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Intersecting identities and globalclimate changeJoane Nagel aa Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, 1415Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and PoweriFirst, 2012, 1–10

Intersecting identities and global climate change

Joane Nagel

(Received 1 July 2012; final version received 5 July 2012)

This article explores the place of race, class, gender, sexual and nationalidentities and cultures in global climate change. Research on gendered vul-nerabilities to disasters suggests that women are more vulnerable than men tomany meteorological disasters related to climate change, specifically floodingand drought. This is because of their relative poverty, economic activi-ties (especially subsistence agriculture) and the moral economies governingwomen’s modesty in many cultures. Research on historical and contempo-rary links between masculinity and the military in environmental politics,polar research and large-scale strategies for managing risk, including fromclimate change, suggests that men and their perspectives have more influenceover climate change policies because of their historical domination of scienceand government. I expect that masculinist identities, cultures and militarisedinstitutions will tend to favour large-scale remedies, such as geoengineering,minimise mitigation strategies, such as reducing energy use, and emphasise‘security’ problems of global climate change.

Keywords: gender; masculinity; climate change; militarism; identity

Introduction

Identities and cultures based on race, class, gender, sexuality and nationalismare critical to understanding all social processes, especially those associated withhuman well-being. Global climate change is no exception. There is a growinginternational scientific and political consensus that climate change poses one of thegreatest contemporary challenges to human civilization (IPCC 2007, Roston 2008,Hoegh-Guldberg and Bruno 2010). Research on climate change is based mainlyon the natural sciences and engineering, and these disciplines and perspectives setthe research priorities and inform the policy agenda. These investigators recog-nise that social factors play a critical role in both the causes and consequencesof climate change, but they generally do not collaborate with social scientistsand have only the most rudimentary understanding of social processes relatingto climate change causation, mitigation and adaptation. Even when social factorsare considered, studies tend to be applied and descriptive: public opinion surveys,policy analyses and economic models (Stern 2007, Nordhaus 2011, Pidgeon andFischoff 2011, Weber 2011). There is relatively little recognition in the climatechange literature of the relevance of gender, race, class and nationalism and cer-tainly not sexuality. When I recently commented to a natural science colleague

ISSN 1070-289X print/ISSN 1547-3384 online© 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.710550http://www.tandfonline.com

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that there might be a gendered dimension to climate change, he laughed out loud:‘Doesn’t climate change affect everyone?!’ The answer to that incredulous ques-tion is ‘no’, climate change does not affect everyone equally, nor does everyonerespond uniformly to climate change. This article presents three examples of howidentities and cultures based on gender, race, class, sexuality and nationalism arerelevant to understanding the impacts of, and adaptations to, climate change.1

Gender, sexuality and the nation

The two consequences of increased global temperatures observed in the last cen-tury are the warming of the Earth’s oceans and the melting of polar ice sheets(IPCC 2007, NSIDC 2012). These combine with an observed and predictedincreased intensity of hurricanes and associated storm surges to make coastalflooding a highly expected outcome of global climate change (Webster et al. 2005,Stammerjohn et al. 2008, Sallenger et al., 2012). A widely studied hurricane inBangladesh in 1991 illustrates the interplay among gender, sexuality and the nationin the kinds of large storms researchers expect to increase in frequency and inten-sity as the Earth’s oceans warm and sea level rises. Cannon (2002) notes thatBangladesh is one of the few countries in the world where men live longer thanwomen. Researchers argue that women’s poverty and vulnerability to weather-related flooding are among the reasons for women’s shorter lives. (Begum 1993,Choudhury et al. 1993). When the flood waters receded after the 1991 monsoon,the International Federated Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies estimated that140,000 had died in the flooding; 90% of the deaths were women and children(Schmuck 2002). What accounts for this disproportionate number of women’sdeaths?

Research on gender and nationalism tells us that women and men occupydifferent spaces in national economies – both material (work) and moral(respectability). Women’s domestic responsibilities and cultural expectations fortheir modesty can expose them to extreme weather events, particularly in thecase of ‘hydrometeorological’ disasters such as floods or storm surges (Spring2006). A number of material and moral economic factors combined to makeBangladeshi women especially vulnerable when the waters rose in 1991. Theywere responsible for the home – caring for children, finding food, water and fuel,cooking meals, growing crops and tending livestock – which tied poor womento low-lying residences. Their mobility was limited by cultural prescriptions forwomen’s proper dress, demeanour and public visibility – their long, loose cloth-ing restricted movement through water; they were ashamed to seek higher groundoccupied by unrelated men; they could not swim. Women’s relative poverty madethem less resilient – they had poor nutrition, poor health care and limited fam-ily support as divorced and widowed women were discouraged from remarrying(Cannon 2002).2 National and ethnic cultures, which restrict women’s mobilityand resilience, make them more vulnerable to the effects of climate change – notonly from storms and flooding but also from drought, in cases where women are

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subsistence farmers, and from forced migrations out of drought and flooding con-ditions. While it is true that both men and women are affected by climate change,the effects are not always the same, nor are they always equal.

Race, class, gender and the moral economy

It is not only in developing countries or the Global South that gendered local andnational identities and cultures shape vulnerabilities to storms and flooding. Seager(2006, p. 30) studied the natural and political disasters associated with HurricaneKatrina in New Orleans in 2005 and noted that:

Poverty combines with race and ideologies about gender to produce a metric ofdeep disadvantage in terms of mobility: even in a country as awash in cars as theUnited States, women are less likely to have a car or a driver’s license than theirmale counterparts.

Reports about post-Katrina New Orleans revealed a moral economy of raced,classed and gendered valuations of worth, credibility, dangerousness anddeservingness that often shape responses to disasters like Katrina which affect thevulnerabilities of different groups. Officials and reporters described post-KatrinaNew Orleans as a ‘war zone’, where ‘anarchy’ reigned replete with sniping, loot-ing and raping (Tierney et al. 2006, Stock 2007). Contrary to initial media reports,the notorious murders in the Superdome were never documented, although severalpeople died from natural causes or suicide, nor was there clearly documented evi-dence of widespread rape or sexual assault (Rosenblatt and Rainey 2005, Thevenotand Russell 2005). Racial cosmologies of Black male dangerousness, especially assexual threats, no doubt added fuel to the rumours of rape and mayhem that char-acterised much early reporting about post-Katrina New Orleans. Ransby (2006,p. 218) found little sympathy for the presumed victims of this crime wave, Blackwomen, who were depicted as ‘culprits in their own misfortune’ because of theirpresumed laziness, promiscuity and irresponsibility rather than because of lowpay, lack of jobs and lack of affordable housing (see also Giroux 2006).3 Raced,gendered, sexual and other moral stereotypes, calculations of worth and blame,questions of responsibility, and notions of fairness can influence plans for andresponses to disasters in different national settings and in the international arena.

Nation, class and the global system

The melting of the Arctic permafrost and polar ice sheets combined with coastalflooding resulting from climate change will have dramatic effects on many islandnations and coastal communities globally. Coastlines around the world – in bothrich and poor countries – will be reshaped by rising sea levels and storm surges,and the consequences and coping capacity of nations to these changes will begreatly influenced by national wealth and standing in the international system.

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Rich countries will have more resources to adapt to the impacts of climate changeby designing barriers to storm surges, refitting buildings and coastal facilities, orrebuilding away from coastlines. Poor countries, especially island nations whoseland and fresh water supplies are vulnerable to sea level rise, will have to rely onothers in the global system to provide them with resources to adapt or migrate.While there is broad agreement that national wealth has contributed to climatechange by industrialisation’s contribution to increased greenhouse gas emissions,there is no credible commitment by these global climate changers to assist poorernations to cope with changes they did not cause. Small island states such as Tuvalu,Micronesia, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Maldives and mostly rural Indigenousoccupants of Arctic coastal communities in Siberia, Alaska, Canada, Norway andGreenland have neither the resources nor the local or international influence toeconomically or culturally maintain their communities by remaining in place ormigrating en masse as climate change floods or melts their homelands.4 Developedcountries have not been quick to take on the responsibility for aiding relativelypoor countries affected by other outcomes of rising global temperatures such asheat and drought, the negative consequences of which are easier to ignore or todismiss as simply ‘weather’, misfortune, outcomes of war and conflict, or the resultof poorly managed development policies.5 As in the case of Hurricane Katrina,the often non-white victims of these slowly unfolding climate-related disasters aredismissed as, at least in part, designers of their own demise by living in placeswhere bad things just seem to happen naturally. The climate change-related ‘badluck’ of poor countries and their populations illustrates both the vulnerabilitiesof some national identities and cultures to the actions and assumptions of othernational identities and cultures. The power of national identities and cultures tokeep in place conceptions of who ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ represent compared to‘them’ is illustrated by the durability of this point of view even in the face of ourobvious role in causing their problem.

Masculinity, militarism and science

Climate-related environmental transformations underway are escalating and willimpact virtually all human communities. Identities and cultures play a role invulnerability to or responsibility for causing global climate change. Responsesto climate change also have a classed, raced, gendered and nationalist face.Strategies for mitigation (stopping or reducing the causes of climate change) andadaptation (learning to live with the consequences of climate change) are notmerely technical matters (increasing energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gasemissions, developing alternative energy sources, redesigning housing, transporta-tion and communities). The policies that shape local, national and internationalresponses to climate change reflect the gendered power, privilege and preoccu-pations of mostly male policy-makers around the world (see, e.g. Bulhaug et al.2008). Researchers note the paucity of representatives from Indigenous communi-ties, women’s groups and underclasses in shaping climate change mitigation and

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adaptation policies, despite the relative vulnerability of these groups to the effectsof climate change (Rohr 2009, UNEP 2009). Less documented is the place ofgendered national institutional identities and cultures in shaping climate changeresponses and setting research priorities.

‘Gender’ is not synonymous with ‘women’, and understanding men’s placeand perspectives in how nations respond to climate change is an important aspectof the relationship between gender and climate change. Men are influential indetermining the causes of and responses to climate change through their domi-nation of politics and policy-making around the world. Masculine interests, andcultures imbedded in scientific and military organisations come to the fore in set-ting climate change research priorities and approaches to addressing the causesand impacts of climate change.

The marriage of militarism and science is reflected in the history of both polarexploration and climate research. Dodds (2006, p. 61, 2009) described Antarcticaas ‘a stage on which men (and it has been men in the main) and their nations eithercarved out claims to the continent or initiated scientific programmes’. UnlikeAntarctica, a competitive (and sometimes cooperative) arena for the men driv-ing international relations and scientific inquiries, Rosner (2009) observes thatthe Arctic has long been gender integrated, occupied by both women and men.It was into this already-inhabited northern realm that European and Americanoften military-backed male explorer/scientists inserted themselves, exploitingIndigenous knowledge, while claiming Western discovery, conquest and owner-ship. Women largely were erased from the personal accounts and professionalpublications of these men of science and discovery, thus avoiding female pollutionof the pure masculine challenge of men against nature. The Arctic reality, however,was more feminised. Palsson (2008) describes long-term intimate and profes-sional liaisons between some of the most famous early twentieth-century Arcticexplorers, such as Robert Peary and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and the Indigenouswomen and men with whom these Westerners lived and worked for extendedperiods of time over decades. Not only were Inuit women seen as convenient sex-ual partners by many Arctic ‘explorers’, and as means to keep the men in theircrews ‘contented’, Native women also had essential skills in hunting and fish-ing, skinning, seamstressing, cooking local fish and animals and polar survival.They sometimes became mothers of explorers’ children, suitable partners in theirplace, but invisible in the lives of these men when they returned home to honourand fame.

It is not only in the history of polar exploration that we find a marriage of mas-culinity, militarism and science. Fleming (2007, 2010) catalogues historical efforts(stretching back two centuries and beyond) by the United States and other govern-ments to use and control climate for military purposes. These projects includedtiming war campaigns to weather forecasts, cloud seeding to create storms andother techniques designed to shift weather patterns. He describes ‘a long papertrail of climate and weather modification studies by the Pentagon and other [US]government agencies’ in the twentieth century (2007, p. 49). For instance, ‘In the

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1950s the Pentagon convened a committee to study the development of a ColdWar weather weapon’, and ‘During Operation Popeye in the Vietnam war, the AirForce flew more than 2600 cloud seeding sorties over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to . . .

Make mud, not war’ (2007, p. 56).The so-called ‘geoengineers’, who imagine and design massive projects to

alter the global climate, are the contemporary incarnations of these climate war-riors. These male natural scientists and engineers are described by Fleming (2007,p. 50) as ‘The new titans who see themselves as heroic pioneers, capable ofalleviating or averting natural disasters’ by large-scale projects to stop globalwarming. For instance, physicist Lowell Wood, a protégé of Edward Teller (fatherof the hydrogen bomb), who worked for 40 years at Lawrence Livermore NationalLaboratory, has suggested building up the Arctic ice by using large artillery piecesto shoot tons of sulphate aerosols or nanoparticles into the stratosphere to deflectthe Sun’s rays and cool the planet or alternatively by hooking a 25-km long ‘skyhose’ to a high-flying military superblimp to pump reflective particles into theatmosphere. Another is chemist Paul Crutzen whose idea is to create a ‘minornuclear winter’ by shooting or ballooning millions of metric tons of sulphur eachyear over the tropics to simulate a Mount Pinatubo-scale eruption (Crutzen 2006,Fleming 2007, p. 48). There are a variety of problems with these kinds of schemes:they are likely to be expensive and ineffectual, they relegate to the back burner anyplans to mitigate or reduce greenhouse gases; they might actually be dangerous.6

They represent an imperialistic, militaristic bent – large-scale projects undertakenby one country (usually the United States) to dominate the global environmentalsystem, or as Fleming (2007, p. 48) aptly summarises, ‘basically declaring war onthe stratosphere’.

The militarisation of climate change studies is evidenced in geoengineeringdesigns. Militarised responses to global climate change can be heard in alarmssounded about ‘national security’ – as in the 2007 report, National Securityand the Threat of Climate Change (CNA-Center for Naval Analysis 2007), the2008 ‘National Intelligence Assessment on the National Security Implicationsof Global Climate Change to 2030’ (US. House of Representatives 2008) andthe 2012 National Council for Science and the Environment conference on‘Environment and Security’ (2012). The institutionalisation of a militarised mas-culinist mentality into the climate-related policies and operations of governmentagencies can be seen in plans to protect borders from climate refugees or use railguns designed during Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars)to fire tons of material into space to deflect the Sun’s rays. The implicationsfor climate science and policy of redeploying the resources of US national lab-oratories previously engaged in nuclear weapons production (e.g. Los Alamosand Lawrence Livermore) for climate change modelling and geoengineeringprojects should not be presumed to be purely innocuous. Even when these facil-ities contribute valuable technology and expertise to the research enterprise,they also bring along their budgetary needs, ‘strategic’ goals and militaristicassumptions.

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Conclusions

Sociological studies of organisational culture suggest that organisations imposetheir own agendas and worldviews on the problem at hand: to a man with a ham-mer, everything looks like a nail. Researchers need to ask: What perspectivesand plans will the United States and other national militaries and their organisa-tional apparati bring to the policy table when planning responses to global climatechange? (Climate security?) What strategies for addressing the effects of climatechange should we expect from national weapons laboratories? (Geoengineering?)It is important to not only ask the question, What is the role of gender in shapingvulnerabilities to climate change? but also to ask the question, What is the roleof gendered institutions and ideologies in creating the world that will result fromgendered responses to climate change? A major challenge for researchers workingon identities and cultures not only is to continue to document inequalities, but alsoto be willing to examine the identities and cultures of those in positions of power.Exploring the place of dominant group identities and cultures in unlikely topicssuch as global climate change, allows us to see more easily the opaque workingsand interests of privilege and interests. Once exposed, our responsibility is to usethis knowledge in policy arenas.

AcknowledgementsThe author thanks Natalie Parker, University of Kansas, and Monique Laney, SmithsonianNational Air and Space Museum, for their collegial assistance with the research and ideasin this article.

Notes1. For overviews of ‘gender and climate change’, see Denton (2002, 2004), Fordham

(2003), Byanyima and Martinez-Soliman (2009) and Enarson (2012).2. For a general discussion of gender and ‘natural disasters’, see Neumayer and Plümper

(2007). Not all of Bangladesh is dominated by or bows to strict patriarchy; Kabeer(2000) outlines the transformation in the lives of Bangladeshi women who partici-pated in Bangladesh’s ‘New Industrial Policy’ in the 1980s which brought many youngwomen to cities to work, challenging traditions of women’s seclusion. In 2011, theBangladesh government approved the National Women Development Policy, whichgives women equal political and economic rights to men; conservative Islamic groupsopposed implementation of the policy, first introduced in 1997, then again in 2007(Islam 2011).

3. Ransby also points out the resiliency of many whose lives were disrupted by HurricaneKatrina, including the support networks and mutual aid responses undertaken by manyof New Orleans most vulnerable residents; for a discussion of the ways in which gendershaped the impact of Hurricane Katrina on men and women in New Orleans, see Read(2009).

4. For a list of small island states grappling with sea level rise, see Association of SmallIsland States (AOSIS) at http://aosis.info/ accessed on 9 January 2012; for a list ofIndigenous peoples contending with the warming of the Arctic, see Inuit CircumpolarCouncil (ICC) at http://inuitcircumpolar.com/index.php?Lang=En&ID=1, accessedon 9 January 2012.

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5. Major contributors to greenhouse gases such as the four biggest emitters – China,the United States, the European Union and Brazil – have not met any previousemissions reduction targets, the first of which was set at the Rio de Janiero ‘EarthSummit’ in 1992 and the most recent in the 2009 ‘Copenhagen Accord’ (UnitedNations 1997, 2010). Similarly, most of the financial assistance promised by industrialcountries to assist poorer nations affected by climate change has not been deliv-ered; see http://www.fedre.org/en/content/developed-world-failing-climate-funds-pledge-says-bangladeshi-minister, accessed on 12 January 2012; http://www.iied.org/climate-change/media/rich-nations-failing-keep-copenhagen-promise-help-poor-nations-adapt-climate-ch, accessed on 12 January 2012.

6. Some of these schemes have been evaluated by natural scientists; for instance, Balaet al. (2008) predict decreased global mean precipitation as a hydrological consequenceof geoengineered reductions in solar radiation.

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Webster, P.J., Holland, G.J., et al., 2005. Changes in tropical cyclone number, duration, andintensity in a warming environment [online]. Science, 16 (309), 1844–1846.

JOANE NAGEL is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Universityof Kansas. She is Director of the National Science Foundation’s C-CHANGE (ClimateChange, Humans, and Nature in the Global Environment) Integrative Graduate Educationand Research Traineeship program at KU. Her recent publications include Race, Ethnicity,and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (Oxford University Press),‘Deploying race, gender, class, and sexuality in the Iraq war’ (with Lindsey Feitz), in Race,Gender & Class, ‘Climate change, public opinion, and the military-security complex,’ inThe Sociological Quarterly.ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Boulevard,Lawrence, KS 66045, USA.Email: nagel@ku.edu

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