Expert answer:analyze the argument

Solved by verified expert:looking for ##summarize-spark notes -outline 1-Lambacher, Freedom2-Vogel, Nature and the Built Environment3-Head, the Cultural Politics of Climate ChangeAnalyze the argument:

Identify the primary question(s) the author is addressing
(What issue or problem is motivating the author to write? Are there several
related problems? What is/are the significance of this/these issue(s)?)

Identify the author’s main argument (thesis)
(What is the main thing the author wants you to think/believe/know as a result of
reading the theory? What answer does s/he give to the question being addressed?)

Identify the key concepts and their definitions
(What are the “loaded” words or phrases used in the argument – words expressing
abstract ideas that people often interpret differently? Consider words like justice,
equality, power, nature, etc. Also consider specialized words expressing new or
distinctive ideas. In either case, what does the author mean by these words?)

Identify the primary evidence provided to support the argument, and its type
(What is the main “proof” the author offers to try to persuade you to agree with
her or him? What kind of proof is it? Is it scientific data, historical examples,
“common sense,” “divine scripture,” logical inference, analogy, something else?)

Identify the assumptions of the argument
(What is taken for granted by the author? What aspects of the theory are simply
presumed to be true, rather than supported by any evidence? Note: anything that
is supported by evidence is not an assumption, even if you’re not persuaded.)

Identify the implications of the argument
(What follows from the argument but hasn’t been spelled out within the text? If
the author were to write a follow-up piece, what might be the logical next
point(s)? How might the argument be applied to an issue not yet discussed?
What is the significance of the argument for other potential questions?)

Identify how the style, tone, and other rhetorical devices affect the argument
(How, and for what purpose, does the author use metaphors, symbols, analogies,
irony, sarcasm, humor, purposeful exaggeration, a dialogue form, etc.? How do
these strategies help to shape the content of the argument?)
vogel__nature_and_the_built_environment.pdf

lambacher__limits_of_freedom.pdf

head__grief__loss___the_cultural_politics_of_climate_change.pdf

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6
Grief, Loss and the Cultural Politics
of Climate Change
Copyright © 2016. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
LESLEY HEAD
In October 2013, when a frighteningly early start to the bushfire season saw nearly
two hundred homes destroyed in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia,
Greens politician Adam Bandt created controversy when he drew attention to the
connections with climate change. He took to Twitter and the newspapers to decry
the new government’s proposal to dismantle Australia’s new carbon-pricing
scheme, pointing to the scientifically well-established link between climate change
and higher bushfire risk.
Not while people are grieving, said many people, from the Prime Minister down.
“Indecent, insensitive,” thundered the radio shock jocks (N. Mitchell 2013). Even
many who agreed with Bandt wondered at his timing. Hundreds were still fighting
the blazes, and residents were still in evacuation centers, not yet permitted to return
to see if their homes were still standing.
The debate sought to separate grief and climate change, as if both were procedurally and ontologically distinct and could be linearly treated. In this chapter
I argue that, on the contrary, grief and climate change are inextricably entwined.
An underacknowledged process of grieving – with all its complexity, diversity and
contradiction – is part of the cultural politics of responding to climate change.
It helps explain the denial we face and experience in accepting the scale of the
changes required in our ways of living.
My perspective is from Australia, but it is increasingly apparent that these
conditions are shared across much of the affluent West (Randall 2009; Doherty
and Clayton 2011). This is the converging, congealing grief at the loss of the
conditions that underpin contemporary Western prosperity. It is grief for the
approaching demise of the conditions underpinning life as we know it – the thing
most of us did not know was called the Holocene. It is grief for the hopeful future
promised by modernity. We now grieve the loss of futures once characterized by
hope, and face a future ridden with uncertainty and anxiety. The central argument
of the chapter is that grief is a companion that will increasingly be with us. It is not
81
Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change : Devices, Desires and Dissent, edited by Harriet Bulkeley, and Johannes Stripple, Cambridge
University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=4620945.
Created from usf on 2017-07-31 14:20:41.
Copyright © 2016. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
82
Lesley Head
something we can deal with and then move on; rather, it is something we must
acknowledge and hold if we are to enact any kind of effective politics. In fact, it
needs to become an explicit part of our politics.
In the terms of this book, grief is desire – affect and emotion. It is often a deeply
embodied emotion in contemporary Australia; raw, in the case of families who lost
their home to bushfires, and pervasive. It is embodied in several ways, including the
cognitive dissonance that manifests as denial, and in a deep-seated pessimism
contrasting with hope.
The diverse manifestations of the grieving process are being identified by
a number of scholars and writers. Some of these are vernacular and emergent;
others have been explicitly researched. Scholars have noted elements of grief in the
loss or change of loved places, as climate change transforms these places or
disrupts the patterns of social life that interact with them (Hastrup 2009; Barnett
and Campbell 2010; Adger et al. 2013; Drew 2013). Most of these studies have,
with good reason, focused on the implications for indigenous and developing world
communities. My focus in this chapter is the affluent West. More generally, Rose
(2013) encapsulates what she calls Anthropocene Noir – “the story without
a known ending; the looming sense of fatality; the creeping awareness that nothing
can be put right” (7). Or, as Hamilton (2010) puts it, Requiem for a Species.
The current relationship between grief and dissent (i.e. political action, in the
terms of this book) prevents a transition to low-carbon societies. Transition is such
a gentle word, but we know that to become low carbon, societies and subjectivities
will require transformative shifts in everyday practice. We do not yet know how
much transformation will proceed deliberately and how much will be forced on us,
but I think it is likely that we will be forced as much as governed to low-carbon
subjectivities. Many of the biophysical processes generating a changed climate are
already locked in (Anderson and Bows 2011). Transformational rather than incremental change appears essential (Park et al. 2012), given the possibility not only of
a 4°C warmer world (Stafford Smith et al. 2011), but also of an increased level of
surprise associated with rapid change in complex systems. The symbolic threshold
of 400 ppm of carbon dioxide is a poignant reminder that we are well past the point
where climate change response can be a planned, gradualist transition.
To me, it is increasingly unlikely that we will choose to undertake the necessarily
radical transformational changes. It is much more likely that profound and unwanted
change in the next few years (perhaps not even decades) will make a mockery of
current policies on climate change and other issues. Our challenge is not how to make
scarce resources last longer, but how to keep the most problematic carbonaceous
resources in the ground. The evidence is that we need to keep 60–80 percent of the
fossil-fuel reserves already listed on world stock exchanges in the ground to have
a chance of avoiding global warming of 2°C (Carbon Tracker 2013). So the
Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change : Devices, Desires and Dissent, edited by Harriet Bulkeley, and Johannes Stripple, Cambridge
University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=4620945.
Created from usf on 2017-07-31 14:20:41.
Copyright © 2016. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
Grief, Loss and the Politics of Climate Change
83
possibilities seem to include “planned economic recession” (Anderson and Bows
2008, 3880) or economic collapse forced by climate change.
We do not yet know what kind of social change decarbonization will be.
Incremental changes such as those encapsulated in ecological modernization cannot
achieve decarbonization quickly enough for the scenario above. Conceptualizations
of transformative change include the catastrophic (Gibson et al. 2015) and the
utopian (Bradley and Hedren 2014). It is possible that a combination of everyday,
bottom-up processes and shifts in government policy would engender a social
tipping point more rapidly than we can envisage at the moment. Given that diverse
literatures now show identification with environmental subjectivities to be
a minority concern in the West, it would be necessary for the present focus on
environmental dimensions of decarbonization (e.g. attention to energy, manufacturing, buildings, mobility) to be complemented by attention to the broader cultural
dimensions of climate change and decarbonization (e.g. implications for family
values, work practices, privacy and rationing).
However change occurs, we must imagine that drastic changes to everyday life
are in the offing. These are terrifying thoughts, given that humans are not good at
voluntary restraint, and given the way that all our lives and well-being in the more
affluent parts of the world are tied into and dependent on a fossil-fuel economy.
One necessary response is that this can only end badly, which is how I got to grief.
The structure of the chapter proceeds into stages. First, I discuss themes that are
relevant to the problem. I clarify whom we are talking about when we talk about
modernity and modern subjectivities, and I discuss anxiety and denial as explained
in the recent literature on climate change and psychology/psychoanalysis. I use
Norgaard’s (2011) analysis of the social organization of denial to build up from the
individual level to the broader social level, in which denial is a collective cultural
process. Second, I go on to use an example from somewhere where grief has long
been an acknowledged companion – biodiversity conservation. A number of
ecological writers mourn for species, habitats and communities as they disappear
in what has been called the sixth mass extinction (Barnosky et al. 2014).
Extinctions are clearly connected to climate change, and will be exacerbated by
it, but first need to be considered as a separate issue (see Section 6.4). Because there
is a long history of dealing with loss in this field, it is useful to probe it for insights
helpful to the climate change challenge. A key part of this argument is to identify
the kinds of temporalities implicated in grief.
I do not go so far as to say that grief can facilitate the transition to a low-carbon
society, nor that it will help us to feel particularly hopeful. However, I do argue that
we will not be able to make the transition without it – grieving is part of the work of
decarbonization. In the concluding remarks I argue that we need to bear our grief,
and consider what this might look like.
Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change : Devices, Desires and Dissent, edited by Harriet Bulkeley, and Johannes Stripple, Cambridge
University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=4620945.
Created from usf on 2017-07-31 14:20:41.
84
Lesley Head
Copyright © 2016. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
6.1 We, the Moderns
Who is this “we” who grieve for modernity? The modern subject in this discussion
is all of us who live with the ideal of progress, however that is imagined. It is
imagined differently in both left and right political orientations, which have worked
toward different utopias while both sharing the aspirations of modernity. Modern
subjects value autonomy and individual freedom, and connect the future with the
possibility of improvement.
If we moderns have had the hope of progress and improvement, the reality has
been dramatically unequal. As the histories of capitalism and colonialism have
shown, the hopes of many have been built on the suffering of others. In no country
of the world have we managed to build societies with both low per capita ecological
footprints and high levels of human well-being, as measured by the human development index (Steffen et al. 2011). So we must acknowledge the Western centrism
of our catastrophic scenarios – for many people in many parts of the world, daily
life is already and has always been infused with catastrophe and grief.
As others have argued, the concept of species is a mistaken category in the way
to think about various types of human influence, including the anthropos in
anthropogenic climate change and the Anthropocene, and the human in human
impact. For Malm and Hornborg (2014), for example, the concept of an undifferentiated human in its impacts is impossible to reconcile with the huge historical and
contemporary differentials in access to resources. Indeed, they argue, “uneven
distribution is a condition for the very existence of modern, fossil-fuel
technology . . . The affluence of high-tech modernity cannot possibly be universalized – become an asset of the species – because it is predicated on a global division
of labour that is geared precisely to abysmal price and wage differences between
populations” (3). Other differentiations that also draw attention to more particular
social and political drivers include the Capitalocene (Huber 2008; Malm 2013;
Moore 2013) and the Econocene (Norgaard 2013).
If, as is clear, the modern process of carbonization has been an inherently
unequal one, it follows that decarbonization cannot be an equally shared human
responsibility or social process. The cultural politics discussion needs to pay close
attention to who is implicated, in different ways.
6.2 Anxiety, Denial and Climate Change
Perhaps most profound and widespread is that dimension of grief manifesting as
denial. I am not only talking about the climate deniers who have emerged so strongly
in a number of Western countries, including Australia. Even those who have strongly
supported emissions reduction schemes, such as Australia’s price on carbon, have
Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change : Devices, Desires and Dissent, edited by Harriet Bulkeley, and Johannes Stripple, Cambridge
University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=4620945.
Created from usf on 2017-07-31 14:20:41.
Grief, Loss and the Politics of Climate Change
85
Copyright © 2016. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
mostly imagined the necessary changes as a variation on business as usual rather than
a more fundamental change. In a very real sense we are all climate change deniers.
Weintrobe’s (2013) psychoanalytic perspectives on anxiety around climate change
provide important insights here, and are worth exploring in some detail. She discusses the subconscious conflict between two parts of our selves, a narcissistic part
“that hates reality, feels ideal and special and is prone to omnipotent thinking,” and
a realistic part that “tolerates limits, tolerates having very ambivalent feelings about
reality, tolerates being far from perfect . . . and is able to mourn an idealized world. . ..
The narcissistic part is anxious it will not survive if reality is accepted. The realistic
part is anxious that the narcissistic part has caused damage and may imperil its
survival” (Weintrobe 2013, 33–34). Common defenses against these anxieties
include “feeling magically big and powerful” (ibid., 36) and denial, which can take
two forms: negation and disavowal. The former is “more likely to be a stage on the
way to mourning illusions and accepting reality [while] disavowal can involve the
more stuck terrain of delusion” (ibid., 36). “With disavowal, anxiety may be systematically gotten rid of, sometimes in a flash, through a range of ‘quick fixes.’ A central
quick fix is minimising or obliterating any sense that facing reality entails facing any
loss” (ibid., 39; see also Randall 2009).
These are experienced not only at the individual level, but also on broader
cultural levels of denial and disavowal. Specific anxieties about climate change
include the following:
• The loss of the Earth as the dependable bedrock that enables and supports our very
life. . . . Specifically, we face the effects of a climate tipped into instability.
• The survival of our very sense of self . . . our hope that we are generative – that our
children will have children who will have children into the future – and rooted within long
time.
• Anxiety that our leaders are not looking after us. (Weintrobe 2013, 42)
Contemplation of necessary lifestyle changes arouses anxieties in the narcissistic
part of ourselves, since “our identities and status are intimately bound up with our
lifestyles” (43). Weintrobe argues:
I think in these circumstances what we dread giving up is not so much particular material
possessions or particular ways of life, but our way of seeing ourselves as special, and as
entitled, not only to our possessions but to our “quick fixes” to the problems of reality. This
underlying attitude, just one side of human nature, is strongly ingrained in current Western
societies.
(ibid.)
There is considerable congruence between Randall’s and Weintrobe’s conclusions.
It is important to acknowledge and speak our grief and loss; we need to provide
emotional support to one another. “It is important for people to bear their anxieties,
Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change : Devices, Desires and Dissent, edited by Harriet Bulkeley, and Johannes Stripple, Cambridge
University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=4620945.
Created from usf on 2017-07-31 14:20:41.
86
Lesley Head
because when they do not, their thinking deteriorates, and irrationality, lack of
proportionality, hatred and narcissism are more likely to prevail” (Weintrobe
2013, 46). For Randall (2009), it is only when we grieve that we will be able “to
remake our futures using all of our creativity, reason, feeling, and strength” (128).
Copyright © 2016. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
6.3 We Are All Climate Change Deniers
Kari Norgaard’s (2011b) ethnography of the pseudonymous Norwegian town of
Bygdaby takes us an important further step from denial as a matter of individual
psychology, in her examination of how denial is socially organized and reproduced.
She adds to the widespread critique of the “information deficit model” (Bulkeley
2000), which implies that better information and understanding of the science of
climate change will be sufficient to solve its challenges. Norgaard’s study throws
light on the way in which, proceeding through everyday life as if things were
otherwise, we are all climate change deniers.
She lived in the town during a winter when it was quite clear that something
unusual was going on: the snows came late, and chanterelle mushrooms – a muchloved part of the Scandinavian autumn – were available until the end of November.
The disruption to the normal weather patterns of winter also disrupted the expected
temporalities of social life. Skiing, an important part of local life, was delayed.
Serving chanterelles for an Advent Sunday dinner was reported in the local paper as
a clear disjuncture in social life.
Norgaard asks how it was that a well-educated, politically active community,
whose national identity coheres around ideals of environmental connection and
egalitarianism, could keep climate change at a distance from their everyday lives.
In contrast to the United States, where levels of actual climate science denial are
higher, the Norwegians were not in dispute with the facts of climate change; they
did not contest the science. These were also lives that had benefited over the last
few decades from the proceeds of North Sea oil, thus benefiting from activities that
had contributed to climate change.
Norgaard coined the term double reality “to describe the disjuncture I observed
that winter in Bygdaby. . . . In one reality was the collectively constructed sense of
normal everyday life. In the other reality existed the troubling knowledge of
increasing automobile use, polar ice caps melting, and the predictions of future
weather scenarios” (ibid., 5). Drawing on work by Cohen (2001) and Zeruvabel
(2006), she built “a model of socially organized denial. . . [which] emphasizes that
ignoring occurs in response to social circumstances and is carried out through
a process of social interaction” (Norgaard 2011, 9; emphasis in original).
The social process took place through norms of conversation and norms of
emotion. For example, it was OK to raise climate change in small talk at the bus
Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change : Devices, Desires and Dissent, edited by Harriet Bulkeley, and Johannes Stripple, Cambridge
University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=4620945.
Created from usf on 2017-07-31 14:20:41.
Copyright © 2016. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
Grief, Loss and the Politics of Climate Change
87
stop, where people might comment on the strangeness of the weather, but not in
educational settings or conversations between parents and children, where people
felt pressure to be optimistic rather than frightened. Emotional norms, e …
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