living with climate change: are there limits to adaptation? exploring cultural dimensions to climate...
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Living with Climate Change: Are there limits to adaptation?
Exploring Cultural Dimensions to Climate Change
Thomas Heyd1 & Nick Brooks2
1Philosophy, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 3P4 Email: [email protected].
2Tyndall Centre, UEA, Norwich NR4 7TJ. Email: [email protected].
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Living with Climate Change: Are there limits to adaptation?
Climate change and culture
• Human beings have experienced large changes in climate throughout history• Up to ~6º C cooler & ~1.5º C warmer than today, with large regional changes• Climate & human society have evolved together• Last systematic reorganisation of global climate ~5000 years ago• Profound impacts on human societies across the globe (Brooks, 2006)• Currently at beginning of another phase of global-scale change in climate
• Responses to climate change influenced by perceptions of the environment (McIntosh et al., 2000)
• How might attitudes towards the environment (“nature”) influence the extent or efficacy of adaptation today?
Pillar of lake sediment in the central Sahara: evidence of profound changes in climate and environment ~5000 yrs ago
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Living with Climate Change: Are there limits to adaptation?
Human society as a part of nature
• For millennia, human society has been seen as embedded in nature
• Mosely (2001) describes the historical Andean world view:
“Nature is believed to be highly animate, charging the landscape with interactive forces.…This all encompassing cosmology provides deep identification with the environment. Andean people literally read their physical surroundings as a resonant text of sacred places and spaces…
• Cruikshank (2000, 2001) describes how Alaskan Tlingit & Yukon First Nations perceive a living landscape, whose components are active counterparts to human beings. “Local knowledge embedded in oral traditions” emphasises
“the social nature of all relations between humans and nonhumans, that is, animals and landscape features, including glaciers.” (Cruikshank, 2001, p. 382)
Caral, the earliest dated urban centre in the Americas: template for Andean culture?
the importance of taking personal and collective responsibility for changes in that world.” (Cruikshank, 2001, p. 391)
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Living with Climate Change: Are there limits to adaptation?
Oral traditions emphasise the agency present in the natural environment
Nature & landscapes as “sentient”
Glaciers perceived as entities that pay attention & respond to human behaviour, e.g. speaking carelessly, spilling blood, making noise, and cooking with grease in their vicinity. (Cruikshank 2001)
Idea of sentient landscapes & social relations between the human & non-human provides a cultural mechanism for engagement with the physical environment
Such an approach is common in non-Western & non-urban societies, characterising animism & naturalistic polytheism, echoed in e.g. Islamic societies (Djinn/Djenoun), “deep green” environmentalism, & interpretations of Gaia theory
See also Heyd, 2005, 2007
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Living with Climate Change: Are there limits to adaptation?
Humanity & nature in Western discourses
Separation from nature as a defining human characteristic• Biblical Fall as a sundering from nature • Hobbes - institutions of government protect us from a “state
of nature” • Freud - civilisation suppresses “original, autonomous
disposition” towards violence and aggression (1930)• Difference between nature & human culture often identified
with the distinction between civilisation & order on the one hand & savagery, chaos & wildness on other (Horigan, 1988)
“Man’s evolution is based on the fact that he has lost his original home, nature - and that he can never return to it.” Erich Fromm (1955)
“mitigation … represents activities to protect nature from society while adaptation constitutes ways of protecting society from nature. (Stehr & von Storch, 2005)”
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Living with Climate Change: Are there limits to adaptation?
Nature, culture & development - the African Sahel
Development boom in 1950s• Start of independence era, technological optimism• Unusually wet conditions, persisting into 1960s• Expansion of agriculture into drier areas in north
What went wrong?• Expansion of agriculture into historical marginal areas• Supplanting of traditional coping mechanisms with “one size fits all” model• Historically normal climatic variations not considered in development
Rainfall decline in 1970s• Catastrophic failure of agriculture • 100s of thousands of people, millions of animals lost• Drought persisted until late 1990s, development undermined
Pursuit of progress & development based on imported models of national economic expansion & commercialisation did not consider human-environment “relations”
See Thébaud & Batterby, 2001; Brooks, 2004
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Living with Climate Change: Are there limits to adaptation?
Nature vs humanity in climate change discourse
“…the ideal scare campaign for those who hate capitalism and love big government… anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-human”
Christopher C. Horner, CEI
Cornerstones of contrarian arguments:• Humans are separate from & “above” nature (“human exceptionalism”)• Nature & humanity are fundamentally in conflict - support for one associated with
contempt for the other
"You can't be progressive if you accept the ecological limits to growth.”
Clare Fox, Director, Institute of Ideas1
“Underlying [environmentalist] assumptions is a misanthropic view of humanity…In the third world the consequences of 'sustainable development', holding back economic growth, are even starker.”
Daniel Ben Ami
“The antihuman premise of nature's intrinsic value goes back, in the Western world, as far as St. Francis of Assisi…” George Reisman
Earth Day’s Anti-Human Agenda headline in Front Page Magazine
1On BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, 6 Jan. 2006
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Living with Climate Change: Are there limits to adaptation?
Concluding thoughts
Dominant doctrine of humans & nature as “separate” • Tends to discourage examination of interdependence of human societies and the
wider physical environment• Has played a major role in the pursuit of maladaptive development policies• Acts as a cultural barrier to both mitigation and adaptation
Other views of “nature” exist, which • Acknowledge agency inherent in the wider physical environment• Allow people to recognise role of variability & change in human affairs• Encourage “social responsibility” towards the environment
The successful & meaningful pursuit of adaptation & mitigation require • A cultural shift in which ideas of nature as responsive & possessing agency are
combined with a modern scientific understanding of the Earth system• The rejection of long-held beliefs about the separation of humanity & nature• Less psychological insulation from nature
How might this be achieved?
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Living with Climate Change: Are there limits to adaptation?
References
• Ben-Ami, D. 2004. The dismal quackery of eco-economics. Spiked, 22 Oct. 2004: http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA750.htm
• Berliner, M. 2004. Earth Day’s Anti-Human Agenda. Front Page Magazine (22 April 2004): http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={D2AB455B-16DE-4CDF-B2D3-AF3B34CC4822}
• Brooks, N. 2004. Drought in the African Sahel: long-term perspectives and future prospects. Tyndall Centre Working Paper No. 61: www.tyndall.ac.uk.
• Brooks, N. 2006. Cultural responses to aridity in the Middle Holocene and increased social complexity. Quaternary International 151, 29-49.
• Cruikshank , J. 2000. The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. University of British Columbia Press.
• Cruikshank , J. 2001. Glaciers and Climate Change: Perspectives from Oral Tradition Arctic 54, 377– 393.• Freud, S. 1930. Des Unbehagen in der Kultur. Translated by D. McLintock as Civilisation and its Discontents,
Penguin, England (2002). • Fromm, E. 1955. The Sane Society. Routledge, England (From revised edition, 2002). • Heyd, T. (Ed.). (2005) Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice, Columbia University Press,
New York.• Heyd, T. (2007) Encountering Nature: Toward an Environmental Culture. Ashgate: Aldershot, U.K.• Horigan, S. 1988. Nature and Culture in Western Discourses. Routledge, London.• McIntosh, R. J., Tainter, J. A., and Keech McIntosh, S. 2000. The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and
Human Action. Columbia University Press, New York.• Reisman, G. 2005. The Toxicity of Environmentalism: http://www.mises.org/story/1927. Posted on 10/3/2005
(Ludwig von Mises Institute)• Thébaud, B. and Batterby, S. 2001. Sahel pastoralists: opportunism, struggle, conflict and negotiation. A case
study from eastern Niger. Global Environmental Change 22, 69-78.