Tag: Political

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‘What I Want’ versus ‘What Is Best’

When ‘what is best’ doesn’t align with ‘what I want’, making the right decision is hard. We need to find ways of working out how make these options align as closely as possible.

Jared Diamond’s point in Collapse is that the fate of contemporary society is in our own hands. I read and wrote about the introductory chapter to a while ago. Eventually I did read the whole book, though as Michael Kavanagh points out;

“You could read the introduction and the last few chapters and get the point. But then you’d miss out on what Jared Diamond does best: tell stories.”

Kavanagh is right; as I’ve talked about before here storytelling is an important way of understanding the world. William Cronon has suggested narratives of global change that offer hope are needed for us to tackle the (potential) problems that contemporary society faces. Most of Diamond’s stories about the fate of previous societies don’t offer much hope however – most collapsed and the only modern example of positive action on the environment is Iceland. Diamond’s identifies five contributing factors to societal collapse:

“… climate change, hostile neighbours, trade partners (that is, alternative sources of essential goods), environmental problems, and, finally, a society’s response to its environmental problems. The first four may or may not prove significant in each society’s demise, Diamond claims, but the fifth always does. The salient point, of course, is that a society’s response to environmental problems is completely within its control, which is not always true of the other factors. In other words, as his subtitle puts it, a society can “choose to fail.”

Diamond emphasises the need for individual action – for a bottom-up approach to make sure that we choose not to fail. Kavanagh suggests the implications is that

“in a world where public companies are legally required to maximize their profits, the burden is on citizens to make it unprofitable to ruin the environment — for an individual, a company, or a society as a whole.”

Others suggest more dramatic action is needed however. Richard Smith suggests that this ‘market meliorist strategy’ won’t be enough. Smith contrasts the bottom-up decision-making of the New Guinea villages that Diamond uses as a potential model for contemporary decision-making with that of contemporary capitalist society. Whereas the New Guinea villages’ decision-making process takes into account everyone’s input:

“…we do not live in such a ‘bottom-up’ democratic society. We live in a capitalist society in which ownership and control of the economy is largely in the hands of private corporations who do not answer to society. In this system, democracy is limited to the political sphere. …under capitalism, economic power is effectively monopolized by corporate boards whose day-to-day requirements for reproduction compel their officers to systematically make ‘wrong’ decisions, to favour the particular interests of shareholders against the general interests of society.”

Smith’s solution? As the global issues contemporary society faces are so interconnected and international, international governance by a “global citizenry” is required. Critics to this approach are likely to be many, but whether it will be enough for individual consumers to “make it unprofitable to ruin the environment”, or whether the we develop a “global citizenry”, the ultimate question here seems to be ‘Are we prepared to change our lifestyles to ensure the survival of our contemporary (global) society’?

With the “End of Tradition” in western societies (i.e. life is no longer lived as fate in these societies) maybe the future of society really is in our hands as Diamond suggests. On the other hand, as Beck points out, as contemporary problems are due to dispersed causes (e.g. individuals driving their car to work everyday) responsibility is rather easily evaded and some form of global decision-making would be useful. To me the latter seems unlikely – those with power are unlikely to give it up easily. The ‘global’ institutions we currently have are frequently undermined by the actions of individual states and leaders. The power to change society and lifestyles (in the west at least) now lies with individuals. But with power comes a responsibly which, on the whole, currently we individuals are shirking.

The changes my and the next generation will need to make will have to go further than simply throwing our glass, paper and plastic in different boxes. There are small ways in which we can save ourselves money whilst helping the environment and they all add up. But sea changes in lifestyle are likely to be required. Governments will not make people do that, and have no right in a democracy. They can cajole via taxation (if they do it right) but they can’t force people to change their lifestyles. People must make those changes themselves because they want to make it profitable to sustain contemporary society. The problem is it’s very difficult to do what’s best when it doesn’t align with what you want. It can hurt. Findings ways of making the two align will become increasingly important. Often the two will not align and it will be necessary to take individual responsibility by accepting there will be a degree of pain. But once this responsibility has been accepted, the next step can be taken – working to minimise the pain whilst ensuring people get as close to what they want as possible.

Inevitably, I think modelling may have something to offer here. Just as Diamond uses evidence of historical environmental, technological and social change to discuss and tell stories about past problems we might use models to discuss and tell stories about potential problems we might face in the future. Simulation models, if appropriately constructed, offer us a tool to reconstruct and examine uncertain landscape change due to environmental, technological and social change in the future. Further, simulation models offer the opportunity to examine alternative futures, to investigate traps that might lie in wait. Just as we should learn from past histories of landscape change (as Diamond suggests), we should be able to use simulation models to construct future histories of change in our contemporary landscapes.

These alternative ‘model futures’ are unlikely to be realised exactly as the model says (that’s the nature of modelling complex open systems), and may not contain the details some people might like, but if they are useful to get people around a table discussing the most sustainable ways of managing their consumption of natural resources then they can’t be a bad thing. Modelling offers insight into states of potential future environmental systems given different scenarios of human activity. At the very least, models will provide a common focus for debate on, and offer a muse to inspire reflection about, how to align ‘what I want’ with ,‘what is best’.

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Post-Normal Science (& Simulation Modelling)

Last week I didn’t quite manage to complete the JustScience week challenge to blog on a science topic, and only on science, every day that week. I managed five days but then the weekend got in the way. On those five days I wrote about the application of scientific methods to examine landscape processes – specifically wildfire regimes and land use/cover change (LUCC). Another of my ‘scientific’ interests is the relationship between science and policy- and decision-making, so what I was planning to write on Saturday might not have fitted the JustScience bill anyway. I’ll post it now instead; a brief review of some of the ways commentators have suggested science may need to adapt in the 21st century to ensure it remains relevant to ‘real world problems’.

Ulrich Beck has suggested that we now live in the ‘risk society‘. Beck’s view that the risks contemporary societies face – such as changing climates, atmospheric pollution, exposure to radioactive substances – shares common themes with others examining contemporary society and their relationships with science, technology and their environment (Giddens for example).

In the risk society, many threats are difficult to identify in everyday life, requiring complicated, expensive (usually scientific) equipment to measure and identify them. These threats, requiring methods and tools from science and technology to investigate them, have frequently been initiated by previous scientific and technological endeavours. Consequences which are no longer simply further academic and scientific problems for study, but consequences that are important socially, politically, culturally, and environmentally. Furthermore, these consequences may be imminent, potentially necessitating action before the often lengthy traditional scientific method (hypothesis testing, academic peer review etc.) has produced a consensus on the state of knowledge about it.

Beck goes on to suggest a distinction between two divergent sciences; the science of data and the science of experience. The former is older, specialised, laboratory-based science that uses the language of mathematics to explore the world. The latter will identify consequences and threats, publicly testing its objectives and standards to examine the doubts the former ignores. Traditional science, Beck suggests, is at the root of current environmental problems and will simply propagate risk further rather than reducing it.

Taking a similar perspective, Funtowicz and Ravetz have presented ‘post-normal’ science as a new type of science to replace the reductionist, analytic worldview of ‘normal’ science with a “systemic, synthetic and humanistic” approach. The term ‘post-normal’ deliberately echoes Thomas Kuhn’s formulation of ‘normal’ science functioning between paradigm shifts, to emphasise the need for a shift in scientific thinking and practices that takes it outside of the standard objective, value-free perspective. The methodology of post-normal science then, emphasises uncertainties in knowledge, quality of method, and complexities in ethics. Post-normal science, according to Funtowicz and Ravetz, embraces the uncertainties inherent in issues of risk and the environment, makes values explicit rather than presupposing them, and generates knowledge and understanding through an interactive dialogue rather than formalised deduction. You can read more about Post-Normal science itself at NUSAP.net, and the Post-Normal Times blog will keep you up-to-date on recent events and issues at the interface between science and policy-making.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the utility of environmental simulation models (particularly those that explicitly consider human activity) for examining the sorts of problems present in the ‘risk society’ and that post-normal science has been promoted as being able to contribute to. I’ll write in more detail at a later date, but briefly many of the theoretical facets post-normal science suggests seem relevant to the issues facing environmental (and landscape) simulation models. Particularly, the epistemological problems of model validation recently discussed in the academic literature (e.g. Naomi Oreskes et al., Keith Beven , and which I have touched on briefly in the past, but must post about in more detail soon) have highlighted the importance of considering the subjective aspects of the model construction process.

As a result I have come to think that model ‘validation’ might be better achieved by taking an evaluative, qualitative approach to rather than a confirmatory approach. A shift in this approach would essentially mean asking “is this model good enough” rather than “is this model true”? Ethical questions about who should be asked, and who is qualified to ask, whether a model is to be deemed trustworthy and fit for purpose to examine real world problems (and not those confined to a laboratory) also become important when these criteria are used. These model validation issues are thus resonant with a post-normal science perspective toward examining the environmental issues contemporary societies currently face.

I’ll write more on both the epistemological problems of confirmatory model validation for environmental and landscape simulation models and potential ways we might go about assessing the trustworthiness and practical adequacy of these models for addressing the problems of the ‘risk society‘ soon.

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Adaption not Mitigation

There’s a lot written about climate change on web 2.0 – and there’s about to be a lot more written about it over the coming weeks. The impending release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report is going to have plenty for the commentators and bloggers to chew on. If you were so inclined it would take you quite a while to get through it all. But if there is one thing I think you should read about climate change in the light of the latest IPCC report it’s Maragret Wente’s piece (re)posted on Seeker.

The important point raised is that although much gets written about climate change mitigation, it is at the expense of discussion about climate change adaptation.

This is not a new point – Rayner and Malone wrote about it in Nature a decade ago, and I even got the message in my third year undergrad climate modelling course. Although reducing carbon emissions is important it may not halt what has already started, and we would do well to get thinking about the best adaptation strategies to the consequences of a changing climate. Of course, we should continue working to reduce our carbon emissions. But we need to accept that, regardless of whether the change is human induced or not, in all probability the climate is changing and we need to be prepared for the consequences.

I’ve posted what I think is the more relevant section below, but the whole thing is very interesting: read the whole article;


The climate debate focuses almost entirely on mitigation (how we can slow down global warming). But climate scientists and policy experts say that in the short term — our lifetimes — our most important insurance policy is adaptation. Nothing we do to cut emissions will reduce the risk from hurricanes or rising seas in the short term. But there are other ways to reduce the risk. We can build storm-surge defences, stop building in coastal areas and make sure we protect our fresh-water supplies from salination. We also can develop crops that will do well in hotter climates.

‘Adaptation’ is not a word that figures much in climate-change debates. Activists (and much of the general public) think it sounds lazy and defeatist. But the experts talk about adaptation all the time.

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Just Science Week

OK, so after a little deliberation I’ve signed up for Just Science week. In a response to the strong anti-science presence on the internet (global warming denialists, creationists, the anti-vaccination movement etc.), starting 5th February science bloggers will post about science only, with at least one post per day for the whole week. Issues which are favoured by anti-scientific groups (creationism, global warming, etc.) will be either avoided, or discussed without reference to anti-scientific positions.

The rationale behind this is that many science bloggers end up spending a fair amount of time combating the misinformation spread by anti-science groups at the expense of blogging about actual science. I generally don’t want to get embroiled in these sorts of arguments – I’ll leave it to those with much stronger feelings on the subject, know more about it and are generally much more organised.

What I am more interested in is the relationship between science and policy- and decision-making, specifically from modelling/environmental/resource management perspectives. I’m with Allen et al. (2001 p.484):


“The postmodern world may be a nightmare for … normal science (Kuhn 1962), but science still deserves to be privileged, because it is still the best game in town. … [Scientists] need to continue to be meticulous and quantitative. But more than this, we need scientific models that can inform policy and action at the larger scales that matter. Simple questions with one right answer cannot deliver on that front. The myth of science approaching singular truth is no longer tenable, if science is to be useful in the coming age.”

Just this week I’ve been considering how the recent work emerging from Demos, the UK thinktank, relates to my PhD research (more on this and this in the future no doubt). The Prometheus blog is great source of inspiration and for this sort of discussion too. But, in the interests of Just Science week I’ll try to steer clear of that stuff and focus on some my work on wildfire regimes (that I haven’t talked about in much detail here but have outlined on my website), recent publication in the environmental modelling literature, and also I’m thinking maybe a post on the Geography of Science (seeing as I am Geographer at heart…)

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country of citizenship?

What nationality do you say you are when you’re in a foreign country and people ask you where you’re from? Not such a straightforward question for people from the UK – for example, 48% of people living in England describe themselves as British versus 27% in Scotland and 35% in Wales. In the UK 50% of people regard themselves as as either English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish only, just less than a third as British only, and the remainder giving different combinations of British and other nationalities. (And this all disregards the tricky questions of ethnicity and religion)

Personally I’d say I would fall in this last category, I’m British-English. When in Britain I’m English. As I move further away I become less English and more British. I probably become more European the further I move away from Europe too. That’s understandable isn’t it? – as the spatial distance increases the spatial resolution of your answer increases. If pressed you can become more precise.

But why the two, British AND English? Well, I feel British, my culture and history are British, and I can move freely around these isles and feel at home. But I still recognise there are differences between the countries, culturally and socially. But also, I think (for me at least) sport is important. Sport is important to me in its own right but I think it also reflects quite well one of the reasons I would distinguish my Englishness from my Britishness. There are great rivalries between the Football and Rugby teams of England, Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland. Sport generates pride in your team, and when your team represents your ‘nation’ you have pride in that place. The Six Nations is a fantastic tournament and a prime example of this. When England are in the World Cup, England goes crazy. Whilst I’ve never been there during a World Cup I’m sure the fervour is less ardent in Scotland when England are competing but Scotland aren’t… At the Olympics we compete as Great Britain (that’s OK none of us would get very far individually!?) but we don’t enter a GB Soccer team. The individual Football Associations are worried that their status as footballing nations would be weakened if a GB team were ever fielded. It looks like there’s going to be a GB team for the 2012 Olympics in London, but I’d doubt many ‘real’ football fans will be too interested.

But what about where I’m from legally? I was filling out a form this week in which there were four boxes regarding the legal status of where I come from (this is what got me thinking about all this). Four boxes:

1. City of Birth:
2. Country of Birth:
3. Country of Citizenship:
4: Country of legal permanent residence:

The first was straightforward (Bristol), as was the second really (England). But the final two were a little more tricky. The immigration cards you get on an aeroplane usually ask for your nationality. But my country of citizenship? Is Britain a country? Isn’t the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” the official name of this country? Can I be UK-ish? And my country of legal permanent residence? England? Britain? UK? I found some help here and filled out the boxes.

So what is my “country of citizenship”? I don’t think I have one. It’s a question that doesn’t work if you’re a British citizen.

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Ironies of the Flat World

Something very ironic just happened in my email inbox, a symptom of the Flat World if you like.

___________________________
Date: 05 Jan 07
Time: 17.29
Sender: Snowmail – Channel 4 News
Subject: Air rage
Message:
Jon Snow here with the newsroom latest

Air rage
==========

The irresponsible face of capitalism? This damning indictment of the airline industry came from the normally exceptionally mild mannered Ian Pearson, an environment minister.

Something undoubtedly got into his tea because he didn’t give up at that, his target specifically was the short-haul cheap flight carrier Ryanair, though he wasn’t very complimentary about British Airways either.

It’s a rare glimpse of antagonism between government and big business, and suggests that despite the appearance of a cozy consensus over climate change, real tensions are starting to emerge over who should pay the price of carbon emissions.

Yes it’s true that carbon emissions from the airline industry are set to triple in the next 20 years, and for every two per cent of efficiency and saving they make through updating planes and engines, the sheer growth of the business is double that, so their carbon footprint is getting worse by the day.

On the other hand, the government is rushing ahead with plans to increase airport capacity so that all these flights can land and take off. If they didn’t build the airports, the flights wouldn’t be able to happen, and carbon emissions – well, Britain’s anyway — wouldn’t increase by as much.

Cathy Newman is on the case but the minister is strangely shy again tonight and his government very far from excited from saying anything at all. Ryanair’s boss Michael O’Leary is voluble, describing the minister as a dead sheep.

Next email
___________________________
Date: 05 Jan 07
Time: 17.31
Sender: easyJet Newsletter
Subject: New Year Sale on flights, hotels and car rental!
Message:
Over 500,000 seats at under £21.99

Thanks to easyJet’s New Year Sale, you can now do more for less in 2007! Why not treat yourself to some winter sun, some ski slope fun or visit a new city with all the family?

We’ve got over 500,000 seats for sale at under £21.99 – but you need to be quick! This fantastic offer must end at midnight on Wednesday 10 January 2007.

These amazing discounts are on flights for travel between 24 January and 24 March 2007.

So don’t delay, book now at…

I shouldn’t laugh but it’s a case in point. Globalization in action in a Flat World. Something that Thomas Friedman would laud – but he doesn’t spare much time in his book to discuss the impacts of globalization on the environment. He does briefly discuss how certain organisations such as Conservation International are beginning to work ‘in partner’ with companies such as McDonalds to reduce environmental impacts (in ways that don’t negatively impact profits), but otherwise there’s nothing. I like the book; its a good, motivating read. I like and agree with the message – get innovating in the developed world or lose out to those who will in the developing world. But it seems to assume that whatever environmental problems we encounter, our innate creativity will be able to solve.

Fair enough, Friedman does suggests at one point that “While many of the old corporate and government safety nets will vanish under global competition in the flat world, some fat still needs to be maintained, and even added. As everyone who worries about his or her health knows, there is “good fat” and “bad fat” – but everybody needs some fat. And that is true of every country in the flat world. Social security is good fat. We need to keep it. A welfare system that discourages people from working is bad fat.” What about the good fat of our valuable and vital environmental resources upon which we base our economies? Our Natural Environment Security? Does that get a look in? It should do but it at the moment when the points are raised we just end up with laughable ironies like that illustrated from my inbox above. Nowhere in his book does he explicitly address this issue.

In his summary, Friedman quotes a business consultant speaking of companies’ demise; “When memories exceed dreams, the end is near”. True maybe, but when all we have are memories of a life-supporting natural environment our end will be upon us. We need to dream and innovate in the flat world, but we also need to remember where we came from and the environment in which we live and require to survive.

________________________
Friedman, T.L. (2006) The World is Flat (2nd Ed.) London: Penguin ISBN: 0-141-02272-8

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Gidden’s Risk and Responsibility

A good story is one that grips you; it’s hard to guess what is coming next but once it has been told, the outcome seemed inevitable. The same could be said for theories about how the world is — sometimes you read something that just makes sense. You knew that’s how the world was before you read about it, but couldn’t put it into words quite so eloquently. That’s how I felt when I was reading Giddens’ ‘Risk and Responsibility’.

The story goes that we have reached the End of Nature and the End of Tradition, and we are no longer in a time of External Risk but now live in a time of Manufactured Risk. Essentially Giddens‘ piece is a discussion of the about how the threats to contemporary society are a product of science and technology, and in this sense is based within the notion of the Risk Society.

To be more specific, the advances of science and technology and the ‘domination’ over nature it allows us, means that our environmental worries are no longer about what nature might do to us, but what we are doing to nature. This may be true in the majority of developed societies, but there are still plenty of developing areas in the world for which this does not apply (and natural hazards still pose a major threat to some areas of the developed world). But let’s leave that point aside and remember the problems of anthropogenically caused climate change, pollution of the worlds water-ways, deforestation of tropical rainforest, the problem of radioactive waste, and all the other protection-of-the-global-commons-type issues. In many ways, we humans have more of an influence over our environment than it has over us. This is the End of Nature.

The End of Tradition, in Gidden’s own words, “is essentially to be in a world where life is no longer lived as fate.” Previously in industrial society, the man went out to work and the woman stayed at home with the kids. But all this has changed; we are more socially mobile and we live in a world where information (via the internet), freedom (via democracy) and opportunities (via strong economies) abound. We can do what we want to do and take control of our own lives. Again, there is a limit to this and it applies mainly to developed areas of the world, but it sounds about right doesn’t it?

Risk as a concept only originated as humans began to think they might be able to take control of their environment. Whilst nature and tradition had not yet ended their demise was on the horizon. Prior to this dangers were ‘taken as given’, as ‘acts of god’ that humans could not control. Humans had little control over external risk, but they could take steps to reduce their losses in the face of frequent hazards. External Risk originated in early industrial societies with the advent of public and private insurance — we couldn’t do much about the risk (because it was external) but we could at least mitigate against our losses.

And now, finally, we have Manufactured Risk, a symptom of the risk society. Manufactured risk is the very risk caused by our own human progress and development, primarily because of the fantastic recent advances of scientific knowledge and technological innovation. Although manufactured risk is caused by human activity, because it is new and we have little experience of it we cannot calculate any probabilities associated with it. Although created by science and technology, science and technology cannot solve the problems they’ve caused — they produce uncertainty as fast as they destruct it. And besides, problem-solving is not the goal of science, science is for generating knowledge (via puzzle-solving).

Thus, whilst science and technology have reduced the problems of external risk, they have also brought the end of nature and manufactured risk with it. The threats and risks produced in our risk society are dispersed in nature and origin. Beck suggests that from this situation emerges ‘organised irresponsibility’; whilst anthropic in nature, no individual actor(s) can be held responsible. This also seems to resonate with the idea of The Tyranny of Small Decisions that I was describing just a few days ago. Scientific knowledge and technological innovation developed in an accumulative fashion, and are used by everyone that has access to it. Who can you blame?

So this is all very gloomy isn’t it? The End of Tradition. The End of Nature. The End of the Story? What can we do about this?

Seemingly the tools we used to get us to this point won’t work to help us move on and deal with the pressing environmental problems facing contemporary society; global warming, pollution, radiation, deforestation, carcinogens… To continue the story and solve these problems it’s been suggested we need a new kind of science. Not a ‘normal’, universal, value-free, distant science, but a situated, value-laden, engaged science. It’s time science stopped sticking it’s head in the sand saying “we just produce the knowledge, it’s up to society to decide what to do with it”. This ‘new’ science been named post-normal science and will be the subject (maybe hero?) as the the story continues another time. Gripping eh?

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Lester Brown: Plan B 2.0

We went straight from the pub to Lester Brown’s lecture at MSU this evening so I didn’t have a pen or pad of paper with me. I need to jot something down before I forget so why don’t I blog it…

President of the Earth Policy Institute, Lester Brown’s talk was based largely around his recently updated book Plan B 2.0. Essentially this was an ecological economics discussion, and many of his examples echoed what I heard at the THEMES summer school earlier this year (did I blog that yet? I should). For example, one clear message was that biofuels (ethanol) is NOT a viable alternative to gasoline for running cars; the resources and area demanded to grow the products to produce the biofuel are to great to ensure it’s economic or ecological viability. A more sustainable alternative presented was wind power; the US could satisfy its annual electricity needs by installing wind turbines in just the three windiest states (I forget which they are). If the number of hybrid electricity/gasoline cars increased this wind power could be efficiently harnessed, stored and used for travel.

Orders for wind turbines globally are so high that waiting lists for production currently stretch to 2008. Why not use the infrastructure already in place in the form of automobile factories to constuct these wind turbines? Unfeasible? Not possible? The example of the shift from automobilie manufacture to arms manufacture in the US during the second World War shows that “where there’s a will there’s a way”.

But do we want have the will? Are we in denial? Why is it so easy to persuade ourselves that there isn’t a problem? Lester Brown suggests that one reason is that we’re not doing our economics properly; we’re hiding many of the costs of the products we produce just as Enron did before their collapse. It may only ‘cost’ $3 to produce a packet of cigarettes (at least that’s the cost they could sell at before tax), but when you factor in ecological and human health into the equation we find that it actually costs $7 in terms of ecosystem and health services.

Echoing Al Gore in his recent movie (still need to blog about that), unless the environmental question is on the lips of the constituent when they meet their political representative, these issues can get swept under the carpet. We need to have the will to make the necessary changes, and we need to let our politicians know we want that change.

And I need to get some sleep so that my presentation tomorrow doesn’t collapse into farce…

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Bill Cronon: Secular Apocaplyse


I saw this photo a couple of days ago. It’s a comparison of the state of a Chilean glacier in 1928 with 2004. The glacier is retreating by 14 metres per year, attributed by scientists to a warming of the global climate. At that rate of retreat the it could be gone in 25 years. Look at that panorama though – would’t it be great to go and see that before it’s gone? Imagine if you were stood there confronted by this awesome sight, what would you be thinking? Greenpeace have been pretty sneaky though (as they have a right to be). Using those beautiful photos that would stick in my mind; when I arrived at that vista I might just think, “I contributed to this”.

I made a point of going to see Bill Cronon at the Thursday morning plenary “Narrative of climate change” at the RGS conference. He suggested that narratives of climate change have been used as both prediction AND (secular) prophecy. This idea of a secular prophecy comes from recent intonations of Nature as a secular proxy for God. Prophecies are often told as stories of retribution that will be incurred if God’s laws were broken. If Nature is a proxy for God then Climate Change is portrayed as a retribution for humans breaking the laws of Nature.

Cronon suggests that Global Narratives are abstract, virtual, systemic, remote, vast, have a diffuse sense of agency, posses no individual characters (i.e. no heros/villains), and are repetitive (so boring). These characteristics make it difficult to emphasise and justify calls for human action to mitigate against the anthropic influence on the climate. Cronon suggests these types of prophetic narrative are ‘unsustainable’ because they do not offer the possibility of individual or group action to reverse or address global climate problems, and therefore are no use politically or socially.

Coronon went on to discuss the micro-cosms (micro narratives) Elizabeth Kolbert uses in her book “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” to illustrate the impacts of global change in a localised manner. She uses individual stories that are picked because they are not expected, they are non-abstract and the antithesis of the unsustainable global narratives. He concluded that we need narratives that offer hope, and not those tied to social and political models based on anarchic thought that do not address the systemic issues driving the change itself. This is the political challenge he suggests – to create narratives that not only make us think “I contributed to this” when we see evidence of glacier retreat, but that offer us hope of finding ways to reduce our future impact upon the environment.