Imperialism, colonialism, and climate change science (original) (raw)
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Climate Imperialism: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism, and Global Climate Change
eTropic, 2021
Global climate change threatens to kill or displace hundreds of thousands of people and will irrevocably change the lifestyles of practically everyone on the planet. However, the effect of imperialism and colonialism on climate change is a topic that has not received adequate scrutiny. Empire has been a significant factor in the rise of fossil fuels. The complicated connections between conservation and empire often make it difficult to reconcile the two disparate fields of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. This paper will discuss how empire and imperialism have contributed to, and continue to shape, the ever-looming threat of global climate crisis, especially as it manifests in the tropics. Global climate change reinforces disparate economic, social, and racial conditions that were started, fostered, and thrived throughout the long history of colonization, inscribing climate change as a new, slow form of imperialism that is retracing the pathways that colonialism and globalism have already formed. Ultimately, it may only be by considering climate change through a postcolonial lens and utilizing indigenous resistance that the damage of this new form of climate imperialism can be undone.
Historiographies and Geographies of Climate
Weather, Climate and the Geographical Imagination: Placing Atmospheric Knowledges, 2020
In this brief Afterword to Mahony and Randalls' edited book ‘Weather, Climate and the Geographical Imagination’, I offer a perspective on the motivations behind this volume and reflect on the wider public value of the types of historically- and geographically-sensitive climate scholarship contained in the preceding pages. In particular, I make three observations. First, given how pervasive the idea of climate-change has become in the contemporary world, it is important to challenge simplistic and historically emaciated accounts of what we understand climate to be. Second, richer accounts as offered here of the multi-faceted idea of climate are emancipatory for contemporary politics. They challenge the dangerous hegemony of a naturalistic climate science—“every society needs a cohort of intellectuals to check the dominance of a single perspective when its ideological hand becomes too heavy” (Kagan, 2009: 266)—and open up new ways of framing climate-society relations. Third, these case studies illustrate the multiple ways in which the idea of climate is performative; how one comes to know climate, and the account one gives of its changes, is never politically neutral nor without effect on the social ordering of the world.
Unraveling the colonialities of climate change and action
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In this introduction to the special section on the Colonialities of climate change and action we provide a conceptual mapping that can help us engage critically with existing approaches to thinking and acting in the context of climate change. We carry out this exercise inspired by Latin American decolonial and political ecology scholarship, as well as by Farhana Sultana's notion of climate coloniality. In an effort to pluralize our understanding of climate coloniality, the articles we present in the special section reflect the diversity and interconnectedness of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and activists' traditions on several continents. Beyond these contributions, we make a call to further pluralize our understanding of the colonialities of climate change and action, taking into consideration different intellectual strands of postcolonial thought, subaltern studies, and decolonization, including those that engage critically with them.
The Unbearable Heaviness of Climate Coloniality
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The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions. This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes. By weaving through such mediations, I offer an understanding of climate coloniality that is theorized and grounded in lived experiences.
Climate change has become a key environmental narrative of the 21st century. However, emphasis on the science of climate change has overshadowed studies focusing on human interpretations of climate history, of adaptation and resilience , and of explorations of the institutions and cultural coping strategies that may have helped people adapt to climate changes in the past. Moreover, although the idea of climate change has been subject to considerable scrutiny by the physical sciences, recent climate scholarship has highlighted the need for a re-examination of the cultural and spatial dimensions of climate, with contributions from the humanities and social sciences. Establishing a multidisciplinary dialogue and approach to climate research past, present, and future has arguably never been more important. This article outlines developments in historical climatology research and considers examples of integrated multidisciplinary approaches to climate, climatic variability, and climate change research, conducted across the physical sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the arts. We highlight the international Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative as one example of such an integrated approach. Initially , ACRE began as a response from climate science to the needs of the agricultural sector in Queensland, Australia for a longer, more spatially, and temporally-complete database of the weather. ACRE has now evolved to
Towards a history of ideas of anthropogenic climate change
In Wefer, G., W. Berger and E. Jansen (Eds): Climate and history in the North Atlantic realms. Springer Verlag, 17-23, 2002
In this essay we show that the notion of anthropogenic climate change is not novel. Concerns over transformations of the Earth’s climate by human activities have been expressed since the 18th century Enlightenment and earlier. It Is reasonable, therefore, to speak of a „history of anthropogenic climate changes“. Most of the instances were not „real“. But all cases were associated with the perception of significant discontinuities and in most instances the perceived change was seen as a threat to society. We briefly discuss the possible implications of this „history“ for the functioning of the scientific community in the present debate.
Cultural History of Climate Change
Course Outline: Climate change has garnered extraordinary attention in sciences and humanities alike. It has defied traditional disciplinary analyses and challenged conventional problem solving by highlighting socio-environmental conditions characterized by unprecedented levels of risks for which world governments do not have ready or convenient solutions. Using historical and contemporary sources, this course aims to understand recent developments in the context of a larger historical and cultural background in which 'climate' and 'climate change' have played a foundational role in shaping traditional and moderns societies. The course aims to explore climate change as a phenomenon inextricably linked to what societies want, think and do and how such wants, ideas and practices inform the contemporary climatological citizenship. Students will explore the cultural and socio-political histories of climate and climate change during the last two centuries. They will learn how to contextualize past representations of climate and examine human dimensions of climate risks in relation to anthropogenic drivers and policy responses to global warming as it gets hold in the politics of contemporary carbon democracies. The course will examine how climate has been perceived, known and understood by contemporary and past societies; how it became socially and culturally constituted as a hazard (or a resource); what weather and climate have mean to different individuals, groups and institutions, and how these meanings influenced the ways in which people individually and collectively respond to the climate change problem today. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we comprehensively explore the uses of 'climate' from colonialism to racism, from mercantilism to globalism and from climatic determinism to climate engineering. This 8-week lesson plan is intended toward upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. The content and learning outcomes will be relevant to students in human, geographical, political and environmental sciences keen to develop a contextual understanding of climate issues and apply it to their field of academic interest and professional career. Assigned readings and discussion questions are included to provide an understanding of the ideas to be discussed in class.