With each year, I find my students increasingly concerned about climate change. A decade ago, their concerns seemed fairly general and abstract. These days, they are concrete and pressing. The other day, a student told me that climate change has been central to their understanding of the world ever since they can remember. Other students have noted ways in which their life decisions are inflected by climate change, and how the effects of climate change carry across generations. Uncertain about the future, some worry about the implications of bringing a new generation of children into the world. Others express anger and resentment toward parents, teachers, and political leaders for setting weak mitigation goals and failing to meet them: in short, for leaving them with a damaged and degraded planet, all while confidently professing faith in the next generation’s ability to develop innovative solutions that “solve” the climate problem. Many students also feel overwhelmed, wanting to contribute constructively to climate action, but without knowing how, and at the same time wrestling with their own embeddedness in the systems and economies that sustain the fossil fuel industry, and more broadly, the entangled exploitation of human beings and ecological systems around the world.
There are no easy responses to these concerns, nor the associated challenges. I’m inclined to agree with Donna Haraway (2016) that what climate change requires is a commitment to “staying with the trouble.” From this point of view, climate change is not a problem to be solved, but an ongoing and evolving set of processes to which we must learn to respond: as Haraway puts it, we need to cultivate “response-ability.”
As researchers, teachers, colleagues, and members of many broader communities, how might we do this? How might it be possible to cultivate responsive abilities in ourselves and support them in others? I have a few suggestions to offer, in the spirit of opening a conversation that continues to explore what response-ability might look like and what we might – individually and collectively – contribute. As Katherine Hayhoe and others have pointed out, climate change is an “everything issue” – it’s not just a topic for scientists to study, it’s a topic that societies need to engage. Climate change is also an issue that emerges out of certain ways of thinking, acting, relating, and being in the world, and these dimensions of climate change have important philosophical dimensions. Here, I’ll just focus on research and teaching, though our roles as colleagues and members of broader communities are critical as well.
As researchers, philosophers can contribute to conversations about and responses to climate change in a variety of ways that support response-ability. One way is by developing conceptual frameworks that generate insights into climate change that might otherwise be overlooked. For example, a number of philosophers have drawn attention to distinctive features of climate change that make it not only an important ethical issue, but a challenging one. Dale Jamieson (2014) has pointed out that climate change isn’t easily addressed by ethical frameworks that emphasize responsibility as tied to direct, intentional harm to other human beings in close proximity to oneself, and Steve Gardiner (2011) characterizes climate change as a “perfect moral storm,” with global, intergenerational, ecological, and theoretical dimensions that complicate responses and invite “shadow solutions” that prioritize some – such as present generations, or the already well-off – at the expense of others. This work ties into notions of environmental colonialism and compound injustice that are important for understanding the disparate impacts and power dynamics associated with climate change and climate policy. Anil Agarwal, Sunita Narain, Henry Shue, and others have highlighted these dimensions of climate change at the international level (Agarwal and Narain 1991, Shue 2014).
Power dynamics – and their ethical implications – extend not only across space, but through time. Putting climate change in a temporal context requires greater attention to intergenerational ethics (see, e.g., Nolt 2011, Gardiner 2011, McKinnon 2012, Almassi 2017). Indigenous climate justice scholarship plays a particularly important role here, drawing attention to philosophies that center intergenerational relations and take seriously histories of colonialism, ongoing colonial patterns, and their contemporary implications. For example, Kyle Whyte (2016, 2017), Sheila Watt-Cloutier (2015) and others have described climate change as an “intensification of colonialism” (Whyte 2017, p. 156) because it exacerbates the impacts of colonialism on Indigenous peoples, but also because climate change in many ways reflects the same extractivist and exploitative mindsets that enabled settlers to see Indigenous-inhabited lands as “empty” and available for the taking.
These scholarly efforts are important in shaping climate discourses, but there are other ways in which philosophers can cultivate response-ability in relation to climate change, including through teaching. In my teaching, I’ve found that some approaches to engaging climate change empower students, and others can overwhelm or disempower. Climate change is having major impacts around the world, especially in frontline communities in the Arctic, along coastlines, and in regions significantly affected by drought. However, some students have been relatively insulated from these effects thus far. From this vantage point, it is easy to consider climate change as an abstract, “global” issue, not a concern here and now.* On the other hand, students who have experienced climate impacts directly – whether due to wildfires, severe storms, or other effects – can sometimes feel that the momentum of climate change is significant and irreversible, making the challenges seem overwhelming.
These are just two of the many possible ways in which students and others might orient in relation to climate change. With this in mind, I think it’s helpful to remember that climate change is not just an intellectual problem or a theoretical one. It is deeply practical and fundamental in shaping human and other-than-human lives now and for future generations. Climate change therefore has important social, emotional, and experiential dimensions that we as teachers can – and I believe, should – engage.
This kind of engagement requires challenging common approaches to teaching climate change that focus only on “the problem.” Those who have attended lectures on climate change are likely familiar with a common narrative arc, in which much of the talk lays out the problem, explaining in detail the challenges and concerns. Then comes the rousing conclusion, often directed toward younger generations: all of this is bad, but you can fix it. We might call this the handoff approach, where one person or group describes a problem, then hands it off to others to address. This approach appears not only in climate-related books and articles, but in climate pedagogies. Taking seriously the multidimensional, practical, personal, and emotional dimensions of climate change requires something different.
Of course, I don’t deny that younger generations have a critical role to play, along with others, in responding to climate change. But as a pedagogical approach and also from an ethical perspective, I think the handoff narrative is problematic and limiting. Our students need and deserve more from us.
Why do I think this? Because the handoff approach, in my view, looks a lot like what Steve Gardiner (2011) calls intergenerational buck-passing. Gardiner describes this phenomenon in the climate policy realm, where each generation takes a few modest steps to curb climate change, pats itself on the back, then passes the bulk of the problem along to its successors. On the teaching side, I think the handoff approach in many ways mirrors this pattern. The handoff approach can suggest – implicitly or explicitly – that we as teachers view our role as descriptive and diagnostic, leaving students to determine the next steps. Of course, it is not our job to tell students what they should do or how they should engage, but we can communicate and cultivate shared response-abilities in ourselves and those we teach.
I want to acknowledge that I’m still learning how to challenge the handoff approach and to center response-ability in my own teaching. The work is ongoing, but here are a few ideas:
1) Scaling climate change: Climate action is often framed in a bipolar way. There’s a lot of focus on international negotiations, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and treaties like the Paris Agreement. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s emphasis on individual action like using public transit or reducing environmentally harmful consumption. But to many, individual action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions feels like a drop in the bucket, and international negotiations feel distant and opaque. One way to cultivate response-ability is to explore additional scales for action: What can happen at the level of institutions like colleges and universities? In cities? Regionally? How does climate change intersect with issues of food justice and food sovereignty? What might “just transitions” look like, and who needs to be involved in developing them? Examples at subnational and community scales can help students see how polycentric approaches to climate change (Ostrom 2010) might work, and how people in various contexts and settings are responding to and building resilience to climate change. This work can shift the focus from polarized debates over individual versus institutional responsibilities and toward questions of what responsibilities different actors might have and how actions at different levels might support and reinforce one another.
2) Community Partnerships: Encountering examples of climate responses at multiple scales and in multiple contexts can help open up thinking about what response-ability can look like, and engaging with community partners can help ground this understanding in the lived experiences and work of those actively involved in climate issues. These partnerships can also illustrate the intersectional dimensions of climate change: What is the relationship between equitable urban food systems and climate resilience, for example? How are racial justice and climate justice linked? In my home state of Colorado, organizations like Food to Power and Groundwork Denver are making these connections. More generally, there are many resources that can support community-engaged teaching. Two starting points are the Engaged Philosophy website developed by Ramona Ilea (Pacific University), Susan Hawthorne (St. Catherine University), and Monica (“Mo”) Janzen (Anoka Ramsey Community College) and a fall 2020 workshop, Teaching Environmental Philosophy: Engaged and Inclusive Pedagogies, sponsored by the International Society for Environmental Ethics. Philosophers for Sustainability is also a great resource for ongoing events that connect philosophers with opportunities for community engagement and climate action, on campus and beyond.
3) Active hope: Last year, my colleague Simona Capisani (currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University), with whom I work closely through the International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE), shared with me a syllabus for her climate ethics class, which is part of ISEE’s broader environmental ethics syllabus collection. This syllabus offers an excellent example of an intersectional approach to climate ethics that takes seriously the social and emotional dimensions of climate change, including “hope, despair, anger, and action.” Picking up on this, I want to focus in a bit on hope. One important paper on Dr. Capisani’s syllabus – and one I’ve integrated into my own teaching – is Victoria McGeer’s “The Art of Good Hope” (2004).
Some people might be skeptical about the role of hope in relation to action, asking, “What good does hoping do?” Mere “wishful hoping” won’t make climate change go away or mitigate its impacts. But then again, neither will hopelessness. McGeer’s important contribution is to theorize practices of good hope by exploring the connections between hope and agency. As she puts it, “hoping is a matter, not only of recognizing but also of actively engaging with our own current limitations in affecting the future we want to inhabit. It is, in other words, a way of actively confronting, exploring, and sometimes patiently biding our limitations as agents, rather than crumpling in the face of their reality” (McGeer 2004, p. 104). In this sense, good hope is active and engaged; it is not simply wishing for a different world.
McGeer also emphasizes the sociality of hope, and in particular, how hope can be scaffolded by the support of others. Active hope can be strengthened when we support and engage with others’ hopes, and when they engage with ours. This kind of engaged, scaffolded and responsive hope can also play a role in the development of active, collective hope, a kind of hoping important to developing the capabilities needed to engage and respond well to climate change. This conception of hope is empowering. Hope is not just an attitude; it is an orientation toward thoughtful action.
Frameworks that not only diagnose the climate “problem,” but offer ways to cultivate just and response-able relations at multiple levels can help sustain both hope and commitment, a kind of active hope that builds and is built in solidarity with others (see Stockdale forthcoming). Research and writing on climate ethics and climate justice, along with insights from the work of community organizations, climate activists, and others, can provide important models. As teachers, I think we owe it to our students to acknowledge that climate change involves more than science, economics, policy, or philosophical arguments. Climate change raises fundamental questions about how to relate to one another and to the broader world, about what kinds of institutions to build and sustain, and much more. The handoff approach is not enough. In our work, we can support students’ responsive capabilities, and we can also cultivate and practice response-ability ourselves.
References
Agarwal, Anil, and Sunita Narain. 1991. Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism. New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment.
Almassi, Ben. 2017. “Climate Change and the Need for Intergenerational Reparative Justice.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 30(2): 199-212.
Gardiner, Stephen M. 2011. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. New York: Oxford University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Jamieson, Dale. 2014. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed–And What it Means for our Future. New York: Oxford University Press.
McGeer, Victoria. 2004. “The Art of Good Hope.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592(1): 100-127.
McKinnon, Catriona. 2012. Climate Change and Future Justice: Precaution, Compensation and Triage. New York: Routledge.
Nolt, John. 2011. “Nonanthropocentric Climate Ethics.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2(5): 701-711.
Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2011. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ostrom, Elinor. 2010. “Polycentric Systems for Coping with Collective Action and Global Environmental Change.” Global Environmental Change 20(4): 550-557.
Shue, Henry. 2014. Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stockdale, Katie. Forthcoming. “Hope, Solidarity, and Justice.” Feminist Philosophical Quarterly. Available at: https://philarchive.org/archive/STOHSA-2
Watt-Cloutier, Sheila. 2015. The Right to be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Whyte, Kyle. 2016. “Is it Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice.” Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledges, Forging New Constellations of Practice, edited by Joni Adamson and Michael Davis, 88-104. New York: Routledge.
Whyte, Kyle. 2017. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 55(1): 153-162.
* This outlook may tie into what Kari Norgaard (2011) describes as “socially organized denial” where information about climate change “is known in an abstract sense but not integrated into the sense of immediate reality” (Norgaard 2011, p. 52).
Marion Hourdequin
Marion Hourdequin is a Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College. Her research focuses on climate ethics, climate justice, relational ethics, and environmental ethics. She currently serves as Vice President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics and is the author of Environmental Ethics: From Theory to Practice (Bloomsbury, 2015).
This is such a good article, Marion!
One additional thought that links the three of your categories of response-ability in different ways:
People in areas of society where there isn’t a lot of know-how with organizing, how politics gets done, and activism can benefit a lot from actually learning how these things work. Practical capacity in the form of knowing how to get people together to act up; how politics works in a given context/at a given level down to the nuts & bolts of policy creation, legal intricacy, histories of backing & lobbying in the area, pressure points, etc.; and how life looks and what works from the standpoint of applying pressure to the system to get it to change — that is key at a certain point for response-ability in scaling action, community partnerships, and active hope.
We need more media, for instance, that simply gives people a taste for “living politics in the first person” – a phrase from the gorgeous, heartbreaking, inspiring and empowering “120 Battements par minute” (“Beats per minute”), a 2017 film about Act Up Paris during the early years of the fight against AIDS.
When people start to live politics in the first person, all three categories of response-ability that you helpfully outlined come together in an aspect shift: that we can do something for the common good by pushing for change in practically informed, communal and effective ways that, despite the protestations of the entitled in an unjust system, gets the system — and them — to change.
When we live politics in the first person, learning how to protest and push to change policies and perceptions, there’s a place of resistance against despair built right into the day. It’s not that we don’t want need hope in some basic form, but that something stronger like faith is built into the drive to change the world, caught up in the community energy of demanding “things must change.” By “faith,” I mean that the action is like a leap that just keeps going and doesn’t have time to stop and lose hope.
Jeremy
Philosophers have an opportunity to play an important role in focusing insightful critical thinking on what could very well turn out to be the end game of a failure to manage climate change, nuclear weapons.
It’s particularly appropriate for philosophers to engage these topics, because both climate change and nuclear weapons arise from the same source, our relationship with knowledge. Few other disciplines are likely to have the necessary training and interest in addressing these threats at the fundamental level that are their source.
Both climate change and nuclear weapons are products of a simplistic, outdated, and increasingly dangerous “more is better” relationship with knowledge. We’ve reached the point where we can no longer assume that a philosophy that served us well in the past will automatically continue to do so in the future. We need philosophers to help the larger culture see that the primary danger currently facing our civilization is our attempt to map a 19th century “more is better” philosophy on to the 21st century.
At it’s heart, climate change is not a technical problem, but a philosophical challenge. Given that this blog serves many early career philosophers, this site could be the place where a thousand smaller issues are set aside in favor of addressing the fundamental issue which will decide these young professional’s future, our relationship with knowledge.
Get it right, the party continues. Get it wrong, game over. As nature consistently says to all her children, adapt or die.