Climate, Capitalism and Communities , livre ebook

Climate, Capitalism and Communities
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Boomtown:
Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Overheating:
An Anthropology of Accelerated Change
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Identity Destabilised:
Living in an Overheated World
Edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Elisabeth Schober
Mining Encounters:
Extractive Industries in an Overheated World
Edited by Robert Jan Pijpers and Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Climate, Capitalism and Communities
An Anthropology of Environmental Overheating
Edited by Astrid B. Stensrud and Thomas Hylland Eriksen
First published 2019 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Astrid B. Stensrud and Thomas Hylland Eriksen 2019
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3957 3 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3956 6 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0486 0 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0488 4 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0487 7 EPUB eBook


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Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
1. Introduction: Anthropological Perspectives on Global Economic and Environmental Crises in an Overheated World
Astrid B. Stensrud and Thomas Hylland Eriksen
2. The Political Economy of the Great Acceleration, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Anna Tsing
3. A Community on the Brink of Extinction? Ecological Crises and Ruined Landscapes in Northwest Greenland
Kirsten Hastrup
4. Sea Ice, Climate and Resources: The Changing Nature of Hunting Along Greenland s Northwest Coast
Mark Nuttall
5. Volatility: Understanding Global Capitalism and Climate Change Vulnerability in Mongolia
Andrei Marin
6. The Dark Side of Progress: The Intersections of Climate Change, Neoliberalism and Modernity in Peru
Astrid B. Stensrud
7. Puzzling Pieces and Situated Urgencies of Climate Change and Globalisation in the High Arctic: Three Stories from Qaanaaq
Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen and Janne Flora
8. Counting: Health Emergencies and the Constitution of Extractive Natures in Northern Loreto, Peru
María A. Guzmán-Gallegos
9. Expansive Capitalism, Climate Change and Global Climate Mitigation Regimes: A Triple Burden on Forest Peoples in the Global South
Harold Wilhite and Cecilia G. Salinas
10. Climate Change, Oceanic Sovereignties and Maritime Economies in the Pacific
Edvard Hviding
11. Islands of Hope and Despair: Scaling the Collapses and the Collapse of Scales
Frank Sejersen
12. Using a Glacier Website to Promote Action and Build Community: Engaged Anthropology in the Digital Age
Ben Orlove, Kerry Milch and Laura Uguccioni
Notes on Contributors
Index
Figures
2.1 The Great Acceleration imagined through J-curves
2.2 The home and the world: Hanford signs
2.3 1940s advertisement emphasising the great expectations held for DDT
5.1 Mongolia and its ecoregions (study area marked in the rectangle)
5.2 Booms and busts of the cashmere price in US$, illustrated by the price paid by factories to primary processors in China (A) and Mongolia (B), and by the price paid by middlemen to herders in Mongolia (C)
8.1 The continuous constitution of (river) parts. You are beyond [the company s] area of influence. If the river dragged the oil it is not our fault
10.1 The anthropological boundary-making of Oceania
10.2 Oceania as Big Ocean States - islands and EEZs
10.3 Oceania as a Sea of Islands
Preface
One of the most dynamic growth industries in academic research and publishing is that which deals with anthropogenic climate change and its implications. Every week, there is a new book in the field. Every day, another conference. Every hour, a new research article. This body of work has fanned out to cover the full range of academic disciplines, from geology and hydrology to philosophy and literary studies; sometimes strictly disciplinary, more often with a hint or more of interdisciplinarity. There is general consensus across academia about the reality and severity of humanly induced climate change (although there are inevitably outliers who question it); scholars also by and large agree that it has to be understood from several perspectives. For example, historians may shed light on the present situation by looking at climatic fluctuations in historical times, archaeologists by studying the effects of the great thaw following the last Ice Age; biologists by researching species mobility, extinctions and the effects of changing habitats; cultural studies researchers by looking at the way in which climate change enters popular and high culture, and so on; and at the forefront are the geophysicists and other natural scientists who play a pivotal role in the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Solutions are being proposed, ranging from technological innovations to a shift towards decentralised low-emission societies. The Gaia metaphor, originally suggested to James Lovelock by William Golding, is again being invoked, neologisms like the Anthropocene are coined, and the relative merit of such concepts is being discussed critically, along with the continuous dissemination of new empirical research and the rediscovery, sometimes but not always acknowledged, of older ecological and ecophilosophical thought. Such is the intensity of the academic interest in climate change that it sometimes feels like an overheated domain; crowded, accelerating, frenzied.
The obvious question following from these reflections is why another book about climate change is needed. Fortunately, we can offer several answers. First, the anthropological literature on climate change, focusing as anthropologists do on local life and local understandings in a comparative spirit, is not overrepresented in this field. Since implications of and responses to climate change are diverse, detailed knowledge about many societies, ideally every society worthy of the name, is necessary for a full appreciation of what is sometimes spoken of as the human dimension in climate change. And for change to happen, people have to be in on it, so we might as well find out what they are up to. Second, this book is not just about local responses to climate change, but it also tackles inequality and the centrality of global capitalism as the driving force in change worldwide. Third, this book should ideally be read not only within the context of climate research, or even the anthropology of climate change, but also as a major contribution to the ERC AdvGr project Overheating: the three crises of globalisation .
This is the seventh book to come out of the project, which represents an ambitious bid for a global anthropology. Overheating refers to accelerated global change, and the project aims to describe and analyse localities exposed to fast changes in the domains of the economy, culture and identity, and climate and the environment, but we have also studied mining, labour, waste and boom-and-bust cycles. Former books include an introductory text about overheating ( Overheating , Thomas Hylland Eriksen 2016), edited volumes about identity ( Identity Destabilised , Eriksen and Elisabeth Schober 2016), knowledge regimes ( Knowledge and Power , Eriksen and Schober 2017) and mining ( Mining Encounters , Robert Jan Pijpers and Eriksen 2018), a monograph from an Australian industrial city ( Boomtown , Eriksen 2018), and an edited volume, which began as a special issue of History and Anthropology , covering several topical areas ( An Overheated World , Eriksen 2018).
The present book highlights clashing scales in a world where bigger is better and there are few restrictions on international trade and investments; it also takes on the vulnerability/resilience nexus from critical perspectives, documents forms of local adaptations and resistance, and last but not least, it contains original ethnography from many parts of the world. It should nevertheless be conceded that a shortcoming in this book, as in most anthropological work on climate change responses, is the relative lack of ethnographies from those countries, and social groups in them, which are the largest emitters of greenhouse gases and most efficient consumers. There are no chapters from Qatar or Norway here, alas.
Many deserve thanks for bringing this project to fruition. First of all, we would like to thank all the core members of the Overheating group for the inspiring discussions and the encouraging comments received during the planning and writing of this book: Lena Gross, Robert Pijpers, Cathrine Thorleifsson, Elisabeth Schober, Wim van Daele and Henrik Sinding-Larsen. A special thanks goes to the formidable Irene Svarteng for her practical support in the organisation of the workshop in April 2016 that led to the realisation of this book. Overheating was based at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, which has given us all the elbowroom and support we could ask for, and we are pleased to see that research related to Overheating continues in new guises at the department.
The title of the workshop was Climate Change and Capitalism: Inequality and Justice in an Overheated World . In addition to the authors in this volume, several others participated as presenters and discussants: Mike Hulme, Susan Crate, Jessica Barnes, Marisol de la Cadena, Lyla Mehta, Karen O Brien, Marianne E. Lien and Chris Hann. We are grateful to all the participants