Last month we published Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination, a collection of essays examining the philosophical questions facing activists, policy makers and educators fighting the causes of climate change. The book interrogates the ethical issues underlying social responses to climate change and in particular how these responses draw upon ideas about the future. Below the book's editor, Stefan Skrimshire, talks about what motivated him and his contributors to pursue the project. Researchers and students of environmental ethics, or indeed anyone interested in climate change and political action, please read on...
Sarah
Amongst the sea of banners that wound around the streets of Copenhagen during the UN Climate talks last December, what stood out for me was various uses of the word “future” I hadn’t noticed before at political protests: ‘Reclaim the Future’; ‘More Future, Less Capitalism’; ‘Our Climate. Your Future. Your Decision’; ‘Change the Future’. The context was, of course, an appropriate one: a conference dubbed even by the then UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, as the ‘last chance’ to avert irreversible climate catastrophe. But it struck me that the banners presupposed a deeper set of questions about how we ‘think the future’. What beliefs, attitudes or visions of the future frame our willingness to take action, in the context of climate change? Are people motivated by fear of crisis, or hope that crisis might trigger action for a more optimistic future?
Questions such as these were at the heart of Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. For whilst our knowledge of the physical causes and effects of climate change may be increasing, our appreciation of how these changes are accepted and acted upon (or indeed, not acted upon) in human cultures is not. As a researcher in the philosophical and religious roots of apocalypse in western culture, I was naturally interested in pursuing this. But also as an environmental campaigner, I have become aware of how important this question of thinking the future is for social movements and political change.
A tacit assumption running throughout the book, then, is that whilst we are dealing with an expressly physical phenomenon, even in a ‘secular’ society this phenomenon is communicated and understood through a complex mixture of narratives, myths and rhetoric by which we understand the future and our place in it. This complexity is reflected in the diversity of the book’s contributors. To take some examples, there are lessons from the historian of genocide Mark Levene; a fascinating trip through the history of ‘environmental apocalypse‘ from protest groups to Hollywood films from US scholar Frederick Buell; reflections on the original meaning of apocalypse given by two leading UK theologians. The influential climate scientist Mike Hulme explains the different cultural ‘myths’ about nature that frame our understanding of the climate; the ‘empathy expert’ Roman Krznaric explains the challenges of relating to future generations; and philosopher Stephen Gardiner considers whether the prospect of disaster might only generate moral reasons for people to do nothing. The book contains many more gems, from a rich variety of disciplines. And there is a powerful reflection on our contemporary situation in the foreword by Alastair McIntosh, author of Soil and Soul.
The book was part of a project I led at the University of Manchester, which brought together activists, academics and policy makers for a series of exchanges on climate change and political action. It’s release is accompanied by the launch of a documentary film, Beyond the Tipping Point? conversations on climate, action and the future.
Stefan Skrimshire is postdoctoral researcher in philosophy of religion at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Politics of Fear, Practices of Hope (2008), also published by Continuum.
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