Mike Hulme’s sympathetic tone in Why We Disagree About Climate Change is fitting; with so many ideas built upon each other in environmental scholarship, being open-minded is important. Just as Hulme shows how personal climate ideologies warp our perceptions of climate change, environmentalism as a study and practice is equally contentious and variable among scholars. By comparing classic to contemporary environmental literature, we learn that much of classic communication is ineffective, economics is a useful framework to examine institutional policy, and many preconceived ideas about eco-friendliness, like recycling or buying local, are misplaced.
First, as environmentalism is highly interdisciplinary, communication is important in bridging the gap between understanding differences among others. Hulme makes a point of this as “one of the reasons we disagree about climate change is that we receive multiple and conflicting messages about climate change and we interpret them in different ways.” (Hulme 2010, 215). He then goes on to describe the deficit model which assumes that people disagree about climate change because they have a deficit knowledge of scientific information and cannot make rational conclusions. Essentially, they need scientists, authority figures in their fields, to tell them what to believe so they can know what to do. And in Michael Maniates’s experience, he finds this classical reasoning is prominent among many of his up-and-coming environmentalist students who believe that educating young people through this model is the best way to raise awareness about environmental issues (2001, 37).
If this communication form was truly effective, then why is climate change still a debate? With 97% of climate scientists in agreement that climate change is real, this is contradictory (Nasa 2017). Perhaps, the way we’ve been communicating about this issues has not properly addressed the concerns of people with different ideologies and who don’t assume that science is the highest order of reason.
If science doesn’t appeal to everyone, then what is relevant to them? As Steinberg shows, economics is an effective framework and form of communication that helps examine institutional policy. He goes on to challenge Garret Hardin’s notorious Tragedy of Commons lamentations that, “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” (1968, 1244) by showing that commons aren’t inherently ruined by being shared. If properly regulated, they can hold many advantages for people, animals, and the environment. For example, Steinberg shows how the Cerulean Warbler’s survival is dependent on institutional and economic decisions. In Santa Catarina Ixtepeji, Mexico, their common lands are either government-owned or privatized, and are used for ecological conservation while also making room for commercial timber mills (Steinberg 2015, 86). Here, the Cerulean Warbler can flourish while the forest industry is supported, but this is due to successful economic systems, good regulation, and an institutional agreement.
Finally, Vaclav Smil and Leigh Phillips challenge conventional assumptions that recycling and buying local are effective and less carbon intensive. Philips dispels the notion that buying local inherently reduces co2 emissions by lessening transportation costs and shows that rather, “it is the production of food that that has the largest energy appetite, rather than transportation” (2015, 119). Instead of buying local, Philips and Smil both advises to shifting towards meat and dairy free diet to solve our carbon footprint instead.
Recycling is another eco-friendly practice that is assumed to be positive. Smil shows that recycling doesn’t mean the same thing for every material. For example, “60 metals and metalloids… have recovery rates of less than 1%” (2014 113) and that recycling our coke bottles isn’t always effective. “Collection and processing of plastics is much more challenging than the reuse of metals, or papers… contain mixtures of five major polymers… that must, after time intensive collection, be manually separated” (2014 114). But it’s also not inherently negative either as certain materials like paper and aluminum have a high recycle rate. With all these things in mind, Leigh and Smil agree that these classical assumptions need to be carefully scrutinized using material life cycle assessments to see how each element is interconnected in the big picture.
All things considered, these differences are ultimately just new ideologies. Although contemporary environmental thought has come a long way from classic thought, many of the same problems concerning the basis of ideology, communication, and institutional vs individual action are still at play today. But, in just the span of a couple decades, contemporary thought has completely transformed from its classic predecessor and shows that schools of thought can dramatically change by reviewing and testing our previous assumptions.
Works Cited
Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (3859): 1243–48. doi:10.1126/science.162.3859.1243.
Hulme, Mike. 2010. Why We Disagree About Climate Change. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Maniates, Michael F. 2001. “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” Global Environmental Politics 1 (3): 31–52.
Phillips, Leigh. 2015. Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts. United Kingdom: Zero Books.
Smil, Vaclav. 2014. Making the Modern World. United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Steinberg, Paul. 2015. Who Rules the Earth?. New York: Oxford University Press.