Disrupt
In Bangalore, late in the summer of 2014, I listened to many animated conversations. There were political debates: the right-wing Hindu nationalist party had, earlier that summer, won national as well as state elections, evoking disparate reactions across society, sowing dissension even among the technological elite. There were technological arguments: should Bangalore continue to be an outsourcing haven for software services, or did India need a new model of development? Technology itself no longer seemed to unite people and offer exciting futures, as it had a decade ago. In Basavanagudi, a neighborhood named after twelfth-century social reformer Basavanna, part of the South Bangalore constituency where Tom Friedman's friend Nandan Nilekani had just lost the local election to the Hindu nationalist BJP candidate, I noticed a growing buzz around a social media campaign for a new documentary on climate change. Facebook, Twitter, and chats excitedly shared news of the upcoming global release of a film seeking to unite the globe in a social movement to stop climate change. Software engineers and social justice activists might, it seemed, be able to come together on this topic, if not any other.
The climate documentary Disruption opened simultaneously around the world in early September. By then, I was back at work in California. I found a local community-activist showing at a progressive church in coastal southern California. A Bangalore-based friend offered his Basavanagudi tech startup office as a site for a community showing of the film, anticipating that it would help link climate change to social justice in ways that would resonate with his diverse social network of techies, environmentalists, academics, and social justice activists. We excitedly shared plans for our near-simultaneous global experience of Disruption.
Through the next day, disappointed reactions from Bangalore trickled into my email in-box. Most of the viewers there had found little reference in the film to conditions they see every day: upper-class overconsumption, caste-based differentials in environmental living conditions, unequal distributions of the benefits of urbanization, gendered burdens of declining resource-availability, and the destruction of rural landscapes by mining and industry. How was life in India's Silicon Valley linked to the science of environmental change? Few of the film's talking heads invoked the complex contradictions that characterize the developing world's everyday realities, or suggested how citizens of counties in post- or neo-colonial relations to the United States, for example, might relate to American mobilizations on behalf of the planet. One viewer commented that the film seemed like an advertisement for a set of New York-based actions. Indeed, the film was made to build support for the People's Climate March scheduled for September 21 in New York, and it did represent an inspiring array of multicultural, cross-class coalitions, though its examples were drawn primarily from the East Coast. The audience of older, white, liberal-to-left California beach-community activists with whom I watched the film, however, displayed no particular disappointment. They did not dissect the film's content after the screening; they seemed broadly in agreement with its summons to action. They proceeded in a business-like manner to make plans for September 21 actions in their communities, drawing on prior experience with local actions to keep their beaches clean, and brainstorming about educational activities for their grandchildren's classrooms.Footnote 1
Community activism around cleaning up beaches, saving charismatic megafauna, and eating organic local foods are mainstream forms of environmentalism in middle-class California. The majority of South Asians tend to be concerned with issues of survival, livelihood, and equity; environmentalism comes to the fore via its intersections with these issues. In my experience as a researcher and teacher of South Asian history, I have found that meanings of environmentalism tend often to be taken for granted in affluent communities of the Global North, and to be deeply contested in working- and middle-class communities of the Global South. These are, of course, broad and contestable generalizations. To go beneath the surface of such general differences one observes in traveling between the United States and India, one would need to draw on the extensive work of sociologists, planners, historians, and other scholars of nature and culture on two continents. It was this deep conversation with the disparate scholarly and activist contexts of environmentalism that was missing from Disruption's analysis of climate change. “Disruption” is a common buzzword among technological workers in India's Silicon Valley. They were prepped, in a sense, to buy into the latest social movement that took up “disruption” as a keyword for social change to save the planet. But it was the business-as-usual, U.S.-based voices speaking for nature that seemed, to Bangalore audiences, to be less disruptive of the status quo than they had hoped.
I describe my travel and e-mail between California and India to suggest that this kind of daily global exchange is commonplace. The makers of Disruption might easily have drawn on spokespeople from Global South movements, or on histories of the developing world; they had at least as much access to funding, scholarship, and networks as I did. Yet they came across to international viewers as nationally bounded, even parochial. Self-professed “global” movements for environmentalism often conceive of themselves in largely national frames, after obligatory nods to the cross-border nature of pollution and the planetary dangers of collapse. Our course curricula and research agendas often do the same. Why should we teach and research environments with transnational frames? And what do Asian studies, in particular, have to contribute to understanding the histories and futures of Planet Earth?
Reframe
Speaking for nature is rarely an innocent act. Although it remains a potent and effective environmentalist tactic to invoke an imperiled, fragile nature in need of saving by well-meaning humans, a range of scholarly and popular writers have taught us to ask what social, political, and communitarian agendas are implicitly mobilized behind a narrative of saving, conserving, or working with a personified “Nature.” Because of the gendered and racialized significations that have historically been associated with discourses of nature, scholars of gender, race, slavery, colonialism, indigeneity, and caste have induced scholars to ask careful questions whenever nature is invoked.
In recent years, historical and contemporary studies of Asian environments have altered analytical frameworks not just in their world regions, but across national frames. A paradigm-shaping textbook in world history begins by recognizing the ways in which South Asian environmental historiography can transform the frames through which we look at historical and environmental scholarship in general. Edward Burke, in the preface to The Environment and World History, opens with the importance of environmental history as a frame for thinking about the world “holistically,” and draws the book's primary examples from South Asia:
Environmental history has the potential to transform our understanding of the human past. . . . Yet most environmental historians, while aware that ecology is a global and holistic science, have tended to frame their work more narrowly and to focus on the impact of anthropogenic change on ecological regions or even particular eco-niches. Few have sought to make broader connections to world-historical forces.Footnote 2
As exceptions to this narrow frame, Burke lists what he calls “atypical” works. All of these examples are drawn from colonial and/or gendered perspectives on environmental history. Discussing the exemplary instance of South Asian environmental history, Burke reminds us that, by contrast with U.S. historians, “historians of the South Asian environment have emphasized the impact of colonialism on their societies and the agency of peasant social movements against both the colonial and postcolonial states. . . . Whereas U.S. settlers regarded North America (and particularly the U.S. West) as an unpopulated space, the realm of ‘nature,’ and the home of the ‘ecological’ Indian, British colonialists in South Asia could not miss the fact that they were intruding into a landscape crowded with preexisting local uses and claims.”Footnote 3 Burke urges scholars to adopt a comparative gaze, which “results in reframing and deprovincializing familiar national or regional narratives.”Footnote 4
Burke's explanation here helps historicize the contemporary tendency to see the U.S. West as the space of the “natural,” and humans' role in saving it as a relationship of stewardship, tinged with paternalism and romanticism. This attitude towards nature is not restricted to contemporary Americans. South Asian activists, too, often adopt a romanticist paternalism toward indigenous people. They commonly arrive at it through a different historical route, influenced by nineteenth-century anthropology and construction of “primitive” Indian tribals as data for the “science of Man.” Comparative historiography and interdisciplinary studies of geography, anthropology, and sociology in these contexts help us to think across geographic and temporal frames. Our aim should be to better understand where our ideas of nature come from. Academics can help forge more effective ways to save the planet, if we teach from our specializations in the detailed, complicated histories of intellectual thought and political practices about, in, and around nature. These complexities, once thought too erudite for the realm of activism, now urgently belong in the sphere of engaged policy and action in the age of the Anthropocene.
Anthropocene
Planet Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old; life has existed on it for more than 3.5 billion years, with humans on it for 2–3 million years, living with other life forms. But the Anthropocene Age is named for us. As its namers, Crutzen and Stoermer, put it: “It seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch.”Footnote 5
There has been overwhelming agreement with the thesis of this original scientific paper. The last two hundred years have, by all accounts, witnessed a disequilibrium in the global environment as a result of the disproportionate changes wrought by humans. Many argue that only in the last fifty years has this impact attracted popular attention. As I suggest in the next section, history shows that concern for the Earth's climate is older than that; but it is true that the late twentieth century saw a boom in popular concern for the planet. In the 1960s, “flower children” brought a new popular cultural narrative to nature. Time magazine called 1988 the year that “the Earth spoke,” and referred to Earth as “Planet of the Year,” anthropomorphizing the Earth, which replaced the “Man of the Year.”Footnote 6 In 1987, The World Watch Institute warned that human consumption was driving soil erosion, groundwater contamination, atmospheric carbon dioxide buildup, stratospheric ozone depletion, and extinction of plants and animals beyond sustainable thresholds.Footnote 7 In 1983, in response to global concern, the UN Environment Program had already created the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the prime minister of Norway. Its 1987 report, Our Common Future, said:
When the century began, neither human numbers nor technology had the power radically to alter planetary systems. As the century closes, not only do vastly increased human numbers and their activities have that power, but major, unintended changes are occurring in the atmosphere, in soils, in waters, among plants and animals, and in the relationships among all of there. The rate of change is outstripping the ability of scientific disciplines and our current capabilities to assess and advise. It is frustrating the attempts of political and economic institutions, which evolved in a different, more fragmented world, to adapt and cope.Footnote 8
The Brundtland Commission report introduced the concept of sustainable development into global discourse in every field: scientific, technical, political, and economic. In December 1989, the United Nations General Assembly decided to convene a UN Conference on Environment and Development. This was to become UNCED, popularly known as the Earth Summit at Rio, in June 1992.
These well-known milestones in responses to the crisis of the Anthropocene are commonly narrated through the lens of European and American environmental history and policy. But at every stage, the developing world in general, and Asia in particular, have been invoked. At mid-century, Asia was often represented as the site of terrifying overpopulation; neo-Malthusian narratives were common, calling for population control in order to save the planet. In the later twentieth century, scholars and activists from the developing world countered the worst fears of the “tragedy of the commons” with careful studies of sharing practices, commons management, policy papers, and historical studies of Asian responses to resource crises.Footnote 9 At the Rio Earth Summit, and in every environmental action through the turn of the century, Asian and other activists have engaged, contested, and changed the terms of analysis and planning. Teaching Asian histories and politics, thus, offers rich resources with which to understand how humans have responded to the scientific crisis of anthropogenic climate change.
Histories of Climate Science
Humans have known about climate change for a while.
In the 1860s, John Tyndall warned that small changes in the composition of the Earth's atmosphere could bring about large changes in its climate. He knew that carbon dioxide trapped heat; he studied the relationship between the sun's radiation and the atmospheric gases that we now refer to as greenhouse gases. Slight changes, such as the absence of adequate water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere, he warned, could have radical effects. “Remove for a single summer night the aqueous vapor from the air that overspreads this country,” he warned, “and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost.”Footnote 10
Tyndall was no obscure doomsayer or marginal pedant. He was a professor at Britain's Royal Institution, and a prolific popularizer of science. “When he lectures at the Royal Institution,” a contemporary noted, “the theatre is crowded—not, as might be supposed, by blue stockings, severe as to look and angular as to outline, by ancient men with long back hair, and younger aspirants with bulbous foreheads, but with the men and women of the great world—the people who help to make society and history.”Footnote 11 Climate science was popular.
This popular fascination with climate science was not restricted to Londoners. When Tyndall gave public lectures in Manhattan in 1872–73, he drew large crowds (more than half of them women), and powerful politicians including the U.S. president and senators.Footnote 12
For a century and a half since Tyndall, scientists have drawn public and political attention to the problem of climate change. The late twentieth century brought three shifts that shape the forms of our concern about climate today: the irrefutable presentation of scientific evidence about anthropogenic climate change, a growing gulf between global scientific expert discourses and populist anti-science movements in the United States, and a series of post-World War II shifts in global geopolitics that brought many European and postcolonial nations into policy positions at odds with the United States regarding forms of industrial development.
Although the United States was often a recalcitrant climate-policy actor at global climate meetings at the turn of the twentieth century, it was not always the case that U.S. governments rejected climate science. A century after Tyndall first explored the link between atmospheric composition and climate, American scientist Charles Keeling showed, in the 1960s, that atmospheric carbon dioxide was rising; he won the National Medal of Honor for his scientific work. By 1965 the U.S. President's Science Advisory Panel concluded that “[t]hrough his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment [which] will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature.”Footnote 13 It warned President Lyndon Johnson that “[w]ithin a few short centuries, we are returning to the air a significant part of the carbon that was slowly extracted by plants and buried in the sediments during half a billion years,” and that this “may have a significant effect on climate.”Footnote 14 The report predicted the possibility of the phenomena we now see, in the early twenty-first century: altered atmospheric composition, melting polar ice, extreme weather events, and rising seas.
U.S. global politics since the early 1980s has been made up of a contradictory mixture of free market anti-communism, nationalist exceptionalism, and economic protectionism, followed by a post–Cold War redrawing of strategies for global economic and military hegemony. In the process, climate politics became simply another pawn on a global chessboard. In the political climate of anti-regulatory, anti-internationalist discourse that continued to dominate U.S. politics through the early twenty-first century, neither Republicans nor Democrats improved the American reputation for climate obstructionism (despite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] and Al Gore's 2007 Nobel Peace Prize).
The second half of the twentieth century saw another set of historical trends that have shaped climate change negotiations. The middle of the twentieth century was an era of decolonization, when several former colonial territories won their independence from European rule.Footnote 15 The resulting “Third World” nations came into being already having been historically underdeveloped, as part of colonial economic policy. As they became known as “developing nations,” and later as “emerging economies,” the industrial practices and waste products that went along with development were to become an issue in climate talks. While there was a range of “Third World” governmental responses to climate change, there was a common thread in demands for the industrialized North to take the lead in addressing the pollution effects and resource depletion that the West's industrial revolution and colonial expansion had set in motion. This argument, however, became more difficult to sustain in international policy talks after the recession of 2007–8 hit the Northern economies and initiated a set of economic discourses that saw India and China as the “tiger” and “dragon” of the future global economy, and also as the worst polluters, along with Indonesia, which was, according to the World Bank in 2009, the third-highest emitter of greenhouse gases.Footnote 16
In 2011, as the world prepared for another meeting of the Durban Conference of Parties (COP) to address climate issues, American environmental economist Michael Grubb observed the global stalemate: “Still reeling from the recession and consumed by debt crises, ‘the West’ is in no mood to be lectured by developing countries about the inadequacy of their response.”Footnote 17He assessed the outlook for future global agreements as “grim,” stating: “It is now abundantly clear that the US is unable to sign up to any specific international commitments.”Footnote 18 Noting the tone that now pervaded climate talks, Grubb articulated what everybody had known for some time: “The world has grown weary of UN conferences that, viewed from the outside, achieve nothing tangible towards solving the problem.”Footnote 19
Moving though the Crisis of the Anthropocene: The Role of Social and Humanistic Studies
Most people approach the issue of climate change as one that originated with scientists, and spread to policy makers. We look to nations to make sovereign policy, and to multilateral institutions such as the UN and the Global Environment Fund (GEF) to shape global policy. We tend to tire at the endless nuances of international law and scoff at the arcane games that nations play in the policy arena. And, like Michael Grubb, we can see only dark days ahead if we focus on the bodies and conferences whose acronyms litter the climate-change literature: GEF, UN, IPCC, COP, and so on.
But the humanities and social sciences have another set of lenses with which to understand long- and short-term change. Whether we study the Age of Revolutions or contemporary social movements, we have long been aware of the power of bottom-up organization to alter things on a grand scale. Our academic canons are made up of books that recognize this, including E. P. Thompson on the English working class; Sheila Rowbotham and Antoinette Burton on British feminism; Robert Bullard on U.S. environmental justice; and Arturo Escobar and Madhav Gadgil on Third World ecological conflict.Footnote 20 From resistance to historical modes and experiences of power have repeatedly come trenchant critiques of the inequities of development. Resistance movements that gain traction and make historical change have left behind them not only movement organizations and their personas, but a legacy of intellectual and practical analyses of the roots of uneven development. It is here that the most exciting possibilities for climate change analysis remain; yet they are often ignored by climate change experts from scientific and policy backgrounds.
The most sustained and complex critiques of climate change have been those that point out the ways in which histories of uneven development, and the continued unevenness of global free market expansion, have resulted in the uneven distribution of climate-related costs. Put simply, it is the poor and marginalized in every nation who have already had to pay the costs of extreme climate-events. They are the canaries in the coal mine, the markers of our climatic futures. In a scientific sense, an experiment has been carried out; the poor have been our guinea pigs, and the results are clear: vast sections of the Earth will be unsafe for human habitation if climate change continues unchecked. But in a humanist sense, an enormous ethical and historical conversation needs to occur. What are the implications of historic and continuing global inequalities for the future of human survival? This is a large question for which scientists and policy makers are not well prepared. Indeed, it is so large as to be nonsensical in a COP-style climate change forum. But historical, social, and ethical questions are the ones we prepare students for, in departments of history, geography, and philosophy.
When the historical, geographical, and philosophical disciplines are combined with training in Asian, African, and Latin American contexts, we have the beginnings of a much more robust and meaningful dialogue on climate change. The climate change discussions that experts dismiss as having run aground might well be replaced by global discussions designed by humanists and social scientists. But to meet the challenges of such a discussion, we, too, will have to shed some cherished beliefs. We can no longer be defined by our disciplinary institutions. While we must write from our expertise in these disciplines, we can no longer write solely to our disciplines. We must write to each other, and to the social movements that already forge new questions about sustainability and global futures.Footnote 21
Below I name five areas in which we will be challenged to think together with our academic colleagues, as well as in dialogue with activist movements throughout the developing South, and in increasingly immiserated sections of the industrialized North. Asian studies will take its place among all other disciplines, exemplary perhaps in the depth of its existing literatures on the history of environment and development, but always expanding its frame in conversation with other historiography and area studies, especially Latin American and African.
Scale
How might we think at different scales? Climate change occurs on a scale that is vast, encompassing spaces that cannot be confined to those of nations and their sovereignty, and times that cannot be periodized in terms of human wars and regimes.
How should we, historians, social scientists, philosophers—trained to think in smaller chunks of time and space—begin to think along the timelines of ecology, and the spatial lines of the planet? Geographic scale and evolutionary time scales are radically different from human scales and spaces. To understand these ecological scales, some disciplines have developed different analytic and descriptive modes. But we do not yet teach these modes in Asian studies classes.
To cross these borders of scalar thinking will be exceedingly difficult. But it is insufficient simply to claim incommensurability between our disciplinary backgrounds. We will have to be more radically interdisciplinary than we have been so far. And we must learn science not just for the content of science; we have much to learn about long-term narrative from environmental scientists, evolutionary biologists, and mathematical ecologists. And they have much to learn about the content of scientific debate from historians and philosophers. There are names for the small overlapping areas in which these questions have already been raised: environmental humanities, the history and philosophy of science, and science and technology studies, for example. Currently marginal interdisciplinary spaces, these kinds of discussions will have to take center stage if interdisciplinarity is to influence the shape of science and society. And Asia, like Africa and Latin America, can no longer remain marginal to humanities and social science departments. The bodies of work that exist in the study of “non-Western” history and society must become central to our understanding of inequality and distribution, as we imagine more sustainable futures.
Analytics
How might we question climate change's central analytics? Science is currently its primary explanation. But we continue to understand science's claims outside of the disciplinary conversations. As scientists found again and again throughout the twentieth century, one gets no traction with “scientific truths” unless a social conversation is built around them. Scientists have already learned much from marginal disciplines such as ethics, anthropologies of science, and histories of technology. Scientists discuss politics and society while they do science. But when mainstream humanists come to the “universal” question of the humanist conjuncture at the precipice of climate change, they tend to take scientific claims as transhistorical, context-free truths.
To understand climate change, our analytics cannot be encompassed by simple positivist claims about scientific truth. This is not a relativist prevarication about the truth of science. Nor should this kind of argument be an opening for the religious right's argument about science being a form of faith, Rather, the point is more banal, more pragmatic. Science must be understood via its historical contexts. The extensive work of fields from urban geography to anthropologies of technology have, for decades now, put scientific controversy, uncertainty, and conflict into social context. The role of Asian and other non-Western histories are, again, crucial to destabilizing the inherited mythologies of Enlightenment science.
Politics
With the apocalyptic narratives of climate change often comes a return of a kind of humanist politics that is at least two hundred years old. Although it is true that we are all connected by the fragility of human experience and awe in the face of nature's destruction, if we leave global climate change observations at this level, we leave unspoken the histories of inequality and exploitation that make different populations feel nature's power in different ways.
The return of Enlightenment humanism runs the danger of erasing the decades of academic work done (in Asian studies, as in other non-Western area studies) on difference and the violent ways in which caste, gender, race, class, and region effect environmental changes in radically different ways on different groups. A focus on universal man does not take us far enough into the texture and detail of extreme climate effects. Who is displaced when a storm hits the U.S. Gulf or Atlantic Coasts? When cyclones and tsunamis lash Asian coasts? When earthquakes hit Mexico, Iran, or Turkey? When a drought hits sub-Saharan Africa? We face the challenge of articulating a kind of politics more nuanced than humanism, in order to face the complex unevenness of climate effects.
Location
The human and the natural have, effectively, been split by the disciplinary separation between policy wonks who study the human, abstracted to national scales, and ecologists who study the natural, systematized in mathematical models. But climate change policy is littered with failures to integrate these modes of analysis. How might we arrive at ways of thinking and acting that take both human and natural into consideration? The first obstacle is the widespread belief in a human-natural dichotomy.
Who believes in the human-natural dichotomy? This depends, quite starkly, on one's location. Well-established disciplines tend to work on clearly demarcated sides of this putatively eternal separation. Historians and sociologists, we are told, work on the human side, while biologists and physicists study the natural world.
Who does not toe the dichotomous line? We could map this quite literally, in terms of the geographies people inhabit, and in their carbon footprints. We could also map this in terms of people's political and economic locations—on the margins of societies, at the bottom of a scale of difference, and so on, we expect to find less belief in the mythological binary of the human and the natural.Footnote 22 The human-natural split is violated in practice, in a range of contexts. Many of these contexts have been studied by ethnographers, who show how the natural and the human co-define each other.
The location of those who integrate, in their practices and in their social models, the human and the natural is often far from the location of multilateral policy institutions and scientific labs. But we must learn to think from these other locations, if we are to think about the human and the natural together.
Pedagogy
How should we teach climate change and history together? How can we teach Asian studies while paying attention to the interconnectedness of metropole and empire, and of different colonial systems? Interdisciplinary challenges for research translate into challenges for modeling new fields of pedagogy, new student majors, and, ultimately, new ways of thinking about sustainable futures.
Conclusion
We might return to John Tyndall, father of climate science, supporter of labor movements, and passionate popularizer of science. He wrote:
We are truly heirs of all the ages;
But as honest men
It behooves us to learn the extent of our inheritance;
And as brave ones
Not to whimper if it should prove less than we had supposed.Footnote 23
Today we inherit both a scientifically defined problem and a historically defined set of constraints to its solution. In approaching the human-natural problem of climate change, we might first turn to the histories of science and society as guides to the roots of the problems we inherit. If policy organizations and scientific expertise have not yet given us what we urgently need for climate sustainability, we might need to turn to studies that examine, more deeply, the certainties both of science and of disciplinary separations. We all inhabit fields of study that will sink or swim together if our conditions of existence on this planet are fundamentally altered. It is human society that must repair the harm wrought in the Anthropocene. As scientists point out, the Earth existed before humans, and will exist in some form after us.
We might close with the dark humor of a contemporary scientist who, asked by a blogger to express how he feels about climate change, offered this letter to Earth:
Dear Earth,
Just a quick note to say thanks so much for the last 4 billion years or so. It's been great! The planetary life support systems worked really well, the whole biological evolution thing was a nice surprise and meant that humans got to come into being and I got to exist!
I'm really sorry about the last couple of 100 years—we've really stuffed things up haven't we! I though [sic] we climate scientist [sic] might be able to save the day but alas no one really took as [sic] seriously. Everyone wants to keep opening new coal mines and for some reason that escapes me are happy to ignore the fact that natural gas is a fossil fuel. Well, no one can say we didn't try!
You're probably quietly happy that “peak human” time has come and gone and it's kind of all downhill for us now, though I guess you're more than a bit miffed at what we've done to your lovely ecosystem (the forests and corals were a really nice touch by the way) and sorry again for the tigers, sharks etc.
In case you were wondering, our modelling suggests that your global biogeochemical cycles (especially the carbon one) should reach a new dynamic equilibrium in about 100,000 years or so. I guess it will be a bit of a rocky road until then but, oh well, no one said the universe was meant to be stable!
All the best and do try and maintain that “can do” attitude we love so much.
Prof Brendan G. Mackey, PhD
30 July 2014Footnote 24
Mackey's letter suggests why the crisis of the Anthropocene is relevant to us, the anthropoi, more urgently than to the planet itself, whose geological scale is larger than ours and whose futures will come to matter differently. Human scholarship is one part of the range of efforts underway in this truly global crisis. Scientists, policy makers, and activists have already reached across economic, geopolitical, and cultural gulfs. National and disciplinary boundaries can no longer be an excuse for us to avoid transdisciplinary theory and practice.
Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge the work of colleagues and students who have helped me understand the diverse meanings of environmental justice: Itty Abraham, Kath Weston, Sankaran Krishna, Alberto Morales, Colin Cahill and Daniel Aldana Cohen. The writing time for this piece was partially supported by grants from the UCHRI (Urban Ecologies, Spring 2014), and the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing (Summer 2014).
