Sourcing Stability in a Time of Climate Change

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change poses a direct and imminent threat to the stability of modern society. Recent reports of the probable consequences of climate change paint a grim picture; they describe a world environmentally much less stable than the world to which we have become accustomed. As we begin to adapt to our changing climate, we will need to identify new sources for the stability necessary for a flourishing society. I suggest that this stability should come from the ideals of the good life we seek to promote when we focus on capabilities, on the substantial freedoms humans need to flourish. These ideals serve as a stable foundation for well-being in a time of great environmental and social instability; they should serve as guides for our policies, practices and institutions. I conclude by appealing to capabilities as a means of integrating well-being into our adaptation strategies, and show how doing so may well provide a way of formulating a powerful moral justification for adaptation strategies appropriate for both the developed and the developing world.

Texturing Waste: Attachment and Identity in EveryDay Consumption and Waste Practices

“…Similarly, psycho-social concepts of a secure (though flexible) holding environment or transitional space in which subjects develop skills to anticipate future events and respond to them has long been viewed as essential in generating a sense of effective agency, identity and security (Groves 2015;Marris 1996;Winnicott 1971). While Suzanna and Jack seek security within their immediate relational and object environments, efforts to recover more tangible forms of interdependency echo Kenneth Shockley's suggestion that facing the uncertainty of climate change, we must identify new sources for societal flourishing by (re)developing our capabilities (Shockley 2014).…”

Living well wherever you are: Radical hope and the good life in the Anthropocene

“…However, specific details aside, the dominant feature of the Anthropocene is instability. This instability constitutes a substantial deviation from the background ecological conditions that have shaped human culture and civilization to this point (Crutzen 2002; see also Steffen et al 2007;Shockley 2014Shockley , 2018. While the instability of the Anthropocene does not (necessarily) point to our doom, it does indicate that we should expect our environmental circumstances in the future to be comparatively novel (Hobbs et al 2013), and correspondingly challenging.…”

Editorial: Adapting to a Perilous Planet

“…As we adapt to a world of 'ecosystems with no historical counterparts' (Hale, Lee and Hermans 2014: 183), we should reconceptualise harms in terms of obligations violated, rather than simply in terms of compromising the value of the thing harmed. Shockley (2014) takes up the theme of stability, and the threats to stability posed by a changing climate. As adaptation requires balancing the need for change with a need for stability, Shockley (2014) argues that we should appeal to basic human capabilities as a way of integrating a certain form of stability into our adaptation strategies.…”