Throughout the class, we’ve heard multiple people give their ideas. Funny thing is that if a bunch of people are roughly talking about the same topic, their ideas will sync up with each other. Here I point out Mike Hulme, Vaclav Smil, and Paul F. Steinberg’s similar ways of dealing with climate change.
Both Hulme and Smil discuss what there is to do about climate change. Hulme explains “that climate change has more potency now as a mobilising idea than it does as a physical phenomenon Ideas can be used, but they can’t be solved. Climate change can no longer be approached as an environmental problem demanding technical solutions” (Hulme 2009, 328). This is similar to Smil’s assertion that “our civilization is in no danger of running out of any major mineral, not imminently (in years), not in the near term (in one or two decades), and not on the scale of average human life-span (60-80 years)” (Smil 2014, 160). Both explain that climate change is not an issue to give our attention to, albeit they come at it from different sides. Hulme says that any call for action in regards to climate change is a ruse, because we have moved past the need for physical action in regards to climate change. Smil agrees with this, at least on the latter part of that. Technically speaking, we’ve got plenty of resources, at least of certain ones. To devote serious time to fighting climate change is time wasted.
However it is incorrect to say that Hulme advises us to no longer seek a way to “fix” climate change. It is fixable, just not how we originally thought. Hulme explains clumsy problems and solutions (2009), a concept he learned from theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. Hulme says that the ways we have been handling climate change are “either inadequate or inappropriate given the intractability of climate change” (Hulme 2009, 334-5). This can be cured by clumsiness, as he goes on to say, which “allows for several or all such contradictory goals and policies to be simultaneously pursued.” To solve a problem, we must first understand it. One needs the poison to find it’s antidote.
Similarly, Steinberg discusses dealing with environmental issues through different levels. In reference to the grand scale of the earth’s different specific ailments, the author writes, “Tackling these unruly problems requires that we include in our field of vision multiple levels of political organization.” If we are to “tackle the underlying causes of environmental problems- we cannot confine our energies to one level of governance. Rulemaking is like a multitiered chess game, with the outcome at one level often hinging on how the game is played on another” (Steinberg 2015, 162-3). The two authors practically mirror each other in their writing. Both point out the fact of consequences for our actions, and call for us to think bigger. Our goal is big, so we must be bigger.
Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree with Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smil, Vaclav. 2014. Making the Modern World. United Kingdom: Wiley.
Steinberg, Paul F. 2015. Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.