her research interests include Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari and ecofeminism, modernity, and climate change. She engages with globalization, philosophy of economics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of technology. She is the author of a book called Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change (2008). She is presently co-editing a book with Professor Martin Thrupp called Another Decade of New Zealand Education Policy: Where To Now? and she has published many articles and book chapters on Nietzsche, Heidegger, the critique of neoliberalism, philosophy of subjectivity, philosophy of education, globalization, and the philosophical and cultural implications of climate change. Ruth Irwin is a foundational member of the Sustainability Research Group at the Auckland University of Technology. ([email protected])

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Lesley Le Grange is professor and vice-dean (research) in the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University. He obtained his BSc degree at the University of the Western Cape, holds a HDE diploma, BA, Bed, and MEd (cum laude) degrees from the University of Cape Town and a PhD from Stellenbosch University. Lesley teaches and researches in the fields of environmental education, research methodology, science education, and curriculum and assessment. He has 130 publications to his credit, has delivered more than 80 academic presentations (21 as invited speaker), and is a member of more than 10 professional associations. He serves on the editorial boards of Africa Education Review, Journal of Educational Studies, Southern African Journal of Environmental Education, and Transnational Curriculum Inquiry (TCI). Lesley regularly reviews articles for several national and international journals and is associate editor of the South African Journal of Higher Education. He is recipient of several research awards. ([email protected]) Heila Lotz-Sisitka holds the Murray & Roberts Chair of Environmental Education and Sustainability at Rhodes University, South Africa. She has contributed actively to the transformation of South Africa’s education system after 1994. She has worked on numerous international research and teaching projects, and in 2007 she served as Scientific Chair of World Environmental Education Congress. She has published widely at national and international levels, and is editor of the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education. She also serves on UNESCO’s international reference group for the United Nations Decade on Education for Sustainable Development. Her research interests include education and agency in contexts of risk and vulnerability, participation in education, and critical research methodologies. ([email protected]) Timothy W. Luke is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He also is the program chair for Government and International Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs, and serves as director of the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. His most recently published books are: There is a Gunman on Campus: Tragedy and Terror at Virginia Tech, ed. with Ben Agger (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Museum Politics: Powerplays at the Exhibition (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx (University of Illinois Press, 1999), The Politics of Cyberspace, ed. with Chris Toulouse (Routledge, 1998), and Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (University of Minnesota


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Press, 1997). All of these works investigate questions rooted in civic engagement with the issues of sustainability and culture in the fine arts, civil society, natural environments, and global economy. ([email protected]) Val Plumwood Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University, shared her time between the Social and Political Theory Programme and the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies. Val Plumwood died on February 28, 2009. She was one of most important ecofeminists of the twentieth century. In the 1960s she worked on biodiversity and resisted deforestation. She has published four books and over one hundred papers, mostly in environmental philosophy but also with a keen interest in logic. Her major books were The Fight for the Forests (1973), together with her then husband Richard Routley, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), and Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002). At the time of her death she was working on a new book called Nature in the Active Voice, a chapter of which is published in this book. She put forward an important critique of anthropocentricism and the dualism between humanity and nature. She wrote on ecofeminism, biodiversity and deforestation, and modernity. She is less well known for her work on logic, but in this field, Plumwood also plays a major role. See, for example, Ross Brady’s edited collection called Relevant Logics and their Rivals, Vol. II; A Continuation of the Works of Richard Sylvan, Robert Meyer, Val Plumwood and Ross Brady (2003). Plumwood’s thorough knowledge of philosophy and her insightful feminist theory has enabled her reconceptualization of crucial ideas in the division and relationship of human identity and the environment. Martin Schönfeld studied in Regensburg, München, La Rochelle, Taipei, and Athens, Ga. He learnt philosophy working blue-collar jobs, walking through Bavaria, kayaking the Missinaibi, and sitting still at a Zen school in rural Taiwan. His ideas are informed by Laozi, Master Eckhart, Kant, and Erich Fromm. He has a PhD from Indiana, 1995. Schönfeld studies the matrix of environmental realities and the patterns of survival, sustainability, and cultural evolution. He explores designs for our post-carbon and postconsumerist futures. He regards global heating and the “long emergency” as market failures, but also as opportunities for social enlightenment. Climate as a phenomenon is more than a sheer sum of parts, and that forms a whole in the way the parts work together. Global climate change, which is largely the historic doing of Americans, raises the question of the cognitivecultural failings that have led to this perfectly avoidable and wilfully

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perpetrated catastrophe. Schönfeld organized the first international conference on climate and philosophy (2006), is now bringing out the Climate Philosophy Newsletter, and will edit a topic issue on climate ethics for Journal of Global Ethics (2009). ([email protected]) Murray Sheard is director of professional integrity training for Tiri, a London- and Jerusalem-based NGO that works with governments, business, and civil society to find practical solutions to the challenges of building governance integrity in an environment of corruption. Murray leads Tiri’s training and leadership programme, Integrity@Work, with a special focus on public service ethics. The role includes initiation and management of DVD-based training projects in many countries in Africa and Asia, and networking universities to include integrity and anti-corruption modules in their courses. These programmes partner with government ministers, senior public officials, and academics. Until 2007, Murray lectured in philosophy at the University of Auckland in his homeland of Aotearoa, New Zealand, where he taught business ethics, environmental ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and theories of human nature. His publications have appeared in philosophy journals, such as Philosophy of Management, Environmental Ethics, and Journal of Philosophy in the Contemporary World. He is the secretary of the Arab Journal of Public Integrity and Management and the author of Living Simply, a resource for justice-focused lifestyles. Concurrently, Murray established his own company, Ethical Edge Ltd, an ethics consultancy that aims to increase the ethical decision-making competence of professionals and business leaders. Prior to this, Murray was the New Zealand Team Leader of Servants to Asia’s Urban Poor, a development charity with teams living and working in the slums of Asia’s megacities, engaged in community development. Murray oversaw leadership and management, training, promotion, public speaking, and development of office and financial systems. His PhD investigated the nature of property rights held by businesses over environmentally sensitive resources and developed a new conception of property that justifies greater environmentally motivated limitations on property than do traditional accounts. It has implications for the design of property law, environmental law, climate change policy, and the ethical responsibilities of business. He also holds a BE in electrical engineering. ([email protected])

Introduction Ruth Irwin Auckland University of Technology

Recently, a very strange announcement was made. The Royal Society in Great Britain is considering whether or not we have moved out of the Holocene Epoch and into the Anthropocene Epoch. This is deeply disturbing on many levels. The Holocene Epoch has lasted some 12,000 years and during this relatively stable and temperate period between ice ages, Homo sapiens have really thrived. All known human civilization developed in the Holocene Epoch. In many ways, the Holocene itself does not qualify as a differentiable climate period as nearly all the living beings that exist during it evolved in the Pleistocene Age, over the previous 1.8 million years. Modern human beings were already spread throughout the globe at the beginning of the Holocene period. The only differentiation of the Holocene from the previous age is human technologies. During the Holocene, humanity managed to establish permanent dwellings, then long-term villages and townships, and eventually, entire cities and complex, sophisticated civilizations. Why then should we further differentiate the Anthropocene Epoch from the Holocene? How do climatic periods get influenced by humanity, and how does our behaviour reflect our philosophies, and vice versa? The suggestion is that since the late 1800s, industrial technology is a new paradigm shift that is radically transforming the climate in ways not seen earlier in the Holocene Epoch. Coinciding with the invention of the steam engine in the late seventeenth century, the Anthropocene Epoch does not promise the stability that enabled the emergence of human civilization. So far, modern, industrial human activity has warmed the planet 1.3°C higher than the pre-industrial norm. Evidence suggests that we are releasing a third more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the 1990 line in the sand. The forthcoming United Nations COPP 15 in Copenhagen is

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struggling to secure a threshold of 2°C warming over the pre-industrial baseline as the very top figure for viable conditions for modern life. Yet, according to the combined efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2°C introduces 50% uncertainty that we may reach a “tipping” point that could slide the earth from global warming into the next Ice Age (cf. Rahmstorf, 2006). The new Anthropocene moniker is to mark the never-before significance that an animal species has had such an impact on the ecology of the entire planet that it has fundamentally changed the whole climate. Species often alter their local ecosystem, slowly evolving symbiotic or inter-relating relationships with other aspects of the ecology to produce a specialized environment that enhances their well-being. Some species have a kind of built-in redundancy where their success eventually over-utilizes or makes toxic the local ecological niche and they die out at that location (or completely). Having an impact on the ecosystem is not unique. It is the scale of our “success” that is unique. Humanity is unusual because we inhabit such a wide range of habitats. Although Bill Ruddiman (2007) argues that the clearing of forests and development of agriculture on quite a large scale, some 8,000 years ago, is the beginning of the human contribution to the greenhouse effect, nevertheless, the scale and consequences of the industrial revolution has produced such toxic abundance that we have thickened the atmosphere with pollution and contributed significantly to the greenhouse effect. Over 200 years of industrial production has shifted us out of the stable conditions of the Holocene, and into the new and rapidly changing Anthropocene Epoch. We are not sure when it really began – 8,000 or 200 years ago – or how long this new Epoch will last. Culturally and philosophically, this extraordinary announcement of a shift to the Anthropocene Epoch raises some important questions. Are we, for example, honestly fronting up to the effects pollution is having on other species and ecosystems, as well as ourselves? Are we naming one of the earth’s great climatic ages after ourselves as a way of claiming and controlling it? Are we visualizing the future in an effort to adapt to these new conditions? Do we hope that it is an aberration and that a correction in worldview and behaviour might make a return to the Holocene possible? Or is it too late for that and the scientists are just noting the significance of the climatic shift and recording it, objectively, for posterity (a posterity that may not last longer than a few hundred years). The climate changing has altered our perception of our place in the world, our place on the planet, and our conception of time. The extension

Introduction

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of knowable time has been dramatically extended backwards (and sharply shortened for the future), as scientists try to understand the pattern of climate before the industrial period. We no longer situate ourselves in terms of nationality, or postwar modernism, but rather in global and planetary terms. This massive expansion in context and the looming finitude of the Holocene Age ultimately changes how we comprehend ourselves. Are we responsible for climate change? Many people still resist this charge. But at this stage, most people in most countries are aware of, and acknowledge, the problem, which is a dramatic change from even five years ago. The question of responsibility is important because it alters our scope of response to the problem. Anthropocentric climate change is almost entirely due to industrial production practices, transport, energy consumption, and mass consumerism. But the practices of modern industrialism have been either accommodated or actively resisted by many, many people. The land clearances of the seventeenth century in Scotland and the Lake district, for example, are a consequence of the earliest industrialization of agriculture and devastated whole communities. Wordsworth, other Romantics, and the Luddites resisted the pollution and noise of modern industrialism vociferously. World Wars I and II can be understood as a consequence of the modern expansion of population and an industrialization of war. Few people at the time willed these events to take place. Most of us were just caught up in it. The fraught anxiety about the role of agency in the unfolding of modernity can be seen in Jünger’s text (1993) on the mobilization of war, and novels such as Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Coping with horror requires taking some kind of responsibility, otherwise we are entirely subject to the whims of the war machine, the hive, the institutional and economic demands of mass consumerism and mass production. Even the peaceful prosperity of the 1950s, was not entirely embraced with enthusiasm. Many people were not particularly keen on the lifestyle shift that mass consumerism and modernity has offered. Aldo Leopold (1987) actively advocated wilderness awareness to counteract modern alienation from natural ecology. And in science fiction, the determinism of modernity and questions about the ethical boundaries to impacting on “pure” nature, or belonging to, and interacting with nature, or controlling and terraforming natural ecologies to be more amenable to human uses have arisen (see especially Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson). So the question of responsibility is not an easy one and likewise, the scale of climate change shifts the ground of philosophy at its disciplinary roots. Since the early emergence of modern democracy, in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Olympe de Gouges, Thomas Paine, and Mary

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Wollstonecraft – all early democratic philosophy desired to attribute agency to the people, and consequently were caught up with the contradiction between freedom and the structures of society. But the momentum of modern technological culture has a mysterious invisibility to the political process. The difficulties of bringing some of these problems to light are dwelt on in the chapters of this book. Despite these long and illustrious histories in environmental philosophy, Martin Schönfeld expounds with bemused wonder in the first chapter, “Field, Being, Climate: Climate Philosophy and Cognitive Evolution,” that there is very little philosophy that engages with either the environment or climate change. There are one or two articles and books that have addressed climate change and philosophy, most notably a collection edited by Coward and Hurka in 1993, several articles by Dale Jamieson and Stephen Gardener, and more recently a book by Ruth Irwin and another by James Garvey. Because of the lack of a voice coming from the Humanities and most of the Social Sciences, the only “solutions” so far to climate change rest heavily on the twin economic precepts of economic growth and technological innovation. One of the key mechanisms for implementing behavioural change is the Emissions Trading Scheme where financial incentives for increasing efficiency and lowering emissions can be traded on the market. Technological innovation is expected to help alleviate the problem, and a number of ideas for terraforming, very “science fiction” in their origin, are beginning to be seriously considered. Among them is the floating of millions of mirrors in the outer atmosphere, to reflect sunlight out of the atmosphere before it gets trapped by greenhouse gases, the feeding of iron filings to expand the plankton population and extend the carbon sink capacity of the oceans, and the sequestering of carbon dioxide emissions back into the depleted oil reserves where it cannot pollute the atmosphere. These large-scale technological interventions aim at “terraforming” the planet to keep it within the erstwhile stable temperature zone of the Halocene. Probably much more effective than these glamorous attempts to control the climate are simple energy efficiency methods (such as insulation) and more sustainable forms of energy production. Yet, despite the economic and technological innovations, the regulations, and the financial incentives to the global modern system, emission of greenhouse gases continues to grow every year. Very little is said at global climate change meetings about limiting consumerism, changing lifestyles, or substantively changing the ethos of modernity. Very little philosophy, education, or social science is presently attending to the problem.

Introduction

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Up until relatively recently, and especially in philosophy, we have taken the climate and the environment at large entirely for granted. It is only as things break down, as Heidegger notes in Being and Time, that it enters our awareness. Otherwise it is simply present, part of the always already world we exist in without active, conscious consideration. We are only starting to seriously consider the activities of modern industrial pollution now that the climate is “breaking down.” We have yet to fully interrogate the philosophical precepts that are now re-contextualized by climate change. At present, ideas that have long circulated through environmental philosophy are being sidelined in the climate change debates as pessimistic and unsexy. Green economics is perceived as progressive and optimistic (despite a failure to establish any real cultural change). Within the analytic and continental traditions, climate change challenges the basis of conventional concepts. Analytic philosophy has been interested in the role of the individual vis-à-vis the state, and climate change challenges normative liberal practice. The metaphysics of idealism separated the subject from the object, which alienates human beings from nature. Key concepts in the continental tradition are also resituated by climate change. For example, Heidegger’s concept of subjectivity, while neither necessarily individual nor idealist, is bound by a time frame that is human in scale. Being-there; Dasein is “there” within the rubric of human civilization. However, “there” is a misnomer for climate. The atmosphere is ubiquitous. Always already the density in which we exist, more than an “event,” climate is, as Schönfeld puts it, the “framework,” “the stage,” the “continuum” of existence. But all these metaphors are insufficient, stabbing attempts to comprehend the immensity of the possibility of life itself. Climate is existence and potentiality; it is the manifest conditions that make any life possible. Thus, climate is much bigger than mere humanity or civilization. It is bigger than the “universal” or essential concept of the “object” like the “chair-ness” to return to Plato’s famous formulation of metaphysical “form.” Despite its almost complete absence from any philosophical discussion, climate predates any of the age old, universal ideas. Paleolithic climate science is extending our knowledge of the earth’s life cycle for beyond the era of human occupation in order to contextualize our activities today. This new knowledge brings a new perspective that radically alters the premises of philosophy itself, just as philosophical critique has a great deal to offer the mode in which modern culture grapples with climate change. It is earlier than the beginning envisaged by the Judaic/Christian/ Muslim tradition too. Climate already exists in the Garden of Eden. Nor is

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it mentioned in the seven days of creation – objects are mentioned, such as animals and trees. But the conditions for their possibility are not discussed; the planet of a particular size and mass, with a gravitational force neither too great nor too weak, the moon that shelters the planet from most of the dangers of meteor strikes, the sun of a particular age and ferocity, at an amenable distance from the planet that the climate will evolve with favourable conditions for the complexities of life to be possible. And once those vital conditions are in place, life is almost inevitable. Life forms keep popping up again and again, in many iterations, and rich variety of forms, from the simple to the immensely complex, from the molecular to the enormous. And the life forms change according to the climatic conditions of the planet’s cycles. The axis of the poles, the level of the sea and the height of volcanic upheavals and tectonic plates and the chemical composition of the atmosphere are all important contributors to normative climatic conditions. There are many, many “causal” components to “natural” climatic shifts, some of which are relatively stable, such as the earth’s orbit, the moon’s orbit, and the relative impact of the sun. Others involve complex feedback systems that stabilize, sometimes for millennia, before succumbing to the ongoing, mostly gradual pressures for change. The Maori creation narrative comes closer than any other that I personally know of, to mentioning climate. At the beginning of time, Papatuanuku, the earth mother, lay together with her partner, Ranginui, the sky father. They had many children, and Tane, the forest, gradually pushed them apart. In this interstice between sky and earth, Tane created the space for living creatures. Ranginui, the sky, is the weather; the climate. The space in between is a feature of the climate. It is “objects” of a sort: rain, lightening and thunder, wind, heat, oxygenated dampness, dusty dryness, stillness. Climate has features but is not an object. And it changes, so time, and particularly seasonal time, is integral to climate. It is also space – the cleanliness and composition of atmospheric space that is one of the important and, until very recently, the more obviously under-rated aspects of climate. Climate is both concretely historical – the chemical composition, the affects of real forestation, desertification, mountains, ocean currents – and fundamentally constitutive. Climate is space and time. It weathers everything.

Human Agency When we talk about the human responsibility for climate change, we are entering the realm of the philosophical. Are we any more “responsible”

Introduction

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than ants for an anthill? Can we alter the activities of modern civilization at whim? Is it within the possibility of democracy and political philosophy to solve the issues of rampant consumerism, pollution, and industrialization? Are we, in short, the “masters” of our own destiny? Ultimately, this boils down to the question of humanity in relation with nature. Are humans every bit as “natural” as any other being on the planet? Many philosophical and religious traditions suggest otherwise. Western idealism, with its roots in monotheistic religion, Ancient Greek philosophy, and possibly older, more humble fears of the dangers of nature, has placed humanity in a hierarchical position in the “Great Chain of Being” over other species, and nature in general, on the grounds of “pure reason.” Others argue there is no validity to set human rationality above other modes of existing, or to justify the hierarchical relation of humans “over” nature. Furthermore the narrative of mastery over nature also plays an important part in global politics. Certainly this myth of mastery is one we have been sold for a very long time. The mastery over nature has materialized in the mind-blowing “success” of human beings in the “competition” of “survival.” As a result of modern technological practices of various levels, the human population has expanded exponentially. As we write, the global population is over sixand-a-half billion, with current projections for around nine billion people by 2100. Very few of these people live in pre-industrial conditions, and those that do live a pre-industrial lifestyle have not, in general, expanded their population base in the same manner as those influenced by modernity. The nature of civilization evolved in philosophical thinking as civilizations themselves emerged, changed, and became concrete. Throughout the industrial period the dangers of toxic pollution have been well known and often explored in many “green” tracts. Cities and civilizations have risen and fallen for 5,000 or 6,000 years. Yet modern civilization is unique for several reasons: it is global and there is no viable “outside alternative” to redress over-consumption. Modern civilization is industrial and extracts resources and maintains production, storage, and transport on a scale never known in earlier periods. By individuating subjectivity and governance it is able to accommodate and absorb ethnic and cultural diversity mere affectively than hitherto. Modern civilization has elevated rationality and the model of the technological, economic “machine” to a form of metaphysics by which the entire world is understood. The success of this constellation of ideas, events, technologies, and institutions has created a horizon of understanding or a worldview that is very difficult to transform. But change is necessary because current industrial practices and modern lifestyles are

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polluting the global ecosystem and rapidly changing the climate to unviable conditions.

Financial Crisis The financial crisis that began in 2008 is the result of many things: layer upon layer of arbitrage bundling “toxic” loans with good ones, an unfounded faith that the housing market would continue its astounding rise despite growing unaffordability, higher oil prices, and corruption. It is an internal collapse, intrinsic to the instability of the system. The effect of the financial crisis on green economics is not yet known. There are indications that it may slow down commitment to the expense of carbon dioxide mitigation. In May 2009, Kevin Rudd, the prime minister of Australia, said the global economic downturn was the reason for putting off the establishment of an Emission Trading Scheme, ETS, from the end of 1010 until a year later, at the very end of the Kyoto commitment period, in 2011. New Zealand will follow suit. On the other hand, Nicholas Stern suggests green economics offers the best opportunity for economic growth since the invention of the motorcar, as demand for efficient technology increases, and productivity curves respond positively. Whichever case may prove correct, the financial crisis has done more to lower the greenhouse gas emissions than any government policy, evidence that consumerism has a direct correlation with climate change. Economists are not in a good position to look beyond the system they are part of. It is vital the Humanities and Social Sciences have a voice in transforming the normative practices of modern culture from the perspective of halting climate change. At present policy makers are using the same tools they always have (technological innovation and psychological behaviourism), and just like the banking system, those tool are over-extended. Some of these philosophical, political, and economic issues have been explored very well, but they are rarely articulated as a whole or seen in the context of climate change. The chapters in this collection aim to do just that; examine the ways that climate change is challenging the norms and modus operandi of modernity, in a variety of settings and at various levels, to begin to think through the consequences of this extreme shift in the conditions of the planet. It brings into sharp relief some of the long-term existential and political problems with globalised modernity, especially the sharp division between rich countries and poor in both producing greenhouse gas pollution in the first place, and having the capacity to

Introduction

9

adapt and cope with the shifts in climate that will affect their locality. The division of labour still renders women most responsible for the household in all countries, and this makes coping with climate change particularly difficult for billions of women, particularly in Ghana, most of Africa, India, and South East Asia. It brings up real questions about responsibility, about the basics principles of liberalism, including property ownership, rational individualism, and the hierarchical separation of human subjects from natural objects. The book has been arranged in four loosely interconnected sections: the first three chapters question modern philosophy; the next three question modern politics and the potential for education to affect cultural transformation, including the problems generated by global inequality; the next two chapters explicitly examine the effects of climate change and global politics on two countries in Africa, Ghana and South Africa; the final two chapters develop liberal responsibility in the context of climate change. The book concerns itself with the need for cultural transformation, in the light of climate change. Global conferences on climate change tend to view cultural transformation from within the current modern praxis and mores. In other words, they make use of financial incentives and disincentives, policies involving the “carrot and stick,” without stopping to ask whether these old modern presumptions about culture actually work. More importantly, those techniques rely upon a presumption of human beings as “rational, individual, utility maximizers” that will alter their choices based on motives of self-interest and greed. By maintaining these prerogatives through our policy practices, we reinforce the morality that has created the problem of toxic greenhouse gases in the first place. Deep transformation of the culture modernity away from unnecessary consumerism and towards a new ethos of responsibility, care, and natural integration is required. In the first chapter, Martin Schönfeld writes on climate change, civil progress, and rational evolution. Current debates on anthropogenic climate change turn on two models: the “mechanical” or “inertial” model of the IPCC (1998–2007), which predicts a slow and steady increase of planetary temperatures, and the “physiological” or “dynamical” model proposed by J. Lovelock (2006), which predicts a rapid and sudden reorganization, or flip-over, of climate into a new steady state. Both models converge in the conclusion that climate change will intensify, with overwhelmingly negative effects on human expectations. Agricultural productivity is at risk, mass migrations are likely, and a dieback is possible. This biospherical challenge to global human well-being raises the question of what is to be done. Schönfeld focuses on ethics, that is, on rationally defensible values.

10


Morality and Stupidity: morals reflect the experiences of earlier humans on presumed benefits and harms. But the feeling for morals – morality – does not refer to these experiences as such, but to the age, the holiness, the indisputability of morals instead. So this feeling is an obstacle to making new experiences and to correcting the morals; which is to say, morality is an obstacle to the evolution of new, superior morals – morality makes us stupid. (Nietzsche, Dawn # 19, 1881) To examine this question, Schönfeld works backwards from an envisioned solution, as in reverse engineering. Suppose climates worsen, and the inertial or the dynamic scenario, or a mixture thereof, comes to pass. Suppose, further, policy makers manage to rise to the occasion; infrastructural, economic, and legal adjustments happen, and civil progress occurs. Suppose, finally, that a future world culture has absorbed the harsh lessons of anthropogenic climate change in such a way that one can speak of rational evolution or cultural enlightenment. Simply put: imagine the Global Village avoids a Darwin Award – what will be values that survive? Applying Kant’s litmus test of replicable normative maxims, Schönfeld argues that civil progress qualifying as a rational evolution towards sustainable cultures presupposes a “re-evaluation of values”. A future world culture proceeding from the lessons of climate change will have values about sexual reproduction, consumerism, ownership, and market economics that are quite different from ours. He details this future moral fitness and explores its legal and social implications. The goal of the first chapter is to delineate a normative road-map that may point the way towards sustainable cultures. In Chapter 2, Val Plumwood refers to debates in the environmental literature of the last thirty or forty years by advocating “Nature in the Active Voice”. This chapter continues to work in the area of recognizing nature as agent, maintaining the systems that maintain us, and deep sustainability. This is directed in part against nature scepticism/cynicism that is so popular in the humanities, and looks further into hyper-separation (the human apartness doctrine) in both science and creationism, as well as into how to reconceive nature in more mindful and agentic terms. The impact that climate change will have on modern civilization has some precedents, albeit smaller in planetary significance. Over the ages, well-established civilizations have died out because they have been unable to alter habits resulting in serious ecological damage. Easter Island is a famous example of beliefs, politics, and the status of the famous giant statues overriding the sustainability of the forest to the point of collapse. The current, modern ecological crisis is showing up in multiple ways, including energy

Introduction

11

issues, lack of clean water, pollution, ecosystem degradation, and climate change. These multiple sites indicate that piecemeal “solutions” are inadequate in both scale and acknowledgement of the depth of the problem. Our most basic cultural narratives need to be opened to a thorough rethink. Public discussion in modern society is dominated by norms established during an era of colonial and patriarchal assumptions that “man” dominates nature. The tyranny of such a narrow worldview is making it especially difficult to acknowledge or respond to the substantive evidence that the separation of humanity from nature is rationally flawed. A deficit in rethinking the basis of the nature of our existence results in poor strategies of response to the many ecological problems that are emerging, especially climate change. The extremely narrow focus of current strategies on economics as signals for cultural transformation is dangerously simplistic. It leads us to solutions such as nuclear technology that have already been thrown out as very high risk. Deficits in rethinking are a failure to engage with the big framework narratives that justify the extravagant demands for consumer goods and the faith in economic growth. While the assumption of mastery and the hyper-separation of humanity from nature is unexamined, this ethos, if normalized, and habits of consumerism and pollution will remain in place. Chapter 3 is by Ruth Irwin on “Climate Change and the Crisis of Philosophy.” Climate change policy has entered a new and dangerous phase, where policy makers (not scientists) are trying to envisage life “after” climate change. They are asking how we can adapt, which presumes many things. To begin with, that there is no hope of stopping the escalation of climate change; that we can adapt at all; that terraforming technology may be invented in the future, alleviating the present of so much responsibility for reducing greenhouse gases. Policy makers are making projections into a future “beyond” the limits that science suggests is the outer boundary of safety (and even 2°C above pre-industrial levels is too extreme, some scientists argue). Clearly, their incentive is not to battle the inertia of present norms of exponentially growing consumerism. The do not know how to conceive of stable, satisfied communities without economic growth and economic growth clearly correlates with increased consumerism and increased greenhouse gas emissions. Irwin looks at Heidegger’s philosophy to gain some insight into the philosophical ethos of modernity. Heidegger looks at the whole span of a life (or a civilization) to assess behavioural norms in the present. The perspective of the life-as-a-whole shifts the framework of time, from

12


progressive teleology that is used in modernity (including economics) to a holistic view of time as an event that encapsulates the entirety of the civilization, from beginning to end. Fundamentally shifting the conceptual basis of time from linear progress to the context of the whole opens up new possibilities for an ecological ethos. In Chapter 4 Leo Elshof embarks upon “Changing Worldviews to Cope with a Changing Climate.” The richer minority world has a set of normative social paradigms based on technological and economic – material – growth that has allowed unparalleled accumulation of wealth and expulsion of pollution at the expense of the rest of the planet. Faith in material growth and unlimited progress is empirically at odds with the real physical parameters of the biosphere and cannot be justified in terms of the “common good.” The epistemological and ontological challenges presented by climate change bring the dominant modern paradigm of industrial-scale production and the discourses that support that into a new spectrum of understanding. This chapter explores how the dominant discourses of productivism still informs current practices in science, economics, and technological education. Silence, resistance, and often, denial still meets the increasingly compelling scientific evidence about climate change. Often climate change is regarded as yet another environmental issue, like water pollution or the ozone hole, that can be “fixed” with technological intervention. Climate change is on a different dimension to all environmental hazards that modernity has yet encountered. The scale of the problem and the threat of calamity that the IPCC scenarios set out demand a deeper cultural shift and a critical assessment of the normative socioeconomic worldviews that inform the discourses, policy, institutional frameworks, and self-understanding of modernity. Climate change brings up problems that have never been adequately addressed before, of inter- and intragenerational equity, global politics between the rich and “developing” nations, technological politics, and environmental justice. Climate change does not allow us to continue with “business as usual.” Elshof argues that it demands deep-seated, innovative, and “world changing” ideas that engage with the social, the technological, and the economic spheres of our carbon-intensive lifestyles. Principles of distributive justice and precaution along with sustainable local livelihoods and “green” public infrastructure can contribute to this shift in worldview. Tim Luke writes in Chapter 5 about “Education at the End of Nature: Learning to Cope with Climate Change.” This chapter moves past the usual register of avoiding or allaying the prospect of climate change as if it is still some avoidable future conditional choice. Instead it asks how we should

Introduction

13

admit to global warming’s current reality, and then map out how climate change is already affecting life. In addition to rethinking values and behaviour that will make climate change worse unless something radically different is done with energy use, it also asks what must be done to cope with and get through newly persistent patterns of extreme weather, species extinction, landscape degradation, and natural unpredictability that are now usually lumped together as either merely strange or still minor. Events over the past decade do seem to represent “the end of a nature” as we knew it, but they also constitute new opportunities to learn about and then teach how to adapt to this new nature shaped by today’s currently changing climate. Tim Luke examines four key authors: Friedman, Al Gore, and Ted Norhaus with Michael Shellenberger. Friedman’s “geo-green” alternative to neoconservatism and environmentalism seems to be a neoliberal form of green politics. He advocates a more “muscular” greenyism than that preferred by wet hippy liberals. Gore’s popular response to climate change is also predicated on market solutions such as offsetting carbon emissions with enhancement of carbon “sinks” and by extension, schemes such as emissions trading. Nordhaus and Shellenberger advocate a type of green pragmatism. While they all engage directly with climate change, Luke argues that their positions rely too heavily on the status quo, and fail to fully grasp the depth of cultural transformation that climate change makes necessary. Neoliberalism, trade in emissions, and pragmatism, all constitute minor variations on the normative culture and politics of modernity, failing on nearly all levels to cope with the cumulative and compounding effects of industrial pollution, environmental degradation, or social inequity. Indeed, although these authors engage with climate change, their unreflective ideas only mitigate isolated problems and ultimately reinforce the cultural ethos of modernity that has caused and is perpetuating excessive consumption and pollution. In Chapter 6, Edgar González Gaudiano argues that “Education against Climate Change: Information and Technological Focus Are Not Enough.” Climate change is increasingly in the public eye, but the mode in which it is discussed is limited to two discursive genres – economic risk and technological fixes. The media is particularly culpable of reproducing these facile interpretations of the damage caused by climate change. Instead of questioning the long-standing problems that the minority consumer society has produced, the media focuses on specific, isolated events and perpetuates a piecemeal, case-by-case façade of containable calamities. In fact, González Gaudiano argues, global statistics make it remarkably obvious that the planetary environment, and by far the majority of the

14


world’s people are not responsible for the excessive energy use, luxury consumerism and flagrant pollution that the “consumer class” regards as the norm. More frighteningly, however, this consumer norm is spreading fast in developing nations and the corresponding increase in greenhouse gases has increased more than 2.5% over the last several decades – despite the urgency of global policy makers. Simple access to knowledge, even the urgency of calamity, does not encourage transformative change according to González Gaudiano. His chapter has an important discussion on why the media and education are failing to do more than passive reproduction of knowledge and what steps might be more constructive for deeper cultural transformation. Chapter 7 is by Lesley le Grange and Heila Lotz-Sisitka. It deals with “Climate Change Education in a Context of Risk and Vulnerability”. Le Grange and Lotz-Sisitka argue that the pan-global attempts to come up with solutions to climate change have so far failed. This is disastrous for the world, but it is even more precarious for places such as southern Africa, where the people do not have the resilience to cope with climatic shifts and more extreme water shortages. Ironically, Southern Africa is probably also the contributor of the least amount of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. This chapter seeks to understand how Southern Africa can adapt to the risks posed by climate change as best as possible having acknowledged the low coping capacity, given the region’s high levels of poverty and unemployment and the specific problems of water access and ecosystem vulnerability. Education has potential for helping the adaptation necessary as climate change encroaches upon the region. However, much of the educational system in Southern Africa suffers from a combination of specific problems – it is shaped by the colonial past and it is under-resourced and so it has poor quality outputs. So while education might fairly be presumed to contribute to adaptation, it is not actually capable of significantly helping those people living with the new dangers posed by climate change. The global politics of modern industrial consumerism has not been able to adequately address climate change at the point of generation. This is as much because of the resistance to repeal the norms of consumerism. The Kyoto Protocol is seen, by the people of the West, as “anti-modern.” Through philosophy and sociological methods, Le Grange and LotzSisitka argue that the history, resource, and capacity constraints in Southern Africa constrain the potential for change. Nevertheless, an array of adaptation strategies at all levels could take place. Le Grange and Lotz-Sisitka make a comprehensive list that takes local ecology into consideration. The strategies are culturally demanding at individual and societal level. They

Introduction

15

include changing the staple diet away from maize and toward the hardier sorghum plant. More profoundly, they believe we must all be prepared to alter the economic system so that the long held inequalities of colonialism and structural adjustment programmes are halted and reversed. Getting local farmers to adapt to these changes will be challenging, and Le Grange and Lotz-Sisitka turn to the role of education in helping these cultural transformations take place. This is also no easy matter, and education will need to reinvent itself in order to be up to the task. In Chapter 8, Trish Glazebrook also focuses on Africa. This chapter brings about a change in philosophical priority, from a justification of positivism and industrial policy to “Myths of Climate Change: Deckchairs and Development.” Philosophy can clearly make a contribution to the climate change debate at the connection of policy and science. That is, the IPCC report presents scientific consensus on the reality of climate change, and is portrayed in popular media as putting to rest the worry that the scientific community stands in disagreement over, in particular, whether such climate change is anthropogenic. Philosophy can analyse and critique the function and effectiveness of science in informing government policy and cultural practice, as well as providing clarification of terms such as “uncertainty” such that non-specialists can better understand the IPCC’s probabilistic approach to risk. Glazebrook argues, however, that this conception of philosophy’s role in the climate change debate is one-sided insofar as it is models philosophy in terms of philosophy of science. An approach to climate change that begins instead with a perspective in which environmental justice is taken to be central to philosophy provides a different, and Glazebrook suggests, desperately needed framework for analysis of the issues surrounding climate change. For example, from an environmental justice perspective that takes gender as focal, the following questions can be asked: 1. In developed nations, a central issue in climate change is car use. Given evidence that women tend to make more multiple-destination trips and more trips for the purpose of meeting the needs of other family members than men, in what ways must analysis of car dependence differentiate users, rather than homogenizing them as if impacts of giving up car use will not be felt differentially, and in ways that create additional challenges for those who already bear a disproportionate burden with respect to their car activities.

16

Climate Change and Philosophy 2. Climate change is likely to have a devastating impact on lived experience in Africa, though Africa is at the same time the inhabited continent making the least contribution. What are the specific impacts that can be anticipated, and how might they be most helpfully understood? For example, if climate change increases the incidence of malaria, and health care is in large part in Africa unpaid women’s labour, how is climate change likely to increase women’s daily work commitments?

This chapter does not aim to answer all the questions it raises, but will explore ways in which gendered analysis from an environmental justice perspective uncovers issues of social justice that are being largely overlooked because of contemporary policy focus on technical aspects of the climate change debate. The task of philosophy, Glazebrook suggests, is to draw attention to non-technical, non-scientific issues such that policy makers might be better guided towards social justice in their mediation of science, technology, and lived experience. Chapter 9 has Robin Attfield writing on “Mediated Responsibilities, Global Warming, and the Scope of Ethics.” The entire context of ethics has fundamentally changed, as Hans Jonas has argued. The impacts of action, which used to be seen as affecting human contemporaries almost exclusively, now, because of technology, impacts on the biosphere and ongoing generations for many centuries in the future. In this chapter Attfield engages with the important problem of responsibility for diffuse and often secondary actions that might be tiny when regarded from the individual’s perspective, but cumulate into very serious problems over large tracts of the world. Human responsibilities need to be reconceptualized in the light of our context, so that the scope of ethics matches to the range of impacts. However, most responsibilities relating to the future are indirect or mediated (with cumulative and often diffused and delayed impacts), and tend to be disregarded for this reason. Even actions or omissions with imperceptible effects can be importantly right or wrong in conjunction with large numbers of separate actions or omissions on the part of others (as Derek Parfit discloses). Impacts on global warming are a case in point, making tiny, often imperceptible, differences to cumulative, potentially threshold-crossing concentrations of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere. Further, ecological debt (as depicted by Juan Martinez-Alier) can involve exporting pollution through participation in systems generating global warming impacts, when apparently innocuous practices of ours depend on reliance on pollutant practices in faraway countries (such as practices of manufacture in south

Introduction

17

and east Asia), and can thus embody mediated responsibility for climatic impacts more directly generated by others. In the new context of ethics, such issues cannot be adequately addressed without concerted international planning involving new thinking about national sovereignty and about democratic decision-making where current practices disregard many (often most) of the affected parties. In Chapter 10, Murray Sheard directs attention to one of modernity’s most sacred institutions, property. His chapter is called “Transforming Resource Use in the Light of Climate Change.” Property institutions are our chief mechanism for the allocation of resources. Decisions about the exercise of ownership rights will create greater or fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Legal curbs that implement measures to halt climate change constitute constrictive alterations to the more generous property rights that may otherwise exist. Hence, for effective international action to mitigate climate change, not only do we need to distribute burdens fairly, we also need to show the moral rightness of limiting the right to use property in polluting ways. Common acknowledgement of limits to property rights are a prerequisite for the transformation of public attitudes to our relationship with land and resources and the often negative reaction to restrictions on resource use, such as emissions, controls other environmental law. Sheard outlines international policy responses to climate change and considers the property institutions necessary to address this urgent global issue. He suggests an approach to policy combining fairness and sensitivity to historical cause and shows how there is a need to develop a better conception of property. Sheard counters that traditional, strong rights are ethically less significant that better approaches for fair distribution that are consistent with rights to property. Sheard’s account of property sets restrictions on property to implement an effective climate protecting strategy and, at the same time, challenges traditional public views on how people can use their property, when those uses conflict with environmental values.

Acknowledgement Some of the chapter summaries were based on material submitted by individual authors.


Part One

Questioning Modernity


Chapter 1

Field, Being, Climate: Climate Philosophy and Cognitive Evolution Martin Schönfeld University of South Florida

Climate change is an emerging reality, an existential challenge, and a disaster in the making. The Stern Review (Stern, 2006) identifies climate change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen” (p. 3). By 2008, the information appears to have solidified into a rather coherent body of knowledge, whose quintessence can be summarized thus: climate change is the effect of a quasi-American lifestyle, adopted throughout the world, especially in the northern hemisphere and by affluent classes elsewhere; a lifestyle defined by faith in consumerism, trust in expanding free markets, and need for fossil fuels. This lifestyle represents, in conceptual terms, a worldview with given values, practices, and prejudices. The term “prejudice” is used with care, for despite scientific studies since the 1930s and despite manifest global warming since the 1980s, climate has garnered extraordinarily little philosophical attention. There is now an incipient climate ethics, guided partly by environmental economics, partly by environmental ethics (early works include Broome, 1992; Gardiner, 2004; more recently Garvey, 2008; and Climate Philosophy Newsletter, 2007–2009). There is a climate-related conceptual geography in Eurasia, which is the inquiry into social climate (milieu or fûdo) and humannature interplays (médiance or aidagara).1 But in the Anglophone Far West, in general philosophy, there is as yet no systematic, concerted, or rational inquiry into the phenomenon of climate and its ontological and metaethical aspects. On a material level, climate philosophy does not exist in classes, seminars, symposia, areas of specialization, tenure-earning lines,

22


and research chairs. The American Philosophical Association had no session on climate on its division meetings as late as spring 2008. In the Far West, climate is virgin conceptual territory. Like health, climate becomes conspicuous only when it suffers damage or begins to deteriorate. Normally health and climate are efficient, humble servants; the one inside, the other outside our being. Both are the background to events, to pursuits or activities happening in the spotlight of attention. When health and climate are seen as the woodwork behind the stage, they must also be seen as the framework that keeps the stage propped up and that allows events up front to unfold in the first place. The woodwork is a load-bearing structure. Its collapse entails crushing the stage and ending the play. The phenomenal reality of climate is akin to Heidegger’s (1979) famous example of a tool. As long as a tool is handy, it stays unnoticed. But if it were found missing or broken, it would immediately become obtrusive and obstinate (pp. 73–74). Similar to a tool, climate can be useful, and it is so when it remains invisible. We talk about weather, sure – but has climate, not weather, ever been the topic of conversation before? Climate makes news as soon as it fails to meet expectations and starts thwarting ends, say, if the outback dries up, or the monsoon stops coming. Then climate, the servant, the woodwork, becomes obstinate and emerges as a reality. It is now a presence because of its changes, which are humanmade, male-made, and made in the United States. Climate change is an anthropogenic, androgenic, and amerigenic reality. That this reality is human-made, and climate change consequently anthropogenic, is common knowledge. That biospherical decline is driven by a masculine stance, and perpetrated more by males, and that climate change, as a symptom and element of such decline, is consequently androgenic is the topic of ecofeminism. However, that climate change is an amerigenic phenomenon is less known, but the facts are on the table. Climate change is indirectly amerigenic through U.S. foreign policy, such as the U.S. resistance to worldwide mitigation attempts from Kyoto 1998 to Bali 2007. It is directly amerigenic by the U.S. carbon footprint. Historically, the United States has been the largest emitter of greenhouse gases of all nations. At present, its 4% of world population creates one-quarter of the world’s emissions. There is no nation with a larger per capita carbon footprint than the United States. The phenomenon of this freely perpetrated transformation of the earth system is a provocation. It answers questions one might prefer to keep open. It supplies answers that are the opposite of what one would like to hear. And it raises questions, of a type that is counter-intuitive, novel, and unsettling.

Climate Philosophy and Cognitive Evolution

23

In answering questions preferably left open, the heuristic impact of climate change is to settle issues unexpectedly. At least for an instant, it silences the perennial conversation of philosophy with an influx of knowledge, unassailable facts, and logical inferences. Philosophers who have rolled their eyes or changed topics show themselves as unwise and incompetent. And there is no arguing with the news. Thus the heuristic impact of climate change on philosophical progression is dogmatic. In supplying answers one does not want to hear, this impact is not valueneutral. It closes cases in a way that is a downer and a buzz-kill. Climate, as the new topic of conversation, crashes the party by arriving with bad tidings and unwelcome news. So the heuristic impact of climate change is subversive. In raising questions, the subversive presence of dogmatic truths injects a dose of innovation. At the philosophers’ party, the questions raised by climate are not queries within conventional discourse. They are something new. The novelty is received step-by-step. Comprehension dawns gradually; gradations are marked. The new questions are unintelligible when first heard, and crazy when heard next. An initial “Huh?” yields to scoffs and chuckles. As news keeps pouring in, and facts cluster around the newcomer, the questions start to sound mind-blowing – odd, but unsettling. Giggles subside. As silence deepens, and the partygoers, sobering up, are forced to regard the presence, the unsettling aspect grows threatening. When at last understood, the climate questions shoot out like fists, crushing the paradigm. Thus the heuristic impact of climate change is revolutionary. After the blow had been absorbed, the formerly so boisterous partygoers are different. Their place is a mess. There’s glass everywhere. All the while, more news keeps coming in; more facts arrive on the scene; the neighbours have come out of their houses to watch; it is impossible to cover things up. The scandal is out in the open. Climate was largely changed by Americans, and then the causation was mostly denied by Americans? O my, classy intellectuals are thunderstruck. A monstrous woodwork has shambled onto centre stage, shattered the cognitive décor, and the thinkers have to watch out to avoid falling over overturned chairs. As discussions return to their former din, the conversation is altered. Climate change turns the marginal into the mainstream, and the mainstream into the new marginal. Profiling this provocation is the point of the essay. The author claims that climate change is an issue with conceptual depth, and that it concerns both theoretical and practical aspects of philosophy. As the practical aspects of climate change are evident in a burgeoning ethical literature, the issue that remains is the theoretical depth of the emerging reality – that is, the question of the being of climate. Clarifying this issue and elucidating this question

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requires the examination of the heuristic impact of climate, as a phenomenon, on philosophy. The examination of this impact points to four aspects: 1. 2. 3. 4.

How has the impact of climate been delayed? What is the being of climate? How do mainstream philosophers dislike this sort of being? And what would mainstream recognition of such being require?

Clarifying anything by comparing it with something else goes only so far, before analogies break down. The phenomenology of climate as cognitive background makes one think of woodworks. But the fluidity of the phenomenon turns the comparison into the quirky and bizarre. First climate is woodwork, next it morphs into a framework, and finally it gives way and destroys the stage. Worse, the initially inert woodwork transmogrifies into a shambling, questing intruder at a party, wanting philosophers’ brains, while wrecking the décor – what kind of woodwork is that? The comparison with tools hits limits too. Like a tool, climate appears handy and useful for human ends. And like a tool, climate becomes visible only if it thwarts human expectations and changes into something suddenly unhandy. But unlike a tool, the being of climate is not that of something that is lying around somewhere. I can point to a tool found broken and say, “there it is,” even, paradoxically, to a tool missing and say, “I just had it in my hand – I put it right here.” But climate refuses to be pointed out that way. Consider an ostensive definition: it would have to be a roundabout, sweeping motion, perhaps with one’s hands tracing out arcs. And even then, one would fail to locate it there. That is unlike weather: standing on a beach, one can see weather, as a thing, moving in. Climate, however, envelops the perceiver, in a moment of space and along an unfurling of time. Even a vague motion will not do – one would have to supplement it with words, saying, “It’s been all here, all along,” or, “it’s around, and it has been there longer than I have.” A tool is situated in a continuum. Climate is a continuum. That makes it an environment, but in contrast to environments such as, say, rooms, or houses, which are static, inert, and passive, climate is an enveloping structure that is dynamic, energetic, and active. Its activity makes its being into a doing. Climate is a functional whole, and this is what distinguishes its being from that of tools and weathers, majority of the students and teachers in the field. But it remains representative of the loudest voices, the highest salaries, the “best” departments. Georgia-Athens, Wisconsin-Stevens Point,


25

Colorado-Boulder, and North Texas-Denton are academic locales that have contributed, in various ways, to the sea-change happening now. They are unconventional. Conventional is Harvard, Pittsburgh, or Stanford. And conventional philosophers hate functional wholes. The delay of reflecting on climate is the result. In fact, climate dynamics and with it, the study of functional wholes, emergent realities, and the unfolding of being, has enjoyed conceptual attention for centuries, but in a very different cultural context. Questions of emergence and self-organization, environmental fate, and the causal flows of weather and climate were explored by pioneers of the East European Enlightenment, such as Leibniz and his disciples. Leibniz’s student Wolff examined air, pressure, the void, and reciprocal fields (1709) before turning to metaphysics.2 Wolff’s successor Kant pioneered modern meteorology. Kant explored forces (1747), environmental fate (1754), emergent evolution (1755), and wind dynamics (1755–1758).3 Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant are comparatively unknown in the Far West. While Leibniz’s insights on nature, networks, and data flows have turned out to be more substantial than those of his rival Newton, he continues to stand in the latter’s shadow – in the United States, for instance, the calculus is characteristically introduced with reference to Newton, although the actual calculus taught is consistently Leibnizian. Wolff, moreover, was the main figure between Leibniz and Kant but remains unknown in the Far West. From a conventional viewpoint, Wolff made three “errors of orientation” that bar him from the canon: he studied climate, he studied being, and he studied China, while taking all three topics very seriously. Kant, finally, exists as a sharply delineated fragment. Part of his oeuvre is readily accessible in multiple translations, but no text on climate, dynamics, and emergence is in print. He occupies a place in the Far West canon with his critical, aesthetic, and ethical work, but is absent as the first climate philosopher.4 The disregard by conventional philosophy of the climate is reflected in convenient gaps in the historical record. But it concerns not only a bygone age but also the recent past; and not only foreign metaphysics but also domestic science. The proof of anthropogenic carbon dioxide as cause of global warming was given thirty years ago by an American scientist writing in English and publishing in a U.S. journal (Hansen, 1981). The discovery of climate forcing – the causality of climate change – is half a century old, was written up in English, and was shared by an American scientist (Revelle and Suess, 1957). How human-made climate change occurs was understood seventy years ago by a British scientist writing and publishing in English (Callendar, 1938). This puts the delay of conceptualizing climate change in

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even starker relief. There is a vast philosophical literature on physics, but extremely little on climatology. And that is strange. Even in its practical dimension, the delay between the emerging political reality of climate and its acknowledgement by conventional philosophy has been remarkably long. In the Far West, the topic of global warming acquired a clear-cut and widely noted political presence with U.S. climatologist James Hansen’s congressional testimony in 1988. But no mainstream philosopher took notice. The Earth Summit convened in 1992. The Kyoto Protocol dates from 1992. And yet, another half a dozen years went by before a conventional philosophy journal, Ethics, would publish on the topic (Gardiner, 2004).5 With regard to the first aspect of this examination, the dates show how the impact of climate has been delayed. The next two aspects (what the being of climate is; and how such being is disliked) are interconnected. The exclusion of climate from philosophical inquiry will make even less sense if one compares the topic with the discipline. Climate has been an emerging reality for years now, and its change is a meaningful event with existential implications. And philosophy is supposed to be the study of reality, meaning, and existence. So the topic fits. Why, then, is climate a misfit in the Far West today? Answering this question requires taking a closer look at the ill-fitting being of climate and the status of entities of its kind in conventional philosophy. Here is a textbook definition of climate: Climate is a broad composite of the average condition of a region, measured by its temperature, amount of rainfall or snowfall, snow and ice cover, wind direction and strength, as well as other factors. Climate specifically applies to long-term changes (years and longer), in contrast to the shorter fluctuations that last hours, days, or weeks and are referred to as weather. (Ruddiman, 2008, p. 4; emphasis in the original) Conceiving climate as “broad composite” means to understand it in terms of its components. Characteristic of the measurable components – temperature, rainfall, snow cover, and so on – is that each is fluid, malleable, and interdependent. The composite structure is accordingly not a set of discrete, individual members, but a network of mutually informing nodes. Understanding climate means to see how its components interact. As the network involves energy inputs and outputs, it is dynamic. This structure, of an interactive network, distinguishes climate from other composites that are merely sums of their parts. Climate is a whole. Sums


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and wholes differ over their relations among parts. The parts of sums relate to each other in passive, aggregate terms. There, parts are what they are. The parts of wholes, however, interrelate in active, purposeful fashion, and here, parts are what they do. When parts express being as doing and work as nodes in a net, the whole becomes functional. A standard example of a functional whole is an organism, with the organs as interacting parts. But is climate – or more exactly, the earth system that encloses it – analogous to an organism? Engaging with this question seriously (even to the extent of eventually yielding only a qualified, complex answer) cannot help but evoke Renaissance thought. The spectre of the earth system as a functional whole, which is now what climatology works with, is reminiscent, in philosophy, of Paracelsus and his mystical idea that nature is macranthopos or human-writ-large, and human is microcosmos or nature-writ-small. Clearly, conventional philosophy is far from Paracelsus. Ironically, this distances it from current science. The old Renaissance sense of earth-as-an-organism is found in J. Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis (1979, 1988, 2000, 2006). This is the climatology model according to which “the Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components” (Moore et al., 2001). The resonance with the organic is visible in a more technical synonym of the Gaia research program: geophysiology (Lovelock, 2006, p. 41). Just as physiology studies functions of organisms, geophysiology is the study of functions of the planetary quasi-organism. Conventional philosophers scorn Gaia, a contempt that can even be traced through textbooks. When the best-selling Environmental Ethics – Readings in Theory and Application, edited by L. Pojman, was first released (1994), it contained a section on the Gaia hypothesis and a summary by Lovelock (pp. 142–146). Although the summary was paired with a rebuttal, by J. Kirchner (pp. 146–154), the mainstream outcry against the sheer mention of geophysiology in a college anthology was so strong that the editor, yielding to the storm of objections, cut all references to Gaia in later editions (2001), even to the point of deleting the critique. Henceforth, the issue was best left unmentioned, a situation that continues with the fifth edition 2008.6 Climatologists, on the other hand, react to Gaia pragmatically. The geophysiological approach explains and predicts something, so it works, and so there is no reason not to use it.7 A strong reading of Gaia implies an organic holism à la Paracelsus. A weaker reading yields the claim that life affects climate just like an organ affects its organism. All climatologists are weak Gaia theorists; in the strong form, few are; many suspect the best interpretation of Gaia will be found somewhere in the middle (Ruddiman, 2008).8

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Conventional philosophy finds functional wholes undesirable. Ideally all sciences must emulate physics – not the “crazy” physics of today, with its final theories, big bang bottlenecks, speculative strings, and anthropic principles – but the “sober” physics of the good old days, the analytic Newtonian variant, whose model of nature cast out all design and conceived of functional appearances as lawful mechanical processes. This evokes the idea of nature as a clock, whose ticking is analysable by the motions of its cogs, gears, and springs (Hempel, 1966; Nagel, 1979). This admiration for all things mechanic, and dislike for all things functional, resulted in the methodological desideratum of reductionism. This, then, is essential for seeing the causes of the delay and dislike of climate: ontologically, its being is a functional whole. Functional wholes are regarded as problems, not as solutions. As problems, they need to be solved. The solution consists in their reduction, that is, in their dissection into parts. Methodologically, this reduction, however, only works, and the composite is genuinely reducible, if the consequently generated set of components can be added up into the composite prior to disassembly. Think of an automotive shop. You start with a running engine; you turn it off; you take it apart; afterwards, you take it back together. If you’re a good mechanic, the engine will start up again and run. While this process of reducing wholes into parts works for mechanical contraptions such as engines, it doesn’t work for organisms. Reductionism, as it turned out, has difficulties over organisms. As E. Nagel put it in 1979, “Some functional wholes certainly can be analysed in that manner while for others (for example, living organisms) no fully satisfactory analysis of that type has yet been achieved” (p. 397). Nonetheless, that such analysis is to be done was taken as self-evident, until, in 1988, M. Ruse challenged reductionism over biology: Could we get rid of teleology? One supposes that even Darwinians admit that in principle we could. One could talk always in terms of the past and of what selection did. But one would have to drop the artifact metaphor, and with it would go its incredible heuristic power . . . Faced with a new organism, speculation would be barred. One would have to look simply at its performance in the wild. This seems an unduly harsh restriction in order to make a philosophical point. Apart from anything else, paleontology would become quite impossible. And in any case, linguists are always pointing to the widespread use of metaphor right through our lives, including (especially including) physics. Why should biology be uniquely purified and crippled? (pp. 48–49)


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Each proposal at reducing functional wholes met with anomalies that demanded ever more auxiliary hypotheses. Thus, reductionist models grew clunky and failed to digest what they were trying to reduce. By 1992, the end of the reductionist paradigm was nigh. As M. Bedau concluded then, its approach “is fundamentally flawed; furthermore, its flaws can be traced precisely to its attempt to be quantitative, descriptive, and value-free” (p. 34). Despite its heuristic impotence, ideological bias, and waning appeal, reductionism has had a powerful cognitive effect – it prevented the mainstream from taking the functional-holistic nature of climate seriously. The example of the college anthology serves as a reminder: although it was clear to specialists by 1992 that reductionism had been a conceptual mistake, the outcry against Gaia-in-college forced a textbook change in favour of reductionism in editions after 1994 until now. In conventional philosophy, the awareness of the reductionist cul-de-sac did not matter; it paled in significance by comparison to the unsettling alternative. The more became known of climate, and its interactive, dynamic, quasi-organic makeup, the more alien, subversive, and monstrous this new information appeared, and the fewer thinkers wanted to have anything to do with it. Thus climate change was ignored. By 2006, T. Flannery summed the state of affairs thus: “It is a reductionist worldview that has brought the present state of climate change upon us” (p. 17). There is little that can be said to rebut this charge. Conventional philosophy has not helped. Conventional philosophy is on record for worsening the problem, and not for being part of the rational solution. The Far West elite have accrued a burden of guilt. But what would it take to correct this situation and to show, as Wittgenstein would say, the fly the way out of the fly-bottle? To turn to the final aspect of this preliminary examination of the heuristic impact of climate on philosophy, what would mainstream recognition of such being require? The reality of climate change refutes reductionist, dualist, and static notions about nature. The obstacle that needs to be overcome concerns stylistic handicaps in the way we are trained to think. For the past half century, conventional philosophy has been done in analytic and postmodern styles, whose “parting of the ways” has been described (Friedman, 2000). Despite differences, these styles share a set of ways, or proclivities of reasoning, that stand in the way of climate philosophy. Three inclinations are salient. First, analytic philosophers dissect concepts; postmodern philosophers deconstruct texts. Both know how to pull data apart. Conceptualizing

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climate turns on the opposite. It requires putting data together. This requires re-learning the art of synthesis, an art lost since Hegel. This is not as simple as it sounds, for an adequate synthetic reflection of functional wholes would mirror their dynamic unfolding. This goes beyond additive arithmetic and is not a matter of just “putting two and two together.” Instead it means to surf the data flow, to find patterns in information, and to discern where such gestalts point next. Figuratively speaking, this would be a matter of exploring how two and two eventually make five. Second, in reaction to the trauma of last century’s lethal ideologies, analytic and postmodern thinkers have come to detest dogma. Analytic thinkers pride themselves on being sceptics. Postmodern thinkers pride themselves on working with the idea that everything is more or less relative, or at least “has another side to it.” Such a dissecting, deconstructive style was the right response to fascism and Stalinism half a century ago. Since such unified worldviews bred violence, pluralistic open-mindedness was an appropriate form of intellectual resistance. But now the situation is different. Climate change and other biospherical harms are being perpetrated by political and corporate entities that use communicative tactics of pluralistic open-mindedness for the sake of financially expedient obfuscation. Hence climate change continued to be portrayed as an “issue” and a “debate” long after all issues had been settled and all debates were closed. Hence irresponsible, obtuse, or corrupt policy makers could get away with making seemingly sagacious suggestions of “the need for more research.” Conventional philosophers, by virtue of a reasoning style that has outlived its purpose, have unwittingly played into the hands of such perpetrators. The style taught at Harvard or Oxford is not all that different from the scepticist sophistry used by Exxon-Mobil executives. Both converge in the rejection of absolutes. Specifically, the style shared by the analytic and postmodern camps is the rejection of rationally attainable absolutes. In such rejection, both camps of conventional philosophy are indebted to Hume. But Kant reminds us that progress unfolds along a critical path equidistant from the poles of sceptical Hume and dogmatic Wolff.9 In this light, conventional philosophy has lost its critical balance. Climate change is an empirical reminder of the need for a Wolffian antithesis to the Humean vogue. There are indeed absolutes, such as human dependence on biological production, which, in turn, relies on benign, unchanging climatic conditions. Such absolutes are trivial. It is precisely their triviality that turns them into the basis for synthesis and progress. Triviality makes the absolute look uniform from all angles. Geometrically speaking, absolutes are the cognitive equivalent of spheres – no matter the perspective adopted, the thesis to be judged will always look perfectly round.


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Another sign of the Humean excess in conventional thought, next to the scepticist compulsion, is the mark left by Hume’s deconstruction of natural causal flows into disconnected empirical instances arbitrarily joined by subjective habit. Hume’s misgivings about mind-independent causal flows had been so congenial in the Far West that the academic riddle persists to this day over whether he, or Kant, had gotten it right. Papers, even entire books, continue to be written on the perceived problem of whether Kant’s second analogy succeeds in clearing up Hume’s doubt, or whether Hume enjoyed the last word (Watkins, 2005).10 Over climate change, the Humean appropriation paralyses conventional thought. The research program devoted to understanding the workings of human- and American-made climate change rests on the core hypothesis of “climate forcing.” This is the contemporary reincarnation of the early modern ontology known as “physical influx” – the idea that an ongoing happening (Ereignis), such as human practices, creates a causal power that forces another happening to come into existence, such as global warming. From the view of conventional philosophy, climatologists seem naïve: since Hume had taken causal influx apart, the hypothesis of climatology, climate forcing, must be an illusion. But seen from the view of climatology, conventional philosophers rely on the wrong books and are trapped by bad ideas. The third and final proclivity of reasoning that needs to be abandoned if philosophy is to escape from its conventional handicap is the inward turn that is shared by analytic and postmodern styles. Culture matters, but not nature. In this inward turn, mind, language, and society are celebrated philosophical topics today. Matter, webs, and climate are not. This inward orientation was innocuous prior to climate change. Through climate change, it has morphed into a heuristic handicap. By turning to climate, philosophy adopts an alternative style of reasoning. This style begins with an outward turn. It is characterized by being in touch with biospherical reality, and not in denial of it. This new style will also be in touch with comparative thought, the Far Eastern, Eurasian, East European, and global, indigenous notions of reality that had been scorned and now appear as the heuristic tools that might save us. Such a turn to climate and the planet has consequences. For one thing, it implies that ontology, freed from its Far West chains, reinvents itself as an inquiry into functional wholes otherwise known as the study of field-being. For another, it means that philosophy, freed from its cognitive handicap, reinvents itself as what it had been in the Enlightenment: weltweisheit or a world-wisdom. It is time to overthrow a paradigm.

Chapter 2

Nature in the Active Voice Val Plumwood Australian National University

The Need for a Thorough Rethink It seems increasingly possible that many of those now living will face the ultimate challenge of human viability, reversing our species’ drive towards destroying our planetary habitat. Two important recent books, Diamond (2005) and Wright (2004), show how cultures that have been unable to change a bad ecological course have gone down (see also Reid, 2005). The appearance of ecological crises on the multiple fronts of energy, climate change, and ecosystem degradation suggests we need much more than a narrow focus on energy substitutes. We need a thorough and open rethink that has the courage to question our most basic cultural narratives. Imagine this scenario – the northern tribe of Easter Islanders never question the desperate religious cult that has devastated their section of the island as they try to placate with tree sacrifice the angry gods who withhold the rain. Instead, their leaders look around for new sources of trees, casting their eyes perhaps on the still-forested lands of the smaller tribe to the south. Meanwhile, their clever men, their scientists, are set to search for tree substitutes – other types of vegetation perhaps. But the need to consume the trees, given by the religion, is not open to question. Most public discussion in our society is dominated by the tyranny of narrow focus and minimum rethink. A rethink deficit is a poor rational strategy in a situation where so many cracks are appearing in the empire, where multiple ecological problems are compounding and converging.

Nature in the Active Voice

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Strategies that limit us to casting about for simple substitutes are dangerous. We revamp those hazardous sources good sense has led us to resist so far – nuclear fuels, for example. Rethinking deficit strategies do not encourage us to question the big framework narratives that underpin commodity culture’s extravagant demands and cult of economic growth. Or to question our right, as masters of the universe, to lay waste the earth to maintain this cult’s extreme lifestyle. So, getting back to my case study, where could my putative Easter Islanders go to find intellectual help? The Islanders of my scenario obviously need people with the courage to look about them and speak up for change. Scientists and activists, you might call them. They need ecological knowledge and memory to help them recognize how nature supports their lives – ecological science and history. Most crucially, they also need people who can open their culture to self-criticism, make them think harder about their big assumptions, such as their high-consumption religion, and its suitability for their very limited support context. In my scenario, science does what it is told by power, and scientists are not encouraged to or intellectually equipped to address the bigger questions. So the Islanders need more than science, and maybe a different kind of science. Perhaps what my Easter Islanders need is a college of philosophers, backed up by a full choir from the humanities? Supposedly, the subject area with the brief for the maximum, full tank rethink is philosophy, whose best traditions have claimed to hold everything open to question. As a feminist philosopher, I would say that philosophy does not always live up to these ideals, and itself has a significant self-reflection deficit. Much of it is far too uncritical of the canon to which I myself feel very little loyalty. (My own allegiance is to certain kinds of philosophical argument and methods but not to the canon.) Obviously philosophy with an excessive respect for tradition won’t help the Islanders with their rethink problem. They might get more help though from the more radical strand of philosophy that endeavours, in Foucault’s words (1986), “to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known.” Could the recent area of Environmental Philosophy help the Islanders to “think differently” about the dogmas that are ruining their island?

Environmental Philosophy First appearing in academia in the area of value theory in the early 1970s, Environmental Philosophy has now made itself felt across the whole

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discipline of philosophy, taking in such areas as political philosophy, ethics (including justice ethics), history of philosophy, moral epistemology, and metaphysics. In all these areas philosophers have exposed the dangerous logic of human-centred frameworks that devalue and background the nonhuman world. Some, such as myself, have drawn on epistemological standpoint theory to argue that human-centeredness weaves a dangerous set of illusions about the human condition right into the logic of our basic conceptual structures (see Plumwood, 1993). Environmental Philosophy remains marginal, many would say, in academia.1 There have been some great recent contributions to the field (e.g. see Matthews, 2003 and 2005), but my overall assessment from over thirty years of involvement is that the discipline needs re-commitment and renewal, and presently is not sufficiently addressing our planetary ecological crisis or providing us with adequate guidance. (Perhaps the increasing influence of money in our learning systems would help explain why this area has been neglected.) Certainly Environmental Philosophy no longer holds the premier place it held globally in the 1970s and 1980s among new non-science disciplines. In Australia, the area has faced neglect or outright hostility from conventional philosophy, and has receded. In the Humanities, the baton has been picked up by emerging stars – ecopolitics, ecoanthropology, and ecocritique – in literature. I will have more to say about their important contributions later.2 For critique of the reductionism and idealism about nature in these texts, refer to Plumwood in Heyd (2005 and 2009). For those who understand how serious the crisis is, this is a race for survival, a race against time to remake the culture. But you would never think so from the low priority these areas are accorded in the Humanities and in general philosophy programs and discussion. Perhaps one reason the Easter Islanders might not get much guidance from Environmental Philosophy is because the college has been conventionally divided since the early 1970s into the shallow and the deep factional polarities, depending on whether their concern is with humans or nonhumans. Australian environmental philosophers have contributed in major ways on both sides: John Passmore arguing in 1974 for the adequacy of a “humans only” tradition was balanced by local theorists from the same period on the deep side. Deep Ecology and Deep Green Theory were major brand names that emerged in the 1970s. Themes of respect for nature, critiques of human arrogance and human-centeredness, debates about intrinsic and instrumental value appeared in their 1970s’ papers. Deeps focused on a better deal for nonhumans – with other human-oriented ecological issues counted as shallow. Many argued for an expansion of ethics to


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nonhumans, or for their inclusion in a larger ethical community, but with very different views about how to constitute it. People like Peter Singer (also 1974) wanted to extend the ethical community minimally to those individuals most like humans, certain animals, others including myself wanting a much larger, less humanized community, with an ethic of respect and attention needing no stopping point. On the other, “shallower” wing, philosophers like Passmore argued that a position considering only human interests would be enough to get us by, that it is dangerous to question human supremacy, and advocated minimum rethink – a cleverer instrumentalism was needed. Nonhuman harm, in this view, matters just when humans suffer too. I would argue against the minimizing rationality of instrumentalism that genuinely sustainable systems cannot be ones that allocate merely minimum resources for providers’ survival, as egoist economic rationality currently dictates. They must encourage greater levels of consideration for nonhuman providers’ long-term well-being. This rules out instrumental, servant, or slave-like relations, as well as competitive market relations (to name a few of those that encourage us to cut costs at the provider’s expense), and rules in mutualistic forms of rationality. This is why I think the conventional deep/shallow division is a pernicious false choice. A rigid division that makes us choose between human and nonhuman sides precludes a critical cultural focus on problems of human ecological identity and relationship, and is also bad for activism. It assumes a fallacious choice of self/other, us versus them approaches, in which a concern is contaminated by self-interest unless it is purely concern for the other. Most issues and motivations are double-sided, mixed, combining self/other, human and nonhuman interests, and it is not only possible but essential to take account of both. Global warming is a case in point. Humans will lose, and so will nonhumans. Both kinds of concerns must be mobilized and related. Philosophy, I think, must understand humans as immersed in a medium that is both deep and shallow (although not in the same place). Our shift into a mixed framework enables us to see that human-centeredness can have severe costs for humans as well as nonhumans. Under the old criterion of depth, in which consideration of costs to humans is inevitably “shallow,” it is not possible to consistently raise the question of how far humancenteredness is a disadvantage to humans themselves. I think a more promising approach is to redefine what is “deep” as what challenges humancenteredness. Then we can address both sides and kinds of issues, human and nonhuman, in a deeper way. Human-centeredness is a complex syndrome that includes the hyperseparation of humans as a special species

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and the reduction of nonhumans to their usefulness to humans, or instrumentalism. Many have claimed that this is the only prudent, rational, or possible course. I argue contrary to this that human-centeredness is not in the interests of either humans or non-humans, that it is even dangerous and irrational. My argument is that one of its results is a failure to understand our embeddedness in and dependency on nature, that it distorts our perceptions and enframings in ways that make us insensitive to limits, dependencies, and interconnections of a nonhuman kind. Where mind is taken as coincident with the human, hyperseparation is expressed in denying both the mindlike aspects of nature and the nature-like aspects of the human, for example, human immersion in and dependency on an ecological world. When we hyper-separate ourselves from nature and reduce it conceptually, we not only lose the ability to empathize (and to see the nonhuman sphere in ethical terms) but also get a false sense of our own character and location that includes an illusory sense of agency and autonomy. So human-centred conceptual frameworks are a direct hazard to nonhumans, but are also an indirect prudential hazard to Self, to humans – especially in a situation where we press limits. This is one of many places where insights drawn from feminist theory can be helpful. Male-centeredness (a good parallel in some ways to humancenteredness) can be damaging to men as well as to women. It makes men insensitive to dependencies and interconnections, as well as devaluing women. It has to be tackled from both sides, by changing men and by changing women, changing individuals and changing institutions. Humancenteredness is similarly double-sided, and we have to see the denial of our own embodiment, animality, and inclusion in the natural order as the other side of our distancing from and devaluation of that order. Human-centred culture damages our ability to see ourselves as part of ecosystems and understand how nature supports our lives. So the resulting delusions of being ecologically invulnerable, beyond animality, and “outside nature” leads to the failure to understand our ecological identities and dependencies on nature. This failure lies behind many environmental catastrophes, both human and nonhuman. The inability or refusal to recognize the way nonhumans contribute to or support our lives encourages us to starve them of resources. It has justice aspects because we refuse to give other species their share of the earth, and it has ethical aspects because we fail them in care, consideration, and attention. This means that our “deep” human-centred ethical failures and our “shallow” prudential failures are closely and interactively linked.


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Nuclear Power A corollary is that a deep analysis that challenges human-centeredness can have much to say to human sustainability. The deep aspects come from the need to see ourselves as more limited beings, constrained by the ecological needs of the larger biospheric community. There is definitely a deep side to the energy and climate issues, although we don’t hear much about it. A classic example is nuclear power. There are major concerns about human welfare, but the issue definitely has a deep side, both in terms of ecojustice for nonhuman lives and systems risked, and in terms of technological overconfidence and the approach to risks and limits. I think the illusion of ecological invulnerability appears in the way its advocates fail to imagine or take seriously its enormous ecological risks and costs – the risks of storing radioactive wastes for up to half a million years, for example, and the enormous risks involved in transport and storage. We get nuclear instead of rethink. Nuclear advocates would inflict a horrendous burden of waste disposal and other risks on many future generations of humans and nonhumans, none of whom will benefit or be consulted (see Routley and Plumwood, 1980, 1982). Why? So we can put off the inevitable rethink for another fifty years and continue the energy extravaganza that derives from seeing ourselves as masters of the universe. The deep aspect of climate and energy issues is the need to rethink ourselves as more limited and responsible beings in the biosphere. This also implies rejecting technologies that demand future human invulnerability and perfection, such as perfectionist forms of nuclear and genetic tinkering.

Reductionism and Human/Nature Dualism Contemporary human societies seem to have many similar problems to the Easter Islanders – failure to understand our ecological situation, being out of touch with what is happening to our ecological world and with ourselves as ecological beings. Can Environmental Philosophy perhaps help us understand how we got into this situation? I think it can. We need to understand the history and the logic of some key concepts to see how the trap we are in has been put together. Then there is a chance we might work out how to get out of it – although sadly, causative insight provides no guarantee of escape. The hyperbolized opposition between humans and the nonhuman order I call human/nature dualism is a western-based cultural formation going back thousands of years that sees the essentially human as part of a radically

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separate order of reason, mind, or consciousness, set apart from the lower order that comprises the body, the woman, the animal, and the pre-human (see especially Plumwood, 1993 and Lloyd, 1984). Human/nature dualism conceives the human as not only superior to but as different in kind from the nonhuman, which is conceived as a lower non-conscious and non-communicative purely physical sphere that exists as a mere resource or instrument for the higher human one. The human essence is not the ecologically embodied “animal” side of self, which is best neglected, but the higher disembodied element of mind, reason, culture, and soul or spirit. The other side of this is the reduction of nature that is part of the dualist formation. On the one side of this hyperseparation, we set ourselves sharply apart from everything else as essentially mindful beings. On the other side we get the concept of nature as dead matter, all elements of mind and intelligence having been contracted to the human. The idea of nature as dead matter, to which some separate driver has to add life, organization, intelligence, and design, is part of human/nature dualism. This ideology of dualism and human apartness can be traced down through western culture through Christianity and modern science. With the enlightenment, human apartness is consolidated and augmented by a very strong form of reductionist materialism, whose project, in Descartes’ formulation, is “the empire of man over mere things.” This framework identifies mind with consciousness, solidifies the human species as uniquely conscious agents, and reduces nonhuman forms to “mere matter,” emptied of agency, spirit, and intelligence. Reductive concepts that restrict even the vocabulary of mindfulness and moral sensibility to humans naturalize the treatment of nonhumans as slaves or mere tools – making it seem natural that they are available for our unconstrained use and are reduced to that use (are “resources”). Reductionism, as an important cultural development associated with modernity, actually relies on a reified separation that took place a lot earlier, through a process of splitting and a hegemonic construction of agency and identity. According to a typical hegemonic pattern, the most general form of mind/body dualism, matter itself (chaos) is not creative, but is silent and formless. Being is split into an uncreative, featureless material part and a hyperseparate, externalized, and often dematerialized “director” or “driver,” usually intelligence, mind, or reason, on the other side. The “driver” is the real author of change (of the outcome or issue), as a separate mechanism or intelligence driving the materially reduced organism from outside, and it is to this external driver that true agency and respect is attributed. Plato


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plays this out in the Timaeus with a cast of cosmos (rational principle) as driver of chaos – prior, formless, empty, and inchoate matter. It is important to understand how the reductive materialism that defines modernity derives from this older construction splitting from and devaluing the material. It is not a bold new beginning, launching out into the void in an explosion of brave new rationality. It simply affirms universally one side of this older dualism, denying the spirit side of the original dualism completely or confining it to humans (or gods). That is, the reductionist materialism that is regarded as the new beginning to modernity is actually just a truncated dualism, which preserves at its heart the original splitting and reducing process that strips mind, intelligence, and agency out of materiality and awards it to a separate driver. It represents nature as passive and uncreative, real creativity coming only from (various) mind-identified drivers, usually humans or humanoid. Modernity’s philosophical contribution so understood is less impressive, that of killing off the driver, but without questioning the reduced concept of materiality that was its other side. This truncated dualism is what underpins the empire of man over mere things, what propels its commodity spirituality.3 Modernist reductionism is highly relevant to the ecological crisis. This ideology has been functional for western culture in enabling it to colonize and exploit the nonhuman world and so-called primitive cultures with less constraint. But it also inherits the dangerous illusions denying human embeddedness in and dependency on nature I have been discussing. It generates modernity’s dominant narratives of scientific progress, unconstrained commodity culture, and unlimited growth. By consolidating the narratives of the empire of man over mere things, reductionist rationality removes key constraints at the dawn of commoditization and capitalism. This is no coincidence of course. I think we do have to understand philosophy in social terms, not as a collection of individual philosophical ideas.

Science Consolidates the Empire Science is crucial in consolidating the Empire of Man over Mere Things. In the new scientific fantasy of mastery, the new human task becomes that of remoulding nature to conform to the dictates of reason to achieve salvation – here on earth rather than in heaven – as freedom from death and bodily limitation. The idea of human apartness emphasized in culture, religion, and science was, of course, shockingly challenged by Charles Darwin in his argument that humans evolved from nonhuman species. But

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these limited insights of continuity and kinship with other life forms (the real scandal of Darwin’s thought) remain only superficially absorbed in the dominant culture, even by scientists. The traditional scientific project of technological control is justified by continuing to think of humans as a special superior species, set apart and entitled to manipulate and commodify the earth and other species for their own exclusive benefit. This world is conceived as an aggregation of material objects, meaningless in themselves and only given meaning or form by their driver. This has been called “the death of nature” (especially in Merchant, 1981). The organismic idea of nature as a realm of creative and self-organizing systems has to be killed off by capitalism/reductionism because nature in the active and intelligent voice cannot so easily be backgrounded, appropriated, and destroyed for human gain. Scientific reductionism assumes a mindless, meaningless, materialist universe open to endless unrestricted manipulation and appropriation: nature is the suppressed slave collaborator – a mere resource, or transparent enabler of projects (on the knowledge model involved here, see chapter 2 of Plumwood, 2003). Now most modern philosophy has supported this materialist reductionism in the name of defending “hard-headed” scientific rationality. In this Australian philosophers (many operating under the rather misleading label “empiricism”)4 have been in the lead, insisting that no other rational possibilities exist. Alternatives are debunked as involving superstition and primitivism, even animism, in contrast to science and rationality. I think it is a serious mistake to identify science and rationality with materialist reductionism, and that more respectful forms of science are not only possible but are better forms of rationality. Now this minimizing rationality that makes the least of the nonhuman other is not materialism in the sense that it respects the material order or works generally in its favour, and in my view it should not really be called “materialism” at all. Of course, some materialist philosophers concede that often it’s a better predictive assumption to think as if there was some mindfulness to the nonhuman world [what Dennett (1989) calls the Intentional Stance; see also Dennett, 1996], but add that we don’t really have to take that mindfulness seriously – it’s all just a metaphor! This way we can preserve the exploitation benefits of reduction without all the costs of sacrificing knowledge and order. As a philosophical animist, I argue that this is doublethink, and that we do have to take the intentional stance quite seriously for nonhumans (see Plumwood, 1993, chapter 8). We will lose the justification for Empire – an empire of growing human, cultural, and biological poverty – but can open another door to a richer world, and can


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begin to negotiate life membership of an ecological community of kindred beings. This is a better rationality.

Creationism This analysis casts the contemporary position known as Creationism in an interesting new light. I see creationists as affirming the original reductionist split that deprived nature of creative power, meaning, and mind. Creationists say things like: “I am not a mere accident.” “I am not ‘a cosmic accident of a chaotic medium.’” “I am not just a ‘fluke of nature.’” “I am a product of unnatural selection, not natural selection, the product of a designer, a creator.” “I’m not the descendant of apes. I was put here by a designer.” “It [nature] couldn’t have got there by itself. It needed a designer.” Several interesting things are happening here: an insistence on human apartness, and an insistence on nature’s blindness and lack of mind. Apartness forces creationists to deny the fluidity of the human the evolution story requires, its flowing on into the nonhuman, both at death, and in historical, evolutionary terms from nonhuman as well as human ancestors. The Creationist Museum in Kentucky, for example, denies the existence of “missing link” fossils, asserting that humans have always been as they are now. Supposed “missing links” are actually deformed people (Bates, 2006, pp. 24–30). It is clear that in rejecting the “random selection” of evolution and calling for a designer, creationists are affirming the very same reduced concept of material order as “mere things” posited by reductive materialism. Nature is an accidental, chaotic, and basically meaningless sphere lacking genuine creativity. In this impoverished creation narrative, mere things have no creativity, only an external designer can have it. Creationists are endorsing the reductionist, debased, “mere matter” concept of nature supplied by reductive science, following in the Platonic footsteps. Creationism is about re-affirming human apartness and the reduced concept of matter associated with it (including the mind/matter split), together with a project to reinstate the original driver/father, or something very like him.5 Creationists distance from the meaningless “mere things” they see science as revealing, as well as expressing the faith that the missing meaning will be

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returned by an all-powerful creator in the future paradise to come. Creationism is very much a reassertion of human apartness, plus the assimilation of the world of nature to the mindless and meaningless sphere left after the external driver is done away with. Nature – portrayed as random, heartless, and lacking (“mere”) – is reduced to mere accident, a chaotic sphere evolving through blind chance and meaningless accident, and thus incapable by itself of delivering the culmination of history – the human mind, as uniquely exhibited in our own species! Meaning, intelligence, and communicativity belong to the external driver, who is to be found only in the human or humanoid sphere (see Plumwood, 1993, p. 110). At bottom Creationism buys the very same reduced framework as reductive materialism. We can see that contemporary Creationism is a reaction to and is conceptually parasitic on reductionism. Of course creationists are right in wanting to reject the meaningless universe, but wrong in endorsing the driver/materiality split or in demanding restoration of the original defunct driver. Both positions are guilty of the same fault of denying and suppressing nature’s own mindfulness and creativity. Science has been busy generating wondrous narratives (usually told by the scientific community in very inhibited, mind-evacuated vocabularies, and in mutually censoring ways) about this self-creativity.6 These narratives are usually much richer and more attentive to the world around us than the simplistic patriarchal narratives of the creationists in which the world is the recent invention of a humanoid god. But science is severely hampered in countering the Creationist worldview, and in representing and celebrating the creativity of nature it discloses, by its traditional identification of rationality with reductive materialism. In a way, reductive forms of science have themselves to blame for Creationism. A sufficiently stripped-down, dualized machine nature demands an external, anthroform designer. So reductionist science has helped produce the demand for a designer through its own mistaken reductionist and mechanistic stance. So to the creationist the philosophical animist would say: Your story of Creation is really impoverished compared to the incredible, infinite complexity of the real earth story written in the rocks and in the bodies of living things, species diversity, and evolution. Without the draining out of spirit and creativity from matter and its centralization in your godfigure, we have creative, active, and mindful matter all around us.7 In an intentional universe we can have it both ways, a dispersed creativity and a decentralized intentionality. For this, we need to spread concepts of agency and creativity more widely into what we have thought of as the dead world of nature.


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Thinking Differently So reductionism (reductive materialism) represents a very incomplete rejection of the original spirit/matter dualist framework. A genuine rejection would be an enriched materialism that puts back what has been stripped out, the mindful and creative properties handed over to the defunct driver. However, the debate usually assumes a false choice of reductive materialism versus creationism, with conventional science calling on us to defend the extreme reductionism and human hyperseparation that it so wrongly identifies with rationality. The debate has assumed a false choice of creativity as the prerogative of the intense agency/pinpoint of a singularized Creator, versus creativity as confined to the human knower (culture) and stripped from non-agentic nature. The real alternatives are not creationism versus reductionism, but creationism, reductionism, and animism as enriched materialism, where animism would spread mind and creativity out much more widely. That the opportunity is available philosophically to do this via openness to the intentionality of the world I argued in my 1993 book, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Monopolizing mind may make us feel superior but it is not helping our accommodation to the earth. An animist materialism has a different answer to Creationism than reductive materialism identified with science (which really doesn’t have an answer at all except self-promotion). It advises science to re-envisage materiality in richer terms that escape the spirit/matter and mind/matter dualisms involved in creationism. Forget the passive machine model and tell us more about the self-inventive and self-elaborative capacity of nature, about the intentionality of the nonhuman world. If the other-than-human world has such capacities, we don’t need an external designer to put them in. It is its own designer, to the extent that design is in question. Recent work in eco-anthropology supports this possibility for thinking differently. It finds that many indigenous cultures have much more animated, agentic, and intentional views of the world of nature. Writers such as Graham Harvey (2005), Deborah Bird Rose (2004), and Tim Ingold (2000) have shown how our concepts of rationality have misunderstood and misrepresented indigenous animism in our own dualistic terms. Colonial ethnocentrism saw “animism” as holding that humanoid (often demonic) spirits inhabit and animate material objects as separate drivers, which could be welcomed, influenced, or evicted. This ploy enabled them to read our own dualisms back into other cultures, and to present a major alternative to reductionism as primitive and anti-rational, thus heading off

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the possibility of anyone (at least anyone rational) being able to think differently. So the big question is: Can we think differently? Can what has been stripped out of our conception of the material world be put back? Can we begin to entertain the hypothesis that the world of nature around us may have many of the intelligent and creative powers the splitters hive off to the designer? Suppose that instead of splitting and denigrating the intelligence of the nonhuman world and attributing creation to an external deity or driver, we began to try to see creativity and agency in the other-than-human world around us. Although it helps to reveal the wondrous creativity of life, science has been doing an ambiguous job in conveying this message of evolutionary theory, because of its ideological commitment to reductionism and its mistaken identification of this narrow and human-centred outlook with rationality. We need to rethink concepts of meaning and accident in relation to the nonhuman world, and to question the reductive and human-centred frameworks that depict places in nature, often rich in narrative, as the product of Meaningless Coincidence. Ancient places such as the Stone Country of Arnhem Land confront us sharply with the difficult knowledge of our own limitations as knowers, for in the complex and intricate narrative that explains the emergence of the correspondingly complex and intricate stone forms we see around us, we can as human observers never know the full story that matches the intricacy we observe. We can discern only a few of its broader outlines: that these extraordinary formations have evolved through the ancestral processes of sea, rain, and wind that have sculpted them through deep tides of time. To save face, our instrumental culture conveniently dismisses the rest under the rubric of coincidence, contingency, accident, or formless chaos, belittling all complexities we cannot know or control. So thinking differently is (in part) about recognizing creativity and intelligence in nature and in evolution: Why can’t we see evolution, for example, as a form of experimentation, of testing and learning, like trial and error, a form of wisdom? Why can we not consider evolution as a demonstration of mind in nature, of the intelligence involved in species differentiation and elaboration, the intelligence of forms, “the wisdom in the wing” (Dennett, 1996) in the form of the species body and its adaptation (via species difference and elaboration) to a particular creative ecological niche via a process of evolutionary learning? Dispersing creativity and agency, we can think the possibility of creative, mindful matter. We do not need to make the choice between materiality and meaning the creationists create.


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These philosophical alternatives discerning wisdom and intelligence in the material world can help move us from the monological to the dialogical, from domination to negotiation with our very material ecological context. They make possible respect and renarrativization as ways to combat the regime of anonymous commodities, and have an important role to play in reducing overconsumption. We need new origin stories that can disrupt the commodity regimes that produce anonymity by erasing narratives of material origins and labour, and replacing them by narcissistic dreams of consumer desire and endless, consequenceless consumption and growth.

The Role of Writing The enriching, intentionalizing, and animating project I have championed is also a project that converges with much poetry and literature. It’s a project of re-animating the world, and remaking ourselves as well, as multiply enriched but consequently constrained members of an ecological community. Opportunities for re-animating matter include making room for seeing much of what has been presented as meaningless accident as creative nonhuman agency. In re-animating, we become open to hearing sound as voice, seeing movement as action, adaptation as intelligence and dialogue, coincidence and chaos as the creativity of matter. The difference here is intentionality, the ability to use an intentional vocabulary. Above all, it is permission to depict nature in the active voice, the domain of agency. The path has a mind of its own but a body shared by hundreds. It is a way through the woods, a way made by the five-toes, the four-toes, the cloven hooves and a few big clodhoppers like mine. This is a path with a memory, a remembrance of passings, and it offers itself to the future for those who recognize a way worth taking. A raven rasps its rapid cries into a strong, southwesterly wind, which rakes through treetops of ash, small-leaved lime, beech and oak. In holly thickets the wind stirs goldcrests and they sing like jingling pockets of change. Old hulks of crashed elm speak of an older wood. When they were alive, a track to take out timber and charcoal cut across the slope. The elms are long fallen and so are the woodsmen whose ghost road leads nowhere. The path only slides down the steep bank to glance along old fragments of the track and then swerves back into the trees, as if deciding it a bit too unsafe to follow the abandoned way. The path touches on the history of the hedge bank too: its mound and ditches perhaps medieval, maybe older, are also under lost trees that have

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shaken loose of the hedge and risen 15m into the air. And above them a pair of crows play in the updraught, tumbling through the wind, snapping at the strings of their own ways through the sky. Midway, between the canopy and the ground, a hard whirring sound: a hornet, slow in the cool air, finds its hole in the hollow lime trees and closes itself into the darkness there. On the narrow, wandering line below, gouged out of clay by hoof, pad, claw and the occasional boot, I follow – a passing thought. (Evans, 2006, p. 22) Notice that in this passage there are many active, agentic subjects that give the passage its life. Every sentence except one is in the active voice, and all involve intentionality. Although none of these subjects are human, we can all understand the passage quite well I think, and it does not cultivate the gothic or strike one as outlandish. Most of us would find it beautiful. Writers are among the foremost of those who can help us to think differently. Of course, artistic integrity, honesty, and truthfulness to experience are crucial in any re-discovery of “tongues in trees.” I am not talking about inventing fairies at the bottom of the garden. It is a matter of being open to experiences of nature as powerful, agentic, and creative, making space in our culture for an animating sensibility and vocabulary. But there are certain critical concepts that are used to stop us thinking differently, that are used in inhibiting and delegitimating any new or old animating sensibility. The concept of anthropomorphism, of “presenting nonhumans illegitimately as more like humans than they really are” plays a major role here. This charge of anthropomorphism is often invoked when someone is found guilty of presenting the nonhuman world in more agentic and intentional terms than reductionism allows. Anthropomorphism is a very tricky concept, with many functions. But one of its main recent roles is that of policeman for reductive materialism, enforcing polarized and segregated vocabularies for humans and nonhumans. Its covert assumption is usually the Cartesian one that mentalistic qualities are confined to the human, and that no mentalistic terms can properly be used for the nonhuman. Attempts to apply intentional terms for the nonhuman can then be said to involve presenting them in unduly human-like terms. For example, in reviewing the recent movie about King Penguins “The March of the Penguins,” many critics took particular exception to the film’s intentional description, to the idea that the Emperor Penguins could be said to “love” one another. In terms of the cluster of behavioural criteria for applying the term “love,” such as being willing to suffer in major ways for


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the loved one, the application of the term to the penguins seems well warranted. True, penguin lovers may move on next breeding season, but why require permanence? A high redefinition of love as lasting forever would certainly rule out most human loves. Of course this charge of anthropomorphism completely begs the question on nonhuman minds. That’s become its major function now, to bully people out of “thinking differently.” It is a highly abused concept, one so often used carelessly and uncritically to allow us to avoid the hard work of scrutinizing or revealing our assumptions, that there is a good case for dropping the term completely.8 Stop hiding behind that wall of Greek, and try saying what you mean in simple direct language! If your thesis is to be stated as “This film/book presents nonhumans as much more like humans than they really are,” be prepared to be asked: “In what respect”? If your reply is “Only humans can have minds, or the capacity to love,” be prepared to defend this indefensible claim, which is now out there in the open for all to see and object to. Otherwise, my advice is: free up your mind, and make your own contributions to the project of disrupting reductionism and mechanism. Help us re-imagine the world in richer terms that will allow us to see ourselves as in dialogue with and limited by other species’ needs, other kinds of minds. I am not going to try to tell you how to do it. There are many ways to do it. But I hope I have convinced you that this is not a dilettante project. The struggle to think differently, to remake our reductionist culture, is a basic survival project in our present context. I hope you will join it.

Chapter 3

Reflections on Modern Climate Change and Finitude Ruth Irwin Auckland University of Technology

Introduction There is a climate change conference in New Zealand in May with the subtitle “managing the unavoidable” (NZ Climate Change Adaptation Conference, 2009). David Adam of The Guardian polled all the 1,756 participants at the Research Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen (March 2009) and discovered that although 60% of them thought it was “technically and economically possible” to keep climate change under the 2°C threshold, only 18 of those who responded think we will achieve that target. Yet at the conference itself, scientists were adamant that mean planetary warming of 2°C above preindustrial levels was the outer limits of what could safely be described as stable and predictable climate. In fact, Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute warned that all the evidence since the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was released in 2007 indicates that global warming is occurring faster than any of the models predicted, and that feedback systems are already speeding up the process triggered by anthropocentric activity. Rahmstorf considers the 2°C threshold very dangerous, as it has a 50% possibility of tipping the climate past the zone of Holocene stability and into very unstable and likely nonviable environmental conditions. Nobody can really imagine what those conditions might be. One way or another, within the 2°C threshold or beyond it, cultural transformation of modernity will be firmly underway by the end of the century.

Reflections on Modern Climate Change and Finitude

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The large Scientific conference in Copenhagen (March 2009) made several important points that update information contained in the 2007 IPCC Report. Among other issues, we heard that a 4°C rise above pre-industrial mean climate levels could turn large areas of southern Europe into desert; sea levels will rise twice as fast as previously estimated; even lower levels of warming could unleash so much methane from arctic soils that will be impossible to halt escalating warming; a failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions could render half of the planet uninhabitable; the Amazon rainforest could suffer an 85% die back (Adam, 2009). Policy responses to climate change are undergoing rapid transformation. On the one hand, there is an apocalyptic message to climate change research – it is the end of the world as we know it. Actually, it is the end of the planet as we know it (the world is another matter). But very recently, the recognition that our consciousness of the problem has had little impact on our modern industrial way of life has stimulated another response; what comes after climate change? Can we adapt? In this chapter I will examine the various reactions to climate change, and look at the thinking of one of Germany’s most important philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger put serious effort into considering the social and philosophical problems of modernity from 1916 through to his death in 1976. His work anticipated most of the issues that climate change raises with uncanny clarity. Most importantly, he recognized the difficulty of escaping certain “essential” characteristics of the culture of modernity, which he called the Technological Gestell. Long before popular films and books began looking at the “end of civilizations” Heidegger generated a philosophy that examines the finitude of civilization but avoids the apocalyptic narrative because he does not have a teleological approach to time. The boundary “line” of finitude constitutes an endpoint, a death if you like. Given that there is nothing at all beyond that point, life as we live it is the locus of all meaning and value. Heidegger anticipates that having the line clearly in sight will stimulate a new readiness for change that cannot occur before this widespread recognition of finitude has taken place. Climate change is challenging the modern assumption that humanity is the master of nature. Mastery assumes we have the agency to make active decisions about our behaviour, however normalized. Since the Kyoto Protocol (1995), and especially the 2001 IPCC report, climate change is for the most part accepted as a very pressing problem, by people at all walks of life, in all countries across the planet. But the continued increase in greenhouse gas emissions over the last twenty years indicates that we are

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unable to alter our behaviour and respond to the restrictions on emission production that climate change presents. Consumerism relies heavily on cheap energy for production and transportation to distant, global markets. Economic growth is the mechanism for the smooth promotion of global consumerism. It is tied to annual increases in the rate of consumerism and in turn, the expectation, even by the poor, that they will do better out of consumerism next year than the evidential poverty of this year. Reliance on markets for basic supplies frees people from the constraints of their local environment, so that even if people are living in highly stressed ecologies, where mining, land clearance, or urbanization have compromised the environment, they can remain insulated from the pain and raw effects of the destruction. Every year economies grow, consumerism grows, and oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions grow. There have been various economic measures and numerous technological innovations that aim to send market signals to consumers, and alter the rate of greenhouse gas emission and energy consumption. Economic growth could benefit from these radical steps towards including pollution externalities and stimulating new technologies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions (Pachauri and Stern in Climate Change, 2009). But I argue that economics solutions are limited by what Heidegger calls the Technological Gestell or horizon. Economics is symbolic of a modern worldview that alienates humanity from nature at its philosophical foundations. It has been unable to comprehend a new philosophical basis in the mode of relating between humanity and nature. At the same time, there is clearly a readiness for important change to take place. People understand the magnitude of climate change and they are increasingly prepared for the sacrifices that a transformation of culture entails. The problem is direction. While we still conceive of solutions to climate change in economic terms, little transformation is possible by people ready, able, and unsure of what to do. Individual efforts make tangibly little effect when compared to the pollution produced by the aviation industry, or aluminium smeltering or any number of a dozen intensive industrial production processes. Martin Heidegger’s critique of modernity is especially important for comprehending the scale of the problem, the dead-ends, and the opportunities for deep and meaningful transformation. The philosophical separation of the subject from the object is the premise underlying the emergence of industrialization (for fuller discussion of this link, see Heidegger, 1989; Irwin, 2008a; Plumwood, 1993, and in this volume).


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Modernity is exemplified by the shift from seasonal lifestyles towards a new mode of technology, economics, and consumerism, to what Heidegger calls the technological Gestell (1977). This is a scientific, economic, and technological horizon for knowledge that has an all-encompassing logic. The technological Gestell determines all ways of knowing so that other, older ways of understanding (the plethora of gods, ghosts, spirits, dryads, poetry, music, and older forms of craftworks are all examples) are annihilated as irrelevant. Heidegger regards the Gestell as extremely dangerous because we forget, to use his terminology, to ask the question “What is Being?”1 Forgetting to question Being means we are content with the evidence that the appearance of the object provides in the worldview of the technological Gestell. This paucity of worldview is contributing to a fundamental loss of meaningfulness. The current, modern era is culminating in nihilism. The scope for knowledge gets narrower and narrower, the illusion of mastery over nature gets stronger and stronger, and the reality that we have much less agency than the separation of subject from object has led us to believe remains hidden from view. The determinism of the technological Gestell, which can be seen in positivist science and economics, is extremely difficult to emerge from. As I will show later, economics is being touted as the best method to alter consumer behaviour and mitigate climate change, but the evidence suggests that this strategy has been a complete failure. It is unlikely that experimental terraforming or other technological innovations will have substantial affect on altering climate change. (Although we will welcome any mitigation possible.) Despite all our best efforts within the modern worldview: the Brundtland Report (1989); the Kyoto agreement (1992), and various Emissions Trading Schemes (ETSs), the majority of climate change scientists believe the planet will go over the 2°C they suggest is the upper limit of relatively safe, post-industrial climate warming. Heidegger’s methodology for overcoming metaphysics or the technological Gestell is completely different from the conventional belief that we will “progress” beyond this mode of knowledge, as our comprehension of objective reality gets better and better, and we get teleologically nearer the Ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect mastery over nature. He conceives of the historical epoch of modernity as a whole, from beginning to end. Any iteration of understanding that occurs throughout has to be contextualized with the mode of being as a whole. The emphasis shifts from idealist progress to a finite epoch that has some defining moments particularly at its beginning and at its end. Structure of civilization-as-a-whole is similar to Heidegger’s structure on one’s life-as-a-whole. It is not conceived in the

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same way as the metaphysical tradition that is of a linear “progress,” most obvious when a child is growing up, and with the deterioration of old age carefully obscured, the finitude of death obliterated for the Ideal of a Heavenly after-world. Heidegger’s conceptualization of life-as-a-whole (and civilization-as-a-whole) has an entirely different structure. Time is not smoothly linear, with an assumption of teleological progress from the potential (Aristotle) of conception to the Ideal fulfilment in Heaven (cf. Adams, 2004; Eldred, 2009). Heidegger calls this the “two beginnings” (1999b). An epoch, from its birth or inception to its death or collapse, has to be understood as a whole. Consideration of the beginning and inevitable finitude of a civilization folds back to what is occurring now; and the contextualization of current events in the finitude of the civilization creates a better possibility for making authentic decisions within the fullest context for knowledge. This context of the civilization-as-a-whole broadens the horizon of knowledge. The focus in this chapter will be on the “second beginning,” the finitude of civilization or the “line” presented by climate change. From this much wider contextualization of the epoch of modernity, the question of economic growth and technological enframing is not as normalized or as determining as they appear from within the current moment. It was from this perspective that Heidegger, taking a line from Hölderlin, was able to think about the nihilism of the culmination of modernity in a different light. Hölderlin saw technology as “the danger and the saving power.” The technological Gestell is nihilist because it encourages people to forget to ask the question of Being. It is the culmination of modernity, the hyper-separation of humanity from nature, and an illusion of mastery through technological innovation. Its determining worldview appears to be impossible to escape, and it is heading us closer and closer to the collapse of modern civilization as the climate feedbacks increase the velocity of climate change beyond the capacity for human intervention. How the technological Gestell can also be a saving power is difficult to imagine. Certainly Heidegger did not think that technology offers any solution to the devastating nihilism of an event such as nuclear devastation or environmental degradation. He was not imagining the “saving power” as economists do, in terms of innovation, creativity, and mastery over a new spectrum of conceptual understanding. Paradoxically, while the technological Gestell encourages us to forget the meaningful questions of life, it also offers a kind of shelter. It protects the question of Being from those who have forgotten its significance. But Being does not simply disappear. Other modes of comprehension are not


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impossible, given the technological Gestell but they are marginalized. The question of Being simmers, waiting, ever-present, able to reach out and be recognized by anyone open enough to comprehend new modes of thought beyond the mere appearance of obvious properties. Thus, the positivist emphasis on evidence can co-exist with other ways of knowing. It is not a question of disposing of the technological in order for new forms of categorization, meaning, and language to evolve. It is a matter of disintegrating the determinism of the Gestell, so that the horizon has shifted, and technology co-exists with humanity and nature without dividing and alienating the one from the other. How this might occur is still unknown. But the readiness to consider it is becoming ever richer.

Two Beginnings and the Whole Climate change indicates a crisis in modern philosophy. In the End of Philosophy (1973b), Heidegger argues, with great detail, the long genealogy of ideas that resulted in the separation of the subject from the object that has been the premise for modern philosophy. This hyper-separation (Plumwood, 1993) of the human subject from the natural object shifted humanity from a fearful struggle against nature, to control over the conceptual understanding of nature. An object may exist, but the interpretation of it is always subjective. Only via rationality can we deduce the objective truth of its being. Speculative, Idealist philosophy has a basis in the nominalist conception of truth and existence prevailing in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, profoundly influenced by Plato’s concept of universal Being, altered and reiterated by Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, Berkeley, Kant, and others. Heidegger explores its many iterations, the latest of which is the postmodern “constructivist” theory that again positions human subjectivity in hierarchical priority over the objects of knowledge, on the basis that we construct our interpretations and ultimately, we are in control of those constructions. The conceptual apparatus of language and truth is complex and important and it is too large a topic for this chapter. Briefly, nominalist thought is sceptical that there is a direct correlation between an object and its name. Descartes wondered if his interpretation of the object were his imagination, his dreams, a frivolous and mischievous devil, and so forth. Ultimately he reduced certainty to his knowledge of him “self,” and rationality, so that even the phenomenological signals sent by his own body to his mind by the nervous system were open to doubt. The separation of the mind from the

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body, the subject from the object, and humanity from nature were complete. This hyper-separation and the privileging of a narrow range of rational deduction underlies modernity. Speculative, idealist philosophy has made possible the disconnection of human subjectivity from the local ecology. That alienation of subjectivity from natural objects is duplicated in the philosophy of science (positivism) and economics (cf. Marx). In Heidegger’s view, there is no translineum beyond finitude and to try and imagine it illegitimately takes value away from the potential for change this side of the line. He argues for a metamorphosis of worldview in the light of finitude. Jünger’s argument “over the line” hopes for a radical transformation of the human will, so we might arrive at utopia through willing the will itself. The will to will might rejuvenate our rejoicing at the simplest things in life, rather than the need for continuous consumerism. Those speculating that we could “adapt” to radically different climatic circumstances are taking a stance based on evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory, in Darwinian terms, repeats the same teleological presumptions (things get better and better) that permeate other modern discourse, such as economics. Fossil evidence suggests that some incredibly simple species have survived millions of years (the slater, for example) and other grand and sophisticated creatures have been made extinct relatively swiftly (Neanderthals spring to mind). There is little to suggest that humanity is capable of evolutionary adaptation as an “overcoming of mankind” (survival of the fittest) beyond the line. Anthropocentric climate change is directly attributable to the industrial period. Yet climate change is at a remove in scale from traditional environmental concerns with pollution and extinction in local ecologies. Climate change is global; it impacts the atmosphere, the wind, and rain patterns, the oceans, the forests, and the polar regions. The affects are not even, and some areas will be more vulnerable than others. The shift in scale complements the scale of industrial modernity. Very few places on the planet are intact from deforestation, mining, farming, urbanization, and other ravages of modern practices. Climate change is a crisis of mastery over nature. While the hyperseparation of subject from object placed emphasis on interpretation of the appearance of properties, we could disregard our integration in the ecological-whole. Philosophy and with it the Sciences and Humanities were swept up in the investigation of “essential” properties (psychological behaviourism, economics, progressive evolution, positivism, and so on) all of which exacerbate the illusion of mastery. The unfolding of that process is worth


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looking at closer because it still prevails as the normative policy discourse to cope with climate change. The planetary limits imposed by climate change though are creating a crisis in philosophy. It is becoming increasingly clear that human mastery over nature is a fallacy. The privileged separation of human society from the natural environment is not just a faulty philosophy, it has tangible and terrible consequences. If evidence does not confirm a hypothesis, then surely the ideas have to be reconsidered. The philosophical hyper-separation of subject from object, of humanity from ecology, has to be rethought.

Critique of the Technological Gestell Martin Heidegger is not generally known as an environmentalist. He is most famous for his critique of modernity. That critique, however, is based on an environmental premise; the shift in technology from craftwork to industrial mass production has alienated humanity from the seasonal tempo of the earth. Ultimately industrial pollution has produced climate change. The seasons are beginning to bite us back. The critique of modernity is a huge and unwieldy task. Heidegger thought it necessary, given the enormous changes that modern technology was imposing on cultures. Industrialism seems to offer many benefits. Life is “easier.” Heidegger argues it gives us the illusion of freedom. That is, freedom from the constraints of nature, from the perils of a bad season where the crops were pummelled before they were ripe, or the animals were starved after a very long winter. Industrialism lifts the local community out of the vagaries of seasonal paucity or plenty and connects people with a wider production system thus minimalizing local dependency on food and materials. Our attention is removed from the local ecology, to the political economy. The scale of climate change is altering the focus yet again, from the national to the global, and from the industrial to the planetary. Planetary ecology cannot be isolated to greenhouse gas emissions and the pollutants in the upper atmosphere. The ecology of the planet is intricately interrelated. Yet the old pastoral local ecology has been replaced. Somehow, we need to discover a way of shifting the basis of the Social Contract to do two things at once; accommodate the globalization of mass production and yet abandon the posture of mastery over nature. We could conceivably change the Social Contract so that there is no longer an assumption that the “state of nature” is “nasty, brutal, and short,” justifying the alienation of human

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beings from nature, recognizing instead that humans are natural beings, intimately interwoven in natural processes. Increased globalization has been advocated since very early in the industrial process. Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations (1776) argues for the shift towards commerce as a way of lowering the price of staple goods in all nations. The Invisible Hand guides the market, encouraging perfect competition, technological innovation, and minimal profiteering. Later Ricardo (1817) described how bartering the maximum efficiency of local production with other people’s maximum efficiency escalates the margins of profit growth in both places (despite a disparity in production values between the two). The a-political, globalized market has been the source of modern pride and freedom from localized scarcity for well over 200 years. But a number of very important considerations, particularly the power disparities of global politics, are omitted from the story of market equity. These are: the role of Royal monopolies in early global market practices, the power inequities that colonialism, wealth, and advanced technological arms continue to exert between “first” and “third” worlds, and the corruption that is rife throughout the market system (Maddoff, the chief executive of the NASDAQ, who was just convicted of fraud to the tune of 65 billion American dollars is a good example). Furthermore, age-old cultural assumptions are that nature is dangerous. Earlier peoples never knew when a sabre tooth tiger might leap out and catch them. According to Hobbes (1651) living in the state of nature was isolated, “nasty, brutish, and short.” While other views of nature are less violent – the Garden of Eden is a lovely example – our fall and eviction from such idyllic circumstances excludes peaceful nature from the basis of the political contract. The assumptions of selfish individualism and the desire of freedom from the tyranny of nature have roots in ideas older still. Heidegger contextualizes modernity in very old ideas that have stimulated ensuing philosophical assumptions. Like everyone with a classical education during the modern period, from the Renaissance through to about the 1980s, Heidegger learnt about the Antiquities in school. He believed that modern civilization has its crucible in the scholarship in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Most of his early work on modernity seeks enlightenment from early Greek thinking (1956, 1962, 1968a, 1969a, 1970, 1973a,b, 1975). The critique of modern technology and the romanticization of home and hearth was a common cultural motif in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s (which justified grabbing “empty” land from Poland and contributed to


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World War II). The horror of the war itself, and especially the industrial ordering of the death camps entrenched in Heidegger a deep revulsion for modern calculation and the “total mobilization” of all things within the politics of economics. The threat of nuclear devastation that emerged in the final weeks of that war introduced a completely new horizon to modernity. The finitude of civilization was in sight. Two other German thinkers helped Heidegger begin to consider the implications of industrial technology, warfare, and the finitude of civilization: Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger. Spengler alerts us to the function of stockpiling. One of the most significant shifts from agricultural to industrial life is storage capacity. Vast, long-term storage means communities are no longer at the mercy of seasonal production – tomatoes are no longer summer fruit but are available all year round. Long-term storage (like refrigeration) makes long-distance transportation possible. When local produce is out of season, or the harvest has been poor, it is possible to import all kinds of products from anywhere in the world. On the face of it, this appears to be a good thing. But Spengler argues it shifts our fundamental mode of being in relation to our local ecologies. It narrows our conception of nature, from the allegorical to the functional. Increasingly, the metaphor of the machine has taken over our understanding of nature and metaphysics. Physics does not mean physis (see especially “On the Essence and Concept of physis in Aristotle’s Physics B,” 1998a and Polt, 2006). The methodological order of the production line, made so famous by Ford in the 1920s, was permeating all ways of knowing. Spengler anguished in his book Man and Technics (1932) that all things organic are dying in the grip of the vice of organisation. An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The civilisation itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fashion. We think only in horsepower now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power. (p. 94) Later, Heidegger called this technological mode of understanding that encompasses all elements of the natural world, and ultimately of human subjectivity, the technological Gestell. In modernity, industrial-scale technology enframes all ways of knowing. It enlists everything towards the vast machinery of consumption. The limits of production are no longer seasonal or ecological, nor even the capacity of factories, instead they are determined by the pace of consumerism. Things can remain in storage; whether as raw materials not yet dug up, or as finished items waiting in

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containers, until the consumer requires them (cf. Irwin, 2008a, chapter 2; Zimmerman, 1990). When we are embedded in the economic paradigm of modernity, where everything is understood through the lens of the market (see Irwin, 2008b), every move simply reinforces the prevailing technological modes of behaviour and the situation gets mired more deeply than ever. It is like hoping for another worldview when you have lived all your life in a valley, surrounded by impassable mountains (see chapter four in this volume). The technological Gestell, or as Jünger put it, the “total mobilization” of all things in the machinery of consumption is so all-encompassing that other ways of knowing become illegitimate and increasingly forgotten (cf. Irwin, 2008a, chapter 8). The technological Gestell enframes all ways of knowing in the modern epoch as “standing reserve” for the potential use in the machinery of consumption. The discipline of economics is embedded within the technological horizon. Heidegger’s concern was “technological enframing” but this phrase has never caught on in the popular imagination. However, though it is usually viewed as a pseudo-science rather than as a philosophical or sociological phenomena, the concept of enframing does have its own common name: economics. Economics is the total management of all resources in the market rubric of consumerism, either as product for sale or as potential resource that contributes either abundance or scarcity value to the market price. Technology is essential to market hegemony as it is one of the few ways that “growth” can be achieved. Ultimately, Adam Smith (1776) explained that perfect market conditions make the widespread consumerism of products possible, at a price set by availability and production costs. The perfect market makes minimal profit because of fierce competition and transparency of costs. Profit making is often short-lived. Technological innovation, both in terms of efficiency of production processes or in the final consumer products, introduce three things that make profit possible: first, no competition, second, novelty (or fashion), and third, nontransparency of production costs. These factors mean that the company can set the price, rather than the consumers, and vast profit is possible. Hence, technological innovation not only reinforces the concept of progress, but is crucial to economic “growth.” There has been a fourth factor for the technological contribution to market turnover in recent years – built-in redundancy. With market saturation, turnover should slow down, but with the increased sophistication of technological gadgets, fixing them becomes more reliant on expertise and less possible by locals. Companies are able to control the maintenance end of


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their products, and make more profit by making them less reliable and more frequently in need of replacement. As yet nobody has done any work to correlate economic growth with increased greenhouse gas pollution. However, the economic recession, triggered by the collapse of the financial system in 2008, has had a far greater impact on greenhouse gas emissions than any of the economic incentives promoted by governments or pan-global institutions. Climate change policy advisers are hoping that climate change will introduce a fundamental shift in the market paradigm – one that will keep the basic premises of modernity intact. They hope that beginning to account for the effects of climate change (in terms of pollution set with cap and trade mechanisms as price per ton) and evaluation of risk (via insurance assessments) will ultimately alter the market price of all products (see Irwin, 2008a for a more comprehensive explanation and critique). The expectation is that the full value of extraction, production, and transport will actually be paid for, rather than leaving a huge segment of the costs as a market “externality.” This improvement leaves the economic paradigm as it is, only the prices set are different – introducing pollution as another inhibiting factor, with a similar function as scarcity in price setting. Higher prices are assumed to change consumer behaviour by driving down consumption, lowering the total emissions per capita. Sustainability is the restriction of rates of consumption to the rate of regeneration. It is a modern technological approach to the seasonal attunement of local ecologies. So, at the very least, future generations, and at best, the ecological systems are not compromised. There have been several economic methods proposed to achieve sustainability, all with little direct discussion of local ecological impacts. Furthermore, sustainability is always understood in the context of continuous, exponential, economic growth (Irwin, 2008b). Efficiency is the first and most important criteria for sustainability. That is, efficiency in production and consumption so the net result is the use of less energy and less material for goods. Efficiency relies heavily on new technology. Decoupling economic growth from physical resource consumption is another alternative (e.g. The Knowledge Economy that is intellectual property not physical property). Third, the ETSs that account for erstwhile externalities such as pollution and risk mitigation and send more realistic price signals to consumers. There are a number of naive assumptions about this economic theory as it stands. While profit and economic growth are the criteria for success and stability, any technological innovation pertaining to climate change and the

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new markets that are opening to accommodate it will be in addition to the existing use of built-in redundancies as a profit-making tool. These are anathema to sustainability and efficiency, but as they are already released from Pandora’s box they will never disappear while profit is the marker of status. In late modernity, economics stands on a particular philosophical ethos, which alienates humanity from nature for the purposes of market consumerism. Heidegger calls this the zone of consummate nihilism. Until the market is resituated as a minor mode of human interaction and an ethos of attunement with nature overcomes the Gestell or technological horizon, built-in redundancies and the motive of profit will continue to dominate. Fortunately, as I will discuss here, the proximity of climate change as a line in the sand is radically challenging the nihilism of unreserved economic growth and excessive, aimless profit. It is possible to do business in ecologically ethical ways, and more and more people are attempting to do so. Their fundamental motive for this change in ethos is ethical, not economic. Economics is the modern name for Spengler, Jünger, and Heidegger’s concept of the total mobilization of all things, (nature and humanity, should we still need to distinguish them) in the mechanics of consumerism. This worldview is so all-determining that “solutions” for climate change are only being conceived within the economic framework. This is the danger: the horizon of the technological Gestell has established the anthropocentric contribution to climate change and it is highly likely that within that economic horizon, no substantive change will take place. Heidegger was extremely despondent about this, describing the technological horizon as nihilism because it encourages humanity to forget the really meaningful question that is the essence of humanity’s uniqueness – What is Being? What is behind the appearance of things? One chapter is too short to examine fully the basis of Heidegger’s concept of Being (an inexhaustible subject) but in brief, and to be followed up later in the chapter, Being is an ancient philosophical concept that he traces back, through Aristotle and Plato, to the pre-Socratics, particularly Heraclitus and Parmenides. Plato’s metaphor of the cave explains an important element of the concept of Being, for our purposes. Humanity is incapable of comprehending the truth of Being, according to Plato. In fact we only have access to the appearance of Being – an impoverished understanding of the fullest depths of Being, akin to the flickering shadows reflected on the walls of the cave. Aristotle developed this idea by looking at the appearance of properties as they show up in the attributes of particular beings. “Facts” are merely the appearance of properties; not the truth of Being. Yet the question of Being has been forgotten as the positivist faith in facts is


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normalized to the point that it is almost never examined. The emphasis on science and technology takes the appearance as “evidence” that the essential properties of a being can be proven. The philosophical revelation of the nominalist gaps, from linguistic naming to the attributes, and from the attributes to the beings properties or essence, and from there to the truth of Being, are forgotten. On the face of it, our focus on the appearance, the shadow, the consistency of attributes allows us to build a stable worldview. That worldview has had great utility and enabled the mastering of the natural seasonal tempo of crop growth to a new tempo dictated by consumerism. A technological worldview that enables the manufacturing of all things and the total mobilization of the potential of everything as a resource (Bestand). The technological horizon, or the total mobilization of all things through methods such as economics forms a closed system, with internal feedbacks, that makes it extremely difficult to escape. A good example is the total mobilization of economics and oil.

The Total Mobilization of Economics and Oil While there are a few, odd pockets of the world who still deny that climate change has anything to do with humanity, by far the majority are taking the problem very seriously. Thus far, the IPCC has produced coherent reports about the scale of the problem, the United Nations addressing it through the Kyoto Protocol calling for a 10% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and lately advising commitments of between 70 and 90% reductions by 2050 in Copenhagen late in 2009. Quite a few countries are creating laws, implementing regulations, and introducing new ETSs. Yet total greenhouse gas emissions have actually increased by some 30% since 1990. There are no easy solutions to industrial scale pollution. Solutions are even more difficult when the global population continues to rise at an impressive 200,000 people a day, and the possibility for a return to some kind of nomadic or pastoral lifestyle is out of reach for the majority. Mass production cannot exactly be scaled down with 6.5 billion people to feed, with the likelihood of the global population reaching and stabilizing at 9 billion by 2100. As far as I can tell, one of the key “solutions” to climate change is to halt all extraction of fossil fuels from the depths of the earth. (This would solve carbon dioxide emissions but not methane, sulphur dioxide, or nitrous oxide.) Burning fossil fuels for energy releases the pollution that is

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contributing in large part to thickening up of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and enabling the sun’s radiative forcing. Without the huge quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the infra-red spectrum of sunlight would reflect harmlessly back out of our atmosphere and the existing Holocene Epoch would continue for another 16,000 years. Such a simple solution to climate change is never mooted at conferences dedicated to “mitigating” the problem. And indeed, in the modern world, such a step is impossible. For a start, there is no mechanism to ban drilling for fossil fuels. If there were, it would not be enforceable (especially as the military is so dependent on fossil fuels for transportation of their heavy artillery and people). In contemporary global modern culture, if oil is available for sale, it will be consumed. There is not even any ethical stance against oil consumption, let alone legislation or enforcement forbidding it. Neither can economics halt the extraction of fossil fuels. According to theory, if the price of oil were high enough, it would send significant signals to the market and production would almost cease. There is still a lot of faith that including erstwhile pollution “externalities” into the market equation of costs versus benefits would set a price that would impact on downward production of oil. As yet, the mechanisms for introducing pollution externalities into the oil market are virtually non-existent. However, the price of oil escalated sharply on at least two occasions in the short history of oil consumption, with the first “oil shock” of the 1970s when OPEC first embraced the powerful position of being the primary supplier of the world’s energy, and in the recent price rises between 2005 and 2008, which were also based on the narrative of limited supply or “peak oil.” The price increase was based on scarcity of supply, rather than the cost of pollution externalities. Both times oil prices skyrocketed, global economics went into a tailspin. In the 1970s accumulation of a substantial percentage of the global monetary system in OPEC countries caused havoc until oil rich countries were introduced to investments in stocks and shares that stimulated the global circulation of money once more (Harvey, 2006, pp. 20–21). The more recent rapid increase in oil prices drew interest away from the continuous economic growth in major assets such as housing and resituated it in paying for higher priced consumer goods and transport. The rapid escalation of energy prices in the mid-2000s is one of the contributing factors to the re-allocation of consumer spending from housing (in rich countries) to petrol and primary products. This lowered the rate of housing inflation that was a condition of the banks’ mortgage policies and enabled bad loans to be absorbed easily by banks, as the annual increase in house commodity price easily offset bad debt. “Toxic” loans could be


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bundled with better loans and onsold with little problem, as the asset would be worth more than the mortgage debt by the time it was discovered by its new lenders. The rapid rise in oil price halted this exponential inflation of house prices and abruptly challenged the practice of bundling or hiding toxic debt. One of the contributing factors to the “tipping point” of the economic crisis of 2008 was a high oil price. And yet although the price of oil was having some impact on consumption, it had by no means halted the extraction of millions of barrels of oil per day or in any way been modified by climate change constraints, before it broke down the existing financial system. The ETS is another version of economics trying to introduce classical price measures to signal changes in consumer behaviour with a focus on fossil fuels. The ETS encourages classical market conditions by putting a price on the cost of pollution and including it in the cost-benefit analysis. Up until now, pollution has been an “externality” borne by the ecology of the planet and collectively affecting especially the weak and vulnerable but ignored by the capitalist system. Increasingly, the costs borne directly by pollution such as toxic water reservoirs and rivers or lung problems of civilians living in heavily industrial areas are being commodified and registered by economics. For example, climate change is so apparent that eleven of the hottest years on record have occurred in the last thirteen years. The heat wave in Europe in 2003 caused 35,000 deaths. Economists are beginning to commodify these costs and include them in estimations of national accounting. Further examples of less direct results of industrial pollution such as the impact of severe weather conditions (such as hurricanes), sea level rise, and drought (to name only a few) are also being accounted and recognized as consequences that ought to be included in the costs of energy generation and, ultimately, material production. The IPCC and Britain’s Royal economist Sir Nicholas Stern have both set a global price on the affects of climate change. By failing to control our emissions, and allowing the climate to continue warming, extreme weather conditions will impact on the stable viability of existing environmental ecosystems. Costs of climate change include insurance costs, clean up costs, finding alternative places for populations to live once their homes are underwater (which has already happened in some coral island states in the Pacific ocean, such as Tuvalu, and threatens Bangladesh, one of the most populous states in the world), and opportunity costs where crops produce at about 40% of current rates because of changes in climatic conditions (less rain, drier soil, frequency of storms, and so forth). According to the IPCC, if we

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continue to release pollution along the trend of business-as-usual, agricultural production will fall by 30% in Central and South Asia by 2050, it will fall 30% in Latin America by 2080, and fall 50% by 2020 in some African countries. They predict crop revenue to fall by 90% in Africa by 2100. Less than one hundred years for such radical change is not long, in the context of the stable Holocene Epoch that has shaped the civilization of humanity. Rajendra Pachauri (in Yee, 2007), the director of the IPCC, estimates the opportunity cost of refusing to recognize climate change is too high. The IPCC’s A4 report states “In 2050, global average macro-economic costs for mitigation towards stabilisation between 710 and 445 ppm CO2 -eq are between a 1% gain and a 5.5% decrease of global GDP” and thus spending less than 3% of global GDP on mitigation is essential. Nicholas Stern (2006) argues that if we do not act, the costs of remedial action will be somewhere between 5 and 20% of global GDP per annum whereas the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions will cost around 1% of global GDP each year (p. vi). These estimates are not wrong. The problem is that these world leaders, who have the attention of prime ministers, presidents, and politburo chiefs all over the world, almost exclusively conceive of change in economic terms. As Pachauri puts it in an interview in 2007, economic incentives and carbon taxes are “the only way that the private sector and consumers will see the merit of developing low carbon options and using them on a large scale” (Yee, 2007). Key mitigation measures, according to the IPCC are “regulations and standards, appropriate energy infrastructure investment, research, development and demonstration, changes in lifestyle and management” but the highlighted, most important measure, they believe, is an “effective carbonprice signal ” (Pachauri, 2008). This means that politicians at global conventions on climate change, such as the forthcoming United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) meeting in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 will make demands of science and economics to mitigate and adapt to climate change without any interrogation of the consumer based model of modernity, the technological enframing of our worldview, or the Idealist assumptions that pre-suppose human subjectivity is different from and superior to natural “objects” that have created the alienation from nature in the first place. For real change to take place, an interrogation of modernity has to occur. Solutions from within the framework of modernity fail to accommodate the need for changes in habitual behaviour and frames of thought. Modernity consolidates progressive consumerism and “economic growth” and these are the crux of the problem. As yet, the policy makers, politicians, economists, and scientists search for methods for ameliorating climate change


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from within the modern framework, rather than regarding modernity as the context of the problem. In some ways this is startlingly ignorant because vast amounts of work have drawn attention to environmental problems (albeit in specific ecological niches rather than the entire planetary atmosphere), to the inevitable problems of continuous, exponential economic growth (Meadows et al., 1972; Schumacher, 1973) and the alienation of humanity from nature [Heidegger, from (orig. 1949) 1962 to 1999; Irwin, 2008a; Marx (orig. 1844), 1993, (orig. 1859) 1887; Nietzsche (orig. 1887), 1989; Plumwood, 1993; and many others]. But it would be unwise to cast blame or cool the ardency or sincerity of the hundreds of scientists and policy makers that are genuinely attempting to institute change. Radical analysis of modernity frequently offers only critique, and no easy mode of implementing an effective alternative system. True to form, I also offer no easy, colour by numbers type of solution. The appeal of economics and particularly neoliberalism for global policy makers is entirely understandable as it is straight forward and systematic and purports to produce results. Nevertheless, I hope that this chapter can begin to explore how the premise of modernity can be analysed for its failings without recourse to revolutionary overthrow, or a return to romantic pastoralism. Some of the philosophical premises of Idealism can undergo a seismic shift, without nihilism overcoming the entire modern enterprise. There is anyway no choice about this. We cannot keep doing “business as usual.” It is releasing ever increasing quantities of greenhouse gases and the planet can no longer keep absorbing them. Business, though, is central to human endeavour. It is concurrent with the advent of civilization. Why would we wish to imagine humanity without either commerce or the accretion of civilizing art, design, music, architecture, and town planning? The interrogation into modernity has to happen another way, then – radical in intent, but also protective of the extraordinary beauty, the inspirational creativity, and the depths of thinking that humanity has produced.

Climate Change as the Line of Finitude Ultimately the limits presented by climate change will radically challenge the norms of modernity represented by economics and the technological Gestell. At the moment we are, as Heidegger puts it, in “the zone” of consummate nihilism. Anthropocentric climate change is created by thickening up of the atmosphere with minute particles of a small selection of gases – which are

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by-products of industrialism. The tiny particulate matter that we have released into the biosphere after burning oil, for example, the tiny molecules of carbon dioxide, methane, sulphur dioxide, and nitrous oxide, are the major culprits, affect the infra-red band of sunlight. When light hits these tiny particles, it heats them up instead of letting the light continue to bounce back out of the earth’s atmosphere. “Radiative forcing” is when the light is captured by the particles, which have converted the light into higher frequency movement (or heat). By thickening up the atmosphere with industrial pollution, we are increasing radiative forcing and this is the essence of the recent, sudden increase in the earth’s mean temperature by 1.3°C since the pre-industrial period. To give some context to the scale of the problem, scientists working with the IPCC have suggested that a mean temperature of 2°C above pre-industrial levels would be 50% likely to trigger the earth’s “tipping points,” which would send us from gradual warming extremely fast towards an Ice Age. In the short term, climate change is climate “warming” but there precedents of rapid Ice Ages being triggered by global warming are a lesson worth learning. When large enough amounts of land based ice melts into the planet’s oceans, it can halt the thermohalene cycle of ocean currents. These currents are like an escalator, driving warm saline rich water into polar regions and cold heavy water into warmer regions. Thermohalene circulation is not a simple linear system of cold water sinking and warm water rising but is complicated by the increasing density of water as it gets deeper, the surface wind affect on warm currents like the Gulf stream and the salt content introduced by warm water to the cold depths at the bottom of the thermohalene current creating important feedback systems (Rahmstorf, 2006). Nevertheless, warm water from the equator is swept up past continental shelves by the thermohalene cycle into the polar region, cold heavy water sweeps back at lower depths in the ocean as it returns to the Pacific equatorial region, evening out the planet’s extremes of temperature by freshening equatorial regions and heating some parts of the polar regions by as much as 10 kelvin. Without this modifying circulation system, the planet would have much harsher extremes of heat at the equator and freezing temperatures at the poles. If these currents are halted by an enormous sheet of land ice suddenly collapsing into the ocean and lowering the salinity of the thermohalene it is possible that an Ice Age could be triggered. Once the tipping point has been triggered, the change from global warming to rapid cooling might only take ten years. The planet could return to its natural condition during an Ice Age; miles deep ice covering nearly all the land


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mass and much of the oceans. Fortunately, this particular scenario is considered quite remote by the climate scientists (see Rahmstorf, 2006). Tipping points are the moment of no-return, when the cumulative impact of often tiny increments reach a stage of readiness for a paradigm shift. A tipping point is impossible to accurately predict but it includes two fundamentals; the readiness of the conditions for change, and a singular moment, a point of difference, often something of comparative insignificance that “tips” the balance from one stable form to a fundamentally different one. The Brownian motion of water is a really good example. At 100°C water can boil. However, water actually overheats, beyond 100°C until the skin on its surface is somehow interrupted and broken. A spot of dust alighting can break the surface tension and allow the over-heated water to break into a boil. That same spot of dust alighting on 70°C water will simply sit on the “skin” of surface tension. Tipping points are unpredictable. They include the random. They include feedbacks that are not necessarily produced by human beings, and they are non-revocable. The singularity is the irreversible metamorphosis of one state to another. Climate change could mean gradual warming and an increase in intense weather situations that make it harder and harder for humanity to survive and thrive as widely spread as we are now. There are five key feedback systems that involve serious changes in the weather cycle, or seasons, such as halting the monsoons, reversing the prevailing wind circulation in the Pacific, creating decades long droughts, and probably killing the equatorial rainforests, along with melting Greenland, Arctic, and Antarctic ice sheets. The number of animal species extinctions is already higher than the “background” norm. There is the distinct possibility that global warming could tip us into a climatic epoch that is non-conducive to human life. Climate change introduces the finitude of human civilization to view with a clarity that has rarely before been seen. The prospect of Armageddon and nuclear holocaust are important precursors in the human imaginary and these earlier hints at the ultimate end point of idealist and modern society hold important conceptual apparatuses for the finitude presented by climate change. Nevertheless, while a cataclysmic end has loomed large in the popular imagination in religion, and proliferate books and films, few philosophers have seriously engaged with the finitude of civilization. Heidegger and Jünger are important exceptions. Heidegger’s work contextualizes present day concerns within the perspective of the whole period, from beginning to end. He applies scale of a “lifespan” at a number of levels: subjectivity, the modern epoch, and ultimately of human civilization.

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Without considering the given moment from the perspective of the entire span, Heidegger believes we cannot understand the fullness of our actions and decisions. Agency at its most authentic (whether individual or collective) needs the perspective of the whole life, from its inception to its inevitable endpoint.

The Line Heidegger had an important conversation with his friend and Ernst Jünger concerning the “line.” Jünger began to think of the line after the horrors that they had lived through in World War II, as nihilistic limits of liveable society. Nuclear devastation had become a reality in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the full consequences of nuclear holocaust were a completely new era of modern technology that introduced a finality never known before. Heidegger (1999a) replied, “Perhaps the zero-line will emerge suddenly before us in the form of a planetary catastrophe” (p. 297). The two of them wrote several texts debating the “line” of nihilism. The preceding World Wars tempered Jünger’s understanding of “finality.” He was a war “hero,” having survived the front line in the German army in both World War I and II. The horror of his experiences had shown him just what devastation can be survived. Survival for Jünger was not simply physical life, but the ability to regain some meaningfulness about the situations and decisions that you have been forced to make. Any soldier in hand to hand warfare has acted in ways that might be thoroughly condemned as immoral in peace time. How do soldiers return to some kind of normality after living through the noise and mayhem of bombs, gunshot, poisonous gas, tanks, and endless mud, the murder of combat? Insight from his devastating war experience meant Jünger’s approach to the “grenze,” the boundary of the line of nihilism, was to overcome it, and will a renewal “over” the other side. Jünger hoped that overcoming the line of nihilism would completely alter humanity. We would be almost unrecognizable, a metamorphosis from the nastiness exhibited in wartime, from the total mobilization of consumerism, from the technological horizon of the Gestell. The process of achieving this metamorphosis is not denial, but rather to embrace the inevitable, and transform it. Jünger (1932) argued that the nihilism of the war-machine is essential to modernity, and beyond control, merely justified by the politics of the day. He believes we need to embrace it. By willing the nihilism of the line, we gain control over our own agency within the system of total mobilization. On the one hand, we are under orders, in this case, pawns in the


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machine of mobilizing globalized consumerism, but we can embrace our role, and will it. That agency gives us some control and the ability to alter our conception of things (which may have an impact on what unfolds). Ultimately, he hoped that recognition (rather than denial) of the distressing finality of planetary catastrophe would create a strong contrast with the simple pleasures of ecological and social stability. The line of nihilism might provide us with the insight necessary to rejoice in what it is to be alive. But this transformation appears so unlikely when bound by the horizon of the total mobilization of consumerism that it only becomes possible beyond the line of nihilism. The metamorphosis is so impossible to comprehend, as is the finality of modern civilization, that the emergence of the Übermensch (Nietzsche, 2006), or super-people, will not necessarily be recognizably human. Jünger suggests that this is a type of evolutionary break, and that the line of nihilism is necessary to its development. Heidegger argued against this view. There is no “over” the line of planetary catastrophe. Heidegger regarded contemplating some form of culture “beyond” the line as irresponsible and pointless. As Nietzsche had also pointed out “beyond” finitude is comparable to the Heavenly Ideal of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religions; a projection of the imagination that ultimately degrades the wonderment of life itself. Finitude is final, for Heidegger. It is the finality that offers contextual importance for the lifecycle of the epoch itself. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s argument takes a lot from Jünger (see Irwin, 2008a). Heidegger contends that proximity to the line makes its deadly consequences much clearer, and so we are better able to re-think our prevailing norms, and conceptual truths. Heidegger (1999a) thought the proximity to the line, in the “zone of consummate nihilism,” might produce a type of transformation not unlike Jünger’s metamorphosis; a new “turning” towards the question of Being. “By this line will be decided whether the movement of nihilism comes to an end in a nihilistic nothing, or whether it is the transition to the realm of a ‘new turning of being’” (p. 292). Thus, the line of nihilism, in late modernity, of climate change, reflects back on our activities and norms and redefines them as life enhancing or life denying. We have better criteria for judging modern normativity. The “turn” is not as simple as facing the finitude and backing off from it. Instead of taking nihilism as straight forwardly life-denying nothingness, Heidegger begins to see that the nothingness is peculiarly important to human conceptual understanding. Both wonder at the Being of life itself, and wonder at the nothingness of non-Being are equally as originary and vital to human capacity for profound thought. Human awareness is crucial.

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Life itself is simply blind existence without human apprehension. Likewise, nothingness only counterbalances existence in any meaningful way if humanity is around to comprehend it. The human being not only stands within the critical zone of the line. He himself – but not taken independently, and especially not through himself alone – is this zone and thus the line. In no case does the line, thought as a sign of the zone of consummate nihilism, lie before the human being in the manner of something that could be crossed. In that case, however, the possibility of a trans lineam and of such a crossing collapses. (Heidegger, 1999a, p. 311; emphasis in the original) The determinism of the technological Gestell can be exceeded once we abandon the belief in progress (1977, 1985, 1999b) (which heads in a direction “beyond” the finitude of the Holocene). Heidegger (1999b) talks instead, about Ereignis, the event, in which things become more meaningfully themselves. While the event seems to be similar to the modern emphasis on “now” (with little or no consideration to the consequences on the future) the event is the becomingness of the now, from the perspective of the whole, in its finite span, from beginning to end. The event is where things fulfil their potentiality (Heidegger, 1968b). What makes humanity more essentially human is meaningfulness itself. Our awareness and ability to conceptualize, think, and communicate (Heidegger, 1968a) makes our role in the natural landscape important. This is a distinct shift from the endless production of technology and a global system of consumerism. But one is not the opposite of the other (see the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” 1998b).

Conclusion Tool-making is part of the repertoire of humanity. It is part of our interaction with our ecological environment (Aristotle, 1999; Heidegger, 1977). Modernity has taken this aspect and elevated it into a metaphysical worldview (Heidegger, 1989) that obliterated the damage being done to local ecologies and ultimately to the planet’s entire climate system. The damage done by the alienation of human beings from nature is immense, but climate change gives us the opportunity to rethink it, and shift to a more aware, ecological ethos. A technological society that can support nine billion human beings and respect ecological sustainability may be possible,


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but only if we take the boundary line of climate change as finite, and not to be overcome. There will be “mere existence” (Heidegger, 1973a) after the climate has shifted from the Holocene Epoch to the next Ice Age. There will probably be life of many sorts. However, many, many species that have emerged over the last hundreds of thousands of years may be extinct as a result of the suddenness of the planetary catastrophe. Whether human beings, and specifically modern human beings, are among them is unknowable. Without cognizance, according to Heidegger, mere existing does not matter.2 Scientific models suggest that if the mean temperature of the planet warms 2°C above pre-industrial levels there will be major feedback systems triggered that has a 50% likelihood of shifting the planet out of the stable Holocene into much harsher climatic conditions. The boundary line of 2°C is arguably already too high (Rahmstorf in Climate Change, 2009). Considering adaptation to even higher temperatures is to take the route proposed by Ernst Jünger, and hope that evolutionary metamorphosis of the human species is possible at incredibly short notice. Nonetheless, the harsh climatic conditions of a planet 2°C and higher will altogether alter modern market-based consumerism. It will be a return to a “struggle” with nature of a type not known to modern mankind. Certainly, the seasonal dependency that we were so proud to be free of will return again; however the seasons will no longer be as predictable and beneficial as we have known. Climate change scientists predict long-term affects of seasonal disruption if the monsoon ceases, droughts last for decades, the Amazon rainforest dying off, storm areas to be hit more frequently and fiercely, and the sea level rising by some seven meters. Heidegger’s point is that imagining survival “past” the line of nihilism is counter-productive. We need to embrace the life we still have, and use our knowledge of its finitude and precarious delicacy to assess and alter our current norms accordingly. The agency necessary to do this is not simply a feat of technological innovation, economic indicators, or democratic policy. It is much more profound than any of those things. It requires a general readiness for change, and the public acknowledgment of problems that are closing the boundary of nihilism from proximity to extinction. Those problems are concurrent with industrial production and the ethos of consumerism. Whether radical reduction of emissions is possible to keep climate change below the 2°C boundary line is not yet known. But we should at least try. Climate change presents a crisis for modern philosophy. The separation of subjectivity from objects that began with Plato and reached its zenith

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with Descartes is entirely problematic. What started as a disconnect between local ecology and consumerism is resulting in planetary ecology undergoing an epochal shift from the Holocene, to a period of warming, and much faster than it should, tipping ultimately towards an Ice Age. The philosophical justification for the disconnect of the local ecology from the mode of local people making a living is a separation of humanity from nature, the subject from the object. This made room for our conceptual interpretations of things and events, a space that we need as it is fundamental to human thinking. But the hyper-separation promoted by modern philosophy has taken that nominalist gap to an extreme and after several thousand years of this presumption, the accumulated affects are becoming visible and obvious. Ethics is about honesty. In the case of climate change, the requirement is an honest appraisal of the modern lifestyle and its premises. We have made a serious mistake. Public acknowledgment of the intricate interaction of all elements of existence will demote humanity from the position of mastery. With that, we might stop trying to terraform the climate, stop relying on economic indicators and technological intervention, and start accommodating our lives to the ecological constraints of the planet. Once we make the philosophical shift from hyper-separation to intricate integration, policy, politics, and more appropriate forms of market interaction will follow.

Part Two

Transforming Global Politics


Chapter 4

Changing Worldviews to Cope with a Changing Climate Leo Elshof Acadia University

Climate change presents a foundational challenge to the dominant neoconservative worldview, as the ethos of boundless progress and material growth is increasingly found to be in conflict with the real-world physical limits of the biosphere. This worldview, which understands never ending economic and material growth as a “right” of life in the rich minority world, is no longer capable of simultaneously supporting a viable vision of a global “common good.” This essay will explore some of the political ecology challenges that climate change presents to the dominant productivist discourses that dominate our public policies and education systems. Despite the increasingly compelling scientific evidence, in the public arena, the looming implications of climate change have often been met with silence, resistance, and even denial. When climate change has been addressed it is often framed like any other environmental issue like acid rain or water pollution, that is, as an issue amenable to a straightforward “techno-fix.” Avoiding the threat of “dangerous” climate change and the dismal scenarios that accompany it requires that we begin to understand climate change as a deeper cultural problem demanding a critical examination of dominant socio-economic worldviews, concepts of inter- and intragenerational equity, technological politics, as well as our implicit notions of social and environmental justice. This essay will argue that ultimately the challenge of climate change demands nothing short of an innovative “world changing” project involving the economic, social, and technological transformation of our high carbon

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intensity lifestyles. Only by facing the “ugly realities” that have worked to paint humanity into a proverbial corner can we begin to create the social, political, and technological changes that will enable us to escape the darkest predictions. Drawing upon principles of distributive justice and precaution as well as emerging ideas around sustainable local livelihoods, I will argue that a hopeful future remains within the grasp of people. Some question whether human beings are equipped with the cognitive abilities to respond to slowly emerging threats. The cognitive maps, the worldviews each of us create about how the world “works,” are inescapably a “caricature” of the real world as it is. This is in part because we are unable to detect so many aspects of it, by some estimates we only experience through our perceptions about one-trillionth of outside events (Ornstein and Ehrlich, 1989). Other fundamental limitations of the human sensory system include the phenomena of “habituation,” which allows our minds to ignore slowly changing, or continuous phenomena and instead focus on the short-term or immediate incidents. As Ornstein and Ehrlich explain, “most vertebrate nervous systems are geared to ‘news’: loosely speaking, their motto is ‘call me when something new happens’” (p. 81). Ornstein and Ehrlich’s assert that: “Our old minds don’t have the capacity to recognize the threat of CO2 increase in the atmosphere: after all, a squiggly line on a chart is hard to translate into a portent of catastrophe. Until catastrophic events are evident, old minds will have trouble registering the problem” (p. 78). Given the fact that human beings have yet not collectively mustered an adequate response to the challenge climate change presents, this warning may come too late.

Why Worldviews Matter We have reached the twenty-first century still firmly clinging on to the myths that endless economic and physical growth is possible on a finite planet, and that Homo sapiens have somehow transcended our basic animal nature, if not physically at least socially and cognitively. Our economic, political, and social systems continue to reinforce these myths at every turn, firmly embedding them in both our personal and cultural worldviews. As Eidelson and Eidelson (2003) point out: “In contrast to core beliefs an individual holds about his or her personal world, collective core beliefs or group worldviews are the templates through which groups and group members interpret their shared experience. Such beliefs are an essential component

Changing Worldviews and Changing Climate

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of group culture” (p. 183). Durning (1997) has described a worldview as “a set of simplifying assumptions, an informal theory, a picture of how the world works.” Myths in archaic societies fulfilled the role of the unifying force of worldviews in society, as they thoroughly “permeate life-practice” (Habermas, 1984, p. 45). Our worldviews possess structure, coherency, and purpose as they help us make sense of our world and find our place in it (Gabora, 1998; Sire, 2004). Worldviews are broader than paradigms, insofar as a worldview is “A master perspective involving paradigms from different disciplines, one of which typically dominates, informs, spills over into the others (Woodhouse, 1996, p. 5). Worldviews serve a number of different explicit purposes. They help us explain our model of the world, how the socially constructed world has arisen and orient us in space, time, and physical context; in essence worldviews help answer “Why is the world the way it is? ” (Heylighen, 1996). In a world where conflicts over resources and the environmental pressures induced by climate change are predicted to increase dramatically and cause massive refugee flows (Dyer, 2008; Homer Dixon, 2008; Webb, 2007; Wright, 2007) the significance of critical worldview analysis becomes more important. In examining the beliefs that drive groups towards conflict, Eidelson and Eidelson (2003) point out that “conflict-engendering miscalculations become more likely when reliance on worldviews replaces objective reality as the basis for judging the intentions and behaviors of others” (p. 183). These include the individual and group level “belief domains” of superiority, injustice, vulnerability, distrust, and helplessness. The ugly reality is that although we live on a planet with two billion people living in dire poverty, the world’s rich, who have access to the world’s best technologies and functional participatory democratic political systems, have accomplished next to nothing to date in terms of combating climate change. In a world with 1,000 billionaires and 8.7 million millionaires holding $33.3 trillion in assets, up from $16.3 trillion a decade ago (Foroohar, 2007), the investment capital to dramatically slow and even halt climate change is potentially available. Although investment in renewable energy is rising rapidly, the question of whether it will be enough and in time to avoid dangerous climate change remains unanswered. The “superiority worldview” is manifest at the individual level in a conviction in beliefs that indicate that their thoughts, feelings, and experiences “merit privileged status” along with beliefs of a sense of “specialness, deservingness, and entitlement” (Eidelson and Eidelson, 2003, p. 183). Ethnocentrism is a feature of the group level “superiority worldview” that encompasses “shared convictions of moral superiority, chosenness,

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entitlement, and special destiny” (ibid.). The self-declared “right” of developed nations to continue to increase the quantities of greenhouse gases they release and to not be held either economically or morally accountable for the historical emissions they have dumped into the atmosphere is a case in point. Climate security is a critical facet of long-term human security, as Krause (2005) states: “The sustainable evolution of human society cannot be based on the enrichment of some at the expense of others, while most are excluded (p. 58). Of all the duties of a modern state, education has a critical task in helping young people understand the threat that a “superiority worldview” poses for all humankind and to challenge this worldview, as it is manifest in many diverse areas, from the policies of governments to the short-term eco-cidal behaviours of corporations and consumers. It may well be true that “our faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology” (Wright, 2004, p. 4) because in effect we have raised the idea of “progress” to the high status of cultural “myth.” Wright states that myth “[i]s an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture’s deepest values and aspirations . . . myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are maps by which cultures navigate through time” (ibid.). As human beings we are now beginning to understand how dysfunctional the economic and cultural myths that have fuelled our orgy of hydrocarbon energy consumption over the last 150 years are. Curry (2006) argues that the processes driving environmental destruction worldwide are not due to a lack of ethics but rather driven by “pathological ethics” (p. 13). These pathologies are embedded in the six key concepts that propel global corporate economic development in both the developed and developing world: uncontrolled economic growth, enclosure, dependency, colonialism, anti-democracy, and consumption (Standlea, 2006, p. 7). Complexity science has revealed how simple small changes in the starting parameters of complex, dynamic, and emergent systems of nearly any type can lead to dramatically different and often wholly unpredictable outcomes. Complex human systems in this sense are no different, the operating parameters, rules, and incentives in the form of economics, politics, worldviews, and core human behaviours have led us to follow particular trajectories and not others. For example, North Americans are the largest energy consumers on the planet, a “logical” if not understandable outcome when inexpensive oil is combined with a culturally entrenched and corporately reproduced love affair with the internal combustion engine and informed by a core materialist ethos of “more is better.” The result of these dynamics is the enormously inefficient North American highway system and the


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sprawling urban development that accompanies it. As homes increase in size they require more energy, usually fossil-based, to heat and cool; on average house sizes grew 140% between 1950 and 2004 while the average number of occupants decreased (Healy and Sittenfeld, 2007). Low density housing sprawl means that cost-effective public transportation to service these communities is nearly impossible. What is emerging as crucial in terms of responding eloquently to the deep-rooted problem of climate change is that we begin to see the omnipresent problems of airborne, water, and soil pollution, habitat and biodiversity loss and population growth as interdependent problems. Ultimately, these problems are rooted in our mindset or worldview. Any attempt to draw artificial disciplinary boundaries around any one of these eco-crises invariably leaves important facets of the problem outside the zone of concern. Whatever corrective measures that emerge to “fix” climate change are weakened or are simply fulfilling a stop-gap measure. We have become inadvertent or accidental planetary engineers, altering the fundamental biogeophysical systems of earth without understanding or even awareness of what the possible outcomes may be. Given this it is quite appropriate to refer to this age as the “Anthropocene,” a new geologic epoch in which humankind has emerged as the “potentially intelligent” globally dominant species, capable of virtually reshaping the face of the planet and its ecosystems through both intention and accident (Schellnhuber et al., 2004, p. 1). As so much is now known about the causal factors, processes, and dynamics of climate change, we need to ask: Why so little is being done by our political, educational, engineering, and business leaders to combat the problem? Satellites and advanced telemetry can tell us within centimetres and parts per million the rate of retreat of ice, the rise of sea levels, the inexorable rise in greenhouse gas concentrations, even their geographic source on the planets surface. Supercomputers and advanced mathematical models can provide us with detailed predictions of how our increasing emissions of greenhouse gases will impact both the atmosphere and the thin ecosphere that supports life on the planet.

The Ugly Emergence of Eco-Crises The earth’s climate system has proven itself to be an angry beast. When nudged, it is capable of a violent response. (Broecker, 2003, p. 1520)

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Anthropologists have told the stories of how eco-crises have been primary factors in the collapse of past civilizations. Whether it’s the Polynesian culture of Easter Island, the Sumerians of Iraq, or the Maya of Mexico, all destroyed their “natural capital,” the ecosystems that ultimately supported their civilization, and all ultimately paid the price (Diamond, 2005). As Diamond (1994) explains: “the pattern of ecological collapses of past civilizations is a familiar, almost banal one” (p. 368). And in terms of how humans destroy their ecological livelihood Radkau (2008) argues that: there is a limited number of leitmotifs that recur over and over . . . since natural laws come into play, this uniformity comes as no surprise. While we are not dealing with a single story, we are dealing with a limited stock of stories, which in typical cases become intertwined and set a vicious circle in motion. (p. 7) One need only look at the emergence of positive feedbacks in our climate system today to see the “thin edge of the wedge” in terms of uncontrollable runaway climatic change. Positive feedbacks in the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland’s ice mean less solar energy is reflected back into space heating Arctic waters even more and causing increased melting of sea ice (Hansen, 2007a). In the last several years unprecedented changes have been seen in Canada’s Arctic regions. For the first time in human recorded history open water has been seen at the North Pole, the fabled Northwest Passage has opened up in the summer, and the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is at its second lowest level since satellite tracking began. Scientists are now predicting that within five–ten years the Arctic could be ice free in the summer, and with less ice reflecting even less solar energy back into the space, climate change will accelerate. The enormous regions of permafrost in Canada and Siberia are rapidly melting and have begun releasing billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide. Because winters in Canada’s northern boreal forest are no longer cold enough to kill the mountain pine beetle, thirteen million hectares of pine trees have been destroyed over the last ten years (Hoyle, 2008). Fears are that the vast boreal forest is turning into a carbon dioxide source and is no longer functioning as a “sink” of greenhouse gases. This may well overwhelm even the small and tentative greenhouse gas reductions that the Canadian government is advocating. In a joint statement, the national scientific academies of all the G8 nations along with Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa have urged governments to commit to make


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“maximum efforts” towards halving global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and move global societies towards a low carbon future (Academies of Science for the G8+5, 2008). The last major warming of the planet fifty-five million years ago extinguished half the species on the planet and now we seem ready to follow the same path. The emergence of these planetary pathologies has prompted one of the world’s foremost earth scientists to use a disease metaphor: “I’m extremely concerned that the Earth has a chronic disease, and that chronic disease is CO2 syndrome, it’s something that’s creeping on us” (Broecker, 2003). It seems that not even the threat of massive melting of the Greenland and Antarctica glaciers or the potential loss of a full quarter of all land animals and plants and over a million species by 2050 as a result of climate change (Thomas, 2004) is capable of motivating a distracted public into demanding immediate and effective action from governments and business. Often the mainstream media coverage of climate change reinforces a sense of fear and helplessness with its “climate pornography” (Walker and King, 2008), that is, dramatic stories and images of the ocean conveyor belt shutting down and super-freezing Europe as in the movie The Day after Tomorrow. Or alternatively, the media provides bromides of how small “painless” individual consumer actions will “help save the planet.” These are always popular as are the feel-good placebos urging people to change their incandescent bulbs for energy efficient ones or by simply turning down the thermostat. These are all reminiscent of the flurry of the feel-good Fifty Ways to Save the Planet books that flooded the stores around the time of the 1992 Rio Conference on the Environment. Green consumption doesn’t address the historical and social injustice embodied in current patterns of consumption and exploitation. Planetary salvation through personal consumer virtue, while important in a limited way, will almost certainly not produce the significant greenhouse gas reductions required in the short time frame humanity has left to avert catastrophic climate change. Much more infrequent are any sincere attempts to engage the public in substantive discussions about the ethical and moral dimensions of rapacious and predatory capitalism-consumerism and their connection to climate change politics. Climate justice principles such as those embodied in the Bali principles (Greenpeace International, OilWatch International, Indigenous Environmental Network, World Rainforest Movement, 2002) are part of a marginalized political discourse in Canada, whose main political parties along with the corporate news media focus almost exclusively on the short-term economic impacts of carbon taxes, trading schemes, and technologies.

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Discussions of intragenerational climate justice issues and racial inequity are also noticeably marginalized in the media. Although African Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population, they on average emit nearly 20% less greenhouse gases than non-Hispanic whites per capita (Hoerner and Robinson, 2008). However they are disproportionately at greater risk from climate change because they are economically more vulnerable to disasters and disease, and because the six states with the highest African American population are all in the Atlantic hurricane zone, and are expected to experience more intense storms and hurricanes like Katrina (Hoerner and Robinson, 2008). Similarly northern Canada’s aboriginal populations will suffer disproportionately because with permafrost melting their basic infrastructure is at risk. As well, because northern Canada is experiencing some of the largest increases in temperature on the planet due to climate change, wildlife populations and migration patterns, upon which much traditional culture depends, are expected to be severely impacted. Diametrically opposed perceptions of what constitutes “climate justice” between rich and poor nations continue to threaten to undermine international climate change negotiations. Almost absent from public discourses in North America is any notion of compensatory or corrective justice; as Roberts and Parks (2007) suggest a “worldview gap” exists and: Scientists and environmentalists in the world’s wealthier nations are mystified as to why this life threatening issue has elicited such an anemic policy response, but many miss the point: Responses to climate change are wound up with other social and economic issues facing nations and are fundamentally about inequality and injustice. (p. 5) It’s not surprising then to see developing nations favouring a per capita approach to regulating global greenhouse gas emissions wherein every human being on the planet would have an equal right to share the atmosphere’s carbon sinking ability. In order to avoid dangerous, even catastrophic climate change some studies indicate that an equal global per capita share for all 6.7 billion people needs to be no greater than one kilogram per person. As the planet’s population heads towards an expected 9.5 billion by 2050 (Population Reference Bureau, 2008), even one kilogram may be too much. Some have argued that shifting the discursive framework of climate change away from the scientific-technological to one based on ethics, human rights, and social justice has “stymied productive discussions” about equal per capita emissions (Agyeman et al., 2008). Mainstream media rarely


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produces stories that draw critical attention to the role of business and industry in hobbling climate change legislation, or how ineffective and even counterproductive existing initiatives have been to date with respect to the magnitude of the problem. A significant dimension of the problem in terms of public awareness and support for effective political action has been the manner in which climate science has been presented to the public. As Nisbet and Mooney (2007) point out, many scientists retain the well-intentioned belief that, if laypeople better understood technical complexities from news coverage, their viewpoints would be more like scientists’, and controversy would subside. In reality, citizens do not use the news media as scientists assume. Research shows that people are rarely well enough informed or motivated to weigh competing ideas and arguments. Faced with a daily torrent of news, citizens use their value predispositions (such as political or religious beliefs) as perceptual screens, selecting news outlets and Web sites whose outlooks match their own. Such screening reduces the choices of what to pay attention to and accept as valid. (p. 56) Technology has greatly expanded the capacity of individuals to filter out information that challenges their worldviews, their biases, and prejudices. This poses challenges to democratic participatory democracy insofar as citizens now have the ability to create ever smaller insular information niches, thus further fragmenting attempts of a broad shared public conversation. In terms of climate change, a measure of this fragmentation can be found in the thousands of climate denial blogs and websites that purport to inform the reader about the “real” issues surrounding climate change. Group polarization is the result of “limited argument pools, social comparisons and the effects of corroboration.” Sunstein points out that although most Americans believed that the United States should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, their support drops to 43% when told that President Bush opposes it. In the “blogosphere” Sunstein (2007) describes “cybercascades” in which “Repeated exposure to an extreme position, with the suggestion that many people hold that position, will predictably move those exposed, and likely predisposed, to believe in it” (p. 69). With tens of thousands of pseudoscience blogs populating the internet, and denouncing everything from the benefits of childhood vaccines, the theory of evolution, to the science of climate change, the capacity to spread disinformation via cybercascades has never been greater.

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Intellectuals and political leaders who offer up visionary plans to reduce greenhouse gases and to decrease oil consumption are often lampooned and attacked on major North American television networks like the rightwing Fox News Network, by CNN’s Glenn Beck as well as by talk radio personalities such as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Given that conservatives and their climate change sceptical commentaries dominate 91% of weekday talk radio in the United States (Halpin, 2007) and their popularity, it should come as no surprise that deep scepticism in terms of taking substantive measures to combat climate change remains entrenched in a large segment of the population. A recent U.S. national poll found that concern about climate change now ranks at the bottom of the public’s priorities for government (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2009), with the implication that “America and President Obama are completely out of sync on human-caused global warming” (Revkin, 2009, p. 1). Adding to this disturbing trend are indications that in the United States at least, the belief that climate change is due to “long-term planetary trends” and not human activity is on the increase with 44% of Americans supporting this view, up from 35% in 2006 (Rasmussen Reports, 2009). This is at odds with the findings of the largest ever survey of 3,146 earth scientists that revealed that 82% of those surveyed were in agreement that human activity is a significant factor in changing global temperature (Doran and Zimmerman, 2009). In examining subgroups of earth scientists, Doran and Zimmerman found that 97% of climatologists actively involved in research agreed that humans play a role, while only 47% of petroleum geologists did. Despite the emerging global financial crisis U.S. president Obama has vowed to make significant progress in setting up a cap and trade system for carbon emissions reducing them to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reducing them an additional 80% by 2050 and investing $150 billion U.S. dollars in energy saving technology (Mason, 2008). Obama’s stated position on climate change is unequivocal: “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all . . . Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response” (Broder, 2008).

The Political Ecology of Disinformation A study exploring political affiliation and concern for climate change found that for Republicans, and those who had little trust in scientists, more


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knowledge did not mean greater concern (Aldhous, 2008; Kellstedt et al., 2008). Kellstedt et al. (2008) found that three main forces, informedness, confidence in scientists, and personal efficacy, influence individuals’ assessment of the risks posed by climate change in unexpected ways: more informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. We also find that confidence in scientists has unexpected effects: respondents with high confidence in scientists feel less responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. Aldhous (2008) attributes this in part as to the different ways people get information about climate change: If your sources are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore . . . the relationship between knowledge and concern is likely to be different than if your main sources are skeptical advocacy groups such as the Heartland Institute, and the conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. (p. 3) Some of the mainstream assumptions made by scientists and advocacy groups that simply supply the public with more data, more quantifiable evidence that climate change poses a serious risk to the human project may be questionable. Drawing parallels to research on public opinion concerning GM foods and embryonic stem cell research, Kellstedt suggests that “more information given to the mass public does not automatically translate into more support for what are (in the public’s mind) controversial areas of scientific research. In fact, more information . . . seems to have the opposite effect, creating opposition to the research area in question” (Tierney, 2008). The extent of the global climate disinformation campaign of the past 15 years, funded by the “Big Carbon” lobby consisting of coal, oil, natural gas, and automotive concerns, is comparable to the efforts of big tobacco to suppress the science on the health impacts of cigarette consumption (Brandt, 2007). Many of the same public relations tactics and even the same PR companies that were employed by the tobacco companies to discredit the independent science on smoking and cancer have been used to downplay the human contribution to climate change or the need to question “business as usual” (Monbiot, 2006). One of the world’s preeminent climatologists Jim Hansen (2007b) refers to the climate change

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contrarians and sceptics as “jesters”: The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important. The real deal is this: the “royalty” controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as Exxon/ Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. The court jesters are their jesters, occasionally paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains’ disinformation campaigns. (p. 4) By any measure, the attempts of the climate delayers and denialists that Hansen identifies reveal the susceptibility of our political decision-making processes to “junk” or “pseudoscience.” Sokal (2008) defines pseudoscience as any body of thought (along with its associated justifications and advocates) that: (a) makes assertions about real or alleged phenomena and/or real or alleged causal relations that mainstream science justifiably considers to be utterly implausible, and (b) Attempts to support these assertions through types of argumentation or evidence that fall far short of the logical and evidentiary standards of mainstream science. (p. 266) The term “junkscience” itself has been become politicized to be “diametrically opposed to what genuine scientists mean by the phrase” and by “right wing politicians and journalists to describe any scientific consensus that contradicts their political, economic, or cultural agenda” (Jacoby, 2008b, p. 210). Junkscience, as Jacoby (2008b, p. 221) points out, “appropriates scientific sounding language without the underlying scientific evidence or logic” to promote irrationality. Herrick and Jamieson (2001) did a study of the term “junk science” as used in U.S. news media over a five-year period. Notably, they found that the articles reviewed “provided almost no evidence of substantive or procedural inadequacies in the science used to support environmental or public health policies” (p. 13). Further they argue that the phrase “junk science”


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is “meaningful primarily from a politicized or ideological perspective” and little more than a “contrarian trope” insofar as it “plays a strategic role as part of a contrarian, anti-regulatory discourse” (p. 14). Anti-regulatory discourse and a variety of forms of libertarian “free-market” environmentalism underpin the thinking that inform many of the climate contrarians. This is especially true when one examines the anti-regulatory vitriol regarding greenhouse gases coming from the major neo-conservative think tanks in Canada and the United States. These include the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the George C. Marshall Institute, and the Fraser Institute in Canada (Baliunas and Soon, 2001; Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2006; Fredricksen et al., 2004; The George C. Marshall Institute, 2008; Lewis, 2007). The Royal Society, United Kingdom (2007), has identified a number of the major “misleading” arguments used by contrarians in their attempt to discredit the science of climate change. These include: 1. The Earth’s climate is always changing and this is nothing to do with humans. 2. Rises in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the result of increased temperatures, not the other way round. 3. Computer models, which predict the future climate, are unreliable and based on a series of assumptions. 4. It’s all to do with the Sun – for example, there is a strong link between increased temperatures on Earth with the number of sunspots on the Sun. 5. The climate is actually affected by cosmic rays. 6. The scale of the negative effects of climate change is often overstated and there is no need for urgent action. (p. 2) By selectively choosing which parts of climate science they accept as “genuine” and dismissing any others that challenge their ideological position, the think tanks are playing the same game that Edward Bernays and the tobacco companies played in the last century to convince people that their product was harmless (Brandt, 2007). In a general sense the efforts of these “think tanks” is simply another example of “Brownlash” reporting, that is, reporting that “attempts to minimize the seriousness of ecological problems and to fuel a backlash against environmental regulations” (McKenzie and Rees, 2007, p. 505). Typical strategies used in brownlash reporting include developing a strategy of “contrived optimism” about the state of the environment and then arguing the economic case to further deregulate and/or abolish existing environmental laws. Brownlash reporting on climate change fundamentally

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misrepresents climate science by using a common set of rhetorical tactics that include: 1. Minimizing human-caused effects by blaming natural processes or by presenting human-caused effects as indistinguishable from or dwarfed by natural processes. 2. Exaggerating uncertainty and misrepresenting the state of scientific consensus. 3. Misframing the scale of problems by obscuring their extent and hence limiting the scope of solutions. 4. Downplaying legitimate and major concerns, often by substituting invented or minor ones. 5. Obscuring both the role of regulation in bringing about improvements and the need to improve standards further. (p. 513) The popularity of a lot of climate pseudoscience is also a window into the public’s understanding of the nature of science. Popular climate pseudo “science” frames contrarian viewpoints in terms of the folk-hero going up against the “scientific establishment,” science for the “little guy” that is fought out not through processes like peer review but rather through rhetorical flourish in tabloid op-ed pieces in sympathetic corporate newspapers, or on Fox News. Often lost on the public is the fact that legitimate science does have a number of “quality control” mechanisms, which include peer-review processes, which are certainly not infallible, but are based on logical argument and empirical data, unlike the rhetorical and ideological bombast found on pseudoscience blogs and websites. Although Lloyd’s assertion (2006) that “Scientific results can’t be proved, they can only be tested again and again until only a fool would refuse to believe them” (p. 55) may be true, it does little to help illuminate why the effective consensus within the scientific community that humans are responsible for climate change has had so little impact on public policy. Junkscience can be considered a branch of “junk thought” whose characteristics include “anti-rationalism and contempt for countervailing facts and expert opinion” (Jacoby, 2008b, p. 211). Political leaders are frequent sources of junk-thought, for example, along with U.S. president Bush, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate believed that creationism should be taught in schools (Paulson, 2008), and at one point that climate change could not be attributed to human causes (Coppock, 2008). Examples of junk climate thought abound. They range from the bizarre, for example, geographer Graham Smith (2008) of the University of Western


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Ontario on his blog “Ecomyths” proclaims that: “Climate change isn’t real, nor can it be ‘solved,’” to the laughable as exemplified by the hundreds of junkscience articles on Junkscience.com, a website run by Steven Milloy, a paid advocate for the tobacco company Altria aka “Phillip Morris” and ExxonMobil and a long-time science columnist for FoxNews.com (SourceWatch, 2008). Junkscience and “astroturf” websites with officious sounding names like the “Friends of Science,” the “Natural Resources Stewardship Project,” the “International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC),” “IceCap,” the “Science and Public Policy Institute” (SPPI), “CO2 Skeptics,” and others ply climate science disinformation as their stock in trade. Some climate disinformation is aimed squarely at scientifically naïve young people. A particularly egregious example of this is “The Sceptics Handbook” (Nova, 2008), which employs cartoons along with an outright and simplistic dismissal of the scientific findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), asserting: “The climate does not respond to boatloads of scientists, no matter how much hot air they produce” (p. 10). In promoting fringe science and pseudoscientific thinking, these groups keep junk thought circulating through media and political networks in what amounts to an “echo-chamber” of climate denial. These groups regularly feed op-ed pieces into mainstream media denouncing any public discourse promoting carbon taxes or regulatory mechanisms to tackle what they frame as the “non-issue” of climate change. Major conservative groups have worked very effectively for their corporate clients since at least 1990 to block any measures to regulate greenhouse gases (McCright and Dunlap, 2003). In Canada one of the most prolific climate sceptics is Tim Ball, a retired geography professor who has made hundreds of presentations and produced dozens of op-ed pieces denouncing climate change science, the IPCC, and the Kyoto Protocol. Despite the fact he hasn’t published on climate science in any peer-reviewed scientific climate journal in more than fourteen years (Montgomery, 2006), Ball (2007) trades on his dated university credentials in order to bolster the credibility of his message that anthropogenic climate change is a “scam”: “Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science” (p. 1). Ball’s sceptic work is supported in part through an Alberta oil patch funded organization set up by another academic, political scientist Barry Cooper of the University of Calgary, an associate of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the founder of the junkscience group “Friends of Science” (Montgomery, 2006). In referring to Ball’s efforts, Canada’s preeminent climate scientist Professor Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modeling and Analysis and chief editor of The Journal of

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Climate states: “He says stuff that is just plain wrong. But when you are talking to crowds, when you are talking on TV, there is no challenge, there is no peer review . . . what Ball is doing is not about science . . . it is about politics” (Montgomery, 2006, p. 31). The manipulation of public opinion through disinformation explains in part why we have accomplished so little in terms reducing carbon emissions, but we also need to examine what systems this disinformation is attempting to protect.

Problems with Industria People need to be able to use the basic conceptual tools of political ecology to analyse how power and money are used to manipulate the public environmental agenda in order to meet self-serving ends. Political ecology as Standlea (2006) explains is: the study of how concentrated political economic power affects environmental, social, and cultural change at multiple spatial levels: the global, regional, and local. It is concerned with the twin themes of ecological sustainability and socio-economic justice, and how these are manipulated and molded by top-down political power. (p. ix) In terms of climate change, political ecology helps illuminate some of the processes and dynamics that have both accelerated us into this crisis and are also working to slow our progress towards effective and just solutions. Political ecology is essential in terms of trying to understand why North Americans live the most energy intensive and materially profligate lifestyles on the planet, and why a number of corporate actors would like to keep it that way. In part this is attributable to the way technological policies and decisionmaking processes are often framed in apolitical terms, leaving the impression that technical and therefore objective and rational decision-making processes are solely at work. The public subsidies provided to all facets of the oil-automotive nexus and the road transportation infrastructure are enormous. The externalized public costs of air pollution from automobiles in health and lost productivity costs in the United States is estimated to be $24.3 billion, while the total annual U.S. subsidy to the oil industry is estimated to be between $65 billion and $113 billion (Tamminen, 2006). Many of North America’s business and industrial elite have fought against the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol or for that matter any binding


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regulations that would severely limit their self-declared “right” to pollute. Although there are many problematic aspects of the Kyoto Protocol, it came very close to embracing the concept of equity embodying the principle wherein “to each according to their need, from each according to their abilities” (Krause, 2005, p. 61). Developing nations without the historical emissions responsibility of countries like the United States and Canada were exempt from initial binding emission reductions, and the “clean development mechanism” allowed developed countries to get credit for supporting projects in developing countries that reduced emissions. “Limited liability” in terms of corporate governance for many of these institutions means “power without responsibility” (Blankenburg and Plesch, 2007, p. 1). Appreciating and understanding this “real-politick” are essential first steps in understanding how governments work today. These issues raise difficult questions concerning public accountability, the manipulation of science for political ends, the use of propaganda, the corporate concentration of power and the ethics involved in the “manufacture of consent” (Chomsky, 1991). Despite the massive “corridors of modernization” (Josephson, 2005, p. 132) that globalization has created across the planet, the limits of our “brute force technologies” have become all too apparent. In striving to “impose a Cartesian grid of regularity and structure” on the natural world, humans have fundamentally misunderstood the complexity and emergent properties of natural systems. And so, across the planet our large-scale industrial farming, mining, irrigation, and forestry practices are systemically unsustainable and destructive. Climate change is simply one more example of planetary collateral damage, albeit the most destructive to date, of how the pervasive “engineering ethos of ‘victory over nature’ at all costs” (ibid.) has had massive negative human and ecological consequences across the planet. We cannot understand the climate crisis without understanding how climate change is rooted in the spread of globalized production-consumption systems wherein raw materials are sequestered from around the planet to produce transient products that form the backbone of hedonistic consumption in developed countries. As Hipwell (2004) explains: “the diverse empires and state alliances that have historically struggled amongst themselves for planetary dominance have finally merged and accreted into a single, self-regulating and self-perpetuating machinic assemblage . . . Industria” (p. 367). Industria, then reflects: “the multiplicitous expression of the interplay between identitarian thought, industrial technologies, states and corporations and the political, economic and cognitive elites

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who control them” (p. 368). Held together by self-interest, industria then becomes an “anthropocentric, rationalising, colonising and ecologically destructive network of capture and control” (p. 370). Reflecting the geographical fragmentation of production-consumption, industria is a global force of colonization and exploitation of indigenous and marginalized peoples and what is left of the planet’s natural habitats. Industria embodies the antithesis of a more sustainable form of regional biopolitics, one focused on ecological sustainability, participatory democratic politics, and social justice. Industria is based on the notion that humans can somehow transcend or escape through denial or wilful ignorance the basic physiochemical and thermodynamic processes that dictate how the burning of fossil fuels translates into a warming of the planet’s atmosphere. This idea will surely go down as one of humankind’s greatest delusional follies, another reflection of what Kuntsler (2008) refers to it as our “mentality of triumphal exceptionalism”: “Even now, we think we are immune to the epochal hazards of history. The notion that nothing really bad can happen to us is reflected in the blind cluelessness of our current news media and their simple failure to report what is now happening” (p. 2).

Understanding the Politics of the Status Quo [You people] in what we call the reality-based community . . . believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality . . . That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. Were history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. (Senior advisor to U.S. President George W. Bush, 2002 quoted in Suskind, 2004, p. 51)

Nowhere is the mentality of triumphal exceptionalism more evident than in the highest political offices in North America. When it comes to writing the story of government leadership and climate change over the past eight years of the Bush administration, history will not be kind when it comes to documenting the legacy of absent leadership, moral blindness, and the obfuscation of emerging climate science by three of “history’s recent


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actors”: America’s George W. Bush, Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper, and former Australian prime minister John Howard. Over their tenure in office the language used by the world’s scientific experts on climate change and embodied in the IPCC (2007) reports has became more urgent, even dire in terms of explaining how human activities have become the main causal agent in the warming of the planet. Although the science of climate change and the role of human culpability made a transition from “very probable” to “virtual certainty” during their tenure in office, these national leaders did everything possible to stymie effective climate legislation both within their countries and internationally. They failed on all accounts to provide the non-partisan leadership on the issue that majorities of their citizens and wider world demanded. Instead of dealing with the ugly truths and ramifications of climate change, they chose to deny the scientific consensus as long as possible, to stall effective legislation, and to continue to provide billions in public subsidies to further entrench the interests of big carbon industries in their respective countries. As a result the cost of mitigation and adaptation will be even higher for future generations. How bad is it? Several of the world’s preeminent scientists including Hansen (2007b, 2008a) and Lovelock (2006) are now arguing that scientists have been too conservative and reticent in their estimations of how rapidly climate is changing and how close we are to a catastrophic “tipping point” and unstoppable climatic change. Pittock (2006) suggests that: “up until now many scientists may have consciously or unconsciously downplayed the more extreme possibilities at the high end of the uncertainty range, in an attempt to appear moderate and ‘responsible’ (that is, to avoid scaring people)” (p. 340). Humans dump an estimated equivalent of 26 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year (IPCC, 2007). On a per capita basis Australia emits 26.2 tons per capita of greenhouse gas equivalents, Canada puts out 23.7 tons, and the United States 24 tons per capita, putting these countries among the highest per capita emitters in the world (Walker and King, 2008). Because carbon dioxide can have a residency time of up to one hundred years in the atmosphere, historical emission trends matter. In terms of the historical emissions of greenhouse gases, Canada, Australia, and the United States are responsible for over 30% of cumulative human emissions to date (Hansen, 2008a). The transition of the primary energy source of the developed world from wood to coal to natural gas has signalled a trend of less carbon per unit of energy obtained, but this trend is now reversing as clean energy sources like natural gas are becoming more scarce (Homer Dixon, 2008). We are

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now recarbonizing the energy economy with dirty coal and tar sands oil pushing us closer to self-reinforcing warming. The ugly reality is that coal, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels, is on the ascendant again; over the past two years alone, China has overtaken the United States as the greatest global emitter of greenhouse gases. It has developed an amazing 170 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity (Nature, 2008). This is more than twice Britain’s entire electricity-generating capacity which was installed over a century (Heffernan, 2008, p. 3). A large portion of this carbon footprint is for the energy used to manufacture goods for global export, in effect leaving a share of this footprint with people all over the world who purchase goods from China. As major industrialized countries and producers of the largest per capita emissions, the United States, Canada, and Australia have, over the past ten years, erected roadblocks to any meaningful international climate change treaty, treated the emerging science with disdain bordering on contempt, and have effectively scuttled the only international treaty to date attempting to limit emissions, the Kyoto Protocol. Although Australia only recently ratified the treaty and the United States under Clinton and Bush refused to do so, Canada’s position is probably the most disingenuous, as its parliament ratified the Kyoto treaty under a liberal government, but its two-yearold conservative government has refused to enact it or to withdraw Canada from it. Although governments have pretended to take the issue seriously, emissions continue to rise while the environmental community continues to wring its hands. In the case of Canada’s prime minister Harper, prior to federal politics he led the “Canadian Taxpayers Federation” a national libertarian tax watchdog organization that demonized the Kyoto accord, and that continues to prominently promote climate change sceptics and their disinformation. In office Harper used the same language of American neoconservative “think tanks” like the “Competitive Enterprise Institute” to dismiss the need to tackle the issue; he once described the Kyoto Protocol as: “a ‘socialist scheme’ designed to suck money out of rich countries” arguing that “it’s based on ‘tentative and contradictory scientific evidence’ and it focuses on carbon dioxide, which is “essential to life” (Canadian Broadcasting Company, 2007). Harper, a member of parliament from Calgary and his Conservative party have very close ties to the Alberta oil and gas industry, and have: “virtually granted the [Alberta] tar sands industry a free ride when it comes to reducing greenhouses gases” (Clarke, 2008, p. 107). With six of the ten biggest companies in the world being oil firms, it is not too difficult to see where political power and influence lie. Spending by the big oil, gas, and coal industries on political lobbying and influence peddling


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in Washington exceeded $180 million in the past three years alone (Center for Responsive Politics, 2008), and in 2008 is expected to surpass last year’s record $83 million U.S. dollars (Hargreaves, 2008). When political contributions, lobbying expenditures, paid advertising, and political spending by outside organizations is added up, the oil and coal industries in the United States spent $427.2 million in the first eight months of 2008 alone, and projections indicate that these groups could wind up spending $900 million to $1 billion in 2008 to manipulate public opinion and policy (Public Campaign Action Fund, 2008). In Canada one of the national right-wing corporate newspapers has systematically attempted to discredit the science of climate change and to promote the views of Big Carbon’s climate change sceptics and crackpots. A recent headline by the editor of the Financial Post, one of Canada’s major sources of business news, screams: “CLIMATE CHANGE A LOOMING CATASTROPHE? OR A LEFT-WING FRAUD?; Don’t believe Al Gore: Global warming is a crock” (Corcoran, 2007; original emphasis). Boykoff and Mansfield (2008) found that climate change reporting in the U.K. tabloid press “significantly diverged from the scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change” (p. 1). In a similar vein the Canadian tabloid press with its primarily working class readership has beat a constant editorial drumbeat dismissive of climate science, fear mongering about what any type of carbon mitigation would mean in terms of lost jobs and endorsing sceptical fringe science documentaries such as the “Great Climate Swindle” (Calgary Sun Editorial, 2006; Corbella, 2007; Worthington, 2005). This has been part of a long running anti-science message campaign featuring regular ad hominem attacks on politicians, scientists, and environmental leaders attempting to raise awareness and action on climate change. In the United States “Fox News” and the anti-Gore blogosphere has become something of an industry as right-wing pundits accuse Gore outright of constructing lies concerning the science and the seriousness of climate change in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The last eight years of the Bush administration resulted in the “Enronization” of science policy in the United States (Michaels, 2008) with the emergence of the most politicized partisan attack on federal science policy in the history of the United States (Donaghy et al., 2007; Union of Concerned Scientists, 2004a,b, 2008). The work of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the warnings of senior climate change scientists and expert groups was routinely censured and downplayed by Republican political operatives, including many with no scientific expertise whatsoever (Bowen, 2008). This occurred because experts used direct

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language both linking human activities to climate change and issuing warnings of the consequences of continued inaction. The U.S. Congressional Committee investigating the Bush record on manipulating the public’s access to climate change science found: a systematic White House effort to censor climate scientists by controlling their access to the press and editing testimony to Congress. The White House was particularly active in stifling discussions of the link between increased hurricane intensity and global warming. The White House also sought to minimize the significance and certainty of climate change by extensively editing government climate change reports. Other actions taken by the White House involved editing EPA legal opinions and op-eds on climate change. (United States House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, 2007, p. 32) Canada has not been immune to the Bush anti-science model of politicizing climate science policy and the muzzling scientists. Under the conservative Harper, climate change reporting by Environment Canada, the federal environmental watchdog has also “‘muzzled’ its scientists, ordering them to refer all media queries to Ottawa where communications officers will help them respond with ‘approved lines’” (Munro, 2008). In terms of dealing with climate change, Commonwealth leaders led by Canada’s Harper in the spring of 2008 eschewed discussions of binding emission targets and commitments, opting instead for fuzzy “long-term aspirational global goal for emissions reductions to which all countries would contribute” (Freeman, 2007). In pushing for “aspirational goals” at the Asia Pacific Economic Council meetings in September of 2007 Harper, Bush, and Howard effectively undermined the mandatory carbon reduction targets of the Kyoto accord advocating instead for meaningless intensity-based targets, a euphemism for “business as usual,” which would effectively allow greenhouse gas emissions to continue to rise albeit at a slower rate. At the recent G8 conference in Hokkaido, Japan, G8 nations refused to establish a base year from which to measure their stated goal of 50% reductions; they demanded a 50% reduction from all countries ignoring massive historical inequities in carbon emissions, and third they refused to establish any mid-term targets to reach their stated “goals.” Although the G8 nations are responsible for 62% of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere, they have not acknowledged that this fact alone makes moral demands to commit them to make much larger percentage cuts than developing nations.


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The notion that mere symbolic gestures or “good intentions” such as “intensity targets” are sufficient to forestall unprecedented changes in the ecological and physiochemical systems that control the Earth’s climate are symptomatic of a worldview that is both delusional and dangerous. Challenging the presuppositions that inform this worldview is essential if effective public policy is to emerge from the smog of disinformation being generated.

Petro-Politics in the Canadian Boreal Forest Because climate change policy is also rooted in status quo carbon politics, it is important to appreciate that it is no coincidence that the public policy development in both Washington and Ottawa has been dominated by the politics of the “oil-patch” over the past ten years. Both Harper and Bush have deep connections to the oil industry. Friedman’s “First Law of Petropolitics” (2006) posits that: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil-rich petrolist states . . . the higher the average global crude oil price rises, the more free speech, free press, free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and independent political parties are eroded. And these negative trends are reinforced by the fact that the higher the price goes, the less petrolist leaders are sensitive to what the world thinks or says about them. (p. 1) While Friedman argues that his “law” describes emerging “petro-tyrannies” in Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, and Russia, Nikiforuk (2007a) suggests that Alberta, Canada, be added to the list. The Alberta tar sands have been characterized as the “most destructive project on Earth” making Canada the world’s dirty energy superpower (Hatch and Price, 2008). The open-pit tar sands mines are the largest known hydrocarbon deposits on the planet and extraction is destroying an area of boreal forest the size of Florida (Leaton, 2008). For every barrel of tar sands oil produced, 125 kilograms of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, three times the amount released for conventional production. On top of that, the tar sand releases the carcinogen benzene at a rate of about 100 tonnes per year, and this is expected to grow to 500–800 tonnes per year by 2015 (Hatch and Price, 2008). This makes the product among the dirtiest of oils in production. Canada is the largest energy provider to the United States and most of this hydrocarbon energy is exported from the tar sands.

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Over the past ten years the transnational oil companies controlling Alberta’s tar sands have been given almost unrestricted access to enormous swathes of Canada’s northern Boreal forest. They consume prodigious amounts of freshwater and energy and leave toxic mine tailings ponds that can be seen with the naked eye from space. Their scale is mindboggling: “If all the toxic waste ponds at Syncrude and other mines were dumped into Lake Erie, they would create a stinking pool 10 inches deep. By 2030, the waste would sit three feet deep” (Nikiforuk, 2007b, p. 39). As Nikiforuk explains, the provincial government now derives approximately 40% of its income from oil and gas revenue, and has been ruled as “a one-party state” – the same conservative party – for the past thirty-seven years. The provincial government spends tens of millions annually on propaganda to manipulate public opinion downplaying the environmental impacts of tar sands development on behalf of the oil industry (Marsden, 2007; Nikiforuk, 2007a). The last eight years have witnessed an abrogation of responsibility by most of the chief executives of the world’s major carbon emitters to do anything substantive and effective concerning climate change. Through their numerous trade organizations like the “Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers” or the “American Petroleum Institute” and even funding junkscience proponents directly in the case of companies like Exxon-Mobil, they have been part of a well-orchestrated movement aimed at discrediting the IPCC science in the eyes of the public – all the while maintaining a thin façade of corporate social responsibility. The “research” of Exxon-Mobil funded think tanks like “Global Change” was even used as the basis for disputing the global warming “hypothesis” by the Bush administration and their censuring of federal climate science (Michaels, 2008). The U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2005), the largest business lobby group in the country, like its Canadian counterpart, has also done its utmost to confuse the public about the scientific basis of climate change and the need for measures like the Kyoto protocol: “even if humans are truly causing global warming, we will have, in pursuit of these fixatives, wasted vast amounts of our time and wealth, leaving us poorly equipped to address the climate change issue when we arrive at a better understanding of how to address the problem” (p. 2). Without even acknowledging human culpability, the speculative climate problem is framed as one beyond the best technology of today, awaiting a potential solution at some unspecified future date. Some of the major multinational oil companies spend more on greenwash advertising than they do on investments in renewable energy. Exxon spent a mere 1% of its $41 billion in profits last year on alternative energy sources while British Petroleum (BP) recently re-branded as “Beyond


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Petroleum,” invested a meagre 2.9% of its profits in renewables (Golodrya et al., 2008). Despite this, massive print, television, and internet advertising campaigns attempt to convince the public that these corporations are engaged with climate change issues and playing their part in being responsible corporate citizens. General Motors, manufacturer of the Hummer and a central party in the intense lobbying efforts of the last twenty years to keep corporate average fuel economy standards (CAFÉ) stagnant in the United States, is now facing billions in losses because their fuel inefficient fleet of vehicles are no longer selling. They have apparently now seen the “green light,” with front page ads on the New York Times website inviting viewers to participate in an online forum: “We share a planet, why not share a dialogue, Let’s talk” (General Motors, 2008). A recent Harris-Decima poll suggests a majority of Canadians want more aggressive government action to fight climate change, despite recent skyrocketing fuel costs. When people were asked whether they support a more cautious approach to dealing with environmental issues, or stronger action to reduce the country’s dependence on oil, 61% indicated that an aggressive approach was more logical, and only 27% said governments should move more slowly on the environment in light of the rising cost of oil and gasoline (The Canadian Press, 2008; Harris-Decima Research, 2008). This Canadian poll is consistent with similar U.S. studies that have also indicated that majorities of people want effective government action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this, the most recent attempt at national climate change legislation in the United States – the “LiebermanWarner Climate Security Act,” a cap and trade proposal – was defeated in part as a result of fierce lobbying by Big Carbon industries. Political leaders of all stripes have a strong aversion to speaking plainly and straightforwardly with their publics about the very real threats and challenges that climate change poses, instead clinging to discredited ideas such as supply-side thinking while finding new ways to promote tax subsidies for big energy companies. The exertion of asymmetrical power over public policy by Big Carbon is abetted by a “deeply entrenched technological optimism” (Boykoff and Rajan, 2007, p .209) that these industries exploit to full advantage when, for example, they call for more “clean coal” technology that doesn’t exist, or frame corn-based ethanol biofuels as “solutions” or techno-fixes for climate change. Eckersley (2001) suggests that linear optimists dominate government and businesses – “those who believe that by continuing on our current path life will keep getting better” (p. 91). Linear optimists according to Eckersley

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believe that economic growth equals progress, and more means better, or as he explains “progress as a pipeline: “pump more wealth in one end and more welfare flows out the other” (ibid.). At the other end of the optimism-pessimism continuum, Eckersley identifies linear pessimists – “those who believe that life will inevitably get worse.” This category includes the stereotypical environmentalists whose pronouncements are often interpreted as being part of a “doom and gloom” anti-modernity framework within which austerity and ecological and social collapse are never too far over the horizon. This stereotype is just that, as many “bright green” environmentally and socially driven technological entrepreneurs are remaking both technological and social systems to reflect a somewhat different set of core values than those that have driven industrialism and our ecological systems to the point of collapse. Ultimately the question of whether genuine progress on climate change mitigation in order to avoid “dangerous climate change” (Schellnhuber et al., 2006) on a planetary level will be resolved by a massive techno-scientific-fix or by a global transformation of political, economic, and moral consciousness, or some combination of both, remains in doubt.

Autistic Economics Economy is no longer instrumental-it is now the supreme objective by which all other forms of human togetherness need to legitimize their raison d’être . . . economic growth is no longer an endeavour with a set objective and a finishing line, but a continuous self-propelling process with no end in sight, end neither contemplated or allowed. No longer the purpose of “growth” is “adding to the world,” accumulation of artefacts enriching human life – but a perpetual acceleration of circulation, replacement, waste-disposal. (Bauman quoted in Rojek, 2004, p. 298)

While climate change is certainly in part a technological failure insofar as our technological systems are directly involved in dumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, failure doesn’t end with our machines. As Barnes (2006) explains climate change is: quintessentially, a problem of negative externalities. We pay owners of land beneath which fossil fuels lie. We pay drillers, refiners, transporters, and retailers. But we don’t pay nature, or anyone else, for dumping


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heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. We shift this cost to our children, and take a free ride. We party, they pay. (p. 10) Climate change then reflects a failure of neoclassical economics in its unwillingness and inability to acknowledge carbon dioxide as a pollutant and to find a price signal that will lead to dramatically reduced carbon emissions. Neoclassical economics treats our atmosphere and the environment in general as a common dump, a public “externality” that in due course has created a “tragedy of the commons” on a global scale. The Stern (2006) report commissioned by the British government on the looming economic impacts of climate change concluded: “climate change is an example of market failure involving externalities and public goods . . . it has profound implications for economic growth and development. All in all, it must be regarded as market failure on the greatest scale the world has seen” (p. 25). “Market failure” is a term used to describe situations where market forces fail to efficiently allocate goods and services to the public. The public interest is not served in situations of market failure, common-pool resources such as air sheds, watersheds, and oceans are abused by some, usually a minority, and costs are passed on to the wider public. The Stern report is stark concerning the risks of business as usual with respect to greenhouse gas emissions: “Our actions now and over the coming decades could create risks . . . on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century” (p. 3). The dire scenario Stern warns about may arrive, not by accident, but rather through the “logical” decision-making processes of a dysfunctional techno-economic system informed by a fundamentally dysfunctional worldview. Alcorn and Solarz (2006) describe modern neoclassical economics as “autistic” insofar as it remains preoccupied with “abnormal subjectivity, acceptance of fantasy rather than reality” in terms of how it models the world (p. 1). Despite its dysfunctional nature, this autistic model of neoclassical economics is still taught in universities worldwide along with the ideas of “perfect markets” and the individual as a rational maximizer, and this Homo economicus is: “More advanced and evolved than the average homo sapien consumer, this idealized construct is capable of analyzing an infinite string of data in an infinitesimally small period of time – all with seamless prescience and precision” (p. 3). Our societies’ addiction to economic growth and therefore ever increasing levels of energy consumption are a key dynamic in the climate change crisis. Global predatory capitalism functions as a perpetual motion machine and any notions of “sufficiency” or “limits to growth” are literally treated as virus-like cultural “memes,” to be avoided or

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downplayed at all costs. A mere glimpse into the insatiable greed that provides the metabolic drive of neoliberal capitalism reveals its machinelike logic; Exxon-Mobil reported second-quarter earnings of $11.68 billion in August 2008, the biggest quarterly profit in history by any U.S. corporation, but these results still “fell well short of Wall Street” expectations! (Porretto, 2008). As Wright (2008) points out “the supposed ‘rights’ of capital trump those of sovereignty, ecology, labour-and future generations. The economy has become a tyranny” (p. F4). Although some religious groups have made significant strides in convincing their followers to treat climate change as a serious issue (Bingham, 2008), many others have not. In fact the major conservative U.S. evangelical groups like “Focus on the Family,” and the “Southern Baptist Convention” have active ongoing lobbying campaigns to convince their millions of followers, as well the government to ignore climate change science arguing that “‘recent, slight warming’ is an unproven threat that could lead to restrictions in energy use and drive up the cost of energy and food for the world’s poor” (Associated Press, 2008). These groups have ignored the numerous scientific reports that indicate that continued inaction to reduce greenhouse gases is hurting the poor and most vulnerable in developing nations the most (Care International, 2008; IPCC, 2007). Climate change is expected to hit Sub-Saharan Africa very hard, Zambia, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso, Togo, Botswana, Guinea-Bissau, and Gambia could lose up to three-quarters of their agricultural output, with climatic shifts increasing the population of malnourished people by fifty-five million, with most of them residing in Africa (Roberts, 2008, p. 226). The carbon footprint contribution of the poorest one billion people on the planet is estimated to be only 3% of the world’s total footprint (United Nations Development Programme, 2007). Despite the fact that these people carry almost negligible responsibility for climate change, because of their vulnerability, they are and will continue to be the most severely impacted by climate change in the near-term. The danger we face, as Leiss (2007) identifies, is that by the time “the actual reality of climate change supplants the faith-based reality so many prefer, it will be too late to take meaningful mitigation measures.”

A Referendum on Resilience and Ingenuity Awareness of climate change in North America burst into the mainstream media in 1988 when NASA Goddard Institute’s scientist James Hansen


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testified to the U.S. Congress that he was 99% certain that human actions were altering the planet’s climate. In the intervening twenty years carbon dioxide levels have increased dramatically and an effective “solution” seems very elusive. In many ways the human response to the emerging climate change crisis could be considered a “real-time” referendum on the resilience and capacity for innovation and ingenuity of our social institutions. In terms of cultural transformation, we might ask whether our social institutions are equipping citizens to grapple with the following difficult questions: z

z

z

z

z

Do citizens understand the implications of the massive loss of biodiversity that will accompany climate change and how it will dramatically impact the quality and quantity of human life on the planet? Do citizens understand the nature and magnitude of the risks we collectively face, the burden of historical responsibility and the hardships already being placed on the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet due to climate change? Are they grappling with the complex ethical and moral questions climate change raises? Do citizens understand enough of the basic nature of science in terms of how scientific knowledge is actually produced and continually tested and validated through processes like peer review, and not simply by rhetorical argument on pseudoscience blogs? Do citizens understand enough political ecology to become aware of how powerful vested interests work to manipulate public opinion on climate change and purported “solutions” to it, while often employing strategies to avoid dealing with the root nature of the problem or to “greenwash” it to their own advantage? Do citizens understand that both technological and social innovation will be necessary to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate? Do they understand that innovation in these areas requires a different worldview?

More effort is required in the preparation of teachers who are ready to engage secondary students with the critical thinking skills and strategies required to detect, analyse, and respond to corporate propaganda that infiltrates and influences education systems. Educators need to reflect on the question at which point does “neutrality and passivism merely amount to a collaboration with the political economic elites in power”? (Standlea, 2006, p. xii). Of crucial importance in terms of transforming thinking around climate change is challenging dominant discourses and fostering the creation of new narratives and worldviews within which individuals and communities can find relevance and meaning (Bateson, 2008).

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For example, corporations such as Exxon-Mobil who have been a recognized supporter of climate change denial propaganda have become corporate sponsors of science teacher training institutes in conjunction with professional golfers (Exxon Mobil, 2008). Exxon Mobil uses these affiliations to burnish their corporate social responsibility (CSR) image, giving the impression in their CSR reports that they “care” about mathematics and science education while also funding “astroturf” organizations who use every manipulative trick in the books to hoodwink citizens about the threat that climate change poses and to discredit the science that supports it (Greenpeace USA, 2007; Maassarani, 2007). Science education, not unlike other areas of the curriculum, has been subject to waves of change and transformation buffeted by economic, political, and ideological trends. Today science education along with many other subjects is in the grip of the “accountability wars” whose embodiment is found in the standardized testing movement found in all major OECD countries. In emphasizing the importance of often decontextualized scientific “facts” over the contextualized sociopolitical and ecological dimensions of science and technology practices in a democratic society, students are left with a “naively inductivist and empiricist misunderstanding of how science creates knowledge” (Turner, 2008, p. 63). As Turner explains Science, Technology, Society (STS) pedagogy with its emphasis on civic scientific literacy, citizenship, and the importance of civic democratic management of science and technology has been in retreat since its curricular successes in the 1970s and 1980s. Turner contends that this shift in pedagogical theory to be: symptomatic of declining citizen confidence in the ability of democratic government to manage technology in society’s interest, or in the belief that government can be fully trusted to do so, or in the necessity of it even attempting to do so in any particularly aggressive or proactive manner . . . Increasingly the civic agenda that was at the heart of the STS reform thrust dissolves in the subjective waters of individual values, is re-directed toward local initiatives and studies, or is conservatively interpreted as the pedagogical instilling of specific skills such as probability assessment, the understanding of risk, or techniques of proper inference from empirical evidence. (p. 68) The most comprehensive government attempt to educate the Canadian public about climate change to date was the now defunct “One Tonne Challenge,” a program that provided grants to raise awareness among youth


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and to develop community-based projects and action plans for greenhouse gas reduction. The One Tonne Challenge encouraged all Canadians to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by one tonne, as insignificant as this is in light of the enormous carbon footprint of Canadians. It was cancelled by the Harper conservative government and has not been replaced by any program to educate or engage youth or communities in the issue. As an indication of just how petty and partisan the issue has now become in Canada, the Conservative Party of Canada has spent millions on a nationally televised political cartoon advertisement featuring a talking grease spot that ridicules the official opposition’s plan to institute a national carbon tax as a “tax on everything” (CBC, 2008). Instead of rational debate between political parties about the merits of different public policy approaches to decreasing carbon emissions, inflammatory and vulgar rhetoric dominate, with the prime minister himself calling the carbon tax proposal “insane” and “crazy,” a plan that would “screw everybody across the country” (Clark, 2008). Although understanding the basic science behind climate change is important, much more educational effort needs to be focused on how the topic is tackled across all facets of the curriculum, in technological, economic, social studies, and political science education. After all, it is not inadequate science education that is responsible for our collective decision to treat the atmosphere as a common dump into which we pour billions of tones of greenhouse gases each year. Nor is poor geography education complicit in the decisions to consume enormous swathes of Canada’s Boreal forest in order to extract carbon heavy oil from tar bitumen sands, to mainly feed North America’s woefully inefficient transportation system. What is sorely required is a stronger move towards interdisciplinary curricula that reflect critical STSE (E-Environmental) decision-making processes and opportunities for young people to grapple with the ethical and moral dimensions of the problem as well. Another critically important education task is teaching young people to critically deconstruct the greenwash and the disinformation that courses through the mediascape. In order to understand the breadth of the educational “blind-spot” in terms of how schools prepare young people to cope and adapt to climate change, it is worth examining the field of technology education. Broadly speaking, technology education is concerned with teaching young people how to use and design a diverse collection of technological products and systems to meet human needs and wants (International Technology Education Association, 2007). A study examining the content of five current secondary technology education curriculum documents from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and New Zealand

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Table 4.1 Frequency of key climate-change related phrases in five secondary technology education curriculum documents. Concept-phrase

Climate change or global warming Consumerism Sustainable development Precautionary principle Future generations Ecological or carbon footprint

Number of times word or concept is mentioned in 1,031 total pages

Number of countries with no mention of the concept in their technology education curriculum

4

4

2 3 0 2 0

4 4 5 5 5

Source: Elshof, in press.

(Elshof, in press), a total of 1,031 pages describing the curriculum content and learning expectations for students reveals how little climate change is mentioned. Table 4.1 illustrates in part some of these findings. An examination of Table 4.1 reveals that “climate change” is only mentioned in one of the five documents and that key concepts related to understanding how technology can contribute or alleviate greenhouse gas emissions are absent. These curricula are all effectively “climate-blind” and at the very least they also raise troubling questions concerning the worldviews and environmental awareness of the curriculum developers in this critical area. If the youth of rich developed nations are not being taught how our present use of technology is contributing to the climate change crisis, or how different forms of design and use can help mitigate the worst of the expected impacts, how can we hold developing nations responsible? To explicate is to analyse and to “develop in detail” in order to reveal deeper meanings. Climate change education for explication would engage students in an open-ended investigation of how lifestyles and the technological “things” they demand are woven into the carbon economy. It would be a journey down the rabbit hole of systems interconnection and interdependence in order to reveal and interpret the implicit and explicit ecological, political, social, and technological relationships they have with the creation of greenhouse gases and the web of impacts that consumption has on the biosphere. Climate change education for “attachment” would lead students through critical and self-reflexive examination of ethics, worldviews, social justice, and the moral dimensions of the climate change conundrum. Central to the educational challenge is coming to grips with our


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apparent inability to understand ourselves collectively as agents capable of being both “world” and “future eaters” (Flannery, 1995; Jones, 1998), while also holding simultaneously feelings of powerlessness as individuals to enact real change. As Latour (2007) asks: How can we read in the newspapers that “we” as humans might be responsible for 30 or 40% of species extinction, without this effecting a change in our “identity” and our “relationships”? How can we remain unmoved by the idea that we are now as dangerous to our life support system as the impact of a major meteorite? . . . Is this discrepancy – between the immensely big and powerful, and the immensely weak and puny – not one of the reasons why we keep reading all of this literature on ecological crisis without really believing in it? (p. 2) As Jamieson (2008) explains, a paradigmatic moral problem is “one in which an individually acting intentionally harms another individual; both the individual and the harm are identifiable; and the individuals and the harm are closely related in time and space” (p. 475). Although climate change should be a dramatic challenge to our moral consciousness, it is often not perceived this way, and because it lacks the defining characteristics of a paradigm moral problem we don’t treat it with the urgency we should (Jamieson, 2008). Importantly, Jamieson points out that the language of “care, empathy, responsibility, and duty” has been absent from dominant climate discourses, replaced instead with the dominant language of “science, economics, and technological development” (p. 481). Educators at all levels need to consider ways to create discourses with young people, which bring care, empathy, responsibility, and duty to discussions involving decision making around climate change

Conclusion Worldviews play a central role in the quickly emerging climate crisis. Rich developed nations have enjoyed the use of cheap carbon-based fuels to develop into the economic powers that control much of the world’s capital and resource flows. Informed by a superiority worldview, politicians, abetted by business and industry-funded contrarian groups, are doing everything they can to entrench the status quo. Thus, they avoid facing the ugly realities that connect energy use and a consumption driven economy with climate change.

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The challenges young people face with climate change spill far beyond the boundaries of any particular disciplinary training they receive in schools and universities. Because climate change issues going forward are deeply embedded in discussions involving inequity and justice and the inertia of a dysfunctional worldview, a critical facet of all education involves a dissembling of the discourses of industria and their connection to climate change. Only then and informed by the “green virtues” of humility and mindfulness will young people have a fighting chance to transform the unthinking that drives industria into a more ecologically sane and sustainable worldview. An important part of this task involves helping young citizens create more inclusive and ecologically sane narratives that both individuals and communities can find hope in. Appreciating the multiple contexts of reality and the ability to think in terms of linking multiple coupled and embedded systems, we may begin to more fully understand the consequences of our own behaviours. Rorty (1999) advises teachers and humanistic intellectuals to “instill the doubt in the student’s own self-images, and about the society to which they belong [in order to] ensure that the moral consciousness of each new generation is slightly different from that of the previous generation (p. 127). The question of whether instilling only a “slightly different” moral consciousness will be adequate to the task of coping with climate change in a fair and just manner remains very much in doubt.

Chapter 5

Education at the End of Nature: Learning to Cope with Climate Change Timothy W. Luke Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Introduction This chapter looks at a few high-profile thinkers in the United States who urgently have outlined approaches for coping with climate change. Yet, it tries to get past the usual register of the “either/or” set out by many climate change worriers and deniers who try to confront the crises of climate change. Too many policy makers go about either totally avoiding the realities of, or constantly allaying the fears about, the global warming challenge as their response. The thinkers under discussion here try to get beyond this common reaction. Various global climate trends appear to be turning very quickly for the worse, so there is little utility in waiting for some unexpected future shift that will bring a better, stable, and unchanged climate. Moreover, the official declaration that carbon dioxide and five other chemical compounds contribute to global warming by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on April 17, 2009, as well as the 2007 official ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that carbon dioxide is indeed a pollutant that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act, marks a definite change in thinking by the U.S. government. Therefore, ordinary citizens and government officials across the United States and the world should acknowledge these materially changing realities, and business must map out new strategies for adapting effectively and equitably to the ways climate change already is affecting human and nonhuman life.

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Global warming trends over the past two decades, now usually lumped together as either somewhat strange weather events or still minor arctic, marine, or biotic developments, do seem to mark, however, “the end of nature” as Nature has been understood over the past few centuries (McKibben, 1989). At the same time, these changes constitute important opportunities for world publics to learn how to adapt to a rapidly changing climate. From this perspective, three important, but not entirely flawless, efforts by American thinkers to evaluate the values and behaviour needed to cope with climate change are worth reviewing, namely, the ideas of Thomas L. Friedman, Al Gore, Jr., and Ted Nordhaus with Michael Shellenberger. They all offer new approaches for thinking about how humans might adapt to a world with extreme weather, species extinction, landscape degradation, and natural unpredictability. While they are directed at policy arenas in the United States, their global warming preparedness proposals have considerable import for reshaping education “at the end of nature” all around the world. These thinkers are authentic attempts to grapple with climate change. Nevertheless, given widespread doubts over the urgency with which climate change should be addressed (Lomborg, 2001; Singer and Avery, 2007), and the ongoing contestability in some policy-making circles of climate change science in general, their intellectual efforts also have been pitched at different levels in important parallel policy registers to accomplish other political goals. As a result, their basic environmental plans also often take the apparent guise of radical new initiatives in American foreign policy, energy policy, or industrial policy. By implementing their recommendations, they believe the United States and the world at large would, at the same time, begin to cope effectively with climate change. The EPA’s much belated official acceptance of anthropogenic climate change two long decades after Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) is perhaps one sign of a new beginning for this transition. After many American missteps in responding to climate change from the Bush (forty-one) to the Bush (forty-three) administration, Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007), Gore (2006), and Friedman (2005a, 2006a, 2007, 2008) are seriously rethinking the threats posed by global climate change. For those outside of the United States, their analyses can ring with quasiimperial tones inasmuch as they couple their hopes for attaining a fresh, green, and just path for global warming preparedness with designs to maintain American preeminence in an increasingly transnational world (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Trying to find the right strategy for all four of these thinkers is critical, since these global climate change fighting tactics also must

Learning to Cope with Climate Change

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revitalize America’s national economy at a rapid case in greenest possible manner as well as save the planet from global warming (Luke, 2002). Whether one reads their views in The Reader’s Digest or The Wall Street Journal, these individuals are beginning to map out high-profile responses to climate change for the United States.

Friedman’s Project The conflation of geopolitical hegemony and planet-wide environmental managerialism in the inchoate musings of American scientific, media corporate, and academic leaders acquires an oddly coherent articulation in the eclectic thinking of the New York Times pundit Thomas L. Friedman. As a long-time Mid-East observer, American politics analyst, and globalization enthusiast, Friedman began touting his own “third way” alternative to either the Bush (forty-three) neoconservatives “Global War on Terror” coalition or the more appeasement-minded European Union elites to dealing with militant OPEC nation petropolitics during 2005 (Kagan, 2003). Caught between what he regarded as multilateralist diplomacy in Brussels and pre-emptive war-planning in Washington as the NATO countries faced Iran’s weaponization of atomic energy, Friedman (2005f) claims, Yes, there is an alternative to the Euro-wimps and the neo-cons, and it is the “geo-greens.” I am a geo-green. The geo-greens believe that, going forward, if we put all our focus on reducing the price of oil – by conservation, by developing renewable and alternative energies and by expanding nuclear power – we will force more reform than by any other strategy. You give me $18-a-barrel oil and I will give you political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran. All these regimes have huge population bubbles and too few jobs. They make up the gap with oil revenues. Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to often up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple . . . The Bush team’s laudable desire to promote sustained reform in the Middle East will never succeed unless it moves from neocon to geogreen. (A17) Friedman’s faith that collapsing oil revenues will ensure social emancipation is perhaps far-fetched, particularly in a global market where strange supply-and-demand dynamics can push gasoline up in a few months from $2.50 to $4.00 and then down to $1.85 a gallon in many major American

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cities. Yet, his complex imaginary of a “geo-green” strategy bears more analysis. While the Obama administration seems to be sticking closely to business as usual, it also is starting perhaps to exhibit some geo-green tendencies. Friedman gets quite direct about his rhetorical position: “In the world of ideas, if you can name an issue you can own it. For so many years, the term green was defined by its opponents who wanted to disparage the idea. They defined green as liberal, tree-hugging, sissy, girlie-man, unpatriotic and vaguely French” (in Yarris, 2008). Of course, there were few epithets as damning as these horrible adjectives in the Age of George W. Bush, and the general prejudice against such dispositions continues under President Obama. Therefore, Friedman believes global warming preparedness politicos have a challenging task ahead by re-branding his “geo-green” policy posture as a tough strategic amalgam of energy, economy, and environment all mobilized for the service of the United States. As Freidman seeks to smelt down sissy greens into strategic geo-greens, then, he takes a sharp environationalist turn (Luke, 1999a). Once again, then, the land, sky, and water making up the environments of America in Friedman’s thought become that essential basis that Americans must use to reinvent themselves, their nation, and the world. For a world that is becoming “hot, flat, and crowded” (Friedman, 2008), it is certain to Friedman “there is nothing we would do to become the most respected, more secure, most innovative, most entrepreneurial nation in the world” (in Yarris, 2008). Therefore, he spells out a new policy formula: geography plus geophysics times geopolitics integrated with geoeconomics becomes his geo-greenism. Nonetheless, Friedman concocts this brew to speak directly to Americans, American firms, and the American state in order to help them cope with today’s warming, flattening, and crowding world system. Yet, bizarrely, his ideas seem to sell elsewhere as well as they do in the United States, judging from the eager embrace given to him by many domestic and foreign transnational firms (Aronica and Ramdoo, 2006). In this respect, Friedman goes Charlie Wilson, a 1950s American automobile executive who said “what’s good for General Motors is good for America,” one much better by redefining the nature of today’s American hegemony. That is, Friedman essentially asserts that what is “green for America” is “green for the world.” Even so, he begins his declarations with a simple article of faith, namely, “green is the new red, white, and blue” (Friedman, 2008). Therefore, it now should be America’s mission to bring its red, white, and blue geo-greenism to a world that is hot, flat, and crowded.


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Such word-smithing at first blush often seems silly, but it always must be remembered that “politics is, essentially, a matter of words” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 54). By lingering in the dust kicked up by world-crushing economic, technological, and social changes, Friedman glibly works at making clusters of technological artifice appear quite natural, and recasting obscure transnational market contingencies as obvious imperative realities. Friedman’s views about globalization as a “world flattening” event express his awe about the recent rising productivity and focused competitiveness of Russia, India, China, Brazil, and other new economic powers, while reflecting his dismay about the fortunes of the United States as it struggles to maintain its preeminent strategic place on the world stage (Friedman, 2005a, 2006a, and 2007). Economic forces cannot easily be resisted, but they might be – in accord with Friedman’s analyses of a flattening world – anticipated, deflected, leveraged, or utilized, effectively or ineffectively, by a nation’s leaders and citizens (Sharma, 2007). Unlike Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007), who proclaim the necessity of hastening the “death of environmentalism” in their quest to capture electoral and intellectual momentum for a new green movement centred on climate change politics, Friedman works just to re-brand environmentalism by repositioning “green” as a much “more muscular and strategic” notion in the guise of his “geo-green” thinking from his 2005 and 2006 New York Times columns, the latest edition of The World is Flat [3.0], and his new book Hot, Flat and Crowded (2008). Friedman seems totally unfazed by proclaiming green is the new red, white, and blue. Asserting this principle, however, means the red, white, and blue intends, rightly or wrong, will have the United States determine the key qualities of the world’s environmental goods, and then dole out the quantities when and where needed of green benefits. Who defines what red, white, and blue is crucial, since this polychromatic claim affirms American leadership or hegemony, munificence or advantage, collaboration or control. Friedman flatly states geo-green policies are the path for the United States to renew its economy and environment so that it might save both itself and the world. That the world could refuse this new vision of green salvation, or could rail against its creation without much consultation, coordination, or codetermination should occur to Friedman, but it does not seem entirely apparent in his analysis thus far. More remarkably, Friedman’s odd combination of a geoeconomics, reborn geopolitics, and a new social ecology as “geo-greenism” in many ways also is a political imaginary inspired by technological an imported

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alien object – Toyota’s pioneering Prius hybrid car. As Friedman (2005e) explains, Diffusing Toyota’s hybrid technology is one of the keys to what I call “geo-green.” Geo-greens seek to combine into a single political movement environments who want to reduce fossil fuels that cause climate change, evangelicals who want to protect God’s green earth and all his creations, and geo-strategists who want to reduce our dependence on crude oil because it fuels some of the worst regimes in the world. (A27) The geo-green strategy is still developing, but Friedman chided the Bush White House for being “M.I.A. on energy since 9/11” as that entire administration wilfully neglected geo-green policies that could have strengthened the dollar, reduced the trade deficit, and made American industry a world leader in reversing climate change. Just as Toyota Motor’s Lexus car prompted him to discuss the virtues of globalization a decade ago (Friedman, 1999), its Prius now has triggered his imaginative geo-green response to global warming. Even after Hurricane Katrina gob-smacked the American nation with a realization it is just another player caught within a transnational economy, which is quite vulnerable to gasoline shortages, weather disruptions, and climate change, Friedman wonders if Washington truly gets it, even now. Asking the White House to launch a new Manhattan Project for energy independence and global warming containment, Friedman’s call met complete stony silence in the District of Columbia. Since Washington ignored The New York Times, Friedman turned to touting General Electrics’ CEO Jeff Immelt, whose views of that company’s future being tied to green infrastructure echo Friedman’s geo-green appeal. Pointing to Immelt and GE, Friedman (2006d) claims: America should strive to make energy and environmental practices a national core competency and by doing so, create exports in jobs. America is the leading consumer of energy. However, we are not the technical leader. Europe today is the major force for environmental innovation. European governments have encouraged their companies to invest [in] and produce clean power technologies. The same is true for nuclear power and government policy that encourages this with subsides and other incentives are giving European companies a leg up. While Europe has been a driver for innovation, China promises to be its market. (A23)


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Rather than pushing for energy independence, via such game-changing technological means, the Bush (forty-three) administration only sought to expand coastal oil exploration, open the ANWR fields in Alaska, and grant tiny tax credits to those who would buy (mostly Japanese) hybrid cars. Meanwhile, China would appear to be answering to Immelt’s challenge, only in mainland Chinese markets to benefit its own economy (Friedman, 2005b, A29; 2005c, A21; and 2005d, A27). Friedman celebrates how Immelt calls his vision “eco-imagination” (Friedman, 2006b, A23), but he also observes this flexible response to climate change still is sadly lacking in Washington, D.C. Of course, the Great Recession of 2007–2009 has uncovered many reasons to question Friedman’s almost naïve faith in geo-greenism. Under Immelt, General Electric’s stock price, annual profits, and corporate reputation all have nearly crashed. Similarly, the prices of oil and gas have collapsed as the world economy has contracted, and the merits of many geo-green “eco-imaginative” technologies are predicted on oil becoming scarcer, global warming worsening, and access to cheap energy narrowing. All of scarcity-driven conditions could reoccur, but the economic shock of 2008– 2009 does trigger justifiable doubts. In outlining his criticisms of the Bush (forty-three) administration, Friedman dismisses that government’s misplaced neoliberal attacks on the nation’s remaining New Deal institutions as it bungled opportunities to put together a “geo-green” strategy that would marry geopolitics, energy policy, and environmentalism to master the digital revolution’s decentred systems of globalization today (2006), or “version 3.0.” In a vicious cycle of coincidences, Friedman sees the United States financing both sides of “the war on terror.” On one side, with tax dollars and foreign borrowing the United States pursues its national strategy; but, on the other, with heavy gas and oil purchases from fundamentalist Arab OPEC countries, it also funds the other side. By maintaining high oil consumption, Friedman argues the United States is propping up jihadist regimes, competing with China for petroreserves, backing autocrats from Venezuela to Russia, accelerating industrial outsourcing in the United States, and worsening the climate change crisis (Friedman, 2006b, A11). To counter this irrational domestic and foreign policy under Bush (fortythree), Friedman outlines “the elements” of his geo-green politics. First, a gasoline tax to maintain a price floor at around $4 a gallon in the United States (a figure that would need a bit of tweaking after 2008) to force consumers into more efficient vehicles, and lessen national oil consumption. Second, a reaffirmation of nuclear power’s promise to generate energy with

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few climate change side-effects. Third, a tax on carbon to compel industries to move from gas, coal, and oil to wind, hydro, and solar power, which also would reduce the deficit, strengthen the dollar, and deflect frictions with China. For Friedman (2006b), “It’s smart geopolitics. It’s smart fiscal policy. It is smart climate policy. Most of all – it’s smart politics” (A11). After barely one hundred days in office, the new Obama administration is beginning to discuss moving in these directions. More pointedly, Friedman outlines what his Geo-Green Party must do. Again, the economic crisis of 2007–2009 makes these aspirations hard to popularize, but Friedman (2006c) has stuck to his guns. First, in raising gasoline taxes and levying carbon taxes, “the Geo-Green party could claim that it has a plan for shoring up America’s energy security, environmental security, economic security and Social Security with one move” (A31). Clean power would topple dirty governments, freshen the environment, lessen climate change, and “renew American patriotism, education, and inventiveness” to help make America not only energy independent but also the dominant power of what will be the dominant industry of the 21st century: clean power and green technology . . . with an agenda that inspires hope and with leadership that inspires trust” (A31). While it is not complex, “That’s GeoGreenism. To be sure, Geo-Greenism is not a complete philosophy on par with liberalism or conservatism,” but it does have a climate change preparedness program to make liberalism or conservatism, the Republicans or Democrats, nationalist or globalists “more relevant to the biggest challenges of our time” (A31).

Gore’s Project A basic impulse behind Friedman’s geo-green thinking clearly draws strength from former vice president Al Gore’s global warming crusades, which stretch back to the Bush (forty-one) years. Even as a senator, Gore investigated how to sustain the true convenience of national prosperity for the United States amid a business, technology, and world environment facing too many inconvenient truths, resting upon the inequitable and irrational use of energy, resources, and information in a new global economy (Luke, 1993, 1994, 2003). As Gore often remarks, energy shortages have been real facts during his entire adult life, whether they were felt as actual supply disruptions and/or real price increases since the first OPEC cartel actions of 1971. Serious natural resource problems tied to air pollution, land degradation, water pollution, habit destruction, and atmospheric


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changes around the world also have become more widely experienced since the 1950s and 1960s (Weart, 2003). Yet, scientific information with enough credibility to evoke some measure of principled precaution about contaminants, pollutants, and risks in the Earth’s ecological balance has been ignored and/or dismissed since the 1950s (McNeill, 2000). Gore’s climate change crusade often follows older trails into the global warning crisis first marked by others over thirty, forty, or fifty years ago (Maslin, 2004). Still, quantitative increases in many environmental troubles are causing qualitative decreases in the benefits available from the earth’s environment as well as the basic chance of gaining equity out of its global economy. Like Friedman, Gore believes he too has the right policy responses to them. Still, it is somewhat discouraging that he has been pushing this agenda for two decades – first as a senator and then as vice president – without much effort. It is not hard to hear Friedman’s geo-green chorus building behind Gore’s central storyline as another inconvenient truth for today’s “flat earth.” Gore’s analysis of climate crisis, then, is not radically new, since he tends to endorse the individualistic practices of 1990s green consumerism, while deflecting attention away from the brown producerism that discourages truly green forms of life (Lomborg, 2001; Luke, 1999a). Gore’s politics of inconvenient truth usually ties back to keeping to a mostly business as usual economic strategy plus strong endorsements for greater energy efficiency, strong OPEC containment, and the decarbonization of electricity generation all wrapped in a new political coalition, or his “We” movement. Of course, he is not factually wrong in making these appeals. Yet, this set of tactics is not unlike those pushed by so many other environmentalists since Earth Day 1970. “Consciousness” about profligate energy use in United States has been, still is now, and will be in the future “raised” now for nearly four decades, but the climate crisis continues to worsen. Gore’s new “We” campaign, or www.wecansolveit.org, is poised to serve as the issue group, agitprop base, and organizational fulcrum for an educational campaign to combat climate change. Somewhat ironically in light of his Inconvenient Truth pitch to get every incandescent light bulb switched out for compact florescent replacements, Gore pledged on July 17, 2008, that he and his “We” pressure group/citizen’s movement were “committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership.” Citing fears of a permanently ice-free Arctic region in the summer, accelerating glacier melting in Greenland, more bizarrely intense weather patterns, and massive wildfire outbreaks, Gore was clearly trying to exert new leadership as he noted, “the climate crisis, in particular, is getting

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a lot worse, much more quickly than predicted.” However, is the answer, even in the short run, anything more than a radical scheme for the complete replacement of all the world’s light bulbs? Gore still tends to short-change the heft of big technological systems with embedded subpolitical power and authority that make such stratagems significant only on the margins of change. Most agendas for consumer choice about energy use are already set before Gore invites his followers to consider a range of concrete moves, like changing light bulbs, that could enable anyone to limit environmental damage. Of course, walking, riding the bus, or cycling will save some gasoline, and in some fashion reduce carbon emissions. Unfortunately, this individual change always happens within limits. Everyday urban systems, built environments, and community cultures often make walking impossible, riding the bus impossible, and cycling inappropriate. Yet, Gore still fingers “us,” the average American, or each and every “you,” for making bad decisions that almost always cannot be avoided. Gore’s “we.com” politics (2006) resurrects older rhetoric from the oil crises of the 1970s in response to today’s climate crisis. This is evolutionary change, not revolutionary transformation. Gore clings to post-war suburban consumerist scripts, announcing to all the easiest means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can be found around the house, because they quickly reverberate as big cost savings at the check-out counter. Therefore, he urges Home Depot or Wal-Mart shoppers to resist climate change by deciding to choose energy-efficient appliances, heat and cool houses efficiently, insulate houses more, get a home energy audit, conserve hot water, reduce stand-by home appliance power loads, improve home office efficiency, or switch to green power. Even though each of these pointers are rational, they are nothing extraordinary. Most people who lived through the 1970s in the United States already know about them, and they are commonplace practices abroad. Nonetheless, too many corporations continue to design, build, and sell goods and services that undercut these ends. Moreover, there is no assurance that 100% cooperation would halt global warming. Despite these realities, Gore touts comparable moves for change with regard to automobile transportation, daily purchases at shops and markets, home yard maintenance, and civic action. All of them are ecologically sensible, economically rational, and ethically defensible. No one should refrain from making these choices. Yet, quite a few million people all over the planet have been doing all, or some, of these things for decades, and the climate crisis has only worsened as the years have passed. On a transnational scale, an accurate accounting for personal environmental overshoot always loses political traction as soon as “everyone”


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becomes responsible. When anyone is accountable, then how can one person do much to change the trends for which they all are each being held responsible? Gore wants to say no one simply can any longer grudgingly accept capitalism’s destructive actions as inevitable, unavoidable, or unanticipated. Instead, he proposes buffering the first, second, and third order implications of many billions of initial decisions to burn more carbonreleasing energy by regulating, rationalizing, and reducing fossil fuels at their individual points of purchase and use through the market. At this juncture, Gore is merely affirming a kind of systemic set of industrial policies readily accepted elsewhere decades ago. Unfortunately, if individual buyers run their purchases through even fairly green firms such as Apple, GE, or Toyota to make their ecological corrections, they only continue to mystify even more the structural imperatives to burn oil, buy cars, and build dependencies on foreign energy sources by pinning full responsibility on themselves – or the agency of individual consumers forced to make such choices (Greider, 1996). This does little to alter crucial embedded systems that still force all to burn oil, only maybe perhaps less; accept automobility, only practiced by driving smaller cars; and, maintain foreign energy dependencies, only by diversifying supplies from many different energy sources. More recently, Gore has outlined another grander strategy for coping with climate change that challenges the United States to rebuild its entire electricity network, fuelling systems, and energy regime within ten years. At its core, Gore’s plan directs Americans “to do away with all carbon-emitting forms of electricity production” in favour of “alternatives like solar, wind, and geothermal power, conservation and so-called clean-coal technology in which all carbon emissions from the burning of coal are captured and stored” (Broder, 2008, A17). Gore backs the continued use of nuclear energy, which generates about one-fifth of the nation’s electricity, but he also expects that half of the nation’s electricity capacity could be displaced by new conservation techniques, wind/solar/geothermal alternatives, more hydroelectric power, and natural gas. Renewables in 2007 were under 3% of the grid’s generating capacity, so they would need to increase as much as fifteen–twenty times in order to meet Gore’s goals (Coile, 2008). Many scientists want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions radically to 1990 levels or less by 2020, but most governments are talking about 50–70% reductions more slowly to meet such ambitious goals only in 2050. Seeing the future of human civilization hanging in the balance, Gore is adamant about realizing his goals. As he announced his plans at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., Gore observed: “To those who say 10 years is not enough time, I respectfully ask them to consider seriously what the world’s scientists

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are telling us about the risks we face if we don’t act in less than 10 years” (cited in Broder, 2008, A17). Gore’s challenge is not happening in a vacuum. With his wide professional ties to the financial world after winning the Nobel Prize, Gore knows many venture capitalists and entrepreneurs want to invest large sums of money in the United States and abroad to pursue new power generation schemes capable of contributing to Gore’s energy plan. Richard Branson of Virgin Enterprises has had a big play running in the areas of advanced biofuel and renewable energy technology, and the Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens also has been leading a new enterprise pitched at building more wind farms, adding to solar energy stations, and converting American buses/cars/trucks to compressed natural gas. Not all of their plans are still on track during the global credit crunch, but many still remain under development. Like Friedman as well as Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Gore cites unstable geopolitics, industrial primacy, and economic sluggishness to justify his challenge. The world needs more energy, but he asks if it must increasingly turn to dirty hydrocarbon fuels in politically unstable areas to just stay slightly ahead of, or just even with, growing demands for electricity? Gore suggests, “our dangerous over reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises” (cited in Broder, 2008, A17). For Gore and his “We” organization, the common strategy needed to move forward is not difficult to determine. It will be hard to implement, but it also could draw together a much larger political coalition of supporters. That is, “the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures that are needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices. Moreover, they are also the very same solutions that we need to guarantee our national security without having to go to war in the Persian Gulf” (Gore, 2008). With this observation, Gore seconds Friedman’s geopolitical aspirations for building an essentially geo-green political economy, and his thinking also links up closely with that of Nordhaus and Shellenberger.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s Project Nordhaus and Shellenberger are intriguing rhetorical experimentalists and policy innovators inasmuch as they choose to rest their climate change preparedness analysis upon the postmaterialism thesis of Ronald Inglehart as well as the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. For them, the larger social


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trends are clear. First, rising affluence in the West allegedly has pushed many human beings to value higher postmaterial needs beyond those of bare material existence pace Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” And, second, Cold War space programs necessitated the creation of terrestrial environments for survival in extraterrestrial settings (like the Apollo moon shot capsules, the Apollo/Soyuz spacecraft, or the space station Mir). This innovation wave enabled many actors in multiple networks to deconstruct the ontopolitical essentialisms of Nature/Society, Organism/Environment, Human/Nonhuman, Organic/Inorganic, or Man/Machine in order to find the multiple, morphing complex hybridities of cyborgs, artificial life, robots, machinic intelligence, and posthumanisms that make conventional “environmentalism” irrelevant. For a few people at the top of the global food chain (Bauman, 1998; Falk, 1999), the always contestable, but not frequently questioned, metaphysics of mind and body, humanity and nonhumanity, natural and artificial inherited from Enlightenment philosophy increasingly are being challenged. Once challenged, these precepts can basically be dismissed in forging a politics of possibility intent upon preserving the hybridized system of systems at the root of today’s high standards of material existence, while conserving the earth’s ecological services for all forms of its living inhabitants – human, animal, plant, and all hybrids thereof. For them, the antinomy of “Society” versus “Environment” as well as “the ancient story of humankind’s fall for nature – is no longer useful. The threat posed by climate change is so massive, so global, and so complex that it can be overcome only if we look beyond the issue categories of the past and embrace a grand new vision for the future” (Nordhaus and Shellenberger, 2007, p. 7). Thus, as the conceptual ground of reasoning shifts from merely “the environmental” to mainly “the existential,” the state and corporation must make the root concerns of ecological change not industrial pollution, but rather planetary evolution. Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2004, 2007) articulate a widespread uneasiness about the intellectual predispositions and political practices followed in the United States by mainstream environmental activists. On the one hand, most environmentalists believe that a pristine Nature exists, and it must not be disturbed; while, on the other hand, they ruthlessly adopt special interest lobbying in Washington to implement this agenda by disturbing society non-stop. Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2004) admit there were once benefits for pursuing to such activism, but argue that today “modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world’s most serious ecological crisis,” or the threat of rapid biophysical and social disruptions caused by “global climate change” (p. 6). Asserting these threats

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will be mitigated only by reversing anthropogenic “global warming,” Nordhaus and Shellenberger assert their plan to meet this challenge improves greatly upon the essentialist politics of tree-hugging mainstream environmentalism. Because “environmentalism has become a special interest” sustaining the status quo of lobbying and fund-raising politics where all activist groups “become special interests” (Nordhaus and Shellenberger, 2004, p. 28) in the currents of global capitalism, contemporary environmentalists constitutionally lack the effective political strategy, vision, and will to succeed. Given these doubts about old-school American environmental politics today, Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007) strain to root their climate change teachings, first, in some deeper epistemic, and indeed, ontological sources, because, after all, their work is meant to serve as “an argument against the politics of essentialism and for a politics or pragmatism” (p. 219); and, then, second, they want to revitalize a grander approach to serving the common good in their “politics of possibility.” After quilting together a colourful but incomplete version of American philosophy from the first Gilded Age with its Charles Sanders Peirce to the second Gilded Age with its Richard Rorty, but sewn together in muted philosophical colours, they imply today’s dead environmentalism rests upon nature-worshiping “essentialism” whereas their new politics of postmaterial possibility is one driven by society-mobilizing “pragmatism.” By essentialism we mean thought that reduces complex and multiple realities to a single essence. Essentialism, in this way, constitutes a metaphysics of stasis, which imagines that all things have an essential unchanging nature that can be represented objectively. The essentialist imagines that these essences represents the totality of the reality in question and are not dependent upon one’s perspective. By contrast, pragmatist thought begins from the premise that all knowledge is perspectival and all realities are constantly in the process of changing and becoming something else. In this way, pragmatism constitutes a metaphysics of becoming. We argue for a metaphysics of becoming rather than a metaphysics of stasis not because we believe the latter is a more objective representation of nature but because we believe it is a more useful tool for describing, shaping, and adapting to the world. (Nordhaus and Shellenberger, 2007, pp. 219–220; emphasis in the original) For them, making this glib theoretical distinction between essentialism (with the old conservation ethic tied to a static Nature) and pragmatism


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(with its flexible contemporary politics of recognizing Nature’s unpredictable climate change) unlocks a rich storehouse of stories for narrative reinventions, like the merits of governmental activism needed to sustain their “politics of possibility.” With little ontopolitical doubt, Nordhaus and Shellenberger claim: Ecology has the potential to be pragmatic if it is contrasted with essentialist thought. And indeed, it was only a matter of time before the scientific eco-logic of interconnected, interdependent becoming challenged the essentialism of environmentalism. The ecological study of nonhuman systems should aim not to reduce our manifold, over-determined, and complex realities to single essences or causes but to explore the interconnections between all things, human and nonhuman, living and dead. Ecosystems are constantly changing. There is no center or essence of any given ecosystem, nor a single meaning of the ways in which it is changing or evolving. (p. 220; emphasis in the original) Not wanting to be pinned down by rigid essentialist categories that oversimplify human and nonhuman environmental relations as antagonistic, Nordhaus and Shellenberger turn to the new ecologies of complexity, turbulence, and instability. Their epistemic assumptions affirm the notion that “a pragmatic, anti-essentialist politics recognizes that the stories we choose to tell about ourselves and the world have profound implications for the kind of world we create and should be judged by their ability to help us imagine and create the world we want” (p. 220), namely, one organized around active state intervention to manage climate change. While most of their claims are quite contestable (Diamond, 2005; Dowie, 1995; Gottlieb, 1993), Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2004, 2007) dismiss the old allegedly dying environmentalism as one-dimensional. It is all gloom and doom rather than promise and potential. For them, ordinary environmentalists reduce climate science to a single essential truth (McKibben, 1989). If greenhouse gassing is increasing the planet’s overall warmth, then the single best solution for reducing all emissions is to return the Earth back to some harmonious original condition. In today’s expanding global economy, Nordhaus and Shellenberger concede that path towards rapid complete greenhouse gas reduction cannot be taken; and, even if it did, the reduction could not quickly halt global warming, because rising temperatures already are a path dependent near certainty (given overall levels of past greenhouse gas emissions to date). Therefore, the pragmatic politics of global warming require

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multidimensional, multinatural, and multifunctional flexibility from everyone, as Nordhaus and Shellenberger command, to get past the doomsday scenario, and embrace the demands of “Global Warming Preparedness.” Their global warming preparedness rests upon a set of new environmental coping strategies for containing climate change with a comprehensive 24 × 7 ecomanagerialism exercised on a global scale (Luke, 2005). Standing on the threshold of new ways of life defined by rising oceans, increasing temperatures, and worsening weather, Nordhaus and Shellenberger provide a glimpse of how pragmatic planetarian politicos would think, feel, and act. Thus, Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007) maintain, The endless debates between environmentalists and market fundamentalists ultimately pit one theological construct, nature, against another, the market. For either camp to expect that reason or science or economics will prevail in such a debate is folly. Just as humans, from indigenous tribes in the Amazon to Americans in Yosemite, are always constructing natures, whether for development or conservation or something else, humans are always constructing markets, whether for positive ends, like ecological restoration, or negative ends, like slave trading. Once we abandon the belief that there exists a nature or a market separate from humans, we can start to think about creating natures and markets to serve the kind of world we want and the kind of species we want to become. (pp. 234–235) Here, the program for planetary management plainly is quite grandiose. Their promise and prosperity story line aims “to break through” to launch alternative “earthscaping” plans and actions guided by government (Luke, 1999b). While they believe dead environmentalism once wished only to halt pollution, their postenvironmental pragmatism aims instead at a full spectrum dominance of human production, consumption, circulation, and accumulation via an almost corporate ethic of continuously improved pragmatic constructivism to pollute in the right place at the right time in the right level to not worsen climate change. Surprisingly, Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007) turn to none other than Richard Milhous Nixon for inspiration for this postmaterialist ecomodernization: What’s needed is a postindustrial social contract that will allow the next generation of young Americans to turn away from survival values and


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materialistic status competitions and toward fulfillment, self-creation, and a new ecological politics. A new politics should inspire Americans to grapple with the existential questions Nixon asked in his 1970 State of the Union address: What kind of a country do we want? How can we achieve it? These questions implicitly contain a question about investment: how will Americans invest our wealth and our labor? (p. 257; emphasis in the original) Once their narrative is floated, the existential question of climate change management becomes a raft of investment decisions. Therefore, ethical planet managers should be able to administer to climate change by preparing the United States to change with the world’s climate (Luke, 1997). As Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007) observe, When we called on environmentalists to stop giving the “I have a nightmare” speech, we did not mean that we should close our eyes to our increasingly hot planet, the destruction of the Amazon, or continued human suffering. Rather, we meant that we all should open our eyes to the multiplicity of ways we can see and experience the world. Global warming could bring drought, disease, and war – and it could bring prosperity, cooperation, and freedom. The future is not destined to be dark or bright, fallen or triumphant. Rather, the future is open. (p. 240; emphasis in the original) In a nutshell, this is the outcome Nordhaus and Shellenberger promise when prognosticating about a common future in which “politics will be postenvironmental, not environmental, and postmaterial, not material. It will be an exercise not in speaking truth to power but in creating new truths in the polity” (p. 160). It is not only geo-green, it certainly is its own unique type of “neo-greenism.” Nordhaus and Shellenberger promise hope by moving to recentre government responses to climate change around the right narrative. It is clear: “creating a new progressive political consensus requires paying close attention to social values, how they are evolving, and how we might create a new social contract for postmaterial America that can provide enough security and prosperity to support a new, more ecological era” (p. 40). At their Break Through Institute (2007), they promise strategies to transcend today’s overly cautious, green movements in favour of a bold transnational campaign.

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They assert their project will accomplish three goals: 1. Achieve a new social contract for the post-industrial economy that increases financial security. 2. Stimulate an equitable and accelerated transition to the clean energy economy. 3. Advance an agenda to overcome global poverty and expand equitable, sustainable prosperity. These objectives crystallize a threatening worry for the ecology-minded: how is this turn anything more than a radical new industrial policy (Nye, 2004; Ohmae, 1990; Reich, 1991)? In many ways, this is precisely their goal. Such new industrial designs must generate much more social equity and clean energy out of America’s existing local, national, and global economies. Yet, the plan might halt global warming as much as it seeks to generate new jobs and wealth out of preparing for its inevitable advent. Moreover, the policy advances put forward by Nordhaus and Shellenberger for Washington to endorse, whether it is Health Care for Hybrids (a scheme to build more hybrid cars and fund auto workers’ health care systems) or Cape Wind (a plan to build huge windmill farms in the Northeast) can be seen as the pragmatic politics of possibility tied to Global Warming Preparedness. Of course, these two thinkers should not go entirely unheeded. In remaking the material base of advanced industrial civilization, this historical moment should afford many opportunities to reimagine what is “advanced,” how “industrial” is understood, and why “civilization” persists in each and every ecologically destructive practice (Luke, 1999a). Truly attaining this goal, however, must lead to an entirely new built environment that is not climate changing, and not just be the same old one plus this or that new natural capitalist product or these or those new green engineering processes that still degrades the atmosphere only more gradually. Instead the entire spatial, operational, temporal, and material quality of everyday life needs to be essentially rethought and remade from beside the ground up, behind the walls out, and beneath the flows downward (Hoffman, 2003; Luke, 2002). Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007) might mean this when they envisage that “the politics of possibility takes concrete form” somewhere around or at “the intersection of investment and innovation” (p. 15), but their neo-green vision at best is extremely vague. Nordhaus and Shellenberger also connect global warming preparedness in today’s economic crises to their notion of “insecure affluence,” or the cluster of coincident circumstances tied to increased wealth and spending power as well as growing real daily doubts about the security of each


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individual’s job, health, retirement, home, and family “a kind of postmaterial insecurity that is profoundly misunderstood when viewed as poverty” (p. 14). This condition has arisen “with the absence of a new social contract, one that joins the individual self-interest with the common good” (p. 15). Despite their amazement, these conditions are not new. They had already arrived in the 1970s with a growing corporate consensus about the merits of neo-liberalism. Ulrich Beck (1992) tagged this condition, and he did so in clearly postmaterial frames of reference, as living in the “risk society” over two decades ago. The reduction of the common good during the 1980s as the sum of individuals’ self-interest granted the fullest opportunity to be free is, in turn, at the root of today’s risk-centred economic prosperity and environmental irrationality. Driving two SUVs per household, and having the Northern Polar Ice Cap melt away all summer as Florida’s air conditioners run can be tied to “living with risk,” and they condemn it; but, their neo-green politics of possibility often appears to be little more than replacing the old SUVs with hybrid ones or running Florida’s air conditioning with windmills. One wonders if the best cure for postmaterial security, then, is to rematerialize an ecomodernization project that “breaks through” the old limits to growth, politics of scarcity, and less is more thinking that Nordhaus and Shellenberger wrongly attribute to contemporary environmentalism (Beder, 1998). Instead, these postmaterialist partisans of possibility “argue for an explicitly pro-growth agenda that defines the kind of prosperity we believe is necessary to improve the quality of human life and to overcome ecological crises” (Nordhaus and Shellenberger, 2007, p. 15). In other words, “smart growth” will become good when guided by the right green leaders. As the best climate change consuls for this politics of possibility, they want those who accede to their world historical project to grasp the vastness of the challenge at hand: Our planet, and we along with it, will evolve in rapid and dramatic ways over the next century. The challenge for humankind now is not whether we can stop global warming, which is already well under way, but whether we can minimize it, prepare for it, and improve human and nonhuman life while we’re (sic) at it. The problem is so great that before answered What is to be done? We must first ask What kind of beings are we? and What can we become? (p. 8; emphasis in the original) Such foundational claims seek not merely to control industrial pollution, but also to administer human social evolution by asking what kind of beings we are as postmaterial/posthuman hybrids (Luke, 1997). And, as such

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beings, can we really begin improving human and nonhuman life by adapting to climate change here and now on a global scale when guided by simplistic policy protocols intent upon maximizing postmaterial prosperity while minimizing climate change?

Conclusions The idea of preparing for “future environmental crises” is almost gratuitous today since a concrete conjuncture of climate changing forces has been at work on centre stage all around the world since the 1970s. After a generation, we are learning that too much time has been lost, the downside of failing to change immediately has dramatically risen, and carbon-based fuel interests have distorted the policy agenda for the past thirty-five years. The global warming crisis has not been avoided, and its worsening is not being averted. A real shift in the basic energy regime is now even more imperative, because a reduction of greenhouse gases is the linchpin in the assemblage of policies needed to mitigate climate change. One inconsistency in these three analyses is how openly they object to “traditional business” being directly blamed for creating the climate crisis. At times, Friedman has dreamt of President Bush embracing the “ecoimagination” of General Electric by firing Dick Cheney and replacing him with Jeff Immelt (Friedman, 2006b, A23). In 2008, Cheney was turned out of office, and Immelt has kept his post, but the economy and environment are worsening. Despite the fact that frugality, efficiency, or environmental awareness have not guided many capitalist firms over the past fifty years in making decisions about profitability or productivity in their investment patterns (Bourdieu, 1998; French, 2000; Hardt and Negri, 2004; Pieterse, 2003), Friedman believes individuals and businesses will now make those more long-term full cost accounting calculations in their daily operations. Yet, how often is GE’s new “Eco-imagination” nothing more than plain-old “PR”? Can spin control in tough economic times be the foundation for rock-solid public policy? Consequently, for all citizens of every country, it is clear that the complex flows of world trade and the social groups actually out there “in search of truth” lead to a conflicted, contested, and contradictory “we” that Friedman, Gore, or Nordhaus and Shellenberger believe must change in a cohesive manner to prepare for global warming. Who this “we” really is, or the common collective that both creates and then suffers the climate crisis, is not yet an identical subject/object capable of quickly reconstituting itself amidst


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such crises from in-itself to act for-itself. Gore is trying to organize this movement, but he really just got started in 2006–2007. Meanwhile, the global media constantly trade in more disaster capitalist reality shows with shocking images of atmospheric alterations, melting glaciers, intensifying storms, rising oceans, and growing chaos. While disconcerting, they frequently are accepted only by the already convinced fractions that “the we” must act. Those factions waiting to be converted to support global warming preparedness, or even working to evade it, are numerous, powerful, and not ready to listen. Having the EPA say global warming is “real” will only harden the attitudes of many climate change deniers. Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007) dismiss old-wave environmentalists for their useless hand waving about radical climate change, who just label, like Al Gore, it as a momentous moral issue. Still, a realistic program for making that fullblown transition to a geo-green future is missing, and here is where effective visions of government intervention must come into sway. Unfortunately, it is not clear that they have one. This initial overview of current global warming preparedness discourses has sought to demonstrate how we can learn more about the inconvenient truths of ruling most planetary places, processes, and practices in the apparent state of emergency caused by worldwide climate changes. Thus far, living like “the world is flat” allows American pundits to express openly the strategic policy rationale at the heart of a U.S.-led regime of planetary management. When it comes to geo-greenism, Friedman’s response (2007) to worsening climate change is to demand “a ‘Green New Deal’” for America (which is not like the more egalitarian original statist project from the 1930s, but rather one articulated in accord with strong discourses of neoliberal exchange and scientific experts imposing changes from above where they will not immediately benefit all), or, more concretely, “seeding basic research, providing loan guarantees where needed, and setting standards, regulations, taxes, and incentives that will shape the market and spawn one thousand new clean-tech companies, focused on everything from power generation to biofuels to more efficient transportation to green buildings” (p. 578). Similarly, Gore’s new ten-year race to build post-carbon power generation grid along the lines of the Apollo Project or the Nordhaus and Shellenberger aspiration to revisit the Great Society as the new Green State are all cut from the same cloth. All four of these thinkers want the United States to still stand tall, if not tallest, on a world that is flat, hot, and crowded as the climate changes. Obviously, there is an unflat world that is either too sick, disempowered, and frustrated to matter or sits poised on the threshold of buying too many

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Toyotas, Frigidaires, and Carriers (or cars, refrigerators, and air conditioners). Both sets of planetary neighbours are seen as a problem by these Americans; so the United States must set an example for both of them by becoming the first and foremost exemplary geo-green country to guide those on the threshold of getting more American-style energy-intensive consumer goods to not do it, or do it better than ever before by geo-green criteria of excellence. As Friedman (2007) asserts, the public and the business community are moving, So enough of this nonsense that conservation, energy efficiency, and environmentalism are hobbies we can’t afford. I can’t think of anything more cowardly or un-American or less realistic than that view. Real patriots, real advocates of spreading democracy around the world, real entrepreneurs live, invest, build, and think green. (p. 579) Again, what is green for America is green for the world, and what is good for this green world they all believe will be quite good for geo-green America. People know that responding to global climate change is a daunting task. The scale and severity of these environmental disruptions dwarf by comparison previous coordinated efforts to limit above-ground nuclear testing, restricting dioxins or banning CFCs. Few proposals will be truly practical right away, and it is not a surprise that Friedman, Gore, Nordhaus and Shellenberger seem quite nationalistic, narrowly focused or neo-collectivist as they talk. It helps remind everyone that climate change is being experienced worldwide, but at varying levels of intensity in different locales, and on timelines longer than democratic electoral cycles, making it hard for green educators to quickly make their global warming lessons come out as convincing. These four thinkers are to be commended for drawing attention to the challenges, even if the responses seem self-seeking, ethically naïve, or economically motivated. Individuals and groups rarely act rationally or advance morally out of altruism. All of these global climate change thinkers are convinced something must be done; and, people should recognize that the road to successful global adaptation will lead, at least in part, through national economic gain, ideological affirmation, or personal celebrity. Such motivating factors cannot be ignored to adapt to this enduring transnational threat. If nothing else, their thinking is one point of initial departure for learning about the tremendous ordeals that lie just ahead.

Chapter 6

Education against Climate Change: Information and Technological Focus Are Not Enough Edgar J. González Gaudiano University of Nuevo León

Introduction Despite opposition from those whose commercial and political agendas require emphatic denial, climate change is a reality that is increasingly in the public eye. Every day, the mass media, especially television, draw our attention to the worrying manifestations of extreme hydro-meteorological phenomena: from scenes of devastation showing extensive flooding of urban zones and rural areas in the wake of powerful hurricanes and typhoons in coastal regions to scenes of desolation caused by prolonged drought and immense forest fires; or heat waves that claim the lives of thousands as happened in August 2003, in France when over eleven thousand died. Once again, as is the case whenever instances of natural or social phenomena are identified as part of the complex, multifaceted, permanent contemporary crisis, education is mentioned as a necessary resource; it is, however, more of an instrument than an end. What problems gravitate to this recurrent demand for education? This chapter sets out to provide a few answers.

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Identifying the Problem Much of the media coverage of news and events related to climate change is focused on one of the following two concerns1: 1. Damage to the economy caused by natural phenomena and the loss of human lives. 2. Costs associated with risk prevention strategies. As can be seen, the focus is mainly on matters of a financial nature where insurance companies set the tone and which support the thesis propounded by Ulrich Beck (1994) on the risk society, in the sense that it is a new moment in the history of post-industrial society that requires a reformulation of its central components. On this topic, Stavrakakis (1997a) correctly points out that the entire risk-calculation structure was completely dislocated bringing about a collapse of the insurance business when it started to become apparent that the current civilizing process, as revealed by the consumer and risk societies, brought with it the possibility of destroying life on the planet (see also Stavrakakis, 1997b). Perhaps this explains why, when tackling the climate change problem, the media place more emphasis on the effects of the problem than on its causes, and when they eventually get round to mentioning what is behind these extreme manifestations, they do so in general terms, indifferent to the notion that they might have a certain responsibility. Furthermore, the media have very little to say on the urgent need for preventative programs and initiatives to raise public awareness that would at least offset the impacts of these climate change processes that, to all practical intents and purposes, can be considered irreversible in nature for at least the next generation, possibly for the next two, and even then only providing transcendental – nay, radical – steps are taken. In other words, programs aimed at a significant reduction in the growing vulnerability that is undermining, as supported by an increasing wealth of evidence, the presumed safety of our comfortable, developed-world lives. However, broad discussion of these issues is considered politically incorrect because it intensifies the level of social anxiety and further dislocates the train of events permitted by the status quo in today’s world, as observed by (Chomsky, 2001, p. 33), echoing the words of Reinhold Niehbuhr and Walter Lippmann, “in order that the ‘confused flock’ – the naïve, bird-brained masses- should not be confounded by the complexity of real problems that, in any event, they would not be able to resolve.” This is the

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main publicly adduced counter-argument: the uncertainty of the scientific data contributed by the International Panel of Climate Change’s (IPCC) working reports and the many other studies carried out by independent organisms. This panorama changed to a certain degree after the recent world showing of the documentary An Inconvenient Truth promoted worldwide by former U.S. vice president Al Gore,2 who has taken a personal interest in this crusade. However, the two Oscars it won in 2006 for best documentary and best song did not compensate for the poor audiences it attracted, especially among a younger generation more used to action movies, because the public did not realize that it was actually a terror movie in the style that Raskin (2006; apud Sterling, 2007, p. 34) denotes as “push of fear,” referring to the gradual realization that we could be sharing a common decadent future. An Inconvenient Truth presents, in a condensed and fairly didactic form, a significant amount of scientific evidence on the problem of climate change, expressed calmly in words that are easily understood in an effort to get the message across to an inexpert public. Convincing pictures supported by charts containing up-to-date information, together with an intelligent commentary lead us to regret the electoral results of the 2000 elections Gore competed in. However, it disappoints somewhat when its final recommendations are limited to a small set of specific, disjointed initiatives, individual in character and lacking a wide-ranging agenda, together with an extreme, unjustifiable confidence in the possible contributions of science and technology (more on this later). Its most radical political proposal consists of suggesting that people should write to their representatives in Congress (which might possibly have some kind of effect on the political tradition of the United States) but there is no denouncement of the American way of life or contemporary consumerism that globalism has heralded all over the world. And that limitation – whether conscious or sub-conscious – is disappointing and it makes us uneasy that someone as sensitive and brilliant as Gore should not be able to find viable ways around the problem. All said and done, the documentary’s simple recommendations transmit a feeling of impotence, an effect quite the opposite to “pull of hope”; in other words, it does not give an extensive commitment of global citizenship to that “positive planetary vision, that is certainly possible” (Ruskin, 2006; apud Sterling, 2007, p. 34). Impacting world conscience on the vital relevance of climate change will require more than documentaries informing on scientific discoveries, and movies, albeit fictional,3 because once again in the linear ranking of domestic and world priorities, environmental matters do not occupy the

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top spots, which are still held by issues related to the economy such as unemployment, debt, or inflation, followed by terrorism, public safety, and violence, which is where the world’s political class has focused its risk analysis. Environmental issues are not politically important and do not even receive good media coverage except in the event of natural disasters, accidents, and the like, or when they affect powerful economic interests. In a climate of fairly generalized disinterest and inaction, there are always the same old opportunists who manage to benefit from the most unimaginable situations. In consequence, we come across advertisements publicizing a new kind of tourism: “disaster” tours, offering cruises to savour scenes of thawing Antarctic glaciers and the new summer ocean route (including the exploitation of seabed minerals) in the so-called north-west passage in the Arctic. The former consists of a shoring-up of today’s more-eternalthan-ever show business “culture,” the grand-scale equivalent of Roman emperor Nero’s reality show as he sat strumming his lyre contemplating the burning of Rome that he himself had ordered. The latter is nothing more than a continuation of business as usual, a plus for the reactionaries determined to keep on increasing the use of energy from fossil fuels and who have done everything within their reach to obstruct, perpetuate, and complicate global negotiations. This posture confirms once again how those who drive the same old kind of economic growth at any and all cost are financing the building of capitalist development on foundations of mud, or to use a more suitable metaphor, on the fluidizing permafrost.4 Climate change is included in one of the worst scenarios prophesied by environmentalist movements as early as the 1970s when growth limits with undesirable global repercussions were first mentioned (Meadows et al., 1972) by those who would have preferred to see manifestations of ecological degradation only on a local scale. However, although climate change is a global phenomenon, the most vulnerable regions are to be found in the tropics or thereabouts, which means that it affects developing countries most severely, especially poor communities living in high-risk areas, whose sustenance depends on seasonal rainfall to obtain meagre harvests, which makes them decidedly vulnerable to any kind of climate change. Clear-thinking western minds, recognizing the deep ecological footprint left by the lifestyles of developed countries as imitated by the ruling classes of developing countries, acknowledge the importance of reorienting the education system in western, consumer-driven societies because there is a risk of replicating these unsustainable models. The problem is that the risk is now enormous because business plans of international corporations promote the western consumer model on a daily basis in all mass media


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programming, whose signal is now received in the most remote confines of the poor, uneducated, and over-populated world. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that the civilized, prosperous, educated, north-western world has no need of new partners to voraciously consume the resources of a planet that are already insufficient for sharing out among those who would be new members of the developed-countries club. As revealed by current trends – leaving in abject misery the high percentage of the human population that the Millennium Development Goals claim they want to help – the world has already taken a turn for the worse that will become dramatically worse in the next few years. Even with the initiatives adopted by the Montreal Protocol, global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses have more than doubled since 1990 and are still increasing. Between 2000 and 2005, the annual growth of emissions was 2.5 times more than in the 1990s, when annual growth was less than 1%; the two hottest years were 1998 and 1995, and it should be noted that eleven of the twelve hottest years ever fell during the last twelve years (1995–2006) (IPCC, 2007).

Some Information about Current World Inequality and its New Trends In its annual state-of-the-world report in 2004, the Worldwatch Institute (WWI) claims that approximately 1,700 million people (more than 25% of the world’s population) have become “consumer class” and adopted the diet, transport systems, and lifestyle that for the most part of the twentieth century were only available to the rich nations of Europe, North America, and Japan. In China alone, 240 million people have taken their place in line as consumers in the world’s marketplaces, a spine-chilling number that will soon grow to exceed the total population of the United States. This is the kind of consumer that uses televisions, telephones, and the internet and that shares western cultural norms and values as well as the corporate ideals that are transmitted through the mass media. Almost half of these people now live in developed countries that have the highest potential for growth. Today, the richest in the world consume an average of twenty-five times more energy than the poorest; and the United States, with barely 4.5% of the world’s population, accounts for 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions and still refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol, despite its limited scope. World expenditure on advertising reached 446,000 million dollars in 2002, almost nine times more than in 1950. More than half of that amount

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is spent by supermarkets in the United States to promote their merchandise and services. An annual investment of 19,000 million dollars, only 2,000 million more than Europeans and Americans spend annually on pet food, would be required to eliminate hunger and malnutrition. And vaccinating all the children in the world would cost as little as 1,300 million dollars, almost ten times less than the 11,000 million dollars Europeans spend annually on ice-cream. In the United States, it is estimated that 65% of adults are overweight or obese, which causes approximately 300,000 deaths per year and in 1999 generated medical expenses if 117,000 million dollars (see Red del Terce Mundo and Conáfrica). The annual amount spent on cosmetics in the United States is 8,000 million dollars and together, the Unites States and Europe spend 12,000 million dollars a year on perfume. The annual expenditure of the United States on the Iraq War is 300,000 million dollars, which means 34 million dollars per hour. Now it is clear why “the income of the richest one percent of the world’s people equals that of the poorest 57 percent, while nearly three billion people live on less than two dollars per day” (UNDP, 2001; apud Raskin, 2002, p. 60); furthermore, the majority of the poor live in the developing countries. According to The World Bank, in 2002, 71% of the population of the developing countries lived on 2 dollars a day or less (The World Bank, 2006, p. 9).

And Meanwhile, What of Education? Obviously the magnitude and complexity of the problem does not simply require education initiatives, whose most valuable effects in the formation of values and attitudes are long term. Also required are drastic political decisions aimed at modifying the mainstream of the neoliberal consumer society in which, as already mentioned, a great amount of resources are used to supply frivolous consumption to achieve position-seeking, extravagant, sumptuary lifestyles (García, 2004). One problem education faces is that the possibilities of raising people’s awareness is significantly reduced as long as we continue to cling to the old paradigm in the belief that our safety is guaranteed and that we are unaffected by the generalized dislocation of the world (Žižek, 1992) brought about by climate change and other global problems such as the progressive impoverishment of gigantic contingents of the human population. We live in an era of desolation (Scavino, 1999) in which we are not only slowly destroying our vital surroundings but also the identity and


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self-esteem derived from the fact that the business moral has taken over our lives, shifting the power from the observer to the observed. Now, as Scavino (1999) so cogently puts forward, “not only what the others do, but what they own is perceived” (p. 111). This explains the proliferation of TV programs and magazines on the life of the jet set, rife with photographs depicting a lifestyle that outsiders will strive ineffectually to copy because once they have made the enormous sacrifices required to acquire these goods or services, they are no longer in fashion, all of which sustains the purpose of the business moral: to control desires with a view to establishing class differences (ibid.). Success or failure depends on the capacity to possess that which makes us appear to be winners in accordance with models of economic and social prestige. This perception, so deeply entrenched in young people’s minds, is what determines the incessant continuity of the central elements of fashion and, consequently, the production and consumption patterns that must be artfully manipulated (Consumer International-UNEP, 2002). This is what education has to actively compete with. Educational processes occur in specific contexts and at determined moments. We cannot make an abstraction of them. Therefore, educating for climate change by insisting on familiar, hackneyed recommendations to add subjects to the syllabus and the resultant actions (materials production, teacher training, etc.) will not take us very far because there are many other non-educational actors using more effective strategies and methods to prey on people’s minds. Chomsky (2000), one of the most aware minds of the north-western world, has said, “Subjects are not all that is learnt at school” and to this aphorism he added that “in order to triumph, the interests of the doctrinal system must be served. We must remain quiet and instil in our students the most useful beliefs and dogmas to the interest of those who are really in power . . . And what is at stake is the impulse to consume more, to be good consumers” (p. 32). In this way, the problem of educating does not simply consist of supplying information on the topic. For a long time it was thought that by providing timely, high-quality information on the environmental problems that plague us, the behaviour and attitudes required to solve them would automatically be generated. In time it was irrefutably proven that this is not the case; indeed, on the contrary, we are increasingly inclined to compete and consume (Sterling, 2001). The change did not happen, possibly because, to borrow from Lagrange and Reddy (2007), when talking about learning environments, it would be necessary to have fomented active and cooperative, not passive, learning for this behavioural change to come about.

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In other words, a transforming learning experience designed to modify old hand-me-down reference frameworks so as to create new models of thought and intervention that guide our decisions (Jackson, 2007; King, 2005; O’Sullivan, 1999). Therefore, encouraging the addition of subjects to the school syllabus is pointless; besides, it causes even greater hardship since the curriculum is already depleted and has forsaken whatever heuristic possibilities it might have had of providing solutions to the problems of our times (GonzálezGaudiano, 2007). It is a curriculum that on a daily basis offers more problems than solutions as it regurgitates a series of unsustainable values that seriously need to be challenged. I am convinced that school education is an important part of the solution, but only if critical thought leads to more subtle, imaginative, intelligent pedagogical and political planning. “Most education [of this kind] simply reinforces practices and pathologies that cannot and should not be sustained over the long term” (Orr, 2001, p. 8). In this sense, school as a social institution would definitely have something to offer in the medium and long term, but only after far-reaching reform that will not be easy; in the meantime, social change will only be encouraged in the schools that are home to those few brave teachers who have taken this challenge to heart, who have accepted the commitment and made the decision to help foment critical, independent thought among their students empowering them to develop the capacity to more coherently understand the meaning of the world and reality. This means that, in the face of today’s emergency, it is more important to take advantage of the potential of non-formal and informal education to provide far-reaching, organized solutions that generate political pressure and effective initiatives with a view to beginning to take the kind of decisions that are required5; in other words, to make the most of the great capacity of critical education for subverting the existing economic and social order “to teach the state, to build popular and effective alliances, and to challenge the ways in which accepted policies and practices contribute to the economic, cultural, and environmental crises that are so pervasive” (Apple, 2007, p. 508).

The Supposed Technological Solution I am of the opinion that it is very important to make an effort to deconstruct the discourse that attempts to persuade us of a technical solution to


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the problem. This discourse has been present throughout the environmental education field’s development and has caused the loss of a lot of valuable time. Nobody can deny that science and technology have much to offer to the search for solutions, but they are not in themselves the solution to the problem. Žižek (1999) notes in this regard that all attempts to reduce the threat of modern technology to the effects of some ontic social error should be rejected. He adduces that these attempts are not only ineffectual but that the true problem is that, on a deeper level, they actually nourish the evil that they purport to combat. He uses the ecological crisis itself as a clear example of this, and claims that as we reduce the disturbances caused by our excessive technological exploitation of nature, we implicitly suppose that the solution consists of turning yet again to technological innovations, to a new “green” technology, more efficient and global in its control of natural processes and human resources . . . All concrete ecological concerns and projects that change technology to improve the state of our environment are therefore devalued because they, in turn, are based on the source of the problem. Žižek (1999) also holds, citing Heidegger, that the real problem is not the ecological crisis in its ontic form, which includes the possibility of a global catastrophe (e.g. caused by the warming of the earth’s atmosphere), but the technological habit of relating to the entities that surround us. This explains why the measures adopted on this level reveal a lack of willingness to face up to the transcendental truth in its unbearable radicalism. Additionally, Kartha (2006) addresses the point that the global community now shares fundamental premises that guide our response to common global challenges. They were hard-won lessons, emerging out of the mistakes of the preceding decades. One of them, says Kartha, is the fact “we are no longer in denial about our crude power to destroy our environment, nor do we any longer entertain a false pride in our ability to facilely adapt to environmental decline, substituting its degrading services with our own engineered solutions” (p. 13). Nevertheless, this conviction is not shared by society in general. Above all in the developed world, the ordinary people, including those who imitate the rich, still believe the environmental crisis to have a technological solution, and that if it has not been implemented, it is because it is not in the interests, for the moment, of the economic powers behind the scenes. The mass media are usually the vehicle that broadcasts this message, as part of the advertising campaigns of new, technologically more precise, efficient, compact products. Nanotechnological research and the development of genetically modified organisms, among others, are creating a false illusion

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of unlimited human capacity that will face, sooner than later, a rude awakening (see Foladori, 2007). Faith in technological promise is an erroneous social representation that must be tackled intensely through educational processes since it blocks the possibility of reaching higher levels of awareness and, in consequence, of commitment to the problem.

Education for Sustainable Consumption Independently of which of the global scenarios assessed by the IPCC becomes reality, the problem is inexorably linked to radical decisions on consumption and lifestyles. Thus, the education for sustainable consumption field has a critical potential for radical transformation, but only if it is not limited to fomenting initiatives of immediate, individual, unarticulated change in a far-reaching program; in other words, if it is not aimed at promoting the usual pedagogy of minimalist results that has not made, nor will ever make, the required difference. By means of education not seen as a curriculum process but as a social process, it is possible and necessary to foment organized, empowered, systematic, permanent citizen action, with political visibility such that it cannot be ignored by the State or by groups that wield authentic power in connivance with the governors. We need a direct action by effect of education that really acquires the capacity to influence decision-making processes on matters that affect the quality of our lives, that prevents the power groups from being able to continue making decisions based on the economic interests of those they serve. Thus, educating for sustainable consumption implies the generation of market pressures that create a different rationality so as to broaden a consumption pattern aimed at product quality and production conditions, marking the difference between needs and desires; a consumption pattern that helps to achieve a higher degree of social equity and less environmental stress by means of educational processes that provoke critical thought on how to choose between various options and why not to choose those that have been advertised as signs of social distinction. However, this will have the limited impact we have seen in recent years unless we also act in order to reduce and modify productive supply for which we need a qualitatively different strategy more based on the well-organized empowerment of communities, giving them political visibility and promoting purposeful initiatives in institutional circles and in the field of public policies, the tax system, and the set of available economic instruments.


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In this sense, it is not possible for environmental education for sustainable consumption to ignore or stop considering product supply from companies or countries that encourage extravagant, positional, sumptuary consumption (García, 2004), that employ captive underage workers, that do not adopt environment-protection measures for emissions and waste, that are not even eco-efficient, that do not protect their workers from work risks, that pay miserable wages or receive fiscal exemptions, special subsidies, and preferential treatment resulting in unfair competition for the rest of the countries. Furthermore, education for sustainable consumption must pay attention to media advertising campaigns, where the public is seen as a docile client, to globalize the north-western material way of life. Such advertising strategies qualitatively undermine the efforts made to create favourable conditions for sustainable consumption (Hurtado, 1997), which makes it necessary to take steps to make them more regulated. Advertising campaigns have therefore become a significant factor in the enormous increase in global demographic migration by promoting the use of satisfiers and comforts that people cannot obtain in their places of origin but would like to possess because the mass media and advertising show has turned them into legitimate, social objects of desire. At the present time, whether we like it or not, people, especially the younger generation, build an identity for themselves (who I am, where I belong, etc.) more in relation to consumption than the abstract rules of participative democracy, decadent nationalist “essences,” or collective intervention in public spaces. In other words, we feel able to participate more as consumers than as citizens; consumption has taken over as an economic, social, and cultural medium that gives us a feeling of belonging and makes us feel differently about the satisfaction of our needs (García Canclini, 1995). Consumption of perishables, the incessant novelty, the whirlpool of fashion and passing fads inspired by the nomadism of personal choice, living only for the moment, and the blurring of regional and personal boundaries regarding what is ours and theirs are inescapable factors in the challenge of inducing critical (Jickling et al., 2006) and responsible consumption; in other words, the transformation through education of the current dominant consumption pattern. It therefore makes little sense, and even less when considering the younger generation, to want to strengthen local initiatives and social cohesion by turning back to traditions and habits centred on non-material values unless the initiatives adhere to a strategy that takes a political and cultural view of consumer practices.

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Today, the breadth of consumption defines the modern identity in both its material dimension and its symbolic aspects (Trímboli, 1997), which leads us to a definitive conclusion: faced with the immensity of the challenge, a far-reaching effort must be made to involve key social actors and a lengthy battle must be expected – though in this respect time is also a species in extinction – in which the pace of decisions will be determined, like an inexorable pacemaker, by global climate change.

Part Three

Global Environmental Justice


Chapter 7

Climate Change Education in a Context of Risk and Vulnerability Heila Lotz-Sisitka and Lesley le Grange Rhodes University/Stellenbosch University

Global warming needs a response that isn’t only at the level of managing an environmental problem to ensure the planet is just about liveable on in the years to come – it needs one that addresses the essential un-freedom, suffering and misery within the present global system. (Hoffman, 2007, p. 7)

Introduction A recent edition of African Business ran an article on global climate change (Vyas and Ponzi, 2007) entitled “avoiding disaster.” The article categorically stated that southern Africans have little choice but to “learn to live with it” (p. 12). “It” here being the projected impacts of global climate change on Africa. As if culpable, southern Africa has been listed as one of the regions most likely to be heavily affected by the impacts of climate change (UNEP, 2006). It is predicted that the region will become hotter and dryer (in an already water scarce region), that agricultural outputs and productivity will decline (in a region that already suffers from food insecurity), and that the spread of malaria will increase (in a region that already experiences high death rates resulting from malaria and other health risks) (Africa Geographic, 2007). The region has already been classified by the United Nations Environment Programme as being highly vulnerable with low coping capacity (UNEP, 2006). With this global verdict, we seem to be cast into a deterministic mode with no choice but to “learn to live with it.” Against this background this chapter troubles educational thinkers to critically consider what this might mean for learning, agency, and the educational project itself.

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Our (Dis)Position Environmental education has emerged as the educational arm of the environmental movement, described by Melucci (1996), Touraine (2000), and others as a “new social movement.” Its purpose is to insert environmental practices into the field of education in ways that disrupt the normal or taken for granted functioning of the education systems that have, through their logic and practice, contributed to the emergence of environmental issues and risks in society. We write from within the broader environmental movement with a specific interest in education. Melucci (1996) writes that “new social movements in complex societies are disenchanted prophets” deeply involved in an era (reflexive modernity) that “constantly takes cognisance of itself as a planetary system that is busy with an ongoing project of generating tensions” (p. 1), which in turn requires adaptation to them. He explains that social movements are a sign, and not merely an outcome of this crisis and their role is to “signal a deep transformation in the logic and the processes [such as education] that guide complex societies” (ibid.). Such movements “speak before” by announcing what is taking shape even before its direction, content, and processes of operation have become clear. This is what this essay does. It “speaks before” an appropriate direction, content, and response to global climate change through education has become clear. In doing so, it seeks to disrupt or trouble the inertia of old categories that continue to shape educational thinking today, and that “may prevent us from hearing the message and from deciding, consciously and responsibly, what action to take in the light of it” (p. 2). However, in describing the work of such new social movements and their role/s in society, Melucci cautions that such social movements need to be reflexive of the illusion that the word they bear is sacred, and the urge that might render them victim to totality that can turn them into churches or new powers that be. Touraine (2000) also warns social movements not to divorce the political and societal aspects of their practice, for if cultural orientations become divorced from political and social conflicts, they can become “moralistic” (p. 123). Melucci (1996) and Touraine both argue that new social movements should be alert to the possibilities and constraints of social action and their appeal to the Subject, as this can strengthen democracy and transform their words/messages into languages, cultural practices, and social relationships that, through collective processes of social change, can build “a practice of freedom” (Melucci, 1996, p. 2). In this sense, Melucci and Touraine both see new social movements as critical participants in building a pro-active, responsive, and reflexive democracy.

Climate Change Education

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In this chapter we seek therefore not to simply be the prophets of new messages or words with disruptive intent, but we also seek to critically consider the possibilities and constraints for social action in the troubled education systems that we work with/in, and to provide starting points for the development of languages, cultural practices, and social relationships that might, through educational efforts, enable the building of freedom practices in southern Africa in the face of the projected impacts of global climate change.

Climate Change and New Social Practices in Southern Africa Hoffman (2007) describes how in November 2006 over 6,000 officials from 180 countries, together with representatives from international business and labour movements, NGOs, and faith groups met at the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Second Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol. The purpose of this meeting was to agree on current and future actions to meet the overall objective of the convention, which is to stabilize anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and prevent dangerous climate change. Despite strong arguments by the European Union and other players, the political process and its arguments failed because humanity has seemingly not yet found an adequate solution to historically constituted global injustices associated with developed and developing economies, and because an adequate concept of social justice at a global level remains illusive (see also Beck, 2000). Hoffman (2007) explains that “At the heart of the difficulties for contemporary political imagination that climate change engenders is the fact that it presents itself as a limit point of overcapitalization yet seems to confirm no progressive narrative beyond it” (p. 4). From this perspective, any discussions on global climate change can be seen to be “anti-development” or “anti-modern.” While the politics of this process are serious indeed, and can be the subject of debates for days in political sociology and international studies courses, the impacts of global climate change, especially on poor countries, is less fascinating and more frightening as topic for debate, given the severity of the risks and projected results of this political failure. And debate alone might not be an adequate response to the complex array of interconnected issues and risks that arise as a result of global climate change. For example, it is estimated that 35% of sub-Saharan Africa’s

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agricultural yields may be lost as a result of climate changes capacity; in some countries yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50% by 2020. Many of these countries already experience malnutrition, with 25% or more of children under five years moderately or severely underweight. The wild foods that many households rely on for safety nets are expected to change their distribution. In a study conducted in subSaharan Africa, of the 5,000 plant species studied, 81–97% will be affected by shifting habitats, and between 25 and 42% of the species’ habitats are expected to be lost altogether (Africa Geographic, 2007, pp. 74–78). The implications of these changes are particularly severe for communities that use these plants for food or for medicines. Deterioration of pastures will also impact on livestock, which in turn impacts on the food security and livelihood security of owners. Not only is food security at issue, but human health risks will increase as malarial areas expand to highland areas that are currently malaria-free. The incidence and prevalence of malaria is expected to grow rapidly, with the co-infection of malaria and HIV being particularly worrying. Increases in flooding in areas where sanitary infrastructure is inadequate is projected to lead to a rise in the frequency of epidemics and enteric diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery (pp. 76–77). Moreover, it is projected that by 2020 between 75 and 250 million Africans are likely to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change (p. 78). To put this into perspective, the population of the fourteen Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries today is 295 million people. When coupled with burgeoning population growth and the resultant demand for an unpredictable, scarce resource, the picture is even bleaker. Climate change brings not only less rain in many parts of Africa, but also higher temperatures. Research in southern Africa shows that a 2˚C temperature increase can reduce precipitation by 10%, and that this effectively translates into a further reduction in water availability, which in turn will impact on hydroelectric power stations, disrupting energy supplies and affecting industry and domestic needs (pp. 74–78). With relatively modest temperature rises, the sea level could rise by one metre, which would have enormous impacts on the great cities of Africa – Cape Town, Durban, Lagos, and Cairo are amongst those that will be severely affected (p. 81). A UN report indicated that some 30% of Africa’s coastal infrastructure is at risk from rising seas (UNEP, 2006). Added to this is the expected “large scale ecosystem switches” where, for example, savanna will change to grassland, forest to savanna, shrubland to grassland, with little predictions as to how species will survive these changes (Africa Geographic, 2007, pp. 82–84).


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While each of these issues is a concern in itself, it is the links between water scarcity, increased temperature and health risk, loss of food security and loss of biodiversity that are of most concern, as they highlight the connection between climate, disease, food security, livelihood security, and other stresses. Climate change issues cannot therefore simply be “disaggregated” and treated separately in such a context, and a holistic response is required from all sectors of society, and by implication all fields of education. It is an irony that the continent that has contributed the least to global warming is the one most likely to have to contend with its harshest outcomes. So what could be done? What kind of new social practices could be cultivated through education and other socio-cultural systems in Africa to counteract these threats, and what are the implications for education? Africa, together with the rest of the international community, is deeply implicated in this emergency, with little time to act. For many Africans, given their existent levels of poverty, there is not much that they can do to reduce emissions in the conventional sense (Vyas and Ponzi, 2007). Abatement, in the southern African context, is therefore not very high on the agenda. Adaptation to climate change will be the biggest challenge for most of the continent (Africa Geographic, 2007; UNEP, 2006; Vyas and Ponzi, 2007). But what does this really mean in terms of new social practices? Africa has abundant natural assets – sunshine, wind, geothermal activity, and ecosystems – that, despite their stress, are still largely intact. It also has one of the greatest tropical forest basins in the world, and it has people who, through the bitter years of struggle against colonialism and poverty, have developed a resilient social fabric that has kept African cultures and community ethics more or less intact. It therefore has many assets that can be harnessed in the process of developing adaptive social practices. While the full scope of such adaptive social practices will emerge as the crisis begins to unfold in more severity, some of the existent adaptive social practices that might be considered in response to global climate change threats might include: z z z z z

Developing technologies to harness solar power, geothermal power, hydroelectric power, and wind energy. Expanding transfrontier conservation areas and conservation corridors to allow for species adaptation and movement. Develop de-salination technologies that could help to deliver fresh water from the sea. Enhance efforts to protect forests. Develop economic incentives that strengthen investment in adaptation practices (e.g. through taxes etc.),

150 z

z z

z


Change agricultural practices towards planting dryland crops such as sorghum instead of maize (which will mean changes in cultural practices associated with diet). Enhance health care systems and strategies to reduce malarial infections (such as the use of mosquito nets). Improve education systems in such a way that they prepare learners to be risk-responsive, creative, and adaptable and to broaden education and training efforts to include communities, business leaders, decision makers in all sectors of society. Engage in social critique and political and other social transformation processes that change the structural dynamics keeping inequalities in place (change the economic systems, etc.).

As seen from the list, these include both technical processes, as well as critical social processes, cultural change processes, and involve various forms of social learning (Wals, 2007). Adapting to climate variability will require altering activities, infrastructure, institutions, mindsets, cultures, worldviews, and philosophies (among others). Such adaptation practices are likely to be more effective if linked to effective governance systems and human rights practices and concomitant concepts of social justice and equity. These adaptation practices will also need to take place at different levels within society, that is, at individual and household level, at provincial and national level, as well as regional and global levels (Africa Geographic, 2007, pp. 110–111). At the level of households in rural communities, for example, where families are likely to be involved in agriculture, it would seem sensible to start adapting farming strategies to cope better with unpredictable and changing climatic conditions. For this to happen, farmers and their families might need recourse to education and training, as well as other resource such as access to credit and markets, and insurance. Examples of the new adaptation practices at the level of household farming practices may include activities such as establishing wind erosion barriers, methods for enhancing soil moisture retention and maintaining biodiversity, using intercropping techniques, using drip irrigation and planting of drought resistant and early maturing varieties. Such adaptation practices are linked to broader knowledge generation initiatives that can help to predict what the climate scenarios might be in different areas, so that strategies begin to address future predictions rather than past trends, effectively introducing a “risk epistemology” into daily life and livelihoods practices. Overall adaptation to climate change is about pro-active action at local,


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national, and global levels, and a populace who are adequately oriented towards such pro-active actions, with the capabilities to negotiate and respond to arising risks that might occur in the course of everyday life, and that are likely to be very different in different contexts and life-circumstances. This is the “disenchanted prophecy” that we offer to education. In doing this, we ask the question whether education systems in Africa and elsewhere are prepared, or are preparing themselves adequately to orient learners in all sectors of society towards such practices. Re-orienting education and training systems is therefore a significant national and local adaptation practice as a more responsive, pro-active education system is likely to be essential for the successful cultivation of other adaptation practices. It is this dimension of adaptation practices that this essay addresses in more detail.

Living in a World Risk Society: Implications for the Aims of Education Popkewitz (1991) in his social epistemology of educational reform explains the relationship between education and the nation-state, and education and modernity. The nation-state is a product of modernity and the modern social mission of the school and university is an institutional arm of the nation-state (Kwiek, 2000). Education is this context is understood as a response to the Enlightenment ideal of reason, and a belief that every person can participate in the modern world order if inducted into the practices of reason that accompany the modern world order. Put differently, education’s role in traditional modernity is twofold: to produce citizens who support the development of national culture; and to produce modern subjects who have embraced Enlightenment ideals of truth, reason, and progress. In a general sense modernity is characterized by a belief in progress that is associated with the explosion of scientific knowledge produced in conjunction with technology. Sauvé (1999, p. 12) argues that modernity is the crucible for the development of unifying theories and the search for major organizing principles (including communism, liberalism, capitalism, etc.). She argues further that modernist epistemology is positivist and that its ontology is realist; that it is based on a search for objectivity that relies on instrumental rationality to legitimize knowledge and to organize it into separate disciplines.

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However, the pillars of traditional modernity are collapsing. With reference to modernity based nation-state societies Beck (1999) writes: The collective patterns of life, progress and controllability, full employment and exploitation of nature that were typical of this first modernity have now been undermined by five interlinked processes: globalization, individualisation, gender revolution, underemployment and global risks (as ecological crisis and the crash of global financial markets). (p. 2) Beck refers to traditional modernity as first modernity and the era characterized by societal responses to the challenges mentioned as second modernity. For Beck (1992), first modernity is co-extensive with industrial society and second modernity (reflexive modernization) with risk society. Industrial society and risk society are, however, not distinct social formations as the risks of risk society are seen mainly as a consequence of industry in conjunction with science (Lash and Wynne: Introduction to Beck, 1992). Risks (including environmental risks) are simply the dangers produced by science in conjunction with technology and the unquestioning belief in human progress as an outcome of more science and technology of the same kind. Human induced climate change might be understood as the effect of industry in conjunction with modern western science (and its associated beliefs). Beck (1999, p. 2) proceeds to argue that reflexive modernization is a radicalized modernization that undermines the foundations of first modernity and changes its frame of reference. The fundamental tenets of first modernity such as controllability and certainty are dissolving. The upshot of this is bringing together what was once mutually exclusive: “society and nature, social sciences and material sciences, the discursive construction of risk and the materiality of threats” (p. 4) – risk analysis therefore requires an interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary approach, which has implications for education (see later). Moreover, risks and the challenges they present are basically the same in Western and non-Western societies creating what Beck refers to as a “world risk society,” although as we have seen from the earlier discussion, global climate change risks do differ in the sense that their impacts are different in relation to the context of power and capacity in which they come to reside. As Beck (1999, p. 5) points out, the globality of risk does not, of course, mean global equality of risk. He writes: “the first law of environmental risks is: pollution follows the poor” (p. 5; emphasis in the original). This law is pertinent to our discussion on the risk of global climate change given that southern Africa is, relatively


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speaking, a small contributor to the volume of anthropogenic greenhouse gases produced globally, but one of the regions that is likely to bear a big brunt of the risks produced. Drawing on these changes in the “state of the world,” we argue that educational thinkers may need to trouble the often taken-for-granted perception that education’s primary purpose is to provide access to the modern world order, and rather conceive of education’s primary purpose as providing orientation for developing capabilities for living in a World Risk Society, after Beck (1999).

“Learning to live with it” As outlined by the discussion on the range of new social practices introduced by evidence of global climate change, and the predicted consequences in southern Africa it is clear that “learning to live with it” implies adopting both abatement and adaptation practices. However, as mentioned the biggest challenge in southern Africa is adaptation and not abatement. Abatement might be difficult to justify given the region’s high level of poverty (therefore the need for development) and because of its relatively small contribution to the production of global anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Because of risks associated with climate change that threaten the survival of many living organisms and their life support systems, the inhabitants in the region have very little choice but to adapt. Having said this, we wish to point out that adaptive social practices (such as the ones mentioned earlier) also involve processes of abatement – the two processes are often closely intertwined. Importantly, we wish to indicate that such practices cannot necessarily be pre-determined, fixed, or known in advance. The context of risk outlined earlier would therefore begin to introduce a new epistemology into education that is more about risk than certainty. Lave and Wenger (1991), Engeström et al. (1999), and other socio-cultural learning theorists such as Edwards (2005) argue that learning is socioculturally located, and is about becoming participants in practices. This introduces a notion of situated learning, which is best described as engagement in a community of practice, centred on a common endeavour (practices), and participation in communities of practice becomes the fundamental process of learning. For example, in the context of our discussion on adaptation practices earlier, we might think about the learning processes involved in the practice of designing new energy technologies, or farming with more drought resistant seeds, or using mosquito nets more regularly, and so on.

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Barton and Trusting (2005) have argued that communities of practice and socio-cultural learning theories have become popular among business managers, educators, and are of particular interest to the radical educator and political activist with social change interests. Edwards (2005), in reviewing socio-cultural historical learning theories identifies that learning to work on new problems, and dealing with complexity and uncertainty are two of the most significant learning challenges for the twenty-first century. In our view, thinking about learning as becoming participants in practices (in this case adaptation practices that are underpinned by an epistemology of risk and uncertainty) provides interesting new possibilities for considering an educational response to global climate change, and significant learning challenges for the education system. In this chapter, we therefore propose that (a) an epistemology of risk and (b) thinking of learning as participating in practices may provide some starting points for our “speaking out” to the education community about southern Africa’s educational response to climate change. These, however, will require a related set of educational change responses that we discuss briefly here.

Some Starting Points for Engaging Education Practitioners in Responding to Global Climate Change In “speaking out” about the need for new thinking in education in response to Global Climate Change, it is of interest to us to note that the recent Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (the most substantial environmental assessment done so far on a global level) reported three key findings on education (ironically hidden in a small, obscure paragraph towards the end of the report) (millennium assessment, June 25, 2007). The findings were: (1) Education is not working adequately with “new science”; (2) education is not working adequately with social theory; and (3) education needs to develop improved learning theory. In response, and in relation to our arguments earlier about epistemology of risk and a practice-centred pedagogy and engaging with new learning challenges, we propose that the following start-up framework for “moving ahead” with an educational response/s to global climate change in southern Africa: (1) education needs to work more pro-actively, creatively, and responsively with “new science” (which includes a knowledge of, and understanding of risk) as it is said that it takes up to ten years for “new science” to make its way into the


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education system (ibid.); (2) that educational policy and practice should be better informed by contemporary social and cultural theories so as to better engage with social changes needed in society to address and adapt to global climate change; and (3) that education policy and practice should be strengthened by learning theories that enable epistemological access to complex issues, and reflexivity (i.e. critical and change-oriented engagements in practices).

Working Creatively and Responsively with “New Science” in Education As mentioned, the risks of first modernity are the products of science in conjunction with technology. But, in second modernity science becomes reflexive, that is, it deals with the mistakes, errors, and criticism of its practical consequences. Put differently, in second modernity science exposes risks of its own creation. Moreover, traditional science disciplines are fragmenting and losing coherence and we are witnessing the emergence new knowledge areas of a transdisciplinary nature, witnessed, for example, in the somewhat ironic creation of a new “trans-disciplinary discipline” called “Sustainability Science” (Clark and Dickson, 2003). We could, therefore, argue that both teachers and learners need to encounter knowledge of climate science to first know that there is a problem, and then to apply scientific concepts in response. This science, however, is complex in itself, and is increasingly technologically communicated through modelling and other sophisticated mechanisms. The history of science education also teaches us that science learning is not simply an “act of transmission,” but in the context of our arguments relating to a risk epistemology earlier, a deep level of understanding of both the certainties and the uncertainties associated with science is needed. Thus, we could argue that the challenge is not just to learn about what is known, but also what is not known (i.e. Beck’s knowledge and unawareness). In such a context science education becomes more a process of learning how to work with science and how to mediate the social context of science (i.e. dissident views, mass media messages, contradictory points, etc.). One could possibly argue here that participation in adaptation practices required to respond to global climate change will require critical and reflexive engagement with science and technology education practices (e.g. investigations, concept formation, designing and making, etc.) and their limits.

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Educational Engagements with Socio-Cultural Change Processes Learning science, however, will not be adequate for enabling participation in the kind and range of adaptation practices outlined earlier. Studies among the youth are increasingly showing that young people feel extremely disempowered to address global issues, and consequently are regressing into a consciously chosen, “short sighted,” and “here and now” worldview (Schreiner et al., 2005). Their main concern is to realize and fulfil themselves in the immediate time-space that they occupy. This is capitalized on by the market, and a “me” generation is being created through targeted marketing to youth and children. Schor (2004) reports that when children start school in the United States, the typical first grade learner can evoke up to 200 or more brands. While this relates to the United States, which is the most consumptive country on the planet, these patterns of behaviour are also visible in some of the more elite sectors of southern African. The combination of an increasingly individualized society (associated with modern democracies) and consumerism is radically changing youth culture, which affects education’s ability to be effective, and motivation to pro-actively participate in sustainability and other adaptation practices. While this is the case among the “upwardly mobile” youth, there is another sector of society that will be disproportionately affected by global climate change, namely, the poor. This introduces ecological politics into education, and questions of ecological justice arise at the interface of adaptation practices and how they are conceptualized and implemented, if at all. Participation in adaptation practices that will benefit the poor, and reduce their vulnerability will require social critique, social activism, and engagement with concomitant complex socio-political debates with complex time-space configurations. As indicated in the opening citation, giving attention to global climate change requires attention to the general social condition of inequality and deprivation that characterizes society. Critical and realistic theories of social change, theories of democracy and justice are therefore likely to be central to the process of conceptualizing adequate adaptation responses and practices in southern African education systems and practices. Of significance is Archer’s (2007) work on human agency in which she explains a morphogenic process of social change that is structurally, historically, and socio-culturally situated, but that recognizes the significance of human reflexivity in enabling social changes. In this work on social change, she recognizes the centrality of


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practice and reflexivity, and argues that we can only really make our way through the world by engaging reflexively with our concerns in relation to society. For education this means involving people actively in such reflexive practices, and building learning capabilities necessary for participation in such practices. A deep knowledge of, and ongoing research into the relationships between social change and education would therefore appear to be necessary as part of the educational response to global climate change.

Informing Education with Learning Theories that Enable Open-Ended, Reflexive, and Responsive Learning Processes to Flourish As indicated earlier, learning as participation in practices decentres a cognitive, individualized view of learning (which currently dominates formal education systems), and locates the learning processes more socially. Rogoff et al. (1993) along with other socio-cultural learning theorists have argued that individual development is dependent on interactions with other people in which societal values, intellectual tools, and cultural institutions function as mediating cultural artefacts. They argue that in thinking about learning in relation to, for example, adaptation practices outlined earlier, it is necessary to also consider the societal basis of the shared problem solving – the nature of the problem the partners seek to solve, the values involved in determining the appropriate goals and means, the intellectual tools available (e.g. language and number systems, literacy, and mnemonic devices), and the institutional structures of the interactions (e.g. schooling and political and economic systems). (p. 232) Daniels (2001) argues that this raises “the interesting question as to the design of the pedagogic practices in the broadest sense. If it is to be acknowledged that macro institutional and cultural factors are at play in the formation of pedagogic identities and possibilities, then how should we set about designing such contexts?” (p. 128). Based on this, and an analysis of the limitations of earlier Vygotskian socio-cultural theories of learning that only took symbolic concepts (such as language) into account, his approach is similar to that of Engeström et al. (1999) who argues for an “expanded model of pedagogy.” Drawing on Cole’s (1996)

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metaphor as “context as that which weaves together” Daniels (2001) suggests that crucial aspects of context should not be omitted in the design and analysis of pedagogic practice. In relation to our discussion on global climate change and educational practices that strengthen and enable various adaptation practices, this would require a consideration of context in learning that (a) recognizes shared semiotic and symbolic processes, (b) the concrete societal nature of cultural artefacts, and (c) the “condition” of the environment itself, particularly since the effects of global climate change will be different in different contexts. It is only through a consideration of these inter-related dynamics of context that learning capabilities for appropriate adaptation practices can emerge. A consideration of context is therefore an important element of enabling an open-ended, responsive, and reflexive orientation to learning.

Undertaking This Work in Troubled Education Systems But how are schools and other institutions of learning to respond to a context of risk when the majority of education systems in southern Africa are bearing the brunt of years of colonial intrusion and neglect? In these educational settings quality education remains elusive, teacher training remains under-funded, and curricula are seen as being largely irrelevant, or at the very least difficult to implement (Lotz-Sisitka, 2007a; UNESCO, 2005). Of interest to this work is the recent UNESCO (2005) finding that environmental education is one of the growth areas in curriculum change around the world. This has been the case in southern African countries too, as many have taken up environmental issues into national education systems in various ways, sometimes by infusion (Ketlhoeilwe, 2007); or by re-defining disciplines to encompass an environmental focus (Lotz-Sisitka and Raven, 2001). Studies are also pointing out that an engagement with environmental issues seems to bring relevance to teaching and learning, and to create “connections” with communities and parents in the learning process (Chikunda, 2007; Lotz-Sisitka, 2007b). These are all positive indicators that giving attention to global climate change and associated adaptation practices might be well received in “troubled schools,” and may well help to establish a re-generation and re-orientation of pedagogical practices and teaching that are welcomed as a result of their relevance to learners and communities. Situating these efforts within the wider intent of the Education for All movement, which aims to improve educational quality, will therefore be an important process in years to come (Lotz-Sisitka, 2007b).


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Drawing on Experiences from the Field of Environmental Education in Southern Africa In taking the global climate agenda forward in southern African education systems, we have noted the following educational practices (through a brief historical analysis of a thirty-year history of educational practices in the field of environmental education in southern Africa) that might be worth developing further in the context of the educational responses to the need for adaptation practices as outlined earlier. These have been tested in the context of rural schools in a range of southern African environments: z

z

z

Establish practice-centred partnerships with organizations that are interested in supporting the development of learning-centred responses to global climate change. We have noted that partnerships are a “cornerstone” of effective environmental education practice in southern Africa, and offer a rich resource for enabling social change through education (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2006). Support practice-centred active learning pedagogical processes that take full account of the context of learning (semiotic, cultural, and environmental). Such practice-centred active learning pedagogical processes, if critically oriented, can foster reflexivity and enhance agency (O’Donoghue, 2007). Give attention to questions of epistemological access associated with a risk epistemology. In our experience this involves “giving the tools of science away” (O’Donoghue, 1993), focusing on resource-based learning approaches, working from context to concept in schools and classrooms, and involving learners in “real world” knowledge complexities where disciplines criss-cross each other and local-global knowledges interface (Lotz-Sisitka, 2007a), that is, allow for disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary examination of issues and risks to enable a broadening of knowledge, social learning, and deeper understandings of risk (O’Donoghue et al., 2007).

Setting a New Research Agenda for Education? Thus, while the situation appears daunting, and the educational challenges are enormous, the situation is not hopeless, as there is already a considerable dynamic operating across education systems to incorporate and address environmental issues (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2006; UNESCO, 2005). This

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chapter has done little besides scope the starting points for a more prolonged engagement with an issue that is likely to become more pronounced in southern African society in the years to come. In doing this it has chartered the following openings for more engaged educational research: z z z

z

Examining a changed epistemology in education that is framed more by risk than by certainty. Examining a changed purpose for education that is not oriented only to access the modern world order, but rather a World Risk Society. Examining how educational theory and practice is engaging with “new science”; social theories and socio-cultural change processes; and learning theory that is oriented towards contextually situated open processes of risk negotiation, reflexivity, and agency. Examining how teachers and learners may engage in learning processes oriented to adaptation and abatement practices (risk negotiation in the everyday).

It is perhaps an ironical co-incidence that technology and environmental education have been recently identified by UNESCO (2005) as the two areas that have seen the most rapid growth in terms of curriculum coverage in education systems around the world. To date environmental education has to a large extent been marginalized “on the fringes” of mainstream subjects (often erroneously interpreted by mainstream educators as a “green” concern). Responding to the enormity of the challenges of global climate change would appear, however, to require a more substantive response than inclusion of “new topics” into the curriculum. As argued in this chapter, it requires a more deep-seated re-orientation of education systems worldwide towards sustainability, risk capabilities, and reflexive agency. Such a re-orientation, according to Sterling (2007) requires “moving beyond mounting calls to ‘change our way of thinking and doing’ . . . to uncover the roots of why we are as we are, and from this basis, clarify the nature of a shift of collective consciousness which is already underway, in order to accelerate it further” (p. 33). He thus links the changes necessary in education to a deeper social transformation process, as is also argued by Hoffman (2007) in the opening citation to this chapter. Sterling (2007) argues further that this re-orientation of society will be an unprecedented learning challenge in itself, and will involve “un-learning and re-learning and new learning to ensure ecological integrity, social coherence and economic viability as mutually interdependent concerns” (p. 34).


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In “speaking before” this chapter argues that placing learning processes orientated towards a range of abatement and adaptation practices at the centre of our educational efforts within a framework of risk, social justice, and socio-cultural change might provide some starting points for this future educational development and research within a broader social change agenda. “Learning to live with it,” is not likely to be a simple matter if we are to do this in a manner that respects social justice, equity, democracy, and human dignity, and if addressing global climate change is indeed going to be oriented towards addressing the essential un-freedom, suffering, and misery within the present global system.

Chapter 8

Myths of Climate Change: Deckchairs and Development Trish Glazebrook Dalhousie University

In developed nations, you can pretty much count on people to know what you are talking about when you mention “global warming.” Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and George Monbiot’s Heat have done much to raise public consciousness concerning climate change. Even Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, though arguing that it is a hoax propagated by resentful and opportunistic environmentalists, did much to generate awareness of the issues, facts, and debates. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) created a similar flurry of insight and excitement among academics when it released its fourth, most recent Assessment Report (AR4) in 2007. The report makes no certain predictions, but evaluates outcomes of climate change probabilistically in the terms shown in Table 8.1: Table 8.1 AR4 probability ranges. Terminology

Likelihood of the occurrence/outcome

Virtually certain

>99% probability of occurrence

Very likely

90–99% probability

Likely


About as likely as not


Unlikely


Very unlikely

1–10% probability

Exceptionally unlikely

Climate Change and Philosophy: Transformational Possibilities (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Rationality and Feminist Philosophy (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Possibilities in Philosophy of Mind

Kantian Deeds (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Foucault's Legacy (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Derrida: Profanations (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Leibniz Reinterpreted (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

The Philosophy of Miracles (Continuum Studies In Philosophy)

Leibniz Re-interpreted (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

John Stuart Mill's Political Philosophy (Continuum Studies In British Philosophy)

Leibniz Reinterpreted (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Derrida and Disinterest (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Rousseau And the Ethics of Virtue (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Platonism, Music And the Listener's Share (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Nietzsche And the Greeks (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Virtue Ethics: Dewey And Macintyre (Continuum Studies in American Philosophy)

Hegel and the Analytic Tradition (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Ricoeur and Lacan (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, and Globalization (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Tolerance And The Ethical Life (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Deleuze And the Unconscious (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Rousseau and Radical Democracy (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Platonism, Music And the Listener's Share (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Virtue Ethics: Dewey and MacIntyre (Continuum Studies In American Philosophy)

Climate and Climate Change

Role of God in Spinoza's Metaphysics (Continuum Studies In Philosophy)

Historical Studies in Philosophy

Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (Continuum Studies In Philosophy)

Climate Change and Philosophy: Transformational Possibilities (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Rationality and Feminist Philosophy (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Possibilities in Philosophy of Mind

Kantian Deeds (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Foucault's Legacy (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Derrida: Profanations (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Leibniz Reinterpreted (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

The Philosophy of Miracles (Continuum Studies In Philosophy)

Leibniz Re-interpreted (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

John Stuart Mill's Political Philosophy (Continuum Studies In British Philosophy)

Leibniz Reinterpreted (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Derrida and Disinterest (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Rousseau And the Ethics of Virtue (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Platonism, Music And the Listener's Share (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Nietzsche And the Greeks (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Virtue Ethics: Dewey And Macintyre (Continuum Studies in American Philosophy)

Hegel and the Analytic Tradition (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Ricoeur and Lacan (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, and Globalization (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Tolerance And The Ethical Life (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Deleuze And the Unconscious (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Rousseau and Radical Democracy (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Platonism, Music And the Listener's Share (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

Virtue Ethics: Dewey and MacIntyre (Continuum Studies In American Philosophy)

Climate and Climate Change

Role of God in Spinoza's Metaphysics (Continuum Studies In Philosophy)

Historical Studies in Philosophy

Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (Continuum Studies In Philosophy)

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