Anthropology and Climate Change

From Actions to Transformations

Susan A. Crate, Mark Nuttall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315530314
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

The first edition of Anthropology and Climate Change (2009) pioneered the study of climate change through the lens of anthropology, covering the relation between human cultures and the environment from prehistoric times to the present. This second, heavily revised edition brings the material on this rapidly changing field completely up to date, with major scholars from around the world mapping out trajectories of research and issuing specific calls for action. The new edition

• introduces new "foundational" chapters—laying out what anthropologists know about climate change today, new theoretical and practical perspectives, insights gleaned from sociology, and international efforts to study and curb climate change—making the volume a perfect introductory textbook;
  
• presents a series of case studies—both new case studies and old ones updated and viewed with fresh eyes—with the specific purpose of assessing climate trends;
  
• provides a close look at how climate change is affecting livelihoods, especially in the context of economic globalization and the migration of youth from rural to urban areas;
  
• expands coverage to England, the Amazon, the Marshall Islands, Tanzania, and Ethiopia;
  
• re-examines the conclusions and recommendations of the first volume, refining our knowledge of what we do and do not know about climate change and what we can do to adapt.

Part 1: Building Foundations of Anthropology and Climate Change

Chapter 1
Climate Knowledge: Assemblage, Anticipation, Action

KIRSTEN HASTRUP

Climate is not new on the anthropological agenda; it has been immanent in ethnographic descriptions since the early days of anthropology. Immanence is a key word here, because, until fairly recently, climate was seen mainly as a basic condition of social life (Hastrup 2013a). In contrast, the contemporary phenomenon of climate change is a relatively new item on the human agenda, reflecting the fact that it became prominent on the global, political agenda only a couple of decades ago. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have been instrumental in this, with five reports to date—the first in 1990, the second in 1995, the third in 2001, the fourth in 2007, and the fifth in 2013. The messages from these reports have gained momentum over the years and are now seen as (more or less) incontrovertible within an otherwise very diversified field of climate research. Among the findings are far-reaching environmental changes around the globe, projected for both a near and a more distant future.

Against this background it comes as no surprise that anthropologists have taken an increasing interest in contemporary climate change and that a number of significant volumes on this issue have seen light since the beginning of this century, seeking to find a distinct anthropological voice that may contribute to the discussion that has so far been dominated by other sciences (for example, Strauss and Orlove 2003; Crate and Nuttall 2009; Hastrup 2009a; Hastrup and Olwig 2012; Greschke and Tischler 2015). The historical dominance of the natural sciences in climate research has induced anthropologists to take a submissive attitude, not being immediately able to match the level of generality or the use of statistical averages (Krauss 2015: 69–71). This situation has by no means restrained anthropologists from contributing their own analyses of particular regional or local developments in works that substantiate the diverse and often momentous implications of climate change for social life across the globe. However, such separate action has drawbacks that are twofold; first, the anthropological engagement with climate change has tended to feature marginal or indigenous communities as (isolated) victims of the massive industrial impact on climate more or less uniformly, and, second, it has isolated anthropology from other kinds of scientific understanding of climate change (Bravo 2009; Pálsson et al. 2012). It is of course right that anthropologists have published their analyses of particular communities, providing evidence for the destabilization not only of global climate but also of social life. In this process itself the entwinement of natural and social histories has become firmly established. The time is now ripe to take up the greater challenge of dealing with the boundless processes of the unknown and even partly unknowable impingement on human life that climate change signals and that questions anthropology’s time-honored focus on local communities— without undermining the key methods of fieldwork. We must learn to theorize across ethnographic fields and offer our theories to the wider community of scholars and scientists for inspection and inclusion in the general field of climate change research (Hastrup 2015).

Anthropology can and must contribute significantly also to the current discussion of the Anthropocene, now a familiar term, dating back only to 2002 (Crutzen 2002). With the human footprint all over the globe, the human science of anthropology must pull its weight. It is no longer possible to entertain a notion of a self-regenerating nature, beyond the human domain. Humans are everywhere, not only as destroyers of nature but also as providers of collective solutions. We need to understand better the human responses to climate change, unfolding at the interface between natural and social histories that always outstretch a particular moment or place.

Thus anthropologists must turn their attention to the processes by which climate change is configured and how a motley combination of knowledge forms enter into the phenomenon’s making, which I discuss in the first section on assemblage. In the subsequent section I address the issue of anticipation being different from prediction in my argument and signposting a way of being. In the third section, I discuss action, with a focus on social action as based both on past experiences and anticipated futures. The key example throughout relates to the Arctic, where people live with rapid changes in their environment and from where many scientific climate models draw some of their main observations.

Assemblage: The Making of Knowledge

In setting the frame for this section I want to stress that the identification of climate as a discrete phenomenon, and by implication of climate change, is an analytical human endeavor. Whether it is talked about by scientists, discussed by fishermen experiencing turbulent seas, or pondered by urbanites witnessing wild cloudbursts, climate knowledge is assembled from many sources. It is not enough simply to designate the diversity of understanding to different scientific scales; scale itself is a product of particular knowledge practices, not a solid ground on which its stands.

In short, the field of climate knowledge remains wide open, even as we try to stabilize it, making the potential outcome of anthropological analyses to be of the same generality as results of general circulation models (GCMs), now seen as authoritative models of climate prediction. The authority of GCMs is vested in the general agreement of the complexity of the global climate system, which functions to transport heat from the equator to the poles and determines how it is retained, distributed, and circulated in the oceans, the atmosphere, and land surfaces. “Owing to its immense size and long-time scales, the climate system cannot be studied by experimental methods. Therefore, scientists have relied on climate models— theory-based representations that characterize or simulate essential features and mechanisms—to explore how Earth’s climate works” (Edwards 2011: 128). Thus simulations are the bases of the computerized general circulation models, which are at the core of present-day climate change scenarios, seductively depicting “time-dependent three-dimensional flows of mass, heat, and other fluid properties” (Lahsen 2005: 898). Closer to the ground, anthropologists have documented recent flows of people across the continents in response to fluid political, economic, and climatic conditions (Hastrup and Olwig 2012)—a phenomenon also known from the past (Orlove 2005). These flows are not computerized but can easily be foreshadowed in imagination, fueled by images of increasing numbers of climate refugees seeking to cross the Mediterranean in sinking vessels or to transgress high-security borders such as the one between Mexico and the United States—often to their peril.

As I have dealt with in more depth elsewhere (Hastrup 2013b), the technological feat inhering in the simulation of the complex interactions of various elements and processes in the earth system, coupling atmospheric, oceanic, and land-surface processes, is not free of subjectivity or untouched by humans. Yet these simulations have great power over the human mind, in part because of their technological sophistication:

In recent decades, our understanding of the climate has been revolutionized by the development of sophisticated computer models, known as general circulation models (GCMs). GCMs are a representation of the physical laws . . . expressed in such form that they are suitable for solution on fast super-computers. (Williams 2005: 2932–33)

Note the authoritative framing used—“representation of the physical laws” and “suitable for solution,” acknowledging a somewhat selective editing process. Such framing is not to denigrate the value of the climate models but simply to humanize them. They are results of hard work and sophisticated reflections made by many people, agreeing (or possibly disagreeing) on their meaning. In short, they are the outcome of a particular “knowledge space” in the sense suggested by David Turnbull, as an “interactive, contingent assemblage of space and knowledge, sustained and created by social labour” (Turnbull 2003: 4). Looking back on the history of climate ideas shows one how these were formed under particular circumstances and by people who were situated in particular places (Heymann 2010; Carey 2012). Thus we must integrate the history of climate ideas into any current discussion of climate.

In the ancient world, astronomer-geographers such as Ptolemy (2nd century C.E. ) connected climate to the inclination of the sun and identified 15 climatic zones on the basis of their longest day, equally an expression of latitude (Edwards 2011: 128). This idea informed the European perception of climate until the 19th century, when climate became seen as the condition of a particular region pertaining to temperature and dryness; climate was now local and static, and on the scale of human lifetimes (Weart 2010: 67). Seeing climate as the stable, long-term average of local weather became untenable during the 19th century, as natural history broke new ground:

Three discoveries changed the general view of a steady world. One was the discovery by Richard Owen (1841) of the fossilized remains of the no-longer-existing giant dinosaurs; the second and most important was Charles Darwin’s expedition on the Beagle in 1839 leading to the discovery of evolution of the species. The third was Louis Agassiz’ discovery of the ice ages (1837). (Ditlevsen 2013: 183)

That the theory of an ice age was first formulated by a Swiss scientist, Agassiz, is no coincidence; he observed Alpine glaciers and formations of big boulders, which were far away from current glacier tongues, and eventually suggested that the entire northern hemisphere had once been covered in ice, of which the Alpine glaciers were but remnants. At the same time, Swedish expeditions to Svalbard were able to ascertain that shellfish fossils found in mainland Scandinavia were still present as living species in the icy ocean around these far northern and uninhabited islands. The idea of an ice age was further solidified by Hinrich Rink’s observations of the huge and very productive glaciers in Greenland and his suggestion that they were outlets from ancient ice on the ice cap (Rink 1877). Ice gradually became recognized as a repository of climate histories in the depth of time. With the high modern ice core research on the Greenlandic ice cap (and in Antarctica), the value of the ice archive of shifting climates over the past 100,000 years, also in relation to future scenarios, cannot be overestimated (for example, Mason-Delmotte et al. 2012).

When Greenland was gradually being mapped in the early 20th century, the ice age had become an established truth. In 1916–1918 a cartographic expedition was made to northern Greenland, where geologist Lauge Koch made important geomorphological observations. He also made the following note on the ice age on his way north: “As will be known, almost all of North- and Middle Europe was covered by one continuous mass of ice, which arched up as a shield from Scandinavia and across the neighbouring countries. A similar case obtained for Canada and the northern parts of the United States. In Greenland, [where] the ice has remained, one is still in the middle of the Ice Age, and travelling from South to North Greenland, is to experience the return of the ice age” (Koch 1919: 565). Thus the ancient climate history was readable in space; cartography and the long story of the ice came together. In the process, it became established that climate could change radically on a planetary scale (Weart 2010: 67).

The main point of this historical review is to show how “evidence” for the ice age was found locally—in the Swiss Alps, in Svalbard, and in Greenland—and was assembled by people looking for boulders around earlier glacier edges or identifying living counterparts in the far north to fossils known from elsewhere. The discoverers were people, steeped in the actualities of the world, which is also true of present-day scientists. Assemblage is the key word in the process of knowledge making. Knowledge does not emerge out of the deep; it is made and authorized in a community of potential dissenters and only later becomes common knowledge. This assemblage pertains equally to scientific and nonscientific knowledge about climate and climate change.

Therefore, climate knowledge must always be contextualized historically and socially (Carey 2012: 238). How climate is understood has changed over time and has “depended not only on scientific achievements but also on broader technological, social, political, and cultural contexts” (Heymann 2010: 582). This need to contextualize becomes very obvious in the 20th century, where the idea that humans could influence the climate gradually took root, albeit unevenly (Weart 2010: 68ff). The process by which it changed from being merely a scientific puzzle to a more ominous and heavily politicized arena of discussion was a long one, heavily mixed up in international politics, warfare, demographic developments, and technological advancements. The establishment of the IPCC was instrumental in transforming the idea into a fact; in the IPCC’s first report (1990), it remained mostly a scientific puzzle, but already in the second report (1995), a consensus was voiced: “not only was the world getting warmer, but ‘the balance of evidence suggests’ that humanity was exercising a ‘discernible’ influence of global climate” (Weart 2010: 75). Recognition of humanity’s role led to the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and onward to ever more concerted efforts on the part of the scientific community to assemble evidence for reports that followed. The understanding of humans’ role also induced the scientific community to integrate the models from different laboratories focusing on different elements—oceans, sea ice, atmospheric conditions—into a comprehensive Earth Modelling Framework in 2002, allowing the different component models to interoperate (Edwards 2011: 135). This surprisingly recent feat should not make us forget that the “fact” of anthropogenic climate change became mainstream only through the combined efforts of thousands of scientists, standing on the shoulders of pioneers who had voiced the hypothesis over almost a century (Weart 2010: 76). It is this human effort of assemblage that we should note.

Anthropologists need not presuppose total consistency with the field of climate research to seek to scale and contribute an anthropological model to this larger multidisciplinary effort for our work to be incorporated. Rather we should take comfort in the volatility of climate science and contribute our own theories in conjunction with other theories, since theories are of equal generality. We might think of David Turnbull’s description of the field of turbulence research, balancing on an edge between stable and volatile knowledge. When entering the field of turbulence research as an anthropological researcher, Turnbull realized that there was no agreement on either the phenomenon or how to deal with it.

Yet despite the lack of consensus there is sufficient coherence for the practitioners to act as if there is a field of turbulence research. Coherence in this case does not derive from a unifying paradigm or the adoption of an agreed set of instruments or methods. It derives from a very loose recognition that the phenomenon at issue is turbulence, even though its nature cannot be specified and even thoug...