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"Change the system, not the climate" is a common slogan of climate change activists. Yet when this idea comes into the academic and policy realm, it is easy to see how climate change discourse frequently asks the wrong questions. Reframing Climate Change encourages social scientists, policy-makers, and graduate students to critically consider how climate change is framed in scientific, social, and political spheres. It proposes ecological geopolitics as a framework for understanding the extent to which climate change is a meaningful analytical focus, as well as the ways in which it can be detrimental, detracting attention from more productive lines of thought, research, and action.
The volume draws from multiple perspectives and disciplines to cover a broad scope of climate change. Chapter topics range from climate science and security to climate justice and literacy. Although these familiar concepts are widely used by scholars and policy-makers, they are discussed here as frequently problematic when used as lenses through which to study climate change. Beyond merely reviewing current trends within these different approaches to climate change, the collection offers a thoughtful assessment of these approaches with an eye towards an overarching reconsideration of the current understanding of our relationship to climate change.
Reframing Climate Change is an essential resource for students, policy-makers, and anyone interested in understanding more about this important topic. Who decides what the priorities are? Who benefits from these priorities, and what kinds of systems or actions are justified or hindered? The key contribution of the book is the outlining of ecological geopolitics as a different way of understanding human-environment relationships including and beyond climate change issues.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Reframing the climate change discussion
Shannon O'Lear and Simon Dalby 2. Postmodern interpretations
Leigh Glover 3. The climate of communication: from detection to danger
Chris Russill 4. Disconnecting climate change from conflict: a methodological proposal
Emily Meierding 5. Climate justice: climate change, resource conflicts and social justice
Paul Routledge 6. Climate change and the insecurity frame
Simon Dalby 7. Geopolitics and climate science: the case of the missing embodied carbon
Shannon O'Lear 8. Technology and politics in the Anthropocene: visions of "solar radiation management"
Thilo Wiertz 9. Biofuels: climate solution or environmental pariah?
James Smith and Shaun Ruysenaar 10. Novel framings create new, unexpected allies for climate activism
Andrew Szasz 11. Catastrophe insurance and the biopolitics of climate change adaptation
Kevin J. Grove 12. Resisting climate security discourse: restoring "the political" in climate change politics
Angela Oels 13. Towards ecological geopolitics: climate change reframed
Simon Dalby and Shannon O'Lear
About the author
Shannon O'Lear is a Professor at the University of Kansas, USA, where she has a joint appointment in the Departments of Geography and Environmental Studies. She is the author of
Environmental Politics: Scale and Power (2010). She has published widely on energy and natural resources, environmental security, and critical geopolitics of the environment.
Simon Dalby is CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada. His previous books include
Creating the Second Cold War (1990),
Environmental Security (2002), and
Security and Environmental Change (2009).
