Have new map,will travel?

Harriet Bulkeley identifies an important epistemic problem and offers a potential solution. The ‘reality’ of global climate change, she argues, is framed in specific ways that circumscribe thought and action. For several decades, geoscientists like James Hansen and Michael Mann have looked for the ‘anthropogenic signal’ in the atmosphere. Their collective research efforts have been synthesized and communicated worldwide by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). From there they have travelled into the realms of politics, civil society and business via the news media and other channels. The result, she suggests, is that ‘climate change’ has become framed as an ‘environmental issue’ – an issue of parts per million concentrations, degrees Celsius increases and melting ice sheets.

Packaged in this way, it not only seems right to ask about specific human ‘causes’, ‘impacts’ and possible ‘responses’ – such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting power stations, sea level rise or stratospheric aerosol injection. It seems equally right to presume that, like climate change itself, these ‘human dimensions’ are amenable to the kind of scientific analysis that alerted humanity to the problem of global warming in the first place. In turn, this presumption favours a certain sort of interdisciplinary research that aspires to mirror in knowledge the ontological fusing of society and climate ongoing in ‘the human age’ (Ackerman, 2015).

The problem here, as Harriet sees it, is that the move towards an interdisciplinary understanding of climate change is only involving certain sections, and styles, of social science. The effect is to limit understanding not only of climate’s ‘human dimensions’ but of the sort of ‘problem’ constituted by climate change. As the IPCC moves in a more ‘solutions oriented’ direction led by Hoesung Lee, this circumscription is likely to have public policy implications that are both consequential and highly specific. It will close-off options as much as open them up, most likely dovetailing with incumbent socio-economic interests absent concerted critique (Stirling, 2008).

These worries about what Alice Vadrot (2017) calls ‘epistemic selectivity’ have been expressed before – including, as Harriet notes, by Karen O’Brien and myself. What’s different is the way she interprets human geography’s role in both perpetuating and eventually redressing this selectivity. Aside from economists, human geographers have been among the most active participants in the social science of climate change (though some would self-identity as ‘environmental geographers’ who approach the subject from the ‘human side’ of the subject). Yet Harriet is right that – to use her felicitous metaphor – climate change is positioned in the middle of the discipline, largely as a ‘society–nature’ problem. Not a few geographers investigate it in ways that comport with the conventions of mainstream interdisciplinarity, whereby ‘pieces’ of knowledge are joined together as if the world is a giant 3D jigsaw awaiting integrated analysis by suitable teams of experts. Elements of Land Change Science illustrate this well, spanning Geography’s ‘human-physical divide’ in ways that echo the familiar manifestos for epistemic ‘synthesis’ (e.g. Baerwald, 2010).

But even geographers ostensibly less inclined to do this are, Harriet suggests, failing to recognize the implications of climate change being more than an ‘issue’ – however big. Seeing it as a condition – as a promiscuous, encompassing phenomena – means that pretty much all of human geography (and all social science more generally) should have something to say about it. And since many or most human geographers do not favour a conventionally ‘scientific’ approach, it follows for Harriet that new framings of climate could usefully challenge those representing it as an ‘issue-problem’. Climate change ought, then, to be ‘everywhere’ in human geography, so too in wider social science – more than the preserve of ‘society–nature’ researchers in whatever discipline. Her two vignettes illustrate the potential for analysis sensitive to how climate change is insinuated in the finer details of government, economy, society and culture. It’s hard to contain, cognitively and normatively.

To pretend otherwise is a political, as much as analytical, decision with worldly consequences. As Harriet implies, the role of systematic inquiry is not simply to ‘represent’ in the epistemic sense: it is also to represent in the normative sense because the world is invested with significance in a great many legitimate ways (even as they lack equal social standing). In both senses, a plurality of knowledge is therefore apposite: climate as condition should not call forth attempts at some ‘super-synthesis’ of bodies of specialized knowledge. Nor should it engender one kind of ‘actionable knowledge’, since there are a multiplicity of possible means and ends when it comes to translating understanding into practice.

In sum, Harriet Bulkeley argues that we already have some of the resources to hand in human geography to address the problem she identifies. Used effectively, these resources could drive a wedge into the wider social sciences in order to crack-open the issue-problem framing so prevalent in climate change analysis, public discourse and government policy.

I am sympathetic to, and broadly in agreement with, Harriet’s diagnosis. Of course, one can quibble over some of the details. For instance, many political ecologists would argue that their modus operandi is precisely the analysis of ‘conditions’ not ‘issues’. A fine example is Matt Huber (2013), whose brilliant book Life-blood (2013) demonstrates the folly of presuming there are zones of society and environment that escape the reach of petro-capitalism. And even in what look like ‘mainstream’ fora, such as the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, there are now signs of unconventional attempts to make social science (and the humanities) speak to geoscience (see Vadrot et al., 2018). A more textured review of the current epistemic landscape is called for and, mea culpa, I note here that my own surveys (e.g. Castree, 2015) have been sketchy rather than finely contoured.

Regardless, the potential solution to the problem Harriet identifies is left implicit in her paper. And it is here – on the question of how to make climate change less of an ‘absent presence’ in human geography – that I’d like to focus some critical attention. Harriet identifies two main causes of the persistent ‘issue-problem’ framing. One is the geoscience-dominated discourse about climate change, fronted by the IPCC for over 25 years. The second, more discipline specific, is the curious tenacity of the society–nature dualism as an ontological precept – curious because the critique of the dualism has bitten wide and deep in human geography since influential statements like Neil Smith’s (1984) Uneven Development and Sarah Whatmore’s (2002) Hybrid Geographies. This second cause has allowed specialization to persist relatively unquestioned among economic, political and other geographers, even as some forge new epistemic connections (e.g. Munroe et al., 2014).

Together, these putative causes speak, respectively, to the power and impotence of knowledge. In light of this, can Harriet’s new map of the whereabouts of climate change alter the movements of those inhabiting the metaphorical territory? As with my own papers on the subject, and Karen O’Brien’s (2010, 2012) articles cited by Harriet, there is a questionable belief that evidence and argument can inspire new practices. For instance, O’Brien (2012) cites the ‘challenge big assumptions’ approach of Kegan and Lahey (2009). Implicitly, Harriet believes that her new map of climate change’s topical location will likewise engender a cognitive and normative shift. One of the enduring wonders of academic life is that very large numbers of researchers, possessed of considerable intellectual freedom, somehow elect to change their questions, theories, models and methods en masse in response to what they read in journals and hear at conferences and workshops. But as Harriet’s observation about the tenacious society–nature dualism attests, very often researchers are free not to choose – they can ignore and deflect even the most convincing information and advocacy.

In the present case, the claim that climate change is a condition that defies all compartmentalization poses a professional challenge – even threat – to many human geographers, both those already in the ‘middle ground’ and those who leave the study of climate change to others. There are good reasons to find the challenge too much, even for local scale analysis of the sort reported in Harriet’s two vignettes. And so I pose a question, one as relevant to O’Brien’s published exhortations for intellectual change as to my own: What sort of institutional innovations are required to meet the challenge?

As Harriet notes, there are new research funding opportunities situated in new frameworks like Future Earth. But only sustained funding can lock-in new research practices and challenge existing ones: 10 to 20 year commitments are required. Money aside, traditional Geography departments are not usually ideal environments to foster a sea-change in academic habits. The silos inhabited by many human and physical geographers attest to this, existing even in the face of loud calls to ‘unify’ Geography (e.g. Matthews and Herbert, 2004). Mission-driven centres and institutes, with strong leadership, are more suited to timely innovations, and even then success is far from guaranteed. Many of these already exist for the sort of mainstream climate research Harriet wants to see challenged – such as the Socio-Environment Synthesis Center in the United States (https://www.sesync.org/).

So, be it in human geography or any other social science, some strong incentives will need to be put in place to foster an embrace of climate change as condition. These would likely draw select people out of their disciplines into research environments and advisory bodies that are purposely designed to facilitate unconventional forms of cross-disciplinary working. Harriet is right that there is considerable potential for change in the study of climate change’s ‘human dimensions’. The worry is that, as Heide Hackmann and co-authors expressed it, ‘the change needed in the social and neighbouring sciences, as well as in broader society, is more demanding than instigating a revolution’ (Hackmann et al., 2014: 655). Can we afford to await even the sort of ‘long revolution’ that typically characterizes major shifts in thinking when, according to some at least, there is a need for a very rapid gestalt-change?