The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.
I was lost and didn't know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart . . .
For the first time in my life I was alone in a world whose behaviour I could neither predict nor fathom_ a world of birds that squealed, of plants that stank, of insects that sprang about without warning.
(Lee 1959, 9)
The poet Laurie Lee remembered when, in 1919 and he was three years old, his family moved to a village deep in the English countryside, which he soon came to love. He admitted that his recollections âmay be distorted by timeâ. Yet his memories seem likely to echo the intense, embodied sensations that young children feel with each fresh experience. There is also the overwhelming sense of unfathomable nature, a sense that becomes lost in several ways. The giant forest of grass to the child seems tame to adults. The child's intense awareness of novelty fades into the adult's less alert familiarity. And beyond the personal, the once wild countryside has been turned into largely silent, over-grazed fields and over-sheared hedges, with the immense loss of birds, flowers, insects and other wildlife.
John Clare (1793â1864), a farm labourer's son, wandered freely over the land around Helpston village, where âIts only bondage was the circling skyâ, until an Enclosure Act in 1809 forced the people off the land. For Clare (1997, 87), the immense moor used to lose itself
In the blue mist the horizon's edge surrounds
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers
Is faded all â a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once, no more shall be
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour's rights and left the poor a slave
Clare wrote over 3,500 poems about his childhood in that natural world. He felt his memories were all he had left, and he spent the last 28 years of his life in lunatic asylums. Today, land enclosures are one reason that over 3.5 billion people now live in cities, many willingly, others longing to return to rural life.
Chapter 3 in Volume 1 on the first plane of social being1 was about children's embodied human nature. This parallel chapter considers material relations between humans and the natural world and how the youngest generations are especially affected by ecological changes. The changes will cause huge effects over coming decades, after the lifetime of older generations who dominate current decisions and activities.
To say we must reduce climate change âfor the sake of our childrenâ can be unhelpful, if it seems to exclude childless adults. The phrase then risks splitting society into factions, when united action is most needed. The phrase also risks turning urgent global responsibilities into distant ones concerning future generations. There is a suggestion that parents should take personal action, rather than everyone including children and young people becoming involved in political action. And children are responsible social citizens now. People of all ages made banners and over half a million of them joined in the climate change marches in many cities around the world in September 2014. UNICEF reported that three quarters of the British 11- to 16-year-olds they had surveyed were âdeeply concernedâ about how climate change will change the world and how it will affect them and children in poorer nations.2 They wanted the government to do more to reduce the threat. Esha Marwaha, aged 15, delivered a 65,000-signature petition to the Department for Education asking them to not to remove climate change from the geography curriculum for children aged under 14 years. Esha said:
It's not about forcing students to believe in climate change, it's about allowing them to make an informed decision based on what they learn . . . The proposed change to the curriculum will reduce our potential to help tackle climate change. It stops us from taking a stand to protect our futures . . . The beauty of geography is the fact that it gives us the skills to frankly express the problems that the Earth and humanity faces, without hiding the truth. . . . It isn't fair that we are causing harm to people less well off due to our own carelessness.3
Action is needed âwith childrenâ rather than âfor childrenâ. âOur childrenâ has a collective meaning when children are public, not private, goods. Everyone, childless or not, will depend on âourâ younger generations to sustain them in their dependent old age, so the interests of each age group are shared among all generations.
âSave the planet from climate changeâ is an inaccurate slogan. The great global mass of minerals will hardly be affected. Instead the concern is with the fragile biosphere surrounding the globe, the gases, liquids, minerals and living species. Wade Davis (2007, x) adds the âwondrous diversityâ of the ethnosphere, âhumanity's greatest legacy . . . the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive speciesâ. To understand immensely complex interactions between climate change and societies, âsocio-ecologyâ combines natural and social sciences and the humanities. DCR especially supports interdisciplinary research (Bhaskar 2010a; Bhaskar et al. 2010; Høyer, 2010), which overcomes single-discipline tunnel vision (NĂŚss, 2010). DCR not only joins up the dots from many different disciplines; it also shows how joining them âchanges the nature of the dotsâ (Cornell and Parker 2010, 30).
This chapter reviews a few aspects of these many interactions, their causes and effects, through the four-stage MELD and a range of DCR concepts (many were introduced in Volume 1, and see the glossary). Nature evokes strong reactions ranging from awe and reverence, to fear and disgust, to the desire to control and exploit. In more muted ways, there are similar attitudes towards childhood and the two responses will be compared to consider their influence on policies. Adequate analysis at the first 1M stage is vital, and is the main contribution made by researchers, before others intervene at the practical 2E stage. Chapter 9 is the most dense chapter in this book, and some readers may prefer to look at later chapters first.
MELD and climate change
1M, first moment and six degrees of global warming
(Bell 2009; Bond 2012; Brown 2013; Carter 2011; Curry 2011; Giddens 2009; Haddad 2012; Hillman 2004; IPPC 2013; Jones 2007; Klein 2014; Lohmann 2006; Lohmann et al. 2013; Marshall 2014; Miller 2009; Monbiot 2007; Neale 2008; Oxfam International 2014; Rogers 2010; Roy 2009, 2014; Shiva 2000, 2013; Stephens 2009; Urry 2011).4
1M begins by closely examining the non-identity and identity of chosen subjects, such as climate change. 1M views each subject as a seemingly finished product at that moment in time. DCR's non-identity recognises that any objects we observe are independent of our perceptions and differ from them. The objects (beings, things, events) cannot wholly be reduced into how we identify them and think about them. Knowledge is never whole or complete and is always open to revision, while researchers aim to report present knowledge as accurately as possible.
By 2014, the annual average global temperature was 0.85°C warmer than it was in 1750 before the industrial revolution, up from 13.7° to 14.55°. Some scientists have set a rise of 2°C from 1750 as the highest âsafeâ level, which must not be exceeded, to protect life on earth. Other scientists consider that a 2°C increase would be disastrous, an âact of extraordinary witting intergenerational injusticeâ. James Hensen and colleagues (2013) detail inevitable immediate and future effects and how children will suffer most. They are suing the USA government for not protecting the rights of young people by planning policies to reduce carbon emissions. Heat waves, floods, infections, and the insecurity of food and clean water that these bring, all have the most severe and life-long or lethal effects on young children (Oxfam International 2011).
When CO2 ppm (carbon dioxide parts per million) in the atmosphere increase, heat also increases. If there are 450 CO2 ppm, a rise of 2°C will be inevitable. Scientists disagree over setting 350 or 450 ppm as the upper safe limit. In 2013, there were 400 CO2 ppm in the atmosphere, up by 24 per cent in only the past 55 years. The present level has been unknown for maybe the past three million years, reported the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2013). Some of the CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. The steady increase of CO2 ppm is a reaction to 250 years of fossil fuel burning and changes in land use. Even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped today, the global temperature would still rise by another 0.8 °C. PricewaterhouseCoopers (2013) estimated that with present and accelerating emission rates, we will exceed 450 CO2 ppm by as early as 2034.
The book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas (2008) has six chapters. Each one explains likely effects on the Earth's surface if the average annual global climate temperature (not the local weather) warms by another degree, from one up to six degrees above 13.7°C. A rise of one or two degrees sounds trivial, but it can have immense effects. Lynas has summarised hundreds of scientific papers that describe and explain climate change, its causes and possible effects.
The research draws on millions of years of geological records, on computer modelling informed by these records and by physicistsâ and chemistsâ repeated experiments, and on climate records since the 1880s, as well as from sources such as tree rings and ice layers. Lynas's book is still useful because it is clear and comprehensive, and most of the predictions that he noted, made in 2007 or earlier, have not been refuted. Indeed, if they have been inaccurate, they have been overcautious and have underestimated the speed and extent of the effects of climate change. Arctic ice, for example, is melting far earlier than expected, shrinking to over a million square kilometres less than the annual average.5 There has, however, been a 15-year pause in the rise of average air temperatures, but that is attributed to immense warming in deep oceans. That is expected soon to trigger faster increases in heat on the earth's surface (Kosaka and Xie 2013).
The IPCC (2008) concluded âunequivocallyâ that climate change is mainly due to human activity, particularly burning of fossil fuels with emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases. The hundreds of authors are cautious in their conclusions and predictions, guarding against claims about errors in their reports, vigorously asserted by climate sceptics, who are funded directly or indirectly by fossil fuel industries (Klein 2014; Monbiot 2007).6 Scientists increasingly work across disciplines (led by IPCC, the Tyndale Centre and other interdisciplinary groups). This enables them to see new ways in which changes trigger one another into tipping points, which accelerate irreversible and multiple effects rather than simply additional ones. For example, melted ice at the poles reduces the giant solar mirrors of white snow that reflect back sunlight. That melting increases areas of black rock and dark ocean, whic...
