Climate Change & The Humanities 2017

Climate change, the result of global warming, which is in turn the result of our massive burning of fossil fuels, is the province of the natural sciences; the vast majority of the information we have about these topics is clearly the result of scientific research. On the other hand, climate change is caused by human behavior, driven by economic considerations and the universal human desire for a better life, and ultimately affects all aspects of human endeavor including the “imaginative practices from the arts and humanities [that] play a critical role in thinking through our representations of environmental change” (Yusoff and Gabrys, 2011). Mike Hulme, writing in Nature Climate Change, one of the premier scientific journals dealing with climate change, in a 2011 opinion piece titled Meet the Humanities, asserted that “Although climate is inarguably changing society, social practices are also impacting on the climate. Nature and culture are deeply entangled, and researchers must examine how each is shaping the other. But they are largely failing to do so” (Hulme, 2011). This was likely the first time that many climate scientists thought much about the humanities as relevant to what they were studying. That was true in my case, and stimulated me to propose a course at Claremont McKenna College entitled “The Human Response to Climate Change”. My working definition of suitable material was any serious writing or research about climate change produced by non-scientists, and by that I meant people who were not some version of physicists, chemists, biologists, geologists, or engineers. In other words, I include the humanities and social sciences, but mostly none of the natural sciences. This book consists of summaries of texts published in 2016 and 2017 which meet these criteria. They are easy to read, interesting, and give a good sense of what non-scientific academics and journalists are currently writing about climate change.

Dr. Emil Morhardt is Roberts Professor of Environmental Biology in the W. M. Keck Science Department of Claremont McKenna, Scripps, and Pitzer Colleges, members of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. He has been writing and teaching about energy, other natural resources, and climate change at the Colleges for nearly two decades. During the two decades prior to that he was a Senior Vice President and Director of Western Operations of a large environmental consulting firm in the San Francisco Bay Area whose clients included electric and gas utilities, petroleum companies, major water suppliers, the Electric Power Research Institute, the National Park Service, the USEPA, and several branches of the US military. He began work in this field shortly after the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law, participated in developing the implementation guidelines for several federal agencies, and was one of the authors of California's first joint federal and state NEPA/CEQA report.