scholarly journals Environmental Crisis, Cli-fi, and the Fate of Humankind in Richard Jefferies’ After London and Robert Harris’ The Second Sleep

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Adrian Tait
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Risks ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Risk And Uncertainty ◽  
Industrial Modernity ◽  
Human World ◽  
To Come

This article discusses two instances of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ (Trexler, 2015: 4) that engage with the environmental crisis that industrial modernity has generated: Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885), and Robert Harris’ The Second Sleep (2019), which both depict a future in which technological civilisation has collapsed, and the non-human world is resurgent. Like climate change fiction, or cli-fi, these novels are concerned with the elusive and unpredictable environmental risks that modern societies inadvertently create, and with finding ways to negotiate the representational challenge of those risks; unlike many instances of climate change fiction, however, these novels do not set out to warn their readers of what is to come, or lament the disaster they depict. They are instead concerned with the legacy of technological civilisation – a legacy of risk and uncertainty – and the question of whether that legacy can ever be escaped. Neither novel offers an answer; but nor do they foreclose its possibility.

scholarly journals Ecological Destruction and Consumerism

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-46
Author(s):  
Clarisa Novello
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Public Agency ◽  
Current State ◽  
Human World ◽  
State Of Affairs

Literature that engages with the theme of anthropogenic climate change carries the potential of awakening the reader’s curiosity by creating a dimension in which the effects and impacts of the crisis are tangible. The urgency and unpredictability of climate change are articulated through reflections that combine societal, cultural and political issues associated to the phenomenon, hence encouraging a deeper understanding of the environmental crisis in today’s society. The article examines the novel EistTau by Ilija Trojanow to navigate the political and economic aspects of anthropogenic climate change. I reflect on the employment of fiction in finding ways to develop attentiveness to nature, whilst exposing how EisTau questions the power relations between culture, politics and economy, in a bid to influence the current state of affairs.  I argue that the depiction of the effects of climate change and the melting of glaciers enable public agency, whilst encouraging the rethinking of the environmental crisis and the acknowledgment of its connection to capitalism and to the constant accumulation of goods.  I observe how the exposure of the interconnectedness of climate change and capitalism encourages behavioural changes that lead to the adoption of alternative lifestyles that can halt the disastrous effects of climate change and prompts readers to develop a sense of care for the non-human world.

scholarly journals Sustainability Education in Risks and Crises: Lessons from Covid-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 5205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lili-Ann Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Education Research ◽  
Sustainability Education ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Environmental Risks ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Educational Policies ◽  
Human World ◽  
Teaching Learning

Humans have always lived in eras of more or less obvious crises and risks. When Ulrich Beck wrote about the risk society in 1986, he talked about risks as invisibility lacking spatial and temporal boundaries. The environmental risks of the modern society may often appear diffuse, even if, for example, the climate change dilemma has progressively become noticeable. However, this year, people on Earth have had to face a most obvious risk. The effects of Covid-19 have reached such proportions that the human world probably will never be the same again. However, the extent of jeopardies is not similar for all world inhabitants, neither are the tools to handle the risks. To face the threat and learn from it, humans need to change manners on many levels and in many social and physical areas. Some of the main questions to reflect on and discuss in this feature issue of Sustainability are: What will the most urgent role of sustainability education be now and in the future? What kind of teaching, learning and educational policies are most relevant? What issues are most crucial in sustainability education research?

scholarly journals Can the Earth be Sacred Once Again? Christianity and Climate Change

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-123
Author(s):  
Sean McGrath
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Pope Francis ◽  
Technological Revolution ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come ◽  
Climate Crisis

The following paper takes Pope Francis’ Encyclical on Climate Change as an opportunity to re-open the debate, begun in 1967 by Lynn White Jr., on the theological origins of the environmental crisis. I note that the Pope’s critique of consumerist modernity is strong, but his lack of a genealogical account of modernity remains a weakness of the text. I argue, with White, that the technological revolution which has caused climate change would not have been possible without Christian assumptions. The original disenchantment of the world was the Abrahamic revelation which disjoined divinity and nature, and contra to appearances, the disjunction was only exacerbated by the doctrine of the incarnation. With climate change, modernity is returning to this revelation in the form of the sobering experience of the precarity of the planet. Nature is now experienced as finite once again, and it includes us. Modernity, however, cannot be disavowed any more than disenchantment can easily be forgotten. A return to the Christian roots of disenchantment might help us to remember what we have forgotten: the virtue of contemplation, which could qualify modern attitudes of control and domination, and engender a Christian experience of reverence for nature. While this is a Christian response to the climate crisis, other religious traditions will need to come to analogous forms of earth-centered ethics if we are to achieved the integrated ecological pluralism needed for the future of civilization.

Climate Justice

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Sustainable Development Goals ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
The Public ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
To Come ◽  
Run Up ◽  
High Level

Climate justice requires sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its resolution equitably and fairly. It brings together justice between generations and justice within generations. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals summit in September 2015, and the Conference of Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in December 2015, brought climate justice center stage in global discussions. In the run up to Paris, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, instituted the Climate Justice Dialogue. The editors of this volume, an economist and a philosopher, served on the High Level Advisory Committee of the Climate Justice Dialogue. They noted the overlap and mutual enforcement between the economic and philosophical discourses on climate justice. But they also noted the great need for these strands to come together to support the public and policy discourse. This volume is the result.

Fostering climate change consensus: The role of intimacy in group discussions

2021 ◽  
pp. 096366252110206
Author(s):  
Lyn M. van Swol ◽  
Emma Frances Bloomfield ◽  
Chen-Ting Chang ◽  
Stephanie Willes
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Group Consensus ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
Group Attraction ◽  
Climate Change Information ◽  
To Come ◽  
Collective Engagement

This study examined if creating intimacy in a group discussion is more effective toward reaching consensus about climate change than a focus on information. Participants were randomly assigned to either a group that spent the first part of an online discussion engaging in self-disclosure and focusing on shared values (intimacy condition) or discussing information from an article about climate change (information condition). Afterward, all groups were given the same instructions to try to come to group consensus on their opinions about climate change. Participants in the intimacy condition had higher ratings of social cohesion, group attraction, task interdependence, and collective engagement and lower ratings of ostracism than the information condition. Intimacy groups were more likely to reach consensus, with ostracism and the emotional tone of discussion mediating this effect. Participants were more likely to change their opinion to reflect that climate change is real in the intimacy than information condition.

scholarly journals Revisiting the Scopes Trial: Young-Earth Creationism, Creation Science, and the Evangelical Denial of Climate Change

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
K. L. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
Scopes Trial ◽  
Creation Science ◽  
Imminent Threat ◽  
Young Earth Creationism ◽  
American Evangelicalism

In the century since the Scopes Trial, one of the most influential dogmas to shape American evangelicalism has been that of young-earth creationism. This article explains why, with its arm of “creation science,” young-earth creationism is a significant factor in evangelicals’ widespread denial of anthropogenic climate change. Young-earth creationism has become closely intertwined with doctrines such as the Bible’s divine authority and the Imago Dei, as well as with social issues such as abortion and euthanasia. Addressing this aspect of the environmental crisis among evangelicals will require a re-orientation of biblical authority so as to approach social issues through a hermeneutic that is able to acknowledge the reality and imminent threat of climate change.

Keeping the Faith: Divine Protection and Flood Prevention in Modern Buddhist Ladakh

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Butcher
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Himalayan Region ◽  
Flash Flooding ◽  
Flood Prevention ◽  
Proper Order ◽  
Religious Engagement ◽  
Moral Universe ◽  
Human World ◽  
Northwest India

In August 2010 the Himalayan Region of Ladakh, Northwest India, experienced severe flash-flooding and mudslides, causing widespread death and destruction. The causes cited were climate change, karmic retribution, and the wrath of an agentive sentient landscape. Ladakhis construct, order and maintain the physical and moral universe through religious engagement with this landscape. The Buddhist monastic incumbents—the traditional mediators between the human world and the sentient landscape—explain supernatural retribution as the result of karmic demerit that requires ritual intervention. Social, economic, and material transformations have distorted the proper order, generating a physically and morally unfamiliar landscape. As a result, the mountain deities that act as guardians and protectors of the land below are confused and angry, sending destructive water to show their displeasure. Thus, the locally-contextualized response demonstrates the agency of the mountain gods in establishing a moral universe whereby water can give life and destroy it.

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