Global climate change is an impending catastrophe. It is
real, and it is right here, and it will profoundly shape the lives of all
living within a mere 20 years.
Many of us working in environmental activism have long
wondered how humans have avoided recognizing this. For the past 15 years, this
was what worried at me. What were the underlying generative principles of
ignoring or denigrating the evidence of the coming catastrophe? In the end,
there’s lots of answers (political bases, self-interest, corporate control,
elite control of the government, and human psychology, among others) – and it
doesn’t really matter why. We might care
about the ‘why’ in the future, but now is the time for action. Studies show
that even people who don’t ‘believe’ there’s climate change recognize that
they, themselves, are experiencing it. Given that shared worldview of massive,
alarming, change we need to leverage that to bring about change.[1] But can we change this
behemoth? Is climate change gone too far? In the Yale Program’s “Six Americas”
quiz, I turn out as “Alarmed,” certain that the climate catastrophe is real,
supportive of climate policies, “but often do not know what they or society can
do.”
This was the “first,” the basic principle for the entire
class. Change is coming (or here). It is inalterable and inevitable. Given
that, what do we do next? I can’t say
that I like that principle. I’d like to be able to forestall climate
catastrophe. But, like my students, the endless stories of extinction and wild
storms and more hurricanes and devastating flooding and so on cannot be denied.
It is irrefutable, as well, that in the face of this potential destruction, we
all feel hopeless. We “do not know what they or society can do.”
I read a lot of (too much) dystopian science fiction – as do
a lot of my students. Environmental dystopian science fiction has long resonated
with me – think Bacigalupi’s “The Water Knife” or “The Windup Girl.” Are we
facing a “Mad Max” world in which we are all reduced to “tribal” groups endless
fighting one another over a scarce resource? Is “The Walking Dead” simply a
metaphor for what our future lives will be like, each group against each other?
Is it going to be the “Hunger Games”? It’s too horrible to contemplate, and we
all shut down.
The second principle, therefore, was hope. This is fueled by
my years of anthropological fieldwork in which I see that humans adapt, imagine
different worlds and innovate, struggle against the odds, and strategize. I was
also inspired by works that imagine a recreated post-apocalyptic future, such
as Robinson’s “New York 2140”
and Mandel’s “Station
Eleven.” I constructed the class to imagine a radically transformed but not
completely and inherently disastrous future. It would be different – but how? What
knowledge do we need to survive in this future?
As an older anthropologist, I have lived in many different
worlds. I have a tremendous mental archive of knowledge about ways that humans
have lived and could live in this world. We are all, as humans, embedded within
an all-encompassing worldview. This is our culture, and we are poorly equipped
to see beyond the boundaries of our ‘known’ (imagined, really) universe. All of
my anthropology classes ask students to recognize that the way we live in this
time and place is not a given, is not the norm for all of humanity. The
constant pedagogical struggle is how to shock people out of their sense of
normalcy. This class started from there and sought to show students the
diversity of human adaptations. It’s planting a seed of knowledge that might be
useful to them in the future. Because it’s their world, they will
have to live in it, to adapt or not.
The intellectual basis of this was Lund’s concept of
“rupture,” introduced to me by the New Mandala page on “Rupture: Structural
Reconfigurations of Nature & Society in the Mekong Region & Beyond” (https://www.newmandala.org/rupture/).
In addition, I made use of Sing Chew’s book “Ecological Futures.”
I asked students not to envision collapse, but rupture. All
are familiar with the concept of ‘lost’ civilizations, which loom large in
popular culture. A corollary of ‘lost civilizations’ is the idea of ‘dark ages’
ensuing upon collapse – the loss of civilization as the loss of culture. To
cultural anthropologists, this has long seemed silly. Yes, the Mayan empire
collapsed but there’s still Mayans! Yes, the Kingdom of Angkor collapsed, but
there’s still Khmer people who still carry out rituals at the site of Angkor
Wat! Angkor Wat was certainly not lost to the Khmer people. It’s not loss or
collapse, it’s transformation. We must understand the terms of that transformation
– what changed, and how.[2]
This is long enough for a blog post. I'll start again with a more careful discussion of concepts of rupture.
And, heavens, I really need to move off of this platform, it's too ugly and hard to read. That will be a project for later this week.
Kate, 5 June 2019
[1]
See, for instance, Gustafsen et al. 2019, “Americans
are increasingly ‘alarmed’ about global warming.” Yale Program on Climate
Change Communication, 12 February.
[2]
I could go on at great length about how and why concepts of ‘loss’ and
‘civilization’ dominate and what they tell us about the cultures that are
obsessed with them. It’s colonialism, it’s “Europe and the people without history,”
it’s Orientalism, and it’s also an underlying fear of our own culture that our
civilization is an ephemeral thing that must be constantly protected from
weakness – and that we would all be the worse for it because our nation, our
culture, our time and place, is the epitome of what is great and wonderful. How
often have students in my Introduction to Anthropology class written about “how
far we have progressed and aren’t we grateful we get to live in wonderful
America today?” despite consistent evidence that others live well as well.
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