Climate Change and Social Ecology

A New Perspective on the Climate Challenge

Stephen M. Wheeler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136344176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

Although strategies to prevent global warming – such as by conserving energy, relying on solar and wind power, and reducing motor vehicle use – are well-known, societies have proved unable to implement these measures with the necessary speed. They have also been unwilling to confront underlying issues such as overconsumption, overpopulation, inequity, and dysfunctional political systems. Political and social obstacles have prevented the adoption of improved technologies, which would provide only a partial solution in any case if the fundamental causes of greenhouse gas emissions aren't addressed.

Climate Change and Social Ecology takes a new approach to the climate crisis, portraying global warming as a challenge of rapid social evolution. This book argues that, in order to address this impending catastrophe and bring about more sustainable development, we must focus on improving social ecology – our values, mind-sets, and social organization. Steps to do this include institutional reforms to improve democracy, educational strategies to encourage public understanding of complex issues, and measures to prevent corporations and the wealthy from shaping societies in other directions instead. This book presents a captivating vision of how to help social systems evolve toward sustainability and explores the social transformations needed for dealing with the climate crisis in the long term. It reviews the climate change strategies considered to date, presents a detailed description of a future sustainable society, and analyzes how this vision might be realized through more conscious public nurturing of our social systems.

This interdisciplinary volume provides a compelling rethink of the climate crisis. Authoritative and accessible, it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about climate change and sustainability challenges and is essential reading for students, professionals, and general readers alike.

1

INTRODUCTION

We’re stuck. Current approaches toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions or dealing with many other sustainability problems aren’t working, and some of the most important underlying issues aren’t even being talked about. The powerful economic and political forces that brought us unsustainable development continue to deny climate change and to prevent rapid movement toward greener societies. Political systems in the United States and most other industrial countries have shown themselves incapable of taking sufficient action. Problems go deeper than can be addressed by technology, economic incentives, or international agreements alone.

However, in the long run there is hope. What’s needed, as I argue in this book, is to reframe the challenge as one of planning our own social evolution toward a sustainable future – restructuring our social ecology so as to be capable of sustainable development. Social change of this sort means reshaping our learning environments, institutions, and value systems so that we can begin healing ourselves, our communities, and the planet. Most fundamentally, this sort of social change means learning to see the world differently, in terms of dynamic, co-evolving systems and radical interdependency. And then it means applying this understanding to concrete actions, building societies that can take their own long-term futures into account as well as better ensuring short-term human and environmental welfare.

One particular sign of hope is the unprecedented growth of “civil society” in recent decades – large and small nonprofit organizations and networks that promote environmental, civil rights, social welfare, public health, or sustainable development agendas. Potentially, civil society can work with a strengthened public sector – that is, government at multiple scales – to improve social ecology and to counter the often self-interested and unsustainable agendas of the private sector. But progress will depend first of all on clarity about our situation and objectives. Only by coming to grips with the cognitive and structural roots of sustainability problems, consciously developing strategies to improve these elements of our social ecology, and articulating this forward-thinking agenda to the general public can we move forward.

This process will not be easy, of course, and will be vigorously resisted – indeed, it already has been – by a wide variety of interests who benefit from the status quo. I have few illusions that such a radical shift in focus will come about quickly. But in the long run it is likely to be the only way that humanity will mature enough to survive climate change and other sustainability threats. This reshaping of social ecology – far more than development of green technologies or other specific sustainability tools – is the challenge of coming generations. The sooner we begin this work, the better.

The solution to any problem depends in large part on how one defines the problem. Defining climate change primarily as a problem of technology, economics, or public policy, as has been done to date by figures ranging from Al Gore to Lester Brown to Nicholas Stern,¹ may make sense on the surface. However, it isn’t likely to lead toward real and lasting solutions because much more fundamental characteristics of societies have prevented us from applying these tools to date. Climate change, like other sustainability challenges, is a result of social ecologies that are dysfunctional, to use a word frequently applied to American politics these days. Helping those systems evolve in more constructive directions is our collective task.

“Social ecology” refers to sets of social organizations, values, beliefs, technologies, and environments that interact to determine the nature and evolution of a society. The term has been associated particularly with anarchist social philosopher Murray Bookchin, who wrote between the 1960s and the 1990s, but has roots in a wide variety of historical efforts to view the human world systemically. These efforts range from Enlightenment philosophies of social progress under values such as reason and democracy, to the holistic regionalism of Scottish planner Patrick Geddes in the 1910s, to socio-ecological models of public health beginning in the 1970s, to the somewhat utopian visions of sustainable societies developed by late twentieth-century nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Friends of the Earth (in the United States) and Urban Ecology (in the San Francisco Bay Area), both of which I used to work for. The “ecological thought” explored by such predecessors is central to sustainable development. At its core, ecological thought means understanding the multiple, dynamic, evolving contexts in which we live. It means thinking across scales, across disciplines, across communities, and across time frames. Perhaps most important, it means understanding the interrelationships within systems that lead them to evolve over time, and seeing constructive ways to nudge that evolution in positive directions.

Few of us have been trained to think in this way. Too often, educational systems train us to perceive the world instead in terms of reductionistic, linear chains of cause and effect. Many of us have been taught to pursue specialized knowledge in one discipline, using one set of mental tools. We have not had practice in deconstructing complex situations or in working across professions, cultures, scales, and epistemologies. And far too few of us have learned how to “question authority,” to use that 1970s phrase, in constructive and useful ways. But this situation is slowly changing. As a number of writers have suggested for many decades now, humanity is in a long transition from what has been called the Cartesian mind-set – atomistic, linear, dualistic, mechanical, and at times overly rational – toward an ecological worldview, emphasizing abilities to understand process, complexity, interdependency, and dynamic and evolving systems.² Drawing on both sides of the brain, the ecological worldview sees humans as inextricably part of nature and human society as a complex and evolving system. Understanding and applying this perspective is essential in responding to global crises such as climate change.

“Social evolution” is a related but even more challenging concept. This term refers to the paths of social systems over time and the ways in which they change in response to internal and external factors. Most of us probably want our societies to evolve so as to increase human happiness and sustainability. But that is clearly not what has happened in practice. Far too often societies have evolved instead to concentrate wealth in a few hands, to promote overly materialistic lifestyles that don’t necessarily bring happiness, and to leave large numbers of people at the bottom of the income scale in poverty. In the process these societies engage in needless wars and sectarian rivalries, as well as drastically degrading the planet’s environments.

The very idea of social evolution has been co-opted historically in unfortunate ways. Dictators, demagogues, and theorists alike have at times advocated shaping societies to promote a particular social class or race. Social Darwinist philosophies, often based on the writings of nineteenth-century sociologist Herbert Spencer, advanced the view that societies should be structured in a laissez-faire way so as to promote survival of the “fittest” human individuals and groups. At best, such perspectives have been elitist; at their worst, they have supported ethnic and racial cleansing. Mainstream social science in the twentieth century, locked into a Cartesian worldview that gave great power to supposedly objective experts, also often supported top-down government or corporate planning that, in the end, was racist and/or elitist. Urban renewal, which often bulldozed lower-income neighborhoods to produce sterile modernist housing and office developments, is just one example of the unfortunate results. In part due to this lamentable history, any discussion of consciously shaping social ecology has generally been avoided.

Yet the concept of social evolution can be used in much more positive and constructive ways as well, and it is essential that we explore these now rather than abandon this important concept altogether. Understanding all the factors that shape social ecology, and revising those over which we have control in transparent, democratic, and constructive ways, can help societies evolve in many positive directions, most particularly toward sustainability. In the twenty-first century and beyond, such social evolution appears essential for survival. It can also help improve the welfare of millions of people in every part of the globe who suffer from the negative effects of current social systems, as well as the welfare of other species with which we share the planet. If collectively we do not assert public control over our future, then other forces oriented around private interests will shape that future for us in much less sustainable directions.

Although both “social ecology” and “social evolution” are complex and challenging terms, they are essential in addressing the question of how humanity might reduce and respond to the threat of climate change. We will explore them throughout this book, asking how they can be understood and applied in constructive ways.

Although writers have warned about potential global crises at least since the time of Thomas Malthus in the 1800s, climate change appears to be the catastrophe that will finally force humanity to rethink its development trajectory. Even for those of us who have been following the topic for years, it is hard to grasp just how profound the changes to the Earth and human societies will be. Because of climate change, in the twenty-first century we face the prospect of living with temperatures up to 11 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, sea levels as much as two meters higher, and vastly different patterns of rainfall. Large regions of the Earth will dry out, including the Mediterranean basin, the American Southwest, and parts of Australia. Other areas will become wetter. Storms will become more intense, leading to floods and additional disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Pests will change their ranges, affecting new crops and species. Food production will almost certainly fall, leaving millions on the brink of starvation.

These changes alone will be catastrophic. But just a bit farther ahead, over the next several centuries, as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions the Earth’s climate is likely to revert back to that at the time of the Eocene, 67 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs. Perhaps a third of all current species will vanish.³ Much if not all of the planet’s ice will melt; sea levels will rise by many tens of meters. Hurricanes and lesser storms will increase still further in severity and frequency. Crocodiles may once again swim at the North Pole.

Or, worse still, we may take the Earth’s climate all the way back to that at the end of the Permian era, 251 million years ago, replicating the largest mass extinction of all time, when 95 percent of species disappeared. In that event, also caused by atmospheric changes and greenhouse warming, the oceans became stagnant and anoxic (lacking oxygen), killing marine life and leading to massive emissions of methane and hydrogen sulfide.⁴ It is hard even to contemplate such a scenario, yet, by tinkering with the planet’s atmosphere, it is possible that we could re-create it.

Other sustainability crises are also emerging, and will almost certainly deepen in the current centuries.⁵ Petroleum, that amazingly concentrated liquid energy source that fuels most of the world’s transportation systems, will reach peak production and then decline in availability during the first few decades of the twenty-first century. Other conventional energy sources, such as natural gas, uranium, and even coal, may last a century or two at current consumption trajectories but will eventually run out as well. So an energy transition is inevitable. In many parts of the world freshwater is also becoming scarce. Deserts are expanding, due in part to climate change and in part to other human activities, such as excessive groundwater pumping. Fisheries will be depleted and the ocean’s ecosystems damaged. Agricultural soils in many places may become exhausted, eroded, or infertile as a result of problems such as salt buildup. The loss of rainforests may alter large-scale regional ecologies. Ocean acidification, a secondary effect of human CO₂ emissions, may threaten planetary life. The list goes on and on. We can’t always tell which problems will be most severe, but we do know that, together, they represent a very large threat to the sustainability of human societies.

Such crises will require reinvention of lifestyles, economies, cultures, built landscapes, and public and private institutions. They will require us to learn to live sustainably on the planet, in other words, in a much more balanced relationship with nature. Environmental philosopher Thomas Berry has called this process of social transformation “the Great Work,”⁶ and it is the central challenge of the next generations. The question is not whether humanity will respond to these dramatically changed conditions, because it will have no choice. The question is when and how. If we can make this collective leap sooner rather than later, the more extreme crises and untold human suffering can perhaps be avoided. Many nonhuman species can perhaps also be saved. If we wait to begin the transition, the outcome will not be so favorable.

The problem is that, despite some fifty years of warnings, we haven’t yet really begun the process. Yes, a great deal of attention is being paid to renewable energy technologies, more efficient motor vehicles, water-saving fixtures, and other technical advances. Many governments have now established targets for greenhouse gas reductions, though usually not the policies actually to reach the targets. Many companies are also painting themselves green. Even enormous fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, and Chevron, which have been responsible for much of the delay in addressing climate change, run advertisements touting their environmental credentials. However, none of this is remotely enough. If we look at the “bottom line” of sustainability – indicators of actual human and ecological welfare, such as annual greenhouse gas emissions – we see that, in many of the areas that matter most, human societies are still following the trend line known in climate change policy circles as BAU, or “business as usual.”

This inability to reverse unsustainable trends is due to the fact that many of the most fundamental issues are still not being talked about. Despite widespread alarm about climate change, these underlying causes of the oncoming disasters are too political, challenge processes of individual and corporate wealth accumulation too directly, and/or hit too close to people’s personal lifestyles. These foundational issues include overpopulation, overconsumption, inequality, and what economist Herman Daly nearly forty years ago termed “growthmania” – economies predicated on continual growth in resource use and material production.⁷ Addressing these issues would threaten mainstream beliefs and values too directly in most societies, and so few political leaders or mainstream media commentators address them. But they will have to be tackled eventually.

Equally worrisome, political debates in the United States – still the most influential, powerful, and trend-setting nation in the world – have degenerated to the point that subjects such as climate change and sustainable development can hardly even be discussed. Political and media debate is so consumed with relatively unimportant issues often distorted for partisan ends, mainly by the right wing of the political spectrum, that thoughtful discussion of how to move toward sustainability is impossible. The situation is marginally better in many industrialized European and Asian nations, but there, too, conservative forces resist fundamental change. And, of course, many societies are still in the grip of authoritarian regimes of one sort or another that have little interest in sustainability or other long-range goals.

Conservative critics in the United States and to lesser extents elsewhere have sought to undermine the very idea of government – that a competent public sector should seek to address collective problems, and that citizens should assist it through their thoughtful participation and tax dollars. These critics advance no constructive alternative, usually relying instead on the clearly fallacious assumption that “free” markets and individual charity will be sufficient to meet collective needs. As historian Tony Judt has argued, virtually all the social democratic reforms of the post-World War II era, including guarantees of health care, retirement, decent housing, high-quality public education, and (after the 1970s) a safe and high-quality environment, have been under sustained assault from such right-wing forces.⁸ Our social systems, in other words, are in important ways becoming less healthy and are moving further away from being able to address subjects such as climate change. With little benefit of democratic oversight, powerful forces routinely shape social systems in ways beneficial to themselves. Social evolution toward the point where constructive policy discussions can even take place then becomes necessary to meet the challenge of sustainability.

This situation can often seem dire. Yet climate change is an enormous learning opportunity as well as a crisis. It offers the chance for human creativity to emerge, for us to build new problem-solving networks. It challenges us to open up our thinking, to build new mental paradigms, as Donella Meadows argued when she first used the term “sustainability” in the 1972 book Limits to Growth.⁹ Now is the time to ask ourselves questions such as: One hundred years from now, what do we want to have gained from this crisis? How can we use global warming to mature as a species so as to achieve sustainable development? How can we become a healthier network of human cultures in the process?

As we look for alternatives to the business-as-usual storyline for the future, the vision of a sustainable society has become the beacon that attracts many of us. On the face of it, the word “sustainability” does not seem likely to excite millions of people. It is too long, too Latinate, and too abstract. Yet its underlying concepts of long-term, holistic, normative thinking have resonated with enough people over many decades now for it to have emerged as the label of choice for an alternative future. It is intuitively obvious to a growing percentage of the population that our current lifestyles and development practices are unsustainable. These ways of living can’t be continued for much longer. More and more of us long for a different paradigm in which human activity is in balance with nature and in which a more humane society supports us individually and collectively, making our lives feel more meaningful and interconnected. These understandings and desires underlie the sustainability movement.

The 1972 book Limits to Growth, in which Meadows and her fellow MIT researchers used computers for the first time to model the future of global systems, seems to have been the first place in which the concept of “sustainable development” appeared in print. One of the most fortunate occurrences of my own life was the opportunity to study with Meadows at Dartmouth College in the late 1970s, and many of the themes of her teaching stay with me still, especially the need to address underlying cognitive outlooks and values in order to bring about social change. However, the idea that we live on a “small planet” had been percolating since the 1960s, when astronauts on their way to the moon produced the first photographic images of the entire Earth – iconic photos that immediately found their way onto countless bulletin boards, stickers, and college dorm walls. Apparently many people needed to see the image of a small blue-green planet hanging in an enormous black void to appreciate the limits of its resources. That image alone led to enormous social learning about the limits of our world and helped give rise to the “limits to growth” philosophy that has been one of the intellectual roots of the sustainability discourse.

The sustainability movement has struggled to gain hold for almost half a century since that time. The forces of old, unsustainable societies around the worl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A Century of Climate Change
• 3. Fifty Years of the Sustainability Movement
• 4. Still Off the Table: Consumption, mobility, population, and equality
• 5. Storyline 1: Over the Cliff
• 6. Storyline 2: A Sustainable Society
• 7. The Nature of Social Ecology
• 8. Planning for Social Evolution
• 9. Getting from Here to There
• 10. Conclusion
• Notes
• Recommended Reading and Sources
• Index