Exploring Cultural Dimensions to Climate Change

1. Exploring Cultural Dimensions to Climate Change Thomas Heyd1 & Nick Brooks2 1Philosophy, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 3P4 Email: heydt@uvic.ca. 2Tyndall Centre, UEA, Norwich NR4 7TJ. Email: nick.brooks@uea.ac.uk.

2. Climate change and culture • Human beings have experienced large changes in climate throughout history • Up to ~6º C cooler & ~1.5º C warmer than today, with large regional changes • Climate & human society have evolved together • Last systematic reorganisation of global climate ~5000 years ago • Profound impacts on human societies across the globe (Brooks, 2006) • Currently at beginning of another phase of global-scale change in climate • Responses to climate change influenced by perceptions of the environment (McIntosh et al., 2000) • How might attitudes towards the environment (“nature”) influence the extent or efficacy of adaptation today? Pillar of lake sediment in the central Sahara: evidence of profound changes in climate and environment ~5000 yrs ago

3. Human society as a part of nature • For millennia, human society has been seen as embedded in nature • Mosely (2001) describes the historical Andean world view: • “Nature is believed to be highly animate, charging the landscape with interactive forces.…This all encompassing cosmology provides deep identification with the environment. Andean people literally read their physical surroundings as a resonant text of sacred places and spaces… Caral, the earliest dated urban centre in the Americas: template for Andean culture? • Cruikshank (2000, 2001) describes how Alaskan Tlingit & Yukon First Nations perceive a living landscape, whose components are active counterparts to human beings. “Local knowledge embedded in oral traditions” emphasises • “the social nature of all relations between humans and nonhumans, that is, animals and landscape features, including glaciers.” (Cruikshank, 2001, p. 382) • the importance of taking personal and collective responsibility for changes in that world.” (Cruikshank, 2001, p. 391)

4. Nature & landscapes as “sentient” Glaciers perceived as entities that pay attention & respond to human behaviour, e.g. speaking carelessly, spilling blood, making noise, and cooking with grease in their vicinity. (Cruikshank 2001) • Oral traditions emphasise the agency present in the natural environment • Idea of sentient landscapes & social relations between the human & non-human provides a cultural mechanism for engagement with the physical environment Such an approach is common in non-Western & non-urban societies, characterising animism & naturalistic polytheism, echoed in e.g. Islamic societies (Djinn/Djenoun), “deep green” environmentalism, & interpretations of Gaia theory See also Heyd, 2005, 2007

5. Humanity & nature in Western discourses “Man’s evolution is based on the fact that he has lost his original home, nature - and that he can never return to it.” Erich Fromm (1955) • Separation from nature as a defining human characteristic • Biblical Fall as a sundering from nature • Hobbes - institutions of government protect us from a “state of nature” • Freud - civilisation suppresses “original, autonomous disposition” towards violence and aggression (1930) • Difference between nature & human culture often identified with the distinction between civilisation & order on the one hand & savagery, chaos & wildness on other (Horigan, 1988) “mitigation … represents activities to protect nature from society while adaptation constitutes ways of protecting society from nature. (Stehr & von Storch, 2005)”

6. Nature, culture & development - the African Sahel • Development boom in 1950s • Start of independence era, technological optimism • Unusually wet conditions, persisting into 1960s • Expansion of agriculture into drier areas in north • Rainfall decline in 1970s • Catastrophic failure of agriculture • 100s of thousands of people, millions of animals lost • Drought persisted until late 1990s, development undermined • What went wrong? • Expansion of agriculture into historical marginal areas • Supplanting of traditional coping mechanisms with “one size fits all” model • Historically normal climatic variations not considered in development Pursuit of progress & development based on imported models of national economic expansion & commercialisation did not consider human-environment “relations” See Thébaud & Batterby, 2001; Brooks, 2004

7. Nature vs humanity in climate change discourse • Cornerstones of contrarian arguments: • Humans are separate from & “above” nature (“human exceptionalism”) • Nature & humanity are fundamentally in conflict - support for one associated with contempt for the other “…the ideal scare campaign for those who hate capitalism and love big government… anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-human”Christopher C. Horner, CEI “The antihuman premise of nature's intrinsic value goes back, in the Western world, as far as St. Francis of Assisi…”George Reisman Earth Day’s Anti-Human Agenda headline in Front Page Magazine "You can't be progressive if you accept the ecological limits to growth.”Clare Fox, Director, Institute of Ideas1 “Underlying [environmentalist] assumptions is a misanthropic view of humanity…In the third world the consequences of 'sustainable development', holding back economic growth, are even starker.” Daniel Ben Ami 1On BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, 6 Jan. 2006

8. Concluding thoughts • Dominant doctrine of humans & nature as “separate” • Tends to discourage examination of interdependence of human societies and the wider physical environment • Has played a major role in the pursuit of maladaptive development policies • Acts as a cultural barrier to both mitigation and adaptation • Other views of “nature” exist, which • Acknowledge agency inherent in the wider physical environment • Allow people to recognise role of variability & change in human affairs • Encourage “social responsibility” towards the environment • The successful & meaningful pursuit of adaptation & mitigation require • A cultural shift in which ideas of nature as responsive & possessing agency are combined with a modern scientific understanding of the Earth system • The rejection of long-held beliefs about the separation of humanity & nature • Less psychological insulation from nature How might this be achieved?

9. References • Ben-Ami, D. 2004. The dismal quackery of eco-economics. Spiked, 22 Oct. 2004: http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA750.htm • Berliner, M. 2004. Earth Day’s Anti-Human Agenda. Front Page Magazine (22 April 2004): http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={D2AB455B-16DE-4CDF-B2D3-AF3B34CC4822} • Brooks, N. 2004. Drought in the African Sahel: long-term perspectives and future prospects. Tyndall Centre Working Paper No. 61: www.tyndall.ac.uk. • Brooks, N. 2006. Cultural responses to aridity in the Middle Holocene and increased social complexity. Quaternary International 151, 29-49. • Cruikshank , J. 2000. The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. University of British Columbia Press. • Cruikshank , J. 2001. Glaciers and Climate Change: Perspectives from Oral Tradition Arctic 54, 377– 393. • Freud, S. 1930. Des Unbehagen in der Kultur. Translated by D. McLintock as Civilisation and its Discontents, Penguin, England (2002). • Fromm, E. 1955. The Sane Society. Routledge, England (From revised edition, 2002). • Heyd, T. (Ed.). (2005) Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice, Columbia University Press, New York. • Heyd, T. (2007) Encountering Nature: Toward an Environmental Culture. Ashgate: Aldershot, U.K. • Horigan, S. 1988. Nature and Culture in Western Discourses. Routledge, London. • McIntosh, R. J., Tainter, J. A., and Keech McIntosh, S. 2000. The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action. Columbia University Press, New York. • Reisman, G. 2005. The Toxicity of Environmentalism: http://www.mises.org/story/1927. Posted on 10/3/2005 (Ludwig von Mises Institute) • Thébaud, B. and Batterby, S. 2001. Sahel pastoralists: opportunism, struggle, conflict and negotiation. A case study from eastern Niger. Global Environmental Change 22, 69-78.