Why We Disagree About Climate Change was very broad, and a little bit overwhelming, ending on a slightly disconcerting note that basically left me with more questions than answers and somewhat unsure of how to proceed or how I felt. As we progressed in the class, the author’s points of view and ideas that we read about got more specific and easier to wrap your head around. One connection between Why We Disagree About Climate Change and Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff, as well as Ecotopia and the Naess’s “deep ecology movement” is religion and theology as a part of climate change. Another connection Between Making The Modern World and Why We Disagree is the idea of material wealth. A third connection is about Individual action vs institutional action in Why We Disagree and Who Rules the Earth.
Hulme’s argument throughout Why We Disagree is that one of the reasons we disagree about climate change is because our notions of climate change are entangled with our religious beliefs and spiritual ideologies. In Chapter 5 Hulme examines the language used to discuss climate change being connected to religion, spirituality, theology and morality. When we talked with him over skype, he really emphasized the importance of bringing religion to the forefront of discussions revolving around climate change, in contrast to many environmentalists, who view religion as a barrier to solving climate change conflicts and challenges and believe that religion is the problem. He emphasized that climate change is a moral and ethical issue and that environmental stewardship is common to many religions including Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikh, Judaism, and Buddhism. (Hulme, January 2016) In many cases in classic environmental thought, a similar idea of religion as an important part of environmental problems is evident. For example, in Naess’s article, The Shallow and the Deep, Long Range Ecology Movements, his idea of deep ecology integrates an idea of a type of religion of nature, if not a spiritual sense or relationship with nature. Naess discusses the “deep pleasure and satisfaction we receive from close partnership with other forms of life” (Naess 1973, 1). Callenbach’s Ecotopia also exemplifies a religious mindset applied to the environment. For example, as is true in many established religions, there is a deep connection between humans and nature and an emphasis on mutual benefits and protection.
This idea of religion and spirituality relates to my next connection, the idea brought up in multiple sources throughout ENVS 160, the conflict of material wealth and personal mindset of simplicity. Smil and Hulme in Making The Modern World and Why We Disagree present comparable ideas. In 5.5 in Why We Disagree, Hulme focuses on “personal transformation” in response to climate change. (loc 3218) There is an emphasis on “spiritual over material, community over the consumer, and, egalitarian over the hierarchical” (loc 3222). He also highlights the notion that material wealth has no correlation with happiness. (loc 3233) Some people, as a result of the tension of over consumption in modern-day society, advocate for radical lifestyle changes such as resorting to “communitarian lifestyle solutions” (loc 3255)
This idea is again illuminated by Naess in The Shallow and the Deep, Long Range Ecology Movements, when he discusses the “Biospherical egalitarianism-in principle” (Naess 1973, 1), meaning that humans should consider themselves as equals with nature, instead of dominant over nature. In contrast, Vaclav in Making the Modern World refutes these extremist ideas that Hulme brings up. He comes at the idea of “living simply” in entirely different, more specific, and perhaps more realistic way: dematerialization. He concludes that even “impressive achievements of dematerialization have not translated into any absolute declines of material use on the global scale- and… the global gap between the haves (approximately 1.5 billion people in 2013) and the have nots (more than 5.5 billion people in 2013) remains so large that even if” developing countries started to come closer to the standards of living in developed countries, we would still have continuous global material growth hundreds of years into the future. (Smil 2014,180)
The last connection I saw was the connection between Individual action vs institutional action in Why We Disagree and Who Rules the Earth. Hulme laid out the categories of risk assessment for us in Chapter 6: Fatalists, Hierarchists, Individualists and egalitarians. Although not directly related to the scale axis: individual and institutional levels of environmental action, I make a connection between these mindsets, especially illuminated by how Steinberg looks at individual and institutional action in Who Rules the Earth. Ultimately, Hulme seems to personally lean toward a solution of clumsy governance, a “bottom up” solution to climate change, meaning a mixture of governmental policies and non-environmental group led movements. (loc 5298-5313) Steinberg underlines in chapter 1 the importance that in reality, small individual actions don’t actually help and that what we really must be doing is working together in civic, political, and other shared contexts to help change/enforce laws (Steinberg 2015). While reading, I questioned what category of risk assessment Steinberg would fall under. I think a mixture of egalitarian and hierarchical would be the best fit, and perhaps Hulme would also fall into this category, although he doesn’t explicitly state his opinions as much as Steinberg does.
References
Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Naess, Arne. 1973. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.” Inquiry 16, 95–100.
Smil, Vaclav. 2014. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom
Steinberg, Paul F. 2015. Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.