How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate

Author: Andrew J. Hoffman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804795053
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Book Description
Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This brief examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Synthesizing evidence from sociology, psychology, and political science, Andrew J. Hoffman lays bare the opposing cultural lenses through which science is interpreted. He then extracts lessons from major cultural shifts in the past to engender a better understanding of the problem and motivate the public to take action. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate makes a powerful case for a more scientifically literate public, a more socially engaged scientific community, and a more thoughtful mode of public discourse.

How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate

Author: Andrew Hoffman
Publisher: Stanford Briefs
ISBN: 9780804794220
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Climate Cultures

Author: Jessica Barnes
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300198817
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times, yet global solutions have proved elusive. This book draws together cutting-edge anthropological research to uncover new ways of approaching the critical questions that surround climate change. Leading anthropologists engage in three major areas of inquiry: how climate change issues have been framed in previous times compared to present-day discourse, how knowledge about climate change and its impacts is produced and interpreted by different groups, and how imagination plays a role in shaping conceptions of climate change.

Don't Even Think About It

Author: George Marshall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 163286102X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
The director of the Climate Outreach and Information Network explores the psychological mechanism that enables people to ignore the dangers of climate change, using sidebars, cartoons and engaging stories from his years of research to reveal how humans are wired to primarily respond to visible threats.

Why We Disagree about Climate Change

Author: Mike Hulme
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107268893
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Book Description
Climate change is not 'a problem' waiting for 'a solution'. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity's place on Earth. Drawing upon twenty-five years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme provides a unique insider's account of the emergence of this phenomenon and the diverse ways in which it is understood. He uses different standpoints from science, economics, faith, psychology, communication, sociology, politics and development to explain why we disagree about climate change. In this way he shows that climate change, far from being simply an 'issue' or a 'threat', can act as a catalyst to revise our perception of our place in the world. Why We Disagree About Climate Change is an important contribution to the ongoing debate over climate change and its likely impact on our lives.

Climate Change as Social Drama

Author: Philip Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110710355X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
Climate Change as Social Drama looks at the cultural sociology of climate change in public communication.

Mediating Climate Change

Author: Julie Doyle
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754676683
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Mediating Climate Change explores how practices of mediation and visualisation shape how we think about, address and act upon climate change. Through historical and contemporary case studies drawn from science, media, politics and culture, Doyle identifies the representational problems climate change poses for public and political debate. She explores how climate change can be made more meaningful and calls for a more nuanced understanding of human-environmental relations.

The Power of Deserts

Author: Dan Rabinowitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781503614864
Category : SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
Hotter and dryer than most parts of the world, the Middle East could soon see climate change exacerbate food and water shortages, aggravate social inequalities, and drive displacement and political destabilization. And as renewable energy eclipses fossil fuels, oil rich countries in the Middle East will see their wealth diminish. Amidst these imminent risks is a call to action for regional leaders. Could countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates harness the region's immense potential for solar energy and emerge as vanguards of global climate action? The Power of Deserts surveys regional climate models and identifies the potential impact on socioeconomic disparities, population movement, and political instability. Offering more than warning and fear, however, the book highlights a potentially brighter future--a recent shift across the Middle East toward renewable energy. With his deep knowledge of the region and knack for presenting scientific data with clarity, Dan Rabinowitz makes a sober yet surprisingly optimistic investigation of opportunity arising from a looming crisis.

From Heresy to Dogma

Author: Andrew J. Hoffman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804745031
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
This is a pathbreaking account of how the environmental movement has led to profound changes in the perceptions and practices of large-scale corporations, as shown here in the chemical and petroleum industries. The book traces how market, social, and political pressures drive corporations to respond to environmental issues, analyzes the cultural frames that organizations use to come to terms with these external influences, and describes the resulting changes in organizational culture and structure. For this expanded edition, the author has written a new chapter that brings his original assessment up to date, expands and modifies the model and data used in the original edition, and offers a broad picture of the current state of corporate environmentalism and where it is going.

Global Burning

Author: Eve Darian-Smith
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150363146X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
How extreme-right antidemocratic governments around the world are prioritizing profits over citizens, stoking catastrophic wildfires, and accelerating global climate change. Recent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning, Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences. Darian-Smith looks deeply into each of these three cases of catastrophic wildfires and finds key similarities in all of them. As political leaders and big business work together in the pursuit of profits and power, anti-environmentalism has become an essential political tool enabling the rise of extreme right governments and energizing their populist supporters. These are the governments that deny climate science, reject environmental protection laws, and foster exclusionary worldviews that exacerbate climate injustice. The fires in Australia, Brazil and the United States demand acknowledgment of the global systems of inequality that undergird them, connecting the political erosion of liberal democracy with the corrosion of the environment. Darian-Smith argues that these wildfires are closely linked through capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, and resource extraction. In thinking through wildfires as environmental and political phenomenon, Global Burning challenges readers to confront the interlocking powers that are ensuring our future ecological collapse.