How Climate Change Comes to Matter

Front matter

Candis Callison

Change Comes to Matter

EXPERIMENTAL FUTURES TECHNOLOGICAL LIVES, SCIENTIFIC ARTS, ANTHROPOLOGICAL VOICES

Introduction

The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us, though problem and method pass one another by.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Debates about the nature of climate change often swing back and forth between what we should do about it and why the public should (and doesn’t) care (enough) about it. For many, these debates have centered on the stability or certainty of the scientific facts bound up in the term climate change. This book takes a different approach. It attends to these debates not only as struggles over complex and evolving “matters of fact” but also as debates about meaning, ethics, and morality. Considering climate change as a form of life, this book investigates vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds and the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in diverse efforts of advocacy and near-advocacy. Climate change offers an opportunity to look more deeply at how it is that issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter for wide publics and to rethink emerging multifaceted interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.

Climate change poses an inherent double bind for those invested in a variety of stances associated with the communication, journalistic coverage, and public understanding of science.’ The first half of the bind is this: climate change is ultimately an amalgam of scientific facts based on modeling, projections, and empirical observations of current and historical records found in tree rings, coral reefs, ice cores, sea ice cover, and other forms of data. Acceptance of the premise of climate change requires a fidelity to and trust in scientific methods, as well as institutional processes like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that collate, elevate, and summarize global research related to climate change. The IPCC is simultaneously a political, social, and scientific enterprise, and what it publishes as the ultimate authority on climate change is based on other institutional prerogatives such as national funding agencies like the National Science Foundation (which also underwrote this research). Not only that, but IPCC reports are also negotiated line by line among country participants and their scientists. With each IPCC assessment report (there are four sets so far, and a fifthis being released as this book goes to press), what can be claimed with certainty about climate change as fact is collaborative, consensus-based, and scientific all at once.

The second half of the bind is that in order to engage diverse publics and discuss ramifications and potential actions, this book argues, based on ethnographic evidence, that climate change must become much more than an IPCC-approved fact and maintain fidelity to it at the same time. It must promiscuously inhabit the spaces of ethics, morality, and other community-specific rationales for actions while resting on scientific methodology and institutions that prize objectivity and detachment from politics, religion, and culture. Science and Technology Studies (STS) and anthropology of science scholarship have sought to situate scientific research as occurring within cultures, politics, and institutional frameworks. How evidence is weighted, what expertise matters and when, and what kinds of research get funded all reflect inherently cultural norms and ideals. What this book asks is what role social movements and media play in how facts come to matter for diverse publics and what kinds of debates this opens up about expertise, advocacy, and professional norms and practices in science and media.

In the U.S. context, the question “Why should we care?” is not a straightforward one of translating scientific facts or even of getting all the facts “out there” and into wider public discourse. Nor does science possess the necessary gravitas anymore (if it ever did) to make all or even most Americans care because the facts somehow speak for themselves. If scientific findings were final, few, and powerful enough to demand care and attention from diverse publics, then occasional authoritative media reports might be enough to inform publics and convince them of when (and what) action is required.

Informing and convincing are easily collapsed in expectations of what role media should play in societies, and many look to polling data to assess whether or not media are fulfilling such expectations. Though polls vary, Gallup has been asking Americans about climate change since the late 1980s, and its annual reports show public concern ranging between 50 and 72 percent, with a high in 2000 (72 percent) and lows in 1997 (50 percent), and 2004 and 2011 (51 percent). Public polling arguably does little to explain how or why issues become meaningful, and it doesn’t show how publics come to care enough to act on an issue. But polling does indicate, particularly over time, how an issue ranks for an aggregate version of diverse publics. Consequently, polls showing how much Americans care about climate change have been and continue to be something of a rallying cry for better and more public engagement, policy changes, and political leadership.

Much has been made about the distinctiveness of American responses to climate change, both in terms of its political response (pulling out of Kyoto, or a refusal to acknowledge scientific consensus in the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency, for example), and the public contestation of scientific fact that divides along political and/or religious lines. (In 2008, 49 percent of Republicans were concerned about climate change as compared with 84 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of independents.) It is tempting to write these contestations off as just politics, or worse, as an only-in-America sideshow. Indeed, the most common explanations and reactions include outrage about the perceived lack of public scientific literacy, lack of trust in science, lack of robust media attention to the issue, or some combination of these sentiments.” These strong reactions are symptomatic of the double bind inherent to problems of communicating science to wide publics, where facts must be perceived to be produced without investment and yet must be laden with meaning once they leave the scientific context.

Climate change provides exemplary insight into how scientists and journalists are negotiating professional detachment and distance, and by extension for publics now forced to sort through claims and counterclaims that take to task scientists and journalists by charging them with bias, exaggeration, or alarmism. Social movements and individual scientists and journalists are attempting to bridge this gap in novel ways, which this book records by analyzing discursive turns that invest climate change with meaning, ethics, and morality. This book analyzes how climate change is being translated into varied vernaculars that make it a science-based problem with moral and ethical contours. In this, then, there are analogous applications to conversations about scientific issues and public engagement beyond the American context, particularly in western democracies where publics are expected to become informed and active. Besides western countries, there are also implications here for those who seek to address adaptation and mitigation related to climate change in countries where religious or tribal leaders play key roles in both communicating science to their groups and making their concerns known to wider transnational or international bodies.

Since this research project began, many books have been written about media, science, skeptics, and some of the social movements recorded here (Boykoff 2011; Edwards 2010; Hoffman 2011; Hulme 2009; Mann 2012; Oreskes and Conway 2010; Wilkinson 2012). This book brings these contexts together in order to think with and across societal ideals around science, media, and democracy. However, in contrast to recent attention and energy spent on the psychological processes that might bring about widespread behavioral changes among individuals, this book privileges the role of collectives, shedding light on the structural and societal aspects of how it is that climate change becomes meaningful and what challenges are presented when social affiliations are seen as consequential and constitutive to knowledge. Specifically, it seeks to address how public engagement works if we take seriously the wider commitments of scientists and journalists whose credibility rests on objectivity as a norm and practice (Irwin and Wynne 2004; Jasanoff 2004, 2005, 2010; Schudson 2001, 2002; Singer 2005, 2007; Ward 2004, 2009) and differently constrained social groups who must engage with the conclusions produced by science and articulated through, around, and with media (Choy 2011; Dumit 20042, 2012; Epstein 1996; Fortun 2001; Fortun and Fortun 2005; Pollock 2012; Rapp 2000; Sanal 2011). In short, it asks who gets to define what a present and future with climate change means, and where, why, and when these differing definitions and epistemologies matter.

What this sets at the center are questions and debates about expertise, advocacy, and adjudicating risk, certainty, and the need for action. Such an approach deeply questions the categories assigned to professions, groups, issues, and concerns, employing an anthropological view suggested by George Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer (1986) that takes the world as a system, asking how people “constitute their own histories” and futures, situate themselves in cultures, and work with and among institutions and their imperatives (Fortun 2003, 180). What Marcus and Fischer and Kim Fortun in her elaboration and experimentation with their work suggest is a conceptual reflexivity that critically engages societal constructs and theories. Such a methodology takes for granted that people must negotiate and act in emergent, complex worlds with an overabundance of information sources, and it employs anthropological tools and analysis in order to draw out differing modes of ethical reasoning in varied communities. This book uses the multisited ethnographic methods suggested and pioneered by Marcus, Fischer, and Fortun to get inside how climate change becomes meaningful in diverse and specific groups and how this underlying double bind of maintaining fidelity to science and expanding beyond it is negotiated by groups that are both central and peripheral to evolving discussions about how to communicate climate change. In so doing, it challenges the ideal of journalists as the public’s primary educator, informer, and persuader-in-chief at a time when platforms, norms and practices, and institutions are in flux, and it turns the formulation of public engagement questions around to think more broadly about how facts, meaning, and action are co-produced.? Instead of asking why climate change doesn’t matter or doesn’t matter enough for Americans, or how to improve and foster scientific literacy, this book is based on research that asks how, why, and when climate change does come to matter, what that looks like, and what roles there are for journalists, scientists, and social movements among a pantheon of influences and information sources.

The Fieldwork

When I first started working on climate change and public engagement in the early 2000s, I knew only that I was after a general theme that might best be phrased as how science wends its way out to diverse publics, often through media, and who gets blamed when that process breaks down. Roles for journalists, scientists, and publics were very much up in the air, but I knew that I was dealing with ideals that, however flawed, went to the foundation of western democracy and science—that facts and information should and must drive public and political actions (Gans 2003; Schudson 1998). In those early years, what I came across in reading daily news and attending to climate change discussions at MIT were indications of (1) a mainstream discourse in disarray, (2) debates behind the scenes between scientists and journalists about how best to communicate climate change to a disinterested public, and (3) indications of other conversations among indigenous people, religious groups, and business groups going on at the periphery of scientific institutions, policy think tanks, activists, and media.

It’s not that alternate discourses were entirely separate, but they certainly werent conceived as related or constituent to mainstream public discourse either. For example, the 2006 Evangelical Climate Initiative and debates among evangelicals about it made for an interesting couple of articles by the New York Times reporter who usually covered religion, and the 2005 human rights case brought forward by the chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council represented an equally novel and exotic approach to demanding an official American acknowledgment of climate change. Such news articles functioned more like an aside than a serious engagement with climate change science, activism, or policy. Yet the presence of such non-science-focused groups brings alongside the dominant conversations a differently configured and articulated notion of the problem of climate change. For Inuit across the Arctic, it is a direct ongoing and lived experience and one that both threatens cultural practices and brings scientists, activists, industry, and policymakers to their region in anticipation of major environmental change and wealth that will likely be generated through resource extraction made possible by a warming Arctic. For American evangelicals, climate change brings into sharp relief both relations with and belief in scientific methods, as well as a call to care for creation (the environment) and address poverty and disadvantage likely to increase globally with a changing climate. Climate change then sounds quite different being explained from the pulpit of an American church or from an Inuit elder in a village in Arctic Alaska than it does in the pages of a major American newspaper. This is how I came to devise a research project that looked not only at scientists and journalists but also at social groups that were not expressly or historically related to the issue of climate change.

Using methodologies from anthropology and STS, this book focuses on how five discursive communities are actively enunciating the fact and meaning of climate change:

1. Arctic indigenous representatives associated with the Inuit Circumpolar Council

Corporate social responsibility activists associated with Ceres American evangelical Christians associated with Creation Care

. Science journalists

WA WN

Science and science policy experts

Throughout the 2000s, each of these groups have been heavily engaged with their own group (and other groups to varying degrees) through media, conferences, workshops, events, and personal interactions. Each group is diverse, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed, requiring multisited fieldwork that focused on collaborative spaces, where articulations, institutional imperatives, vernaculars, and activism, as well as conflict and debate over meaning, effects, ethics, and action are evident and recordable.* Although a practice of “itinerant” multisited fieldwork departs from traditional anthropological methodology, it offers some purchase on the way in which facts travel (Dumit 20042), social movements evolve and form enunciatory communities (Fortun 2001),° and media operates as a social practice (Ginsberg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002).

My fieldwork centered on group and intergroup settings, and I conducted semistructured interviews with the leading voices within each group between 2007 and 2009. Traveling to far-flung parts of the United States from the Arctic to southern Florida, I conducted interviews formally and informally about the issues that members of these groups saw as paramount to the communication of climate change. I was interested in further investigating what seemed to be a mainstream drama full of mishaps, spin, and argumentation, and understanding how scientists and media were working together (or not) to inform the public about climate change. And on the other hand, I specifically sought out communities that dealt with the politics, morality, and ethics related to climate science—those who worked as a minority on the shifting terrain of new and old institutions associated with national and international climate policy and saw the implicit need to operate at both an elite and localized level. My questions asked them to elaborate not just on what they were doing about climate change but also (1) how they perceived public discourse on the issue, (2) the tactical options available through media in flux, (3) the utility of scientific findings and scientific spokespeople, and (4) how they saw themselves situated within and/or outside the climate change conversation.

The five groups were strategically selected both because they engage in the process of enrollment and legitimation (Habermas 1976; Latour 1988, 2005; Weber et al. 2004) and because they represent multiple means of intervention via human rights (ethical imperatives), the church (mobilizing norms and morality), the market (creating incentives and disincentives), mainstream media (mobilization of policy opinion), and science (production of facts and knowledge). With regard to the processes and approaches to educating “the public,” they also provide a stark contrast between the dominant dialogue about climate change reported by mainstream media and the often-submerged narratives that are rarely reported on. Together, these groups provide a basis for understanding democratic engagement, conceptions of publics, and the interacting roles of advocacy, science, and media in public discourse.

ICC represents Inuit in Alaska, Russia, Greenland, and Canada who are directly experiencing the early effects of climate change. With the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), the vulnerability of the northern polar region and the Inuit people became a strongly evidenced part of climate change discourse. The original UNFCCC document drafted in 1992 at the Rio Summit does not list the Arctic as a vulnerable region. ACIA thus represents rather stark evidence that took time to migrate to global policy discussions. What originally got my attention was the 2005 human rights claim that was brought before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights by Sheila Watt-Cloutier, then international chair of ICC. Though the claim was not submitted formally on behalf of Icc, it was supported by the organization and put the Inuit experience with climate change into wider public discourse in the form of legible rights and claims. ICC’s commitment to impart “a human face” to an abstract global problem reframes climate change as a matter of ethics, oral history, decades of experience with its effects, and scientific fact. It also brings to light the long struggle for self-determination across the Arctic—a struggle intimately intertwined with the rush for resources made extractable by a warming climate.

Ceres is a corporate social responsibility group based in Boston that has successfully repositioned and reframed climate change as “climate risk,” working to enroll Wall Street firms, insurance companies, and many other national and multinational corporate leaders in their conferences and efforts to push for legislation and regulation related to climate change. While the basic premise and scientific veracity of the research behind climate change is taken for granted, how risk is elaborated, measured, and managed is very much up for grabs. How climatic change will look on the ground for companies with vested stakes and interests in old and new technologies lies at the heart of how they consider climate change-related concerns. Ceres sees itself not as an environmental activist group but as a coalition of investors and environmentally concerned business leaders who seek to implement structural changes in the drivers of American business and investment.

Creation Care is a recent effort to make climate change a Christian concern and responsibility among what’s estimated to be 30 million American evangelicals. Traditionally opposed to what’s perceived as a left-wing ideology, concern for the environment is being retheorized as a moral and biblical concern, hence the term creation care as opposed to environmentalism. Science is not the primary basis for their involvement in the issue, though certainly prominent scientists have been involved in their efforts to convince fellow evangelicals. Instead, the role of “messenger” must be performed by those trusted to “bless the facts.” Creation Care translates climate change into the vernacular of the group by following biblical and moral dictates surrounding care for the poor and the natural environment.

While journalists and science experts do not conform to the notions of “social group” normally associated with groups like ICC, Ceres, or Creation Care, I am treating both journalists and science experts here as social groups in order to provide rigorous, comparative analysis of how they seek to transform and translate climate change for wide publics and think through issues of action and advocacy. Science experts and science journalists conform to professional norms and practices, and generally they see themselves as part of a larger group of professionals (Gans 1979; Hannerz 2004; Jasanoff 1990; Latour 1988; Merton 1973; Schudson 1978; Ward 2004; Weber, Owen, Strong, and Livingstone 2004). But climate change has compelled many to rethink norms and practices regarding objectivity, detachment, and democratic obligation with regard to engaging the public and persuading them to act on climate change-related facts and information.

In the cacophony of calls for action on climate change, the diverse efforts of these groups to communicate widely has become particularly salient as they are not only competing with other issues but also with conflicting points of view and priorities that have emerged within environmental discourse over the past several decades (Gelobter et al. 2005; Shellenberger and Nordhaus 2005). Each group has varying relationships with the environmental movement, with governments both in the United States and globally, and these intersect in various ways and at differing levels of intensity and collaboration. By studying them together, the language of science, while it may be somewhat diversely articulated in various subfields of scientific research, is shown to be a vernacular with shared idioms, terms, and modes of apprehension for expressing information and views about the natural world (Fischer 2003; Fleck 1979; Irwin and Wynne 2004; Jasanoff 2004; Merton 1973). In the vernacular of all these groups, then, scientific findings are combined with and filtered through other vernaculars, views of the world, everyday life, and democratic citizen responsibilities. While this is most obvious with the three nonscience groups, it is also clear in the ways that journalists and scientists think about articulating science for wider publics and in their discussions of framing and “translating.”

The past decade in particular has witnessed the dramas associated with coalescing “scientific consensus” on climate change and attempts to initiate political action (Oreskes 2004a, 2004c). These groups, however, take climate science as scientific and experiential fact and move beyond the debates about the veracity of climate change predictions. The questions they ask are not about the settledness of the science but rather about how climate change might unfold and what ethical and moral responses are required, or even demanded, in response. Most, if not all, must at times contest those who would see climate change as a false or exaggerated claim, but this task remains avowedly at the periphery. Instead, by translating the issue into their own vernacular, these groups and their leading advocates attempt to answer these questions for their own constituents/ audiences and wider publics: How do we define climate change for our group? What does it mean? Why does it matter? Beyond the group, the questions begin to shift to who can speak for and about the signs, models, and predictions of climate change, what lingua franca they use, and what constitutes expertise regarding the issue.

Methodology

Changes have occurred in all of these groups since the time when I conducted fieldwork, particularly in the leadership roles, but group sentiments and positions recorded here persist even as the work of the group might have evolved or even changed direction. The contribution of this book, however, is not a report on the positions of these various groups.

Rather it is an approach to thinking about how issues come to have meaning outside the established categories and in/around/through the existing institutions that attempt to manage these issues, both in terms of articulations and actions. Climate change in this analysis is treated simultaneously as object, issue, cause, experience, and body of scientific research, evidence, and predictions—as a linguistic “token” or floating signifier that is given value as an evolving, emergent, overlapping form of life (de Saussure 1986; Fischer 2003; Wittgenstein 2001). It is the way that climate change is articulated, used, circulated, and understood that creates its particular form of life and hence its meaningfulness for individuals and groups.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his seminal 1953 work, Philosophical Investigations, theorized that meaning is generated socially through use, action, and context and is governed by sets of rules and grammar evidenced through use and action. Wittgenstein’s many language games in which he seeks to know, for example, how it is we know we have a brain or that an individual is in fact reading, as Joseph Dumit points out (2003), brings him to culture. We know things because someone we trust has told us or we’ve read it in a trusted source. This point at which we no longer ask for explanation or more evidence, where “giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end,” is the point at which meaning is established— through our acting (Wittgenstein [1969] 2008, 204).

Wittgenstein’s concept of how meaning is established through action is the underlying methodology that drove my fieldwork and continues to guide my analysis. Such a method takes as its field the collective rather than the individual processes by which concepts come to have meaning.’ In locating what climate change means (what its form of life is) at various times and places and for various groups, this book throws into question just what climate change is, how “correct judgment” of what the problem of climate change is occurs, and what techniques and moral/ethical codes are used to assess it as a fact requiring action. The meaning of climate change emerges as many assemblages and efforts to explain it compete and collaborate in media and other forums to define the features, rules, and grammars of its evolving and multiple forms of life. Unlike Wittgenstein’s games for well-established objects in life like the brain, climate change presents a new conundrum of facts and predictions constantly in motion, requiring translation, clarification, and mobilization as facts requiring actions.

Drawing on Wittgenstein, Michael M. J. Fischer (2003) has argued that techno-scientific problems present as emergent forms of life—replete with ethical dilemmas, the face of “the other,” and historical genealogies, “requiring reassessment and excavation of their multiplicity” (58). This explanation of the facets of emergence and the work needed to understand climate change as a problem in the world (as opposed to in the lab, or in the policy debate, or in the content of a major news source) has shaped the ways in which my ethnographic fieldwork evolved. I began this research project with a set of questions about whose responsibility it was to get the message of climate change out. But where this book lands is in the midst of ethics, morality, and multiple, sometimes submerged ways of thinking about and being in/with climate change. What bringing together these multiple and diverse discourses leads to are historical and moral contexts for understanding how climate change is understood and integrated into ongoing narratives that explain identities, social movement directions and efforts, the production and weighting of knowledge, and structural elements of society that address ethical and societal challenges like fairness, equity, and self-determination.

Climate change then is not a straightforward problem nor is it a standalone fact. It is one in which many sea-level impoverished and wealthy regions of the world may suffer, where polar regions may be transformed, where unpredictable weather may devastate some and elevate others. Thus conceived, climate change is a term whose meanings are very much in negotiation among social groupings of many kinds, yet bringing publics into agreement with specific and narrow instantiations of it has been a focus of those involved in policymaking, science, activism, and journalism. Climate change, as this research shows and inherently argues, eludes stability and specificity, both scientifically and socially. We don’t know exactly which predictions associated with climate change will come true, nor do we know exactly how to make it matter enough so that everyone begins to act with a future laden with climate change potentialities.

The applied methodology in this case then aims to excavate climate change as a multiply instantiated fact with varying scientific, political, ethical, and moral contours. As an evolving, heterogeneously articulated, emergent form of life, the meanings of climate change are established through attention to multiple discourses, assemblages (institutions, actors, networks), and vernaculars where situated knowledge, advocacy, activism, ethics, and morality become apparent (Dumit 2004a; Fortun 2001; Haraway 1996; Tsing 2005). What this research thus follows are partially submerged narratives and meaning-making processes between and within groups.® It tracks the flows of information and sentiments, an evolution of positioning and positions, the emergence of newly configured professional norms, and a struggle for/against the re-inclusion of varied perspectives. This book records parallel processes of meaning-making where the stakes and what success might look like are considered and articulated differently. The ways that climate change is formulated and codified by these groups are constitutive to the understanding, care, investment, and mobilization around the issue.

In some instances, this process conforms to geography and so might be termed “local,” but it also conforms to the communal and to the ideological factors that go beyond geography as a unifying factor. In the vein of the Sapir-Whorf thesis on language and worldview, what these groups do is translate climate change into the language of their group: their vernacular.? By vernacular I mean to signal here the interpretive frameworks by which a term comes to gain meaning within a group and the work of translation that such a term must undergo in order to integrate it into a group’s worldview, ideals, goals, perceptions, and motivations to act. The groups described here are variously heterogeneous and fluid, and the notion of a vernacular is meant to describe how climate change has become an issue that a group is concerned about and publicly associated with, as well as how it is discussed, considered, and articulated on its behalf outside of a group. Vernaculars act in myriad ways to provide a kind of boundary-demarcation element for who’s in and out of a group and, at the same time, a method for enrollment and membership or identity reinforcement.

In this sense, then, climate change as articulated in graphs, IPCC reports, and peer-reviewed scientific literature is not necessarily universal terminology outside the scientific community. Rather, climate change itself is an object for which the process of how it comes to have meaning is not determined by its scientific origins. I am calling this process “translation,” but not in the strictest terms. Wittgenstein’s notion of language objects as forms of life provides an alternative framework because, as he points out, even when we speak the same language, grammar, rules, and meaning are still up for negotiation. Meaning cannot be assumed, though it often is; it must be established and agreed upon. I am taking it one step further and arguing that the ways in which meaning is established and evolves also create a set of stakes for the group, group leaders, and if we take climate change seriously, the state of tightly coupled global systems and the nature of risk.