Social Science Perspectives on Climate Change

David Canter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317408376
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Although it is generally accepted that the climate is changing for the worse and that human activities are a major contributing factor in that change, there is still only marginal response to the challenge posed by climate change. The reasons behind this limited response are becoming clearer through the recognition that climate change is not just a set of physical science facts, but it is also part of a series of complex social processes. Consequently, this book is important in providing social science perspectives on a range of attempts to adjust human activity to reduce its environmental impact. These attempts vary from the changing of the dress code in Japanese offices to the creation of zero-carbon, gated communities in Bangalore, India. Taken together, the contributions to this book provide timely insights into the complexities of saving the planet through human endeavour. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.

The challenge of climate change

David Canter

International Research Centre for Investigative Psychology, The University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK

It is generally accepted that human behaviour needs to change if the depredations of climate change are to be reduced. Yet despite overwhelming evidence for this need there has been remarkably little modification of what people do to limit climate change. This book brings together a number of social science studies that demonstrate the challenges and potential for such adjustments to human actions. The studies brought together here support the view that there is a need to look beyond scientific facts about the environment if human environmental activity is to be modified. People modify what they do when there are incontrovertible experiences that demonstrate that the social rules that shape interactions with their surroundings (‘rules of place’) must be changed. The range of social science studies in this book indicates the great difficulty of modifying human quotidian behaviour without altering the social and societal context that supports it.

Why do we leave it so late?

Most people know the climate is changing in ways that are deleterious. There is even a term of insult that parallels the outlawing of holocaust deniers – climate change deniers. Furthermore, most scientific opinion supports the view that human activity is a dominant cause of these unwanted environmental changes. So why are we doing so little to change our actions in order at least to reduce their impact? As Sunstein (2007) points out the US has responded much more effectively to the threat of terrorism than to climate change. The reason Sunstein gives, as did Cronon (1996) much earlier, is that human cognitive processes are limited in appreciating the real significance of climate change and that, in essence, more information is needed to convince people of the need to modify their activities.

As important as this perspective is it undervalues the social processes that hold back human actions in the face of change. Studies of behaviour in shorter term emergencies and disasters (Canter, 1990) indicate that an understanding of how people make sense of and use their environment indicates that there are crucial limits on what people are prepared to change in regard to their use of their environment.

These studies of behaviour in life-threatening situations demonstrate how wedded people are to their daily activities. The actions in place are not some superficial aspect of a person but are integral to individuals’ self-concept. The person we think we are is shaped by the patterns of place use we participate in. As Raymond et al. (2010) demonstrated the attachments people have to where they live incorporate a mixture of views of themselves and their relationships to others.

The processes that introduce inertia into reactions to environmental change, and limit variations in behaviour so that it is not modified to reduce environmental threats, are fundamentally social processes. These are the same processes that have led to many emergencies in the past getting out of control to become disasters, despite early warnings of imminent danger.

The early stages of many disasters are often ambiguous. It is unclear what the threat is or even if there is one. It is this ambiguity that delays serious responses. Why risk seeming to be silly when there is no clear indication that there is anything untoward happening.

The first law of human action

Actions in emergencies illustrate what might be thought of as a law of human activity that parallels Newton’s first law of motion. People carry on with their existing behaviour unless some external force leads them to recognise that some new set of rules are now guiding their activities. This gives rise to regular mis-estimates in the development of danger. This is illustrated in Figure 1. There the difference between how people think danger grows and how it typically does grow is represented.

Broadly speaking, it is often assumed that danger grows in a simple, linear fashion even though it tends to develop in an exponential or geometric way. In the early stages, therefore, the estimates of growth are reasonably accurate. This lulls people into thinking that they understand what is happening and it is manageable. But their estimates become ever more inaccurate as time moves on until the emergency gets out of control.

The reasons for this inertia are the existing patterns of behaviour and the understanding of what is expected of interactions with each other and with the known context. It takes a major jolt to re-evaluate what is happening and to change. It is necessary to recognise that the context has changed so that different social rules apply – until that is the case, people are reluctant to change their behaviour.

This behavioural inertia is what happens in small scale disasters where people die in their own homes, major industrial accidents such as Piper Alpha and the Herald of Free Enterprise, and even in large scale international disasters such as Rwanda and Bosnia, or the recent Ebola outbreak. Typically early indicators of impending disaster are ignored with the consequent delay in recognising that something needs to be done, until the indicators of danger are so overwhelming that decision makers can then accept that the situation has changed to something so different that they can now apply new rules. By then it is often too late and disaster is extremely difficult to avoid.

Figure 1. A comparison of estimates of the growth in danger with its actual growth, showing that underestimates increase rapidly over time.

It is worth emphasising this central point. Emergencies become disasters because initial warnings are ignored. They are not ignored out of obstinacy or ignorance but because of the psychological processes that underlie habitual patterns of activity. The examples are all too familiar. Disasters on the railways came about in a context in which trains were going past signals set at danger. Before the New Orleans floods many people said the levees needed to be developed and strengthened and that more money needed to be put into flood control. The emergency is predictable but the processes in place limit effective responses.

With climate change the ambiguity that characterises the starts of so many disasters is made worse by the fact that it is a concept rather than a direct experience. In her interesting essay in Chapter 2, Catherine Leyshon points out that although climate change is hardly ever out of the news, it is an invention of empirical analysis. It is possible to watch the sun rise, so noting the change in the light, but longer term and subtler changes, whether it be inflation, the average age of the population or global warming, are only noticed by observers who record and measure over what might be long periods of time. Because of this the changes are actually creations of those who make the recordings. They are therefore open to challenge; challenge not just to their existence but, more importantly, what is causing them. In this crucial sense, then, Climate Change is an aspect of knowledge; knowledge that has accumulated over the last 30 years or so. Climate change is not an immediately observable aspect of experience.

Social processes and climate impact

The findings from the study of human reactions in emergencies combined with the abstract nature of climate change point to the importance of understanding the social and psychological issues behind personal decisions and actions. Rather than dealing with people as rational automata to be manipulated by economic and political forces, they need to be regarded as sentient agents interacting consciously with their environment.

There may be global changes that create local conditions, but it is their impact at the level of individuals going about their daily activities that produces their effects. If a micro-climate manages to avoid the global pattern then actions and organisms in that location will not be effected. It is necessary to consider what it is that maintains activity in any given setting in order to understand why people leave it so late to deal with environmental threats.

A further understanding of how local processes, relating to interactions between individuals, is the key to environmental change can be gleaned from a consideration of the roots of present day concerns with the use and abuse of the environment. It is not usually appreciated, as Cronon (1996) indicated some time ago, that the environmental movement and concerns with global changes can be traced to roots in the early Romantic Movement and the Romantic poets. This predates Darwin’s Origin of Species by almost 100 years.

It is an intriguing aside to note that it is often poets, novelists and playwrights who identify crucial issues and draw attention to them before scientists eventually turn them into something more mundane and technical, often losing some of the emotional power of the poet’s insight. This may be one of the messages for those who seek to have climate change taken more seriously, perhaps what is needed in the debate is more drama and poetry that deals with localised, individual experiences and fewer facts and figures?

Looking back to what is often regarded as the origins of concerns with the environment there are some remarkable parallels to present day discussions. Oliver Goldsmith’s (1730–1774) poem, The Deserted Village, published in 1770 is regarded by many as the starting point for the development of a Romantic attachment to the natural, rural landscape and a notional Golden Age in which humanity all lived in a pleasant, Arcadian environment. The essence of the poem is captured in the stanza:

Sweet, smiling village! Loveliest of the lawn

Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn:

Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,

And desolation saddens all thy green;

He is bemoaning the fact that this idyllic village, Auburn, in which he grew up is now empty. The people have left the countryside to go into the nasty town. The trend, started most clearly with the British industrial revolution, is today mirrored across the globe, with peasant, village life fading as cities develop rapidly with vast numbers of individuals coming in from the countryside. And who is causing the problem; the tyrants, the rich multi-nationals; the organisations that are making it more attractive to go into the town.

Although The Deserted Village is apparently about the loss of a rural idyll and the degradation caused by urbanisation it is more fundamentally an exploration of the breakdown of the relationship between people and their physical environment. It is an early recognition that countryside is not just a resource to be exploited but an integrated part of who we are and how we live.

In many senses the poem heralds a new humility in which the domination of nature by humanity is no longer the unchallenged norm. It is a budding flower of the Romanticism, given such impetus by Wordsworth and Coleridge, in which people are seen as part of nature rather than its inevitable masters. The Romantic vision that perfection resides in the everyday, rather than in some aspired to ideal, puts human beings on a par with nature rather than being above it. The ecological implications, intriguingly, that we owe our survival as a species to how we interact with our environment, has some of its origins in concerns for the consequences of leaving villages for the depredations of the town.

The complexity of environmental concerns

As noted, climate change is not directly available to the senses – it is an idea, a construct. Like many ideas that emerge into public consciousness it covers many different things; everything from changes in the icecaps, to reduction in biodiversity, depletion of natural resources such as water or land or energy. Debates on environmental degradation also become embroiled in explorations of policy options, challenges to the economies of developing countries and the gamut from education to forms of burial. With such a diversity of issues under one umbrella term it is perhaps not surprising that it is so difficult to generate actions to deal with them. What exactly is the phenomenon that needs to be addressed?

It was Winston Churchill who summarised the complexity of the interaction with the environment with his characteristic eloquence. During the Second World War, after the Houses of Parliament had been bombed, he led the debate on the re-building saying:

On the night of May 10, 1941, with one of the last bombs of the last serious raid, our House of Commons was destroyed by the violence of the enemy, and we have now to consider whether we should build it up again, and how, and when. We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us. Having dwelt and served for more than forty years in the late Chamber, and having derived very great pleasure and advantage therefrom, I, naturally, should like to see it restored in all essentials to its old form, convenience and dignity.

28 October 1943 to the House of Commons (meeting in the House of Lords).

His central argument, that was accepted when parliament was rebuilt in 1950, was that the old House of Commons should be recreated as it had been, even though there were not enough seats for eve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Contemporary Issues in Social Science
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The challenge of climate change
• 2. Critical issues in social science climate change research
• 3. Values, identity and pro-environmental behaviour
• 4. Putting practice into policy: reconfiguring questions of consumption and climate change
• 5. Input–output analyses of the pollution content of intra- and inter-national trade flows
• 6. Decentralising energy: comparing the drivers and influencers of projects led by public, private, community and third sector actors
• 7. Urban experiments and climate change: securing zero carbon development in Bangalore
• Index