Building the Critical Anthropology of Climate Change Towards a Socio-Ecological Revolution Routledge Environmental Anthropology Series

This book applies a critical perspective to anthropogenic climate change and the global socio-ecological crisis.

The book focuses on the critical anthropology of climate change by opening up a dialogue with the two main contending perspectives in the field, namely the cultural ecological and the cultural interpretive perspectives. Guided by these, the authors take a firm stance on the types of changes that are needed to sustain life on Earth as we know it. Within this framework, they explore issues of climate and social equity, the nature of the current era in Earth?s geohistory, the perspectives of the elite polluters driving climate change, and the regrettable contributions of anthropologists and other scholars to climate change. Engaging with perspectives from sociology, political science, and the geography of climate change, the book explores various approaches to thinking about and responding to the existential threat of an ever-warming climate. In doing so, it lays the foundation for a brave new sustainable world that is socially just, highly democratic, and climatically safe for humans and other species.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students studying environmental anthropology, climate change, human geography, sociology, and political science.

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Climate turmoil: introducing a socioecological model of human action, environmental impact, and the mounting vulnerability

Chapter 2 –Conflicting anthropological perspectives: cultural ecological, cultural interpretive, and critical anthropology of climate change

Chapter 3 – Anthropocene or Capitalocene: rethinking our era of climate change production

Chapter 4 – Social inequality and climate change

Chapter 5 - Planetary health: a critical health anthropological perspective

Chapter 6 - Toward a critical anthropology of climate refugees

Chapter 7 – Can ecological modernization contain climate change? How the rich and powerful want to address the ecological crisis

Chapter 8 – The elephant in the sky: why and how anthropologists need to grapple with their heavy reliance on flying in the era of climate change

Chapter 9 – Two genres of the climate movement: climate action vs climate justice

Chapter 10 – Towards a critical anthropology of the future: climate change and future scenarios

Chapter 11 – Eco-socialism as the ultimate climate change mitigation strategy

Hans A. Baer is Principal Honorary Research Fellow, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Merrill Singer is Professor Emeritus in Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, USA.