The substance of climate: Material approaches to nature under environmental change

Abstract

Climate change is at once immediately tangible and embodied-in hurricanes, droughts, and the expansion of tick and mosquito habitats, for example-and almost unimaginable from a human scale. Climate encourages us to think expansively, in terms of millennia, geological epochs, systems and patterns earthly in scope. Climate, through material and cultural processes, connects people to weather and the environment, particularly in timescales beyond the human lifetimethough some changes occur rapidly, visibly, and spectacularly. This review seeks to understand how people mediate between climate change at once lived and unfathomable. I propose that people do this through interactions with nature as material objects and earthly processes. That is, there is a substance to climate that is sometimes erased from abstract models and political debates. This article considers the substance of climate through three analytical frames: (a) matter and substance, (b) lively nonhuman nature, and (c) experience and embodiment in science and policy. The materiality of climate allows us to consider the scientific and environmental impacts of climate change immediately alongside the power dynamics that enable and can solve this problem.

The nature, significance, and influence of perceived personal experience of climate change

“…An argument which continues to be made, across disciplines, is that of the ‘psychological distance’ of global climate change, emphasizing geographic and temporal ‘distance’ considerations, uncertainty and social distance, phenomenon and issue global scale and complexity, and convergent protection motivation responses to a salient and grave threat (e.g., Carmi & Kimhi, 2015; Hulme, 2009; McDonald, 2016; McDonald, Chai, & Newell, 2015; O’Reilly, 2018; Schuldt, Rickard, & Yang, 2018; Spence, Poortinga, & Pidgeon, 2012; Trope & Liberman, 2010; Weber, 2006). In a somewhat different vein, a number of authors and researchers argue that it makes little sense to speak of individuals’ experiencing ‘climate change,’ given the global, atmospheric system, wicked problem nature of climate change, its largely future threat status, and the inability of any individual to accurately ascertain causal attribution of any specific environmental event or condition (e.g., Brown, Harris, & Russell, 2010).…”

Muslims and climate change: How Islam, Muslim organizations, and religious leaders influence climate change perceptions and mitigation activities

“…Finally, a few studies also mention climate change skepticism among Muslim communities (Khan, 2014; O'Reilly, 2018; Yildirim, 2016) and governments of Muslim‐majority countries (i.e., Saudi Arabia, see Depledge, 2008). For example, Khan reports that Muslim farmers in the Jamuna River region (Bangladesh), where the soil is eroding and shifting, perceive the concept of climate change as “poisonous knowledge from the West” (Khan, 2014).…”

Views from nowhere, somewhere and everywhere else: The tragedy of the horizon in the early Anthropocene

“…There is also criticism of the processes by which technocratic approaches gain traction (Oppenheimer et al, 2019;O'Reilly, 2018). If the IPCC and other global bodies are captured by technocracy, then the parallel process should, ideally, enable opportunities to bridge 'the virtually incommensurate material worlds science and policy occupy' (O'Reilly, 2018: 7).…”

“…There is also criticism of the processes by which technocratic approaches gain traction (Oppenheimer et al, 2019; O’Reilly, 2018). If the IPCC and other global bodies are captured by technocracy, then the parallel process should, ideally, enable opportunities to bridge ‘the virtually incommensurate material worlds science and policy occupy’ (O’Reilly, 2018: 7). In other words, as O’Reilly (2018: 8) states, the ‘dominant, though unrealistic, idea that strong science feeds neatly into policy decision-making’ is unrealistic and research is needed that considers ‘the scientific and environmental impacts of climate change immediately alongside the power dynamics that enable and can solve this problem’.…”