Tvergastein bears the name of Arne Næss’ cabin retreat in the mountains of Hallingskarvet. It was there that Næss, an activist and one of the most wide-ranging philosophers of the last century, wrote the majority of his work. These writings, his unique ecophilosophy, and his life of activism continue to inspire environmentalists and scholars in Norway and abroad.In making this journal its namesake, we aim to similarly join academia with advocacy for the environment. We aspire to the ”enormous open views at Tvergastein” and the perspec-tive Næss found there.

© 2013 Tvergasteinwww.tvergastein.com

Adaptation and its limits

Ad

aptation

and

its limits

Issue 3, 1/2013

3rd issue

1/2013

Editorial board: Marit Flood Aakvaag, Sari Cunningham, Maryam Faghihimani, Jørgen ToralvHomme, Theodore Howard, Misha Jemsek, Luis Carlos Rosado van der Gracht, Eirik Sjåvik and Eivind Trædal. Design: Eivind Freng Dale and Sahar Ajami Cover illustration: Sahar Ajami – The cover, depicting the Opera House on stilts, represents a way of adapting to rising sea levels, and to climate change. Printer: Grøset Trykkeri Circulation: 800 Editorial review finished: 10th of September 2013 Date of publication: 20th of September 2013 Tvergastein has two annual issues and is distributed for free at UiO, UMB and several other locations. A digital version can be found at our web page: www.tvergastein.com We would like to extend our sincere gratitude and thanks to Mitchell Anderson for lending us his photographs, as well as to our sponsors: The Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), Green UiO and Rector’s Challenge at UiO. The illustration on this page is provided by fallenzeraphine.deviantart.com Address: Tvergastein, co/SUM, Postboks 1116, Blindern 0317, OSLO E-mail: tvergastein@sum.uio.no Web: www.tvergastein.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tvergastein Twitter: @tvergastein The article submission deadline and theme for the next issue of 2013 will be announced on our web page and our Facebook page. Tvergastein accepts submissions in two categories: Shorter op-ed pieces (2,000 - 5,000 characters) and longer articles (10,000 - 20,000 characters), in either English or Norwegian.

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Tvergastein 3rd Issue

4 The horror of Business As usuAl

Photo Editorial

12 KlimAendringene hAr KommeT Til norge

– Og Norge slipper ikke unna Erik Martiniussen

18 AdApTATion And TrAnsformATion: Why do We need BoTh? Interview with Karen O’Brien Maryam Faghihimani

24 rocK ArT pAsTorAlisTs in The horn of AfricA

Historical Ecology of Adaptations to Climate and Environmental Change, ca. 12 000 BP – AD 1860 Gufu Oba

36 ArT And ApproAching ApocAlypse

Melancholia and Beasts of the Southern Wild As Representations of Climate Change T. Vanderkemp Howard

44 “iT is immorAl To Be A pessimisT” Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in Norwegian Literary Fiction Reinhard Hennig

52 miTchell Anderson

Photo essay

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56 climATe deniAl, emoTions And everydAy life in norWAy And The uniTed sTATes

Dr. Kari Marie Norgaard

64 locATing climATe chAnge

Eivind Trædal

76 Blue Border

Two Ecosystems, Two Stories, One World Ingeborg Ulvund Barlaup and Ingrid Marie Martinsen

86 mennesKe inn i KlimAmodellAne

Hanna Kvamsås

92 inTerpreTing The rAmsey equATion

Frikk Nesje

102 A resilienT TrAnsiTion

Towards Developing Ecological Resilience Through Psychological Resilience Myrtle Cooper

110 ABouT The conTriBuTors

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The ice cap on the Norh Pole will be completely gone in the summer by the end of the century if global warming reaches two degrees.

Photo: NASA Goddard

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The Horror of Business as Usual

Climate change is unavoidable. That was the conclusion of the newest draft of the IPCC report on climate change, leaked to Reuters on the 19th of August, 2013. This can lead to fatalism. It is easy to think that if mitigation of climate change is impossible, we should just skip that step, and move right on to adaptation.

This idea is flawed on several levels. Firstly, we must acknowledge that climate change is not a question of either-or, but literally of degrees. The less we mitigate emissions now, the bigger the problems we will face in the future. Secondly, not everything can adapt in time. Every concession of degrees – be it one, two or three – of warming, means accepting perhaps irrevocable damage and destruction to societies, to individuals, to habitats and to species.

Unfortunately, large portions of the world as we know it can never adapt to the projected warm-ing. 0.8 degrees of warming has already occurred and reaching two degrees seems unaviodable at this point. It is already time to consider what places, what species, and what landscapes we have given up on. What has slipped through our fingers, in our endless talks, conflict and stalling over climate change. Status quo is also a choice, and in the coming decades, we must acknowledge that adapta-tion will be a luxury, which large parts of life on earth will not be able to afford.

Behind every sterile buzzword, filling the pages of a veritable rainforest of literature on our coming struggle - including this journal, of course - is a stark reality. Sustainability has never been a choice, it is inevitable. Adaptation will not be a choise, it is inevitable. It is the abyss we drift towards when we do not make sufficient and informed choises to navigate away. The costs of adaptation and transition to sustainability, and the question of who will foot the bill, is still hidden somewhere behind the jargon.

41 years ago, Jørgen Randers, Donella and Dennis Meadows shook the environmental com-munity with their book “limits to growth”. Today, as our civilization is steadily overshooting our sustainable levels of consumption, we may have to face another, frightening question: what are the limits to adaptation? What can be saved? We have a moral responsibility to remember the destruc-tion implicit in these words. The horror of ‘business as usual’, the destruction of ‘status quo’, the sufferings of ‘adaptation’.

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Tuvalu cannot adapt to the ocean level rise predicted by the IPCC.Photo: Stefan Lins

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Clownfish and other parts of coral reef ecosystems cannot adapt to warming and more acidic oceans.Photo: Hani Amir

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The American Pika is threatened by extinciton because of climate change.Photo: AdititheStargazer

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The seabird Krykkje, native to Norway, is dying out, because of warming water. It will not survive the projected warming.

Photo: Ulrich Latzenhofer

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40% of productive land is projected to be lost in the southern region of Bangladesh if the oceans rise 65 cm by 2080s. Current predictions go as high as 97 cm.

Photo: dougsyme

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The coffee plant is vulnerable to temperature and climate changes. Nearly 100 percent of the places where it grows in the wild—mostly Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya—may become unsuitable for the plant by 2080.

Photo: datenhamster.org

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En dag i august 2011 vandret Erling Briksdal (56) opp til Briksdalsbreen for å måle lengden på den. Han hadde bodd opp under breen hele sitt liv, og hadde gått turen mange ganger før. Han visste at breen var i ferd med å trekke seg tilbake, men det som møtte ham denne dagen kom likevel som en overraskelse. Brearmen, som årlig fikk besøk av nesten 300.000 turister, var brutt i to. Vannet fosset ut under den smeltende isen. Han tok fram kameraet og ringte lokal-avisen Fjordingen. «Det er noen uker siden jeg var der sist, men dette var en overraskelse», sa Briksdal til avisa som satte bildet av den delte breen på trykk.

De siste hundre årene har Briksdalsbreen

trukket seg tilbake nesten en kilometer. Smelt-ingen har akselerert de siste ti årene. Klimafor-skerne levner den liten mulighet for å overleve. Men den er slett ikke den eneste breen som er i ferd med å forsvinne i Norge. I tillegg til Briks-dalsbreen er 12 andre brearmer i tilbakegang her til lands. Gråfjellsbrea i Kvinnherad har gått til-bake 270 meter siden 2002 og Buerbreen i Odda er redusert med 281 meter siden 1998. Ved Hardangerjøkulen har Rembesdalsskåka i Eidf-jord gått tilbake 349 meter siden 1997, mens Midtdalsbreen ved Finse har gått tilbake 154 meter siden 2001.1 Om sommertemperaturene i Norge øker med 2,3 grader vil 98 prosent av de norske breene forsvinne.2

Klimaendringene har kommet til Norge

– Og Norge slipper ikke unna

Erik Martiniussen

Illustrasjon: NVE

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norge druKner i regn

Bresmeltingen er bare ett eksempel på hvordan Norge påvirkes av klimaendringene. I gjennom-snitt er jorden nå 0,8 grader varmere enn den var i førindustriell tid. Men temperaturøkningen er ikke jevnt fordelt over kloden. I nordområdene og i Norge stiger temperaturen raskere enn den gjør i andre deler av verden. Konsekvensen er at gjennomsnittstemperaturen nord for 64. bred-degrad allerede har økt med 2 grader. Det fører til varmere somre i Nord-Norge, slik vi har sett i år, men også mer nedbør og flom.

Høyere temperatur gir mer fordampning og vanndamp i atmosfæren, noe som fører til mer regn. I mai og juni i år fikk vi et forvarsel på hva som er i emning. De to vårmånedene ble noen av de våteste mai og junimånedene som noen gang er registrert her til lands. I mai regnet det 150 prosent av normalen. Nye nedbørsrekorder for mai ble satt på mer enn 30 ulike vær- stasjoner, mange av dem i Oppland, Buskerud og Hedmark, som ble preget av storflom. 23. mai var en av de verste dagene. På værstasjonen på Sjoa i Oppland falt mer enn 50 millimeter nedbør på ett døgn. Det tilsvarer 50 liter med vann over hver kvadratmeter av bygda, eller fem tonn med vann per mål. Aldri hadde det regnet mer i Sjåk på et døgn, noe som førte til storflom i hele Gudbrandsdalen.

Også i Buskerud og Hedmark ble det satt nedbørsrekorder. Samtidig førte de store van-nmassene til ras i fjellet, stengte veier og stengt jernbane. Til sammen kom det inn over 2000 skademeldinger over hele Sør-Norge. Ifølge Norsk Naturskadepool vil kostnadene for å rydde opp belage seg til mer enn en halv mil-liard kroner.

Med en søkkvåt maimåned bak seg ventet mange østlendinger på finværet i juni. Men det måtte vente lenge. Juni 2013 ble nemlig enda våtere enn mai, med en nedbør på 160 prosent av normalen. Nok en gang ble det flom og ras i Gudbrandsdalen. Denne gangen var det tett-stedet Tretten som ble rammet. Særlig dramatisk

ble det for en av beboerne, som fikk en bekk gjennom huset sitt. Vannmassene kom inn via verandaen og pløyde veg gjennom deler av hu-set. Den enslige mannen som bodde der kom seg heldigvis velberget ut.

Flommen ble enkelte steder regnet som en hundreårsflom. Men det var ikke 100 år siden siste flom av tilsvarende størrelse rammet Gud-brandsdalen. Det var to år siden.

Faktisk regnet det enda mer i juni 2011 enn det gjorde i juni 2013. Da regnet det 170 prosent av normalen. Måneden etter, juli 2011, ble det satt rekord igjen, med 185 prosent av normalen.3 Det mest oppsiktsvekkende med de nye nedbørsrekordene er likevel ikke størrelsen på dem, men at de nå kommer langt tettere enn før. For mange av de gamle rekordene er slett ikke så gamle. Normalt skulle man vente at det gikk flere tiår mellom slike ekstreme ned-børsmåneder som vi har hatt i 2013 og 2011. Men sist det ble satt slike rekorder i Norge var i 2010, 2000 og 1999.

Været er rett og slett ikke normalt lenger. I Norge regner det nå 20 prosent mer enn for 100 år siden. Og ifølge FNs klimapanel vil CO2-mengden i atmosfæren øke med nye 40 prosent fram mot 2100. Det vil gi ytterligere 30 prosent mer nedbør i Norge. Dager med kort og inten-sivt regn vil fortsette å øke i hyppighet.4 Det betyr at en by som Bergen, som i dag mottar nesten tre meter med nedbør i året, vil kunne få opp mot fire meter regn i året. Oslo vil kunne få opp mot to meter regn i året, noe som ikke er langt unna hva nettopp Bergen hadde på midten av 1900-tallet. Selv om vi bygger ut kostbare og nye, høydimensjonerte avløpssystem, vil vårf-lom bli et årlig fenomen.

snAufjelleT gror igjen

Mer regn og smeltende isbreer. Hva mer kan vi forvente oss i framtidens Norge? Plantebiolog Sverre Lundmo mener å sitte på ett av svarene. I sommer var han på klimabefaring på fjellet Trolltiden på Arnøya i Troms. Der fant for-

Klimaendringene har kommet til Norge

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skerne blåbærlyng langt høyere opp i snaufjellet enn forventet.

«Plantene var unge og det betyr at de har etablert seg relativt tidlig», fortalte han til avisa Nordlys.5 Dataene han var med på å samle inn vil i tiårene fremover gi kunnskap om hvordan

den norske naturen forandrer seg. 20 referanse-ruter skal etableres rundt om i landet for å se hvor raskt vegetasjonen i fjellet øker. Med et var-mere vær sprer trær og busker seg til snaufjellet. På Finnmarksvidda vokser det i dag langt flere trær, busker og mose enn det gjorde for 100 år siden.6 Kanskje ikke så rart, så lenge sommer-temperaturen i Alta kryper opp mot 30 grader i juni og juli måned. På Skibotn i Troms ble det den 9. juli 2011 målt en temperatur på 31,4 grader, den varmeste julitemperaturen i landet som helhet det året. Fire stasjoner i Nordland og Troms satte ny varmerekord den måneden.7

Mange nordlendinger kan glede seg over varme sommerkvelder. Men de store endrin-gene skaper problemer for reinsdyrene, som får problemer med å skrape fram mat om vinteren. Med mer vegetasjon pakker snøen seg hardt rundt bukser og trær slik at reinsdyrene ikke får tak i mat. Samme tendens er målt i høyfjells-områdene i Sør-Norge. Planter som i dag ikke kan overleve i fjellet, fortrenger planter og dyr som er avhengig av snaufjell. Fjellreven, snøugla og snøspurven er bare noen av dyrene som kan forsvinne. Nye arter og insekter, som til nå har vært fremmede i norsk natur, kan komme inn.8

Fjell, vidder og breer er viktige identitets-markører for nordmenn. Klimaendringene truer dem alle sammen. Breene og viddene er nevnt. Men hva med fjellet?

I 2009 fikk regjeringen utarbeidet en studie som skulle si noe om hva slags virkninger klima-endringene vil ha her til lands. Et av funnene var

at varmere vær truer permafrosten i de norske fjellene.

Mange norske høyfjellsområder er fulle av permafrost. Denne oppstår når bakken er kon-tinuerlig frosset i mer enn to år. Den kan ha ulike former, som frosset grunnfjell, løsmasse av

ulike typer, og glasiale typer, frosset is og stein. Der grunnen består av løsmasser danner perma-frosten såkalt jordbunnis, som binder løsmassen sammen. I fjellskråninger med løst fjell og løs-masser vil permafrosten virke stabiliserende.

I Sør-Norge er det permafrost i store deler av fjellet, helt ned mot 1400 meter over havet. Tiner isen vil massen begynne å bevege på seg. Det vil ikke bare skape problemer for den som er vant til å gå i fjellet, men vil også påvirke elver og dalfører lenger ned.

På Juvasshøe i Jotunheimen er det påvist at temperaturen i permafrosten er i ferd med å øke med 0,4 grader per tiår. Tilsvarende tem-peraturøkning er også påvist andre steder. Løse fjellpartier, der en utglidning kan ha katastrofale konsekvenser, er identifisert flere steder i Møre og Romsdal og Troms. På Nordnesfjellet i Troms er det en rekke ustabile fjellpartier som beveger seg opp til 3 centimeter i året. På samme sted strekker permafrosten seg ned mot 700 meter over havet. Med klimaendringene vil dette en-dre seg. Dersom fjellmassivet glir ut, vil det rase ned i Lyngenfjorden, og skape en flodbølge med store konsekvenser for alle som bor rundt hele fjorden.

KlimAendringer BrA for norge?Det er ingen tvil om at klimaendringene vil ramme Norge hardt. Derfor er det underlig å se med hvilket hovmod de møtes. Enkelte studier hevder til og med at det er positivt med kli-maendringer i Norge. Vekstsesongen for land-

Erik Martiniussen

Flommen ble enkelte steder regnet som en hun-dreårsflom. Men det var ikke 100 år siden siste

flommet rammet Gudbrandsdalen. Det var to år.

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bruket vil bli lengre og varmere vær vil gi flere turister konkluderte Vista Analyse med i 2010. Slik kunne Norge tjene på klimaendringene. Spør turistene som kommer for å se Briksdals-breen om de er enige. De kommer ikke til Norge for å sole seg og bade på stranda. De kommer for å se spektakulære fjell, vill natur og spen-nende isbreer. Klarvær og opphold er heller ikke å forakte for å skape gode turistminner. Men her spiller klimaendringene heller negativt enn positivt inn. Likevel hevder Vista Analyse altså at turistnæringen vil kunne tjene opp mot 60 milliarder kroner mer i året, om temperaturen her til lands stiger med fire grader.9

Utsiktene for jordbruket er heller ikke rosen-røde. Etter flommen i 2011 falt kornproduks-jonen i Norge som en stein. Over store deler av Sør-Norge var nedbøren 185 prosent av nor-malen. Korn- og potetåkre råtnet på rot, og det var umulig å kjøre ut maskiner for å høste. Avlingene ble ødelagt av ekstremværet. På Sels- vollen i Gudbrandsdalen ble enorme arealer med hveteavlinger ødelagt av flom. I Telemark og Oppland var situasjonen tilsvarende. Bønd-ene tapte millioner av kroner.

I fjor var det Troms som fikk ekstremned-børen. I Bardu, Målselv, Balsfjord og Storfjord ble mer enn 5000 dekar dyrket mark ødelagt. Tilsvarende har det vært de seneste årene. I 2008 og 2009 sviktet hveteavlingene etter mye ned-bør. Bare rundt 30 prosent av mathveten kunne brukes til matproduksjon, rapporterte Statens Landbruksforvaltning. Også i år ser situasjonen mørk ut for bøndene grunnet sein og våt vår.

Mot dette grelle bakteppet av mer ekstrem nedbør og mindre forutsigbart vær, blir speku-lasjoner om hvordan en ekstra måneds vekst-sesong kan påvirke kornavlingene mindre rel-evant. For en lengre vekstsesong har som kjent lite å si, om avlingene regner vekk på våren og høsten.

KysTfisKeT Trues

Hva så med kystfisket og matproduksjonen fra

havet? Fra januar til april hvert år trekker tor-sken inn fra Barentshavet for å gyte utenfor Lo-foten og Vesterålen. Det fører til et eventyrlig sesongfiske som det knapt finnes maken til i resten av verden. Skreien har vært eksportvare til Europa i århundrer.

Men klimaendringene truer også lofotfisket. Fisken i Lofoten er del av et større økosystem, av småfisk, bunndyr og plankton, som strekker seg langt nordover til iskanten i Barentshavet. Mes-teparten av fisken beiter på småfisk og plankton her hele sommeren og vinteren, før den trekker inn til Lofoten. Når isen trekker nordover, fors-vinner fisken samme vei.

De siste tretti år har isen i Arktis blitt mer enn halvert. Det viser satellittdata fra den ameri-kanske forskningsorganisasjonen NASA. I 2011 lå gjennomsnittstemperaturen i Arktis 2,8 grad-er over det som var normalen i perioden 1950-1980.10 Der isen i 1980 dekket rundt 4 mil-lioner kvadratkilometer av Nordishavet, dekket den i 2012 mindre enn 2 millioner kvadrat-kilometer.11 Det betyr at næringsgrunnlaget til torsken forsvinner nordover. Om isen forsvinner helt, kan det få alvorlige konsekvenser for bes-tanden. Lofotfisket kan forsvinne som følge av klimaendringene.

Klimaendringene gir store utfordringer for Norge. Både jordbruket og fisket kan bli nega-tivt påvirket, og dyr og planter både i fjellet og langs brekantene trues av utryddelse. Sannsyn-ligheten for at matproduksjonen faller er større enn sannsynligheten for at den øker.

Det er på tide å innse at klimaendringer ikke er noe koselig. Norge kan kanskje tilpasse seg én grads oppvarming. Like lett vil det ikke bli om temperaturen stiger med to grader til. I 2011 ble store industriområder utenfor Bangkok satt under vann på grunn av flom. Det var illustrer-ende for hvordan verdens industrisentre kan bli påvirket av flom og havstigning. Tre graders oppvarming kan gi mindre matproduksjon og global resesjon. Da vil Norge bli rammet uan-sett hvor mye vi forsøker å tilpasse oss. I år var

Klimaendringene har kommet til Norge

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det Tyskland, Polen, Tsjekkia Sveits og Østerrike som ble rammet av ekstremflom. Forsikrings-bransjen beregnet at oppryddingen ville koste et kriserammet Europa nesten 100 milliarder kroner.

Den eneste måte å løse dette problemet på er globale kutt i CO2-utslippene. Da må alle land bidra, også Norge. Så langt har vi ikke vært flin-ke nok. Siden 1990 er norske CO2-utslipp økt med hele 30 prosent. Det er den største prosent-

vise veksten i Europa. Slik kan det ikke fortsette. Norge er ikke isolert fra klimakrisen. Det er på tide at vi også tar vår del av ansvaret for den. Ved å kutte egne utslipp.

Erik Martiniussen

noTer1 I 2012 gikk Bødalsbreen i Stryn tilbake hele 110 meter på bare ett år. Også i Vest-Finnmark og Troms smelter breene raskt. Norges Vassdrags og energidirektorat (NVE) (2011, 10. november): Breane fortset å smelte tilbake [online]. URL: http://www.nve.no/no/Nyhetsarkiv-/Pressemeldinger/Breane-fortset-a-smelte-tilbake-2/2 Aaheim, H. Asbjørn, A. Patt, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Frank Berkhout, Andries F. Hof, M Isaac and Reinhard Mechler (2009): “Adaptation in integrated assessment modeling: where do we stand?”, s. 137–138.3 Metrologisk institutt (2011, 11. august). URL: met.no4 Hanssen-Bauer, Inger mfl. (2009): Klima i Norge 2100. Norsk klimasenter, Oslo.5 Nordlys (2013, 25. juli): Våt, rå framtid i nord.6 Tømmervik H, Johansen B, Riseth J, Karlsen S, Solberg B, Høgda K. (2009) “Above ground biomass changes in the mountain birch forests and mountain heaths of Finnmarksvidda, northern Norway, in the period 1957–2006”. Forest Ecol-ogy and Management.7 Metrologisk institutt (2011, 11. august). URL: met.no8 Noen av de største breene kan kanskje klare seg. Aaheim, et. al. (2009, side 124), anslår at 1 av 3 breer over 8 km2 vil forsvinne. 9 Vista Analyse (2010) www.vista-analyse.no10 NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) (19.1.12)11 ibid.

liTTerATurAaheim, H. Asbjørn, A. Patt, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Frank Berkhout, Andries F. Hof, M Isaac and Reinhard Mechler (2009): «Adaptation in integrated assessment modeling: where do we stand?»Isaksen, K. (2006): «Endring i permafrost. I Utvikling i naturulykker som følge av klimaendringer» CICERO: Oslo.Hanssen-Bauer, I. et al. (2009): «Klima i Norge 2100. Bakgrunnsmateriale til NOU Klimatilpasning». Norsk Klimasenter. Nordlys (2013, 25. juli): Våt, rå framtid i nord.Norges Vassdrags og energidirektorat (NVE) (2011, 10. november): Breane fortset å smelte tilbake [online]. URL: http://www.nve.no/no/Nyhetsarkiv-/Pressemeldinger/Breane-fortset-a-smelte-tilbake-2/Metrologisk institutt (2011, 11. august). URL: met.noGudbrandsdølen Dagningen (2013, 23. juli): Evakuerte kan vende tilbake.ANB-NTB (2013, 5. juli): Flommen kostet en halv milliard. Dagbladet (2013, 9. juli): Juniflommen i Europa koster nesten 100 milliarder.NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) (2012, 19, januar).Vista Analyse (2010) URL: www.vista-analyse.noTømmervik H, Johansen B, Riseth J, Karlsen S, Solberg B, Høgda K. (2009): Above ground biomass changes in the moun-tain birch forests and mountain heaths of Finnmarksvidda, northern Norway, in the period 1957–2006. Forest Ecology and Management.

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The climate is changing, and governments, or-ganizations, and individuals are taking notice and starting to adapt. Plans and strategies are being discussed and implemented in response to and in anticipation of the impacts of increas-ing global temperatures and rising sea levels. An increasing number of conferences are be-ing held and books are being published about

the challenges and costs of adapting to a new climate. Adaptation is becoming an important part of development policies and practices. But is adaptation a sufficient response to the climate challenge, or is it time to pay more attention to transformation? We discussed this with Karen O’Brien, professor of human geography at the University of Oslo.

Adaptationand Transformation:

Why do We Need Both?Interview with Karen O’Brien

Maryam Faghihimani

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Can we really adapt to the changes that scien-tists are telling us lie ahead?

There is a lot that we can do to adapt to the impacts of increased temperatures, changing precipitation, and increasing sea levels. Some of these adaptations will call for new technologies, new institutions, new investments, and new behaviors. But we are deluding ourselves if we think that we can successfully adapt to the rate and magnitude of changes that are anticipated

based on current trends in emissions of green-house gases. We are on a trajectory that is head-ing towards temperature increases of 2, 3 or 4°C or more in this century, with great uncertainties about the centuries ahead. The trajectory that we are on is, by all definitions, dangerous.

What is so dangerous about a 2° or 4°C change, particularly if we can adapt?

We are not just changing temperatures – we are influencing the larger Earth system, and at a rate and scale that is mindblowing from a geological perspective. One change triggers many others, introducing feedbacks and thresholds or tip-ping points. Consequently, each additional de-gree of warming is likely to have different and greater impacts than the previous degree. Also, changes to the climate are not occurring in isola-tion from other environmental changes, such as biodiversity loss of and ocean acidification. This will make adaptation all the more challenging. Social changes, such as increasing urban popula-tions, may also influence our capacity to success-fully adapt. We have sufficient knowledge of the consequences that rapid environmental changes will have for human security, and we know that

there are limits to adaptation for some places, groups, ecosystems, and activities that we value. Based on this understanding, we need to pay far more attention to transformation.

What is the difference between adaptation and transformation?

The two concepts are closely related, yet dis-tinct. Both refer to processes of change, but the motivation and approach to change differs. Ad-

aptation generally involves change of something to something else, either as a response to or in anticipation of changing conditions over time. Whether responsive or anticipatory, adaptation accepts the changing conditions, including the context and paradigm from which they emerge. It seldom challenges the drivers of change, but instead complies with them, often based on the argument of inevitability. For example, in response to more extreme heat, a farmer may switch to more heat tolerant crops, or in an-ticipation of changing probabilities of extreme events, the insurance industry may increase its premiums. These actions may be very impor-tant, yet they do not address the changes them-selves, which are influenced by human actions.

Transformation, in contrast, involves a change from something into something else. This can occur in response to change – and in-deed most of the global environmental changes we are experiencing qualify as transformations in response to human activities. However, trans-formations can also deliberately challenge the very systems, structures, behaviors and mind-sets that generated the changes in the first place. This involves not only recognizing that humans are an important part of the Earth system, but

… transformations can also deliberately challenge the very systems, structures,

behaviors and mindsets that generated the changes in the first place.

20

also understanding that humans have the capac-ity to influence the future climate, for better or worse, as well as the option of taking respon-sibility for it. To address the root causes of the problem, we in many cases have to adapt to the idea that we are transforming the Earth system, and this is not trivial.

Yet most of the current adaptation efforts are focused on policies and measures that merely re-spond to changes in social ecological systems. In some cases, responses may call for transforma-tional change, such as relocating coastal popula-tions in response to sea level rise or shifting to new types of agriculture. The concept of “trans-formational adaptation” is receiving increased attention now in relation to the impacts of cli-mate change. This may be important, but it does not address the root causes of climate change and social vulnerability. The transformations that address these may address energy systems, transportation systems, financial systems, edu-cation systems, risk management practices, and so on. But if the goal is moving to a trajectory that is sustainable and does not push us against the limits to adaptation, we need much deeper transformations as well, including changes in the way that we think about change.

Are such transformations really possible on the time scale that we are talking about? Isn’t some climate change inevitable?

Climate change is an ongoing process, and be-cause of the long residence time of greenhouse gases and lags in the system, we will definitely have to adapt to changes over the coming de-cades – changes that we are responsible for through past emissions. We have to adapt to the physical impacts of a changing climate, includ-ing changes in variability and extreme events. Adaptations also have to address social vulner-ability, i.e., the social, economic, institutional, cultural, and political conditions that inhibit successful responses and subject people to harm.

Adaptation to climate change is a necessary re-sponse to changes to which we have already con-tributed. It will have costs, and we will likely ex-perience the limits to adaptation, defined by the loss of things that are valued. The disappearance of a large amount of ice in the Arctic, increased flooding in many coastal areas, the extinction of some species, and the loss of some human lives and livelihoods are just some of the near-term impacts. Yet on a longer time horizon, the future is being decided today, and we have important choices to make – not just about mitigation and adaptation, but about a much larger transforma-tion to global sustainability.

Transformations may be incremental, where changes are hardly noticeable until a point is reached where suddenly it appears that every-thing has changed. They may also occur sudden-ly and instantaneously, and this is most often associated with physical shocks, such as earth-quakes or tsunamis. They may, however, also occur quite suddenly when we release strong beliefs and let go of implicit assumptions. Re-gardless of how it happens, transformation goes beyond business-as-usual and the outcomes are not always clear and predictable. Transforma-tion of larger systems is not simple, for disrup-tive challenges can create pushbacks and resis-tance, particularly by vested interests, including our own. From many perspectives, adaptation appears to be an easier, more palatable response than transformation.

Are such transformations realistic, given the lack of progress on climate change to date?

The transformations that are called for in re-sponse to climate change are unprecedented, and from current perspectives they look daunt-ing. But social change is non-linear, and small things can make a big difference. The transfor-mations that we are talking about challenge our assumptions about what is possible and force us to reflect on our values and how they influ-

Adaptation and Transformation: Why do we need both?

21

ence our priorities. Are our world views actually adapted to the complex challenges that we now face? Climate change is more than just a tech-nical problem of developing new energy tech-nologies, reforming institutions or developing strategies to live in a warmer world. It is also an adaptive challenge that calls for us to ques-tion our habits, loyalties, beliefs, and assump-tions. This involves adaptation from the inside-out. We know, however, that not everyone will

change within the short timeframe available for avoiding dangerous climate change. However, it has been estimated that it takes only 10 percent of the population holding a firm belief to influ-ence the larger population.

Do you mean not everyone has to change?

Research shows that values and worldviews do not change easily; often they start with individu-als and small groups who think differently about an issue and are willing to challenge prevailing paradigms and practices. Think about the end of slavery in England – a small group challenged the idea that it was okay to own slaves, and their view spread and eventually challenged the sys-tems and structures that enabled slavery. In some cases a simple change in practice can spread and become the norm – doctors washing their hands before delivering babies is an example of this. Most of us do things as habitual social practices, and we are strongly influenced by trends in soci-ety. The challenge is to shift the trends, and this is seldom initiated by a majority; most of us are followers in many aspects of our lives.

Yet we can choose to change. To adapt from the inside-out involves changing how we think about causality, human agency and change, and recognizing that we are individually and col-

lectively responsible for the outcomes of cli-mate change. This is no easy task, as it calls for transformations in how we think and act in the world. It calls for us to be willing to question our assumptions and beliefs, particularly those that we are not even aware of, yet which we have blindly adopted through families, cultures, or experiences. Identifying these blind spots is critical to innovation and transformation.

We are at a pivotal moment. When we look

at the different climate scenarios for the future, we see that there is still an option for climate stabilization below 2°C, but that it requires that we make some important choices today. Those who have the courage to change have the op-portunity to lead change. It won’t happen if we wait for everyone to agree that climate change is a problem: The strategy of “convincing” people is not very effective, as people tend to see what they believe. However, the number of social en-trepreneurs and change agents around the world is rapidly increasing, and more and more people are recognizing the power of collaboration, and understanding that transformation involves changes within the personal, political and prac-tical spheres.

What kinds of policies are involved in trans-formation, and how are they different from policies for adaptation?

Policies for transformation go beyond business-as-usual. They challenge traditional ways of doing things, thinking about things, and plan-ning for the future. They recognize that current approaches may be limited and insufficient, and that complex systems call for flexible and adaptive policies. Policies for transformation recognize the relationship between the way we

Maryam Faghihimani

The trajectory that we are on is, by all definitions, dangerous.

22

perceive problems and the solutions that we consider most appropriate. Adaptation poli-cies are responsive to change, whereas policies for transformation are generative of change. We certainly need both, we also need to recognize that a deliberate transformation to sustainability may be the best adaptation policy for humanity.

Why do we need research on both adaptation and transformation?

Both adaptation and transformations are already occurring all over the world – not necessarily or exclusively in response to climate change -- but neither are neutral processes. For this reason, we need critical knowledge about these processes, including a better understanding of how and why they occur, who benefits and loses, and what the long-term implications are for global sustainability. However, given the short time scale for responses to global environmental change, it is also important to understand how these processes can be promoted or accelerated in ways that are ethical, equitable and sustain-able. In the coming years we are likely to hear more and more “great solutions” to climate change, and the research community needs to be able to respond quickly and critically to as-sess the social and environmental implications of these suggestions. This is especially important because of the tendency to look for and priori-tize technological fixes, rather than social and political changes that address the root causes of global environmental change.

Are technological changes considered an adap-tation strategy, or a transformation strategy?

They are an important part of both adapta-

tion and transformation. But alone, they will not solve the problem. In fact, what we see as solutions often have side effects. For example, the tens of thousands of data centers that sup-port the explosion of digital information use approximately 30 billion watts of electricity, which is more or less equivalent to the output of

30 nuclear power plants. An adaptive challenge requires that we go much deeper to address the root causes of global environmental change. Experience shows that if an adaptive challenge is treated as merely a technical problem, it is bound to fail.

What do you think are the root causes of global environmental change, and are you optimistic that these can be addressed?

When we look for the root causes of problems like climate change, biodiversity loss, deforesta-tion, changes in biogeochemical cycles, and so on, we inevitably end up looking to the larger political economy, including how the financial, trade, and economic systems place higher values on some resources over others, and some people and places over others. If we go deeper, we see how these systems emerge from views of the world that are either hierarchical or individualis-tic, that see the environment as something sepa-rate from humans that can be exploited or man-aged without concern for human well-being and security, and that do not take into consideration the systemic connections across people, places, species, and generations. It comes down to how humans relate to the environment, and to each other, including future generations.

I am optimistic that these root causes can be addressed, as there are examples of social inno-

…if an adaptive challenge is treated a merely a technical problem, it is bound to fail.

Adaptation and Transformation: Why do we need both?

23

vations from all over the world that are emerg-ing from a worldview that is not only connect-ing the dots between environmental and social problems, but reconnecting them to create a world that works better for everyone. Further-more, technological changes are accelerating the diffusion of ideas and innovations. Whether they will be addressed at the scale that is called for in response to climate change is another

story, for it depends on each of us and our ca-pacities to challenge our own assumptions, to work collaboratively with others, and to gener-ate social transformations that take into account the wellbeing of the biggest we that can be imag-ined. Both adaptation and transformation pres-ent challenges, but they also offer the thrill of being able to influence the future in a positive, meaningful way.

Maryam Faghihimani

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This article illustrates how prehistoric pastoral-ists in the Horn of Africa adapted to climatic and environmental changes. The article uses archaeological evidence to understand how domestication of livestock enabled these no-madic bands to improve their food sources, develop organization, and use mobility to re-spond to changing environmental conditions. The iconography of their rock art left behind information about their adaptive mechanisms to environmental change. The livestock they domesticated and depicted in the rock art ex-emplify choices based on the adaptive capacities of various species, while the chronological se-quences of their introduction into local habitats

depict economic transformation.2 From this dis-tant past, we can make inferences about societal adaptive strategies. Before proceeding, we need some clarity on the terms historical ecology and climate and environmental change adaptation. I adopt Bruce Winterhalder’s3 definition of ‘his-torical ecology’. He suggests that although the concept might have a variety of meanings and refers to different ideas, it can be summed up as “a commitment to certain theoretical princi-ples, a methodology or a form of investigation...within a framework provided by a certain set of concepts”. This description makes the concept interdisciplinary while the historical component describes the “chronological accounts of selected

Rock Art Pastoralists in the Horn of Africa

Historical Ecology of Adaptations to Climate and Environmental Change,

ca. 12 000 BP – AD 1860

Gufu Oba1

Illustration: Eric Lafforgue

26

events”. The ecology component refers to rela-tions between organisms (we have used rock art pastoralists) and their environments within the context of time and space. The term ‘climate change adaptation’ is defined in various ways,4 but we will adopt a simplified form, referring to responses to the dynamics of environmental conditions over lengthy periods that fluctuated from one stable form to another. Adaptation is a responsive action that individuals and commu-nities undertake to protect their livelihoods over time. Adaptation could be successful if the sys-tem of production is made sustainable through structural and behavioral changes in response to long-term climate change.

We analyze the complex relationships be-tween society and the environment at historical and geographical scales. This is despite the use of scattered sources, which Bethwell A. Ogot warns against, claiming “that uses [of ] frag-mented sources would leave voids”.5 Addressing the gaps or voids would not make it any easier for historical ecologists to investigate how soci-eties adapted to climate change6, other than by presenting a synthesis in order to make rational deductions about the mechanisms of adapta-tion. We will draw on proximate environmental indicators and rock art as the methods for read-ing climate and environmental change to learn about human behavior imbued with the use of space, time and knowledge as functional adap-tive mechanisms. We will show that the survival of prehistoric pastoralists during the long and fluctuating Holocene climate (ca, 12,000 BP) was a reflection of their successful adaptation mechanisms.7 We will also show how the cli-mate shifted from a wet to a dry phase, influenc-ing corresponding shifts in vegetation cover, and investigate environmental desiccation and cor-responding adaptations undertaken by societies. We consider regional connectivity in terms of sub-continental and regional scale movements of Neolithic pastoralists whose rock art depicts the domestication and selection of better adapt-

ed livestock species. Adaptive mechanisms are presented in terms of the praxis of time, space and knowledge.8 We ascertain the processes by which societies created social landscapes, thus leaving their ‘footprints’ across time.9 Here, our use of the term ‘adaptive strategies’ (or ‘adapta-tion’), provides us with “an interpretive tool for pursuing the intricacies [of responses to climate change] in space and time”.10 We have used the Horn of Africa as a regional case study. The ar-ticle is divided into seven sections. The first sec-tion introduces the geographical scope; in the second, climatic and environmental changes are examined. The third examines impacts of climatic change on the environment. The fourth section dwells on the evolution of rock art pastoralists; the fifth considers regional level migrations by the rock art pastoralists. In the sixth section the article uses the rock art styles to present analysis of pastoralists’ movements, while in the seventh, it presents the analysis of adaptive mechanisms in the use of space, time and knowledge.

geogrAphicAl scope

The Horn of Africa serves as a laboratory for the study of climate change adaptations. In this re-gion, climate events have had a major influence on the biological activities and local economies of the pastoralists and other societies for several centuries. The physical diversity of landscapes and the ancient history of human activities pro-vide us with evidence of regional-scale human adaptations. Geographically, the Horn of Africa lacks ‘precise boundaries’11 but in this article, it refers to the region encompassing Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea and northern Ke-nya. Climatically, the Horn comprises the cen-tral Ethiopian highlands, the lowlands, coastal plateaus, and maritime coastal zones, making it a region of ecological diversity. The central Ethiopian highland is the hydraulic catchment area for the whole region and its patterns of rainfall enable an understanding of the climate

Rock Art pastoralists in the Horn of Africa

27

history of the region.12 The area is the source of major drainage networks, the main drainage lines being the Blue Nile, the Omo, the Hawash, the Webbi Shebelle, Juba and Daua Rivers (Fig. 1). Impor-tant geographic features that have contributed to the in-vestigation of historic climate changes are the Great East Af-rican Rift Valley lakes.13

The hot deserts of the coastal plains, and the semi-desert of the lowlands in-habited by multi-cultural acephalous (non-hierarchical) societies such as nomads, have had significant impacts on the social and political landscapes of the region. To-day, the semi-desert lowlands are home to between 26 and 30 percent of the total popula-tion of the Horn of Africa. The pastoralists com-bine different ecological systems and landscapes in their seasonal livestock grazing movements, preferring particular ecosystems for grazing by different types of livestock during the wet or the dry season. “The key was their adjustment to the [rainfall distribution which is] the primary limiting factor of production”.14 In the hot low-lands, the high spatial and temporal variation in vegetation production induces mobility in no-madic herds in search of grazing and water. Hu-man adaptations to improve herd survival did not only result in the diversification of livestock species – which varied from thirst tolerant to less tolerant species – but also the application of mo-bility as a strategy to deal with local droughts.15 Thus, in terms of environmental drivers that have shaped human behavior and social memo-ry, the landscapes in the Horn of Africa could be considered to be a historical construct which has

left a “visible imprint of past human agency”.16 The historical ecology of the Horn of Africa has not been uniform over time; rather the environ-mental and human history has been punctuated by climatic episodes − periods of shocks, sepa-rated by long intervals of stability.

climATic And environmenTAl chAnges Climate fluctuations during the Holocene were a global phenomenon.17 Our interest is in un-derstanding how these fluctuations contributed to environmental changes and human responses. As Bryson and Padock imply, a shift in climate stimulates varied adaptive techniques.18 In the region of the Horn of Africa, both the highlands and the lowlands experienced climatic fluctua-tions. It is possible that during the early phase of the wet Holocene climate, the highlands were too cold for human settlement. Finnevan reports: “The ...wet phase was accompanied by

Gufu Oba

Eastern and southern horn of Africa

28

a glacial retreat” from the highlands in both Ethiopia and East Africa.19 Between 12,000 and 5,000 years ago snow retreat resulted in a rise in the levels of the Ethiopian and the East African Rift Valley lakes.20 At the regional level, the fluctuation in the East African Rift Valley lakes was synchronized, suggesting close links between changes in lake levels and regional cli-mate.21 The timing of the changes in lake levels correlates with the changing flood patterns of the Nile River. The link is not between the Nile and the East African lakes, but with the region-wide climate fluctuations.22

In East Africa, during the full Holocene pe-riod from around 10000 through 6000 BP, the high water levels in the Rift Valley lakes did not allow human settlement in the moist environ-ments. The wet and the dry phases alternated between 4450 BP and 2700 BP23, with lake lev-els dropping, followed by recession of the sub-humid vegetation towards arid conditions in the lowlands and the retreat of forest cover in higher elevations.24 From the Afar region of Ethiopia, lakebed changes depict the different phases of the paleoclimate. Grove25, referring to carbon dating of the sediment cores of the lakes (i.e. Shala, Abiyata and Langano), confirms higher lake levels around 9200 BP, which retreated to the present levels by 4000 BP. The decline in the lake levels is an indication that climate condi-tions had shifted to a dry phase ca. 5000 BP.26 We draw two conclusions based on this evi-dence. First, the lake levels alternated between the wet and drier climates. Second, the changes towards the present conditions of the lakes were characterized by long unbroken periods of arid-ity. The climate change had major impacts on environmental changes.

impAcT of climATe chAnge on

The environmenT

Palynologic studies (i.e. pollen studies) enable one to draw inferences about how changes in lake levels reflect changes in the environment

and in turn the types of economic activities pursued by inhabitants.27 The pollen grains that serve as environmental fingerprints varied ac-cording to local conditions, while at regional level they displayed physiognomic changes in response to changes in the climate. However, attributing the pollen data to either local land use or climate change might require careful con-sideration.28 This caution aside, the use of pol-len as a reflection of ecological changes remains valid for collecting information about local and regional level environmental changes caused by past climate change. The pollen describes “veg-etation history” in relation to changes in climate and human land use.29 The changes might be lo-cal or regional, according to the patterns of pol-len deposits.30 Each phase of vegetation change was dynamic, increasing the “significance of var-ious genera”, which characterized the particular climate phase.31

In the northern Ethiopian highlands, the climate shifts resulted in the retreat of humid forest covers “giving ground to expanding grass-lands”.32 In the northern region of Kenya and the extreme northern parts of the Horn of Af-rica, the wet climate encouraged the growth of savannah woodlands between 9000 and 6700 BP and wooded-grassland savannahs by about 6000 BP, which encouraged the early herders to introduce goats. In southeastern Ethiopia, pol-len analysis from the Arsi and Bale highlands showed decreases in pollen taxa between ca. 600 and 300-200 BP in response to reduced temperatures,33 providing evidence of strong background effects from climate changes.34 The drier phase of the Holocene climate prompted the Neolithic pastoral cultures to synchronously adjust their systems of land use. Rather than subduing their land use systems, the temporali-ty and spatiality of the environmental variations induced adaptive mobility, a critical survival mechanism for the herds.35 As aridity increased, there were corresponding changes in vegetation adapted to arid conditions.36 Archaeological re-

Rock Art pastoralists in the Horn of Africa

29

cords show the impacts of hu-man subsistence mechanisms such as foraging and livestock grazing in the form of an in-crease in the use of fires during the humid phase between ca. 6600 and ca. 1900 BP.37

The period referred to as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) (AD 1000 to 1270) was followed by periods of per-sistent aridity suggesting that the environments in the Horn of Africa could have been much drier than they have been during the present day.38 Rainfall fluctu-ated between the seventh and eighth centuries, followed by increases in the tenth and eleventh centuries and a decline by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The drier climates were likely to have reduced pastoralists’ utilization of some of the areas, forcing the population to disperse.39 Aridity created scarcity in water and pasture, to which the pastoralists responded by adopting more drought resistant species of live-stock.40 The dry conditions prevailed from AD 1700 to AD 1750.41 This was the period when the western regions of East Africa experienced major droughts. Aridity became widespread between 1750 and 1860.42 The changes had dramatic effects on the evolution of the rock art pastoralists.

The evoluTion of rocK ArT pAsTorAlisTs

Evidence from rock shelters is available from around 9000 BP when Neolithic pastoralists had expanded “and progressively assimilated more and more of their neighbouring gathering-hunter peoples into their societies”.43 The Horn of Africa might not be the origin of pastoral-ism, but the emergence of this lifestyle change in the region is attributable to climate change that forced societies to abandon foraging habits for livestock herding. The Neolithic herders ar-

rived from the Sahara. The period between 5000 BP and 3000 BP represents the mid-Holocene, when aridity induced migrations of prehistoric pastoralists into the Horn of Africa. In the East African highlands pastoralism appeared abrupt-ly around 3000 BP. The appearance of the pas-toral population in the highlands might suggest an adaptive response to aridity in the lowlands where resource pressure could have forced some of the less adapted populations to move into wetter ecosystems.44 During the wetter phase of the climate, pastoral grazing lands expanded, al-lowing population dispersal, whereas during the dry climate pastoral land use was concentrated around key resources, as depicted in rock art.45

Rock art is an important source of scientific information as a proxy for the human conceptu-alization of nature and as a framework of social expressions about ancient systems of produc-tion, social beliefs and knowledge. “Rock artist’s mental space [is] framed in an iconographic lan-guage”.46 Representations of different landscapes and social and economic scenes serve as ‘images’ of ‘territorial markers’.47 Population aggregation and organization required ritual spaces across territories.48 As Tilley49 suggests, “the meanings of space always involve [a subjective] dimen-sion and cannot be understood apart from the symbolically constructed life worlds of social ac-

Gufu Oba

Figure 2. Las Gaal ancient Rock art, Northern Somaliland.100

30

tors”. In this case, the actors used symbolic im-ages of livestock to tell stories about their beliefs, values and the environmental changes they were experiencing.

During the Neolithic period called Bovid-ian, the styles of the rock art enable various in-terpretations based on the depiction of livestock species such as ovids (goats) and capris (sheep) and Bovin (cattle). By about 8000 BP, the depic-tions in the rock art were mainly of ovicaprids and cattle.50 The rock artists were predomi-nantly concerned with the sources of their food during each period. Thus, the shift from the Paleolithic phase, which represented the hunter foragers, to Neolithic developments, which rep-resented pastoralists, show shifts in food sources and society responses to climate and environ-mental changes.51 The domestication of Bos primigenius (primitive cow) expanded into the Nile valley about 7000 BP;52 this was the ances-tor of the cattle breeds Bos taurus (the humpless long horned) and Bos indicus (the humped short horned zebu). Bos taurus was common during the humid phase of the climate, while Bos in-dicus became prominent with increased aridity. The depictions show that the rock art serves as a slow cinematic sequence of pastoral evolution to climate change, even when data from a single site is scrutinized. In particular, the gradual dis-appearance of Bos taurus and the popularity of Bos indicus in rock art sites strongly imply en-vironmental adaptation since Bos indicus had better thirst tolerance than its predecessor. The camel was introduced later than the bovids dur-ing periods of increased aridity. 53 From the rock art across the region archaeologists have pieced together the regional migration patterns of the rock art pastoralists.

regionAl migrATions By The rocK ArT pAsTorAlisTs

From rock art and other archaeological evidence, we see that pastoralism was introduced into the Atbara valley at the end of 4000 BP. Desicca-

tion and droughts triggered migrations through Nubia (in present day Sudan) into Ethiopia. The introduction of cattle (Bos) into the Ethio-pian highlands spread into the lowlands of Afar, down the Red Sea coast.54 This route represents not only one phase of migration, but a series of migrations reflecting changes in ecology and pastoralists’ adaptations to mobility.55 Amanuel Beyin and John Shea56 state:

Beginning around 25000 [BP], pastoralists and agro-pastoralists from the Butan region east of the Nile began to move further east, eventually establishing large villages along the Gasha River…Dependent on cattle, goats, and sheep and perhaps cereals as well as wild game and plant foods, they also migrated into the Red Sea hills…The Gash group…continued their movements to the east, soon occupying the entire Sudan-Eritrean bor-derland, including Agordat. Farming and herding were the main subsistence activities, except for more environmentally marginal lands…The Agordat communities…could have played a very important role in the re-gion as the social, economic, and political conduits between the polities of Eastern Su-dan and the Nile valley, and the increasingly more complex socio-political systems emerg-ing in the Eritrean/Ethiopian highlands such as the ‘pre-Axumites’ and the Ancient Ona.

On the Asmara plateau archaeologists found fauna remains indicating some level of special-ization by pastoralists; in some sites there were cattle remains, while in others sheep and goat re-mains were found. The “patterns in archaeology appear to be deliberate herd management tech-niques.”57 In the Eritrean lowlands that served as a major centre of pastoral rock art dispersal, cli-mate adaptations were impractical without the accompanying development of socio-economic and political complexities in the emerging so-cieties that combined a variety of production systems. About 300 BP, the communities of the

Rock Art pastoralists in the Horn of Africa

31

Ancient Ona in the Greater Asmara that earlier practiced a mixed agriculture disappeared, but from archaeological evidence, it is uncertain if abandonment and its drivers were comparable across the region.58 Yet that abandonment might have been followed by societal transformations and increased diversity in their economies. It was quite possible that by the 1st millennium BP the pastoralists pursued different economies linked by trade and labor exchanges with the highlands. From there on different pathways might have become available as the societies dif-ferentiated into distinct cultural groups.59

By the beginning of the Christian era, there is evidence that the Axumites were in contact with the Beja nomads, through trade and con-flicts. Enslavement of the nomads may have been the purpose of the raids conducted by the Axumite Empire.60 By about 700 AD, the Axu-mites had herds of “long- and short-horn cattle, sheep and goats” and trade with the nomads in the lowlands. The nomads in the lowlands con-trolled the import of metallurgy ores and other imports from across the seas into the Axumite kingdom.61 The relationship between the high-land agro-pastoralists and the lowland pasto-ralists was therefore not necessarily always one of conflict, but rather, mutual relations shared through trade networks.62

Pastoralism was already the dominant form of subsistence agriculture by 3000 BP in the western lowlands of Ethiopia, and expanded into the rest of the Horn of Africa by 2000 BP. At that time, aridity forced the pastoralists to move into the highlands on the northern and eastern Ethiopian plateaux.63 Evidence adduced from rock art shows that environmental disas-ters triggered population movements in order to seek better pastures and water for livestock. Considering that “a year is judged good or bad depending on the amount of rainfall and when it occurs,”64 mobility becomes a necessity of life. The populations were able to adjust to minor crises, while disasters such as climate fluctua-

tions caused major disruptions to their existing adaptive strategies. Thus, the links between cli-mate change and the distribution of pastoralism remain a relevant means of tracking environ-mental change.65 Regarding responses to envi-ronmental desiccation by rock art pastoralists, Brandt and Carder had the following to say:

…the desiccation of the northern African environments elicited the migration of pas-toralists and/or diffusion of their products into the Horn by c. 500-4000 BP. We predict that, given the pronounced environmental dichotomy [i.e. the highlands and the low-lands] in the Horn, pastoralists would rap-idly establish a bipolar mobility pattern…from the highland pastures to the [lowland] pastures. 66

The adaptations to the variable climate were by multi-species livestock comprising brows-ers and grazers.67 We are uncertain how social stratifications and different pastoralist identities emerged. It was possible that by the late Holo-cene the pastoral societies of the Horn of Africa were beginning to build separate societies dem-onstrating territorial behavior. Based on the na-ture and location of the resources, groups might have fashioned geographically distributed ter-ritorial systems, within which they dispersed.68 Our knowledge is from the iconography of the rock art, from which influences of climate and environmental changes can be interpreted.

The rock art evidence shows two impor-tant developments. The first development is a link between different types of pastoral exis-tence, perhaps alluding to cultural variations, which meant that the artists were able to vary their messages in the rock art. The second de-velopment is evidence of environmental change that might have brought different groups into the same area, thus making the transfusion of knowledge possible. The most important issue for us to consider is whether the appearance of different styles of rock art and the clustering of

Gufu Oba

32

sites might enable inferences about intra- and inter-regional relations. According to Brandt and Carder, common styles such as the fusion of limbs and “variations in bovine torsos and horns may reflect the maintenance of alliance networks at an inter-regional scale while em-phasizing intra-regional socio-economic par-ticipation”.69 The density of the rock art sites in different locations also suggest “settlement size,

density of material culture” and duration of oc-cupation and emergence of territoriality.70

The various styles of rock art are depictions of human behavior and beliefs. The spread of the animal breed types was from the Horn of Africa to eastern Africa.72 Following the desiccation of the environment in the Horn between ca. 3000 and 2000 BP, the short horn zebu depicted in the rock art were widely distributed on the west-ern Eritrean plateau and along the coast by the 2nd millennium BP. The type of rock art of this period has the iconographic or style name ‘sorre-Hamakiya.’ Teka73 reports that the “artistic style of ancient rock art provides the basis for recog-nizing a particular cultural-historical tradition”. In the common style of rock art referred to as ‘Ethiopian-Arabian’, the main features are “the depiction of humpless bovine in profile with forelimbs and the hind limbs each merged into one thick line”. In rock art caves on the Ethio-pia-Sudan border, depictions include rainmak-ing rituals, showing the complexity of inter-re-gional relations between different sites as well as expression of shared cultures and differences. 74 Records from eastern Ethiopia and the northern parts of the Horn (the present day Somaliland) show that the rock art depicted domestic species with different art styles. In Somaliland, the rock shelter called Damaline has polychrome paint-ings depicting sheep, wildlife, snakes, turtles and human figures with arrows. In the rock art in the Gudka Hardhka caves in northern So-maliland, the iconographic representation of a camel confirms the phenomenon of increased aridity.75 Evidence from archaeological works elsewhere in Eastern Africa shows that the pre-historic pastoral economies had “some resem-blance to that of the present inhabitants”.76 In the eastern Lake Turkana area, depictions in the “middle to the third millennium [BP]” show the presence of both ovicaprids and cattle, but the camel appeared only later. These pastoralists built stone enclosures to protect their livestock in the plains of the Chalbi basin and expanded

Rock Art pastoralists in the Horn of Africa

Figure 3: Rock art showing stylistic representations of bovine. Note the fussed legs.70

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southwards into the East African Rift valley due to threats by epizootics.77 Comparisons of the depictions across the region have yielded evidence of inter-regional relationships.78 The environmental and geographical locations, and therefore spaces, that connected communities, influenced their art, providing evidence of the diffusion of knowledge towards thirst tolerant livestock species.79

The pastoralist communities diversified their livestock species as well as showing social trans-formation with the emergence of ‘resource own-erships’ as aridity induced resource scarcity with a possibility of increased competition in com-parison to when the environment was wetter.80 Thus, the relationship between climate change and adaptation by herding communities was in the development of social institutions that ensured access to the vast drylands for grazing and built relationships with others to negotiate access to forage and water sources along their migratory trajectories. The rock art sites might reflect functional linkages with other areas, which had new key resources such as water, or resting places where pastoralists had time to ex-press their interests and describe events around them.81 The art might also reflect different pas-toral cultures − each identified with the live-stock species they represented in their drawings − cattle pastoralists were predisposed towards cattle, while those managing mixed herds rep-resented cattle, sheep, goats and camels in their rock art. The species preferred in the representa-tions would in turn describe mobility patterns. 82 The overall impression is that there were two processes at work: pastoral mobility and diversi-fication of livestock species, with both processes implying environmental desiccation.

The prAxis of Time, spAce And KnoWledge: mechAnism of AdApTATions

We are interested in understanding how the pastoralists in earlier centuries influenced the environment within the context of climate and

environmental change. How do we know what the ancient landscapes looked like and how the nomads responded to landscape changes? The question is difficult to answer considering that “[i]t is extremely difficult to reconstruct the full ecological trajectory of natural communities, and specifically, how [landscapes] have accom-modated both the intrinsic variability of [bio-climatic and the long-term influences of human activity]... over the course of time.”83 This being so, the continuous use of the same environment by the contemporary population would have had a profound influence on the dynamics of the landscapes concerned. For the herders the past and the present landscapes are contextual both in terms of their social, historical and eco-logical significances.84 Social relations across space are the subject of a political ecology that describes the interactions between society and the environment at varied scales.85 Knowledge of nature expresses long-term memory of envi-ronmental changes. The knowledge of landscape as an ecological and ethnographic source pres-ents analytical profiles of how past memories may be explained in the present.86

In our interpretation of pastoralists’ histori-cal adaptations, we have relied solely on non-chronological material in relation to changes in social behavior and memory. Nevertheless, we are obliged to work retrospectively by consider-ing the knowledge of contemporary pastoralists in terms of the way they divide space and time according to management strategies for different livestock species. The divisions correspond with variable rainfall: the wet season being a period of plenty, and the dry and hot season being a pe-riod of scarcity. The diversity of landscapes dur-ing the annual grazing cycle optimizes the use of space and time in relation to environmental change.87 To attempt to understand this inter-play of space, time and knowledge, we apply the social theory of praxis.

When considering praxis from the perspec-tive of environmental change, there are multiple

Gufu Oba

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facets of actions and reactions. Climate change influences the environment and the society, while the society in turn influences the quality of environmental change through regular uses. We may also view environmental change in terms of “ecological praxis,”88 which considers the scale of use and subsequent changes in the environment. The scale refers to the extent of land units that pastoralists consider as resources that they may utilize for watering and grazing, which can be at local or regional levels. We now discuss the praxis of landscapes from two addi-tional perspectives, the first in terms of spatial variations and knowledge systems that pastoral-ists require to utilize resources, and the second focusing on changes in the quality of environ-ment that influences pastoralists’ responses.89

The concept of time in this discussion is not necessarily a chronological representation of events as variously mentioned, but rather, portrays a temporal framework for exploitation of landscape resources by pastoralists. Space, in relation to prehistoric pastoralists, refers to the territories they controlled and exploited. The territories had imaginary borders across which different groups negotiated relationships. ‘Spaces’ might refer to settlements, ritual sites, grazing neighbourhoods or restricted lands pre-served for dry year grazing. When combined, these concepts put the analysis of the space-time continuum into proper perspective. At geo-graphical scales, the interaction between people and their environment describes how societies moved across space over time.90

We seek to understand how people in the past, similar to those in the present, used space and perceived changes induced by either human activities or by changes in climate. In analyzing the praxis of environmental change, we might therefore examine multifarious situations that require deciphering of the complexity of human and environmental relations. The analytical ap-proach to this challenge is not straightforward, considering that our knowledge of prehistoric

pastoralists, beyond their rock art representa-tions, is meager. The transformation from pre-historic to modern day pastoral groups and their identity shifts, as well as physical drifting across space and time, remain a matter of generaliza-tion. By expanding the spatial-time approach in terms of “the active quality of space” and ex-tending the use of the concept to “the notion of territoriality [and], migrations,”91 impor-tant relationships between environmental and climate change and pastoralist adaptations can be recognized. The environment itself serves as “an historical document”92 so that the past can be used to make inferences about the present, an example being how societies adapt through a continuous process by which specialized and non-specialized pastoral groups (i.e. in terms of the species of livestock species they manage) re-spond to “new conditions.”93

As far as pastoralists are concerned, the prax-is of environmental change is real as well as sym-bolic. It is an abstraction in terms of different aspects of nature, in the form of both resources and climate change, which influence human be-havior. Nomads perceive the resources provided by nature as being dependent upon two spheres of life: the physical land (i.e. the earth) and the supernatural (i.e. God). These two spheres in-fluence how pastoralists behave and relate to the environment. The ‘earth’ produces the re-sources that the livestock and humans utilize, while ‘God makes resources grow’. Metaphori-cally, the two concepts represent landscape and climate. Nature is variable and the productivity of nature is dependent upon variation in the cli-mate. The physical quality of landscapes influ-ences productivity.94 The nomads depend on the interaction of the two in order for them to reap the benefits of nature’s variability, which they achieve by means of mobility. Pastoralists’ land use is however not ad hoc but relies on compre-hensive knowledge of landscape change.

Landscapes provide traces of the historical past and therefore transcend present uses by

Rock Art pastoralists in the Horn of Africa

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being located in “a larger spatial” context95 and reveal the footprints of past human activities in terms of settlement patterns of population ex-pansion or collapse. The historical settlement patterns transform societies’ perceptions of in-dividual landscapes in terms of “materialized histories of decision making”, thus serving as ‘libraries’ of past environmental change that il-lustrate the ordering of past ecological events.96 The history of change therefore needs to be examined by comprehending “landscape and history,” giving rise to the term “inscription of landscape” which influences the way landscape is comprehended and interpreted.97 For a rock art herder, landscape identity is in terms of fa-miliarity with individual patches from past uses, while landmark features such as a rock, a hill, a dry valley, an old tree or other shapes character-ize the particular landscape. Of course, the herd-er’s landscapes are not mobile, but they do shift in terms of the resources they produce during different seasons. What is crucially important is the way herders interpret the changes such as shifts from grassland to bush lands.98

In reconstructing historical environmental changes, we therefore consider how landscapes are “connected to past environmental memo-ry.”99 We will not attempt to be more specific about the places where changes occurred, or its influence on economic relations amongst local populations, such as when the vegetation shifts

from grasslands to bush lands, creating shifts in patterns of land use, with populations that man-aged browsers moving in and the populations managing grazers moving out. We acknowledge the common vision of seeking suitable grazing lands, whether in the past or the present. We can examine this by varying the analysis from one driven by perturbations of the environment (i.e. climate change) to one in which human overexploitation became a persistent problem as we reach the nineteenth century level of knowl-edge of environmental change. The challenge is to balance the narrative of adapting to environ-mental uncertainties, against the counter narra-tive in which pastoralists are destructive agents. The latter argument ignores the fact that adapt-ability requires regulated environmental exploi-tation. These varied arguments have important implications on the interpretations of historical ecology of adaptations to climate and environ-mental changes in the Horn of Africa by the rock art pastoralists.

Gufu Oba

noTesYou will find the notes for this article on www.tvergastein.com

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In 1982, a goofy, unsuccessful satire starring Sean Connery in a toupee predicted that an at-tack on the World Trade Center in New York would be used as justification for a United States military invasion of a Middle Eastern country.

In the preceding decade, bookended by a worldwide spike in petroleum prices triggered by the 1973 OPEC embargo of the United States and the second crisis of 1979, anxiety about energy shortages, and the geopolitical power of petroleum-producing nations, was frequently manifested in products of popu-lar culture. They appeared in everything from paranoid spy thrillers such as Three Days of the Condor (1975), which revolves around govern-ment machinations to secure access to oil fields,

to numerous road-race comedies (The Gumball Rally, Cannnonball, The Cannonball Run, and many others) loosely based on an actual cross-country race organized in protest of speed lim-its which had recently been established as an energy-conservation measure. Wrong Is Right, the film mentioned in the opening, should not be taken as any indication of its screenwriter’s keen analytical and predictive insights. But, as an eerily clairvoyant outlier, it does serve as an example of the range of ways in which socio-political concerns pass through art and popular culture. The same audience that could vicari-ously enjoy the symbolic defiance of petro-crisis limitations in the form of groan-inducing road comedies could also see the long term implica-

Art and Approaching Apocalypse:

Melancholia and Beasts of the Southern WildAs Representations of

Climate Change

T. Vanderkemp Howard

Illustration: fallenzeraphine.deviantart.com used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

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tions of global energy politics unfold on screen.Art, in forms both critically admired and

popular, functions not so much as a reflection of the social situation in which it is produced than as a point of refraction through which an ongoing cultural conversation passes. It is less mirror than prism. The effects of this refrac-tion are more complex than a linear relation-ship between the intention of a creator and the understanding of an audience. Making definite

determinations about such a relationship is not a simple task, and even less so is determining the broader implications of culture’s continual refraction through art. Still, we may attempt to read signs of context in cultural products, and look for the marks those products leave on so-ciety.

The aforementioned films were created in the context of an energy crisis that looks laugh-ably mild in comparison to the threat of cata-strophic anthropogenic climate change in the coming centuries. Yet that earlier crisis led to a number of decisive actions: government and industrial policy was successful in greatly in-creasing energy efficiency, and diversification and expansion of energy production lead to the exploitation of petroleum resources in Texas, Alaska, and the North Sea, leading to the col-lapse of prices in the 1980s (as well as the mod-ern Norwegian oil industry and the economic viability of Thatcherism, among other things).1 A policy such as the French government’s ban of any advertising which could be interpreted as an encouragement of energy consumption (not to mention France’s rapid transition from fossil to nuclear energy) seems almost unimaginably radical in comparison to most of the tepid bu-reaucratic policy responses to the present threat

of climate change.2 While such a failure of cur-rent climate politics can be blamed on many factors, it does clearly indicate a gap between information and necessary action, between the documentary, journalistic and educational pre-sentation of the facts and consensus scientific predictions surrounding climate change, and the crisis-response it calls for. This, I believe, is reason enough to attempt a reading of the prod-ucts of popular culture, to try to trace how con-

cerns about climate change are refracted by art, outside of the more linear avenues of pedagogy, reporting and activism.

Thus, this paper will look at how the serious-ness of climate change may be communicated through art by means of a close reading and comparison of two recent films: Melancholia (2011) directed by Lars von Trier, and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) directed by Benh Zeitlin. Much could be said about how either film addresses (perhaps problematically) a range of other issues, such as gender, race, and class, but I will for the most part be avoiding these broader analytical and normative questions and focusing on how these films manifest, in mark-edly different ways, the threat of climate change, and perhaps evoke emotional responses to it.3

I will begin with Melancholia, a film that fol-lows a small cast of characters in the few days before a massive planet, which shares its name with the film, previously hidden behind the sun, shifts its position and smashes into the Earth. It is not a great leap to see this apocalyptic sci-ence fiction premise as a metaphor for the exis-tential threat of climate change. The danger to civilization and the human species from extreme climate change, after all, is that the Earth as it has been during the last few hundred thousand

Art and Approaching Apocalypse

Does keeping his eyes closed allow the boy to imagine an alternative to the destruction of the planet, or is this merely a fairy-tale delusion?

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years will be replaced with a planet of radi-cally different conditions. This rapidity of that change would be comparable, on a geologi-cal time scale, to that future state of the world violently colliding with the present. The rate at which high-income countries consume resourc-es is sometimes expressed through the concept of an ‘ecological footprint,’ in which consump-tion is measured as the area of the Earth’s sur-face needed to produce the resources and receive the wastes required for that consumption. The extent to which this footprint exceeds the eco-sphere’s regenerative capacity is communicated through the notion of how many ‘planets’ would be required to support this level of consump-tion over the long term if it became the global average. The obliteration of Earth in its collision with Melancholia could be read as an image of a planet of a size necessary to support the con-sumption of high-income countries colliding with the Earth as it really is.

Thus, the fictional apocalypse portrayed in Melancholia can be seen as an alternative rep-resentation of a real threat. From its very first frames, the film hints that it is concerned with alternative representations, filtered through art. The film begins with scenes from the moments before Melancholia’s collision with Earth. Yet by the end of the film we see that none of these scenes could have actually occurred within the narrative of the film; at the end of the linear nar-rative, the Earth’s final moments are portrayed differently. These first moments of the film are delivered in a highly stylized, very disconcert-ing manner, with objects moving impossibly, as if following different physical laws, each scene looking like an eerily animated canvas, evoking both the creepy, subliminal surrealism found in the still sequences of Last Year at Marienbad and European Renaissance painting. In fact, a Re-naissance painting (“The Hunters in the Snow” by Peter Bruegel, which appears again later in the film) is shown burning to ash. This is to say that the film opens with an alternative represen-

tation, filtered through art, of its own fictional end of the world, which is itself an alternative representation, filtered through art, of an end of the world as we know it.

The rest of the film is largely concerned with how anxieties about the end of the world are linked to anxieties about human social and bio-logical reproduction. This connection between human reproduction and the continued repro-duction of the Earth as a system is played out through the central character, Justine. The nar-rative begins with Justine and her new husband arriving many hours late for their wedding re-ception, because the unnecessarily large car they chose (a stretch limousine, for two people) is unable to negotiate the road to the exclusive golf resort, owned by Justine’s brother-in-law John, which is hosting the reception. The rituals and processes of social reproduction are first repre-sented by the absurd regulations of the wedding planner, who, for example, strictly insists on passing food only to the left, not the right. They are seen also in the competing demands and bickering of her divorced father and mother. The expectations of the market are represented by the domineering attitude of her employer, also the best man at the wedding, who uses his speech at the reception as an opportunity to remind her that she needs to provide a tagline for the marketing campaign she is assigned to. He goes so far as to display the image requir-ing a tagline on the flatscreen televisions set up in the dining hall. Seeing that her employer is the groom’s best man, his imposition of work onto her wedding reception is not as strange as it first appears. Saying yes to marriage is also say-ing yes to career; the different aspects of social reproduction come as a package. Immediately after Justine tells her boss that he is a “despi-cable, power hungry little man,” her husband leaves, not to be seen again. Violating the codes that govern the relationship between boss and worker spells the end of all forms of social re-production.

T. Vanderkemp Howard

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Justine’s anxiety about social reproduction corresponds with her premonitions about an impending astronomical catastrophe, and she rejects more and more of the expectations of the former as the latter draws nearer. As the lavish reception continues through the night, Justine’s spells of withdrawal, catatonia, anger and mis-behavior are mixed in with oddly calm skygaz-ing reveries. The story of Melancholia is the story of a cosmopolis ending, as Stephen Toulmin4 uses the term to denote a world view or system of thought wherein human and natural or univer-sal order is intrinsically connected. In the film, both orders come to an end together. This com-municates that anthropogenic climate change, the end of the Earth of the Holocene and the beginning of the Earth of the Anthropocene, does indeed mean the collapse of a cosmopolis. This cosmopolitical view is made more explicit near the end of the film, when Justine, in her prophetic mode, states with certainty that no one will miss the Earth, that life on Earth is evil, and that there is no life anywhere else. The en-tire universe can therefore be considered to be within the realm of human morality and its defi-cits, and the end of human morality becomes synonymous with the end of the cosmos.

Justine chooses, step-by-step, to abandon the layered processes of social reproduction. In the second half of the film, having lost her job, and with her husband, father and mother all having departed, the only remaining representa-tive of the forces of social reproduction is John, who embodies a rationalist discourse of techno-economic certainty, of the sort that dismisses the need for immediate action to slow, prevent or mitigate climate change, since any problems it causes in the future will have technological fixes, funded by further, unimpeded economic growth. John owns the golf resort and tracks Melancholia with an expensive telescope, and his access to technology and possession of scien-tific information is deeply intertwined with his elevated socio-economic position. This comes to

the surface in the moment when he brusquely informs a servant handling the telescope that “you don’t touch the instrument!” and when he tries to restrict the access his wife has to informa-tion about Melancholia to keep her from worry-ing. John commits suicide once it becomes ap-parent that Melancholia will in fact collide with Earth, perhaps because the collapse of scientific authority (which is intimately connected to his socio-economic authority) is as difficult to take, or even harder to take, than the end of life itself.

If one accepts that Melancholia functions as a vehicle for communicating the existential threats built into how human societies are cur-rently structured and reproduced, one might look to the unavoidable and complete nature of the catastrophe in the film and see it as hope-lessly fatalistic, and therefore not useful in con-necting the feelings evoked with prospects of positive action. The final scene of the film com-plicates this fatalism considerably with the rela-tionship between Justine and her young nephew. Although she has completely rejected reproduc-tion for herself, and seems generally unmoved by the coming end of the world (and outright hostile to her sister’s attempt to approach it with dignity), seeing the fear and vulnerability of a younger generation does affect her emotionally, and prompts her to invent a tale of a “magic cave” which can protect them from the colli-sion. In the final moments of the film, Justine, her sister and nephew sit under this improvised “magic cave,” a simple cone made from sticks. While her sister weeps and Justine looks on worriedly, the boy keeps his eyes tightly closed. Does keeping his eyes closed allow the boy to imagine an alternative to the destruction of the planet, or is this merely a fairy-tale delusion? The question remains open and deeply ambigu-ous as the film ends.

Beasts of the Southern Wild approaches the idea of cosmopolitical catastrophe from a differ-ent angle. Its central character is Hushpuppy, who lives in a sort of improvised shanty town

Art and Approaching Apocalypse

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called the Bathtub, on a fictional island in the Louisiana bayou on the Gulf Coast of the Unit-ed States. The first image we see of Hushpuppy is a bizarre act of cultivation: she waters a nest she has made from dirt, and then attempts to place a baby bird inside, curious but not alarmed when it does not immediately go inside. She seems to be both intuitively connected to the non-human world, but is at the same time so uncertain of its workings as to be alien from it. We are introduced to her proclivity to listen to

the heartbeats of things, both animate and not. She admits that she cannot understand the ‘lan-guage’ spoken by the heartbeats. Her behavior follows from the general cosmopolitical outlook of the residents of the Bathtub, which, unlike the brother-in-law’s techno-rationalist world view in Melancholia, appears to be a mystical, holistic form of animism or panpsychism which sees the whole universe as vital and alive, and draws no distinction between humans and the rest of the animal realm. Later in the film, when her father disappears for a time, Hushpuppy narrates that her “daddy could have turned into a tree, or a bug. There wasn’t any way to know.” Nature forms a continuum with human life, but is no less unpredictable and confusing because of it.

Hushpuppy and the other residents repeat-edly express this holist view of the universe, per-haps never more bluntly than when a character explains to a group of children: “Every animal is made out of meat. I’m meat. Y’all ass is meat. Everything is part of the buffet of the universe.” This same character also explains that “Any day now, fabric of the universe is going to unravel. Ice caps gonna melt, water’s gonna rise, and everything south of the levee is going under.”

While their outlook is non-anthropocentric, the people who espouse it still strongly feel a right to their place. As Hushpuppy says, “Me and my daddy, we stay right here. We’s who the Earth is for.” The shared ethos of the Bathtub is expressed through its embrace of drunken rev-elry, and the maintenance of a tolerant, diverse community. Its relationship with non-human nature is one of love and admiration, and stub-born place-based dedication – but also one of alienation – as seen in Hushpuppy’s curious and

puzzled interactions with non-human nature, and deep threat – as Hushpuppy says, one day the water will rise and wash the Bathtub away entirely.

In a parallel to Melancholia, Hushpuppy uses fiction in order to understand climate change – by imagining the melting of the ice caps as releasing ferocious herds of aurochs as a stand in for processes of a geologic scale. (In reality, aurochs are the wild progenitors of domestic taurine and zebu cattle; in the film, Hushpuppy sees them conjured up as mythical stampeding beasts.) As with von Trier’s opening hyper-styl-ized frames, we are primed to read the film as an artistic representation of catastrophic threat by an imaginative representation of catastrophe within the film itself.

Hushpuppy’s father, Wink, contrasts the Bathtub, which he calls “the prettiest place on Earth,” with the world directly outside, which we see most prominently represented by an oil refinery and a levee protecting it – a symbol of civilization’s disruption of natural systems, and its attempt to shield itself from the effects of that disruption. Later, when a storm puts most of the Bathtub underwater, the few residents who re-main decide to blow a hole in the levee in order

Beasts of the Southern Wild displays the end of the world as a complex linkage of worlds, local, regional and personal, which come to an end at

different places and different times.

T. Vanderkemp Howard

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to drain the shanty town. In a piece of loaded symbolism, they execute this plan by stuffing an alligator corpse with dynamite – nature striking back at the disruption caused by the oil refinery and the hubris of the levee, at the same time as the residents of the Bathtub strike back at the social order which keeps itself dry by keeping the Bathtub under water.

While the reality of Hurricane Katrina was one of vulnerable segments of society suffering from the failure of infrastructure meant to pro-

tect them from the uncontained actions of non-human nature, Beasts becomes a story of delib-erately undermining that same infrastructure in order that a vulnerable segment of society may embrace the uncertain and uncontained ac-tions of nature and claim some ownership over a place so that they may experience wildness and belonging.

This is part of how Beasts of the South-ern Wild communicates the reality of climate change in a very different way than Melancho-lia. By focusing on the dispossessed who will be most vulnerable to its effects in the future, and soonest, and by placement in a location well known for actual events in which socio-economically underprivileged people suffered from extreme weather events, the film combines a fictional portrait of hurricane-lashed Loui-siana with a semi-mythical projection of what the experience of climate change will be like for those on the margins of society in the future, while communicating the extent to which such impacts from climate change are already here in the present, if one looks in the proper places. While Melancholia translates the possibility of climatic catastrophe into a momentous and un-questionable apocalyptic scenario – our world

obliterated with unimaginable force by another world – Beasts of the Southern Wild displays the end of the world as a complex linkage of worlds, local, regional and personal, which come to an end at different places and different times. As Hushpuppy states after surveying the effects of the flood, “for the animals that didn’t have a dad to put ‘em in a boat, the end of the world already happened.” The end of the world means the end of a plurality of connected worlds, human and animal, local and global. The post-modern con-

cept of ‘heterotopias’, of parallel, simultaneous worlds, is applicable to dystopia just as much as to utopia.

Whereas in Melancholia, the cosmopolis con-nects the rituals and orders of social reproduc-tion with the continued reproduction of the Earth and life in the universe, in Beasts of the Southern Wild, such intimate, necessary connec-tions extend from the level of the planet down to the social and the personal – Hushpuppy ex-periences the order and disruption of the uni-verse as tied to the disruptions in her own life. When she pushes her father in anger and he col-lapses to the ground, there is a rush of sound and then a cut to a disintegrating ice floe, and she yells “momma, I think I broke something.” This is one of many times when the sound of storms, calving ice bergs, and the hooves of the mythic aurochs become one. When Hushpuppy believes she may have ‘broken’ her father, she has broken the universe – as she says, “the whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get busted.” Her father’s unspecified terminal illness becomes en-tangled with the ill health of the entire world. And she defiantly declares that she knows about

Art and Approaching Apocalypse

The value of connection to nature and place is thrown into question by the prospect of their disappearance under the waves.

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and can see this condition.While Beasts of the Southern Wild is suffused

with feelings of hope – one might well call it a “feel-good movie” – it may ultimately be just as ambiguous as the much gloomier Melancholia. As her father comes closer to death, Hushpuppy confronts the aurochs which she has imagined stampeding towards the Bathtub throughout the film, and when they stop at her feet, she tells them that “you’re my friend, kind of.” The ambiguity of this statement encapsulates the conflicted feelings pervading the film, which are brought on by the instability and contradic-tions of a universe so alive and interconnected on the one hand, and dangerous, unpredict-able and unstable on the other. This ambiguity suffuses the film’s final shot as well. In a voice-over, Hushpuppy proudly asserts that “when I die, the scientists of the future, they’re going to find it all. They gonna know. Once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub.” Yet as we hear her declaring the im-portance, and, in some sense, the permanence, of her life and her small, marginal community, we see the remaining small band from the Bath-tub walking down a narrow, nearly washed-over road, with water on both sides. The value of

connection to nature and place is thrown into question by the prospect of their disappearance under the waves. This goes some distance to complicating what could be seen as an over-sim-plified romanticization of Bathtub’s connection to nature, and the notion that it compensates for their social marginalization.

Much more could be said and debated about how these films can be read as representations of climate change, how they successfully or problematically address other social issues, how they function, succeed or fail aesthetically and as narratives, and how different audiences might interpret them, and beyond this, the extent to which the experience of any form of art can be said to influence how anyone views the world and takes action in it. I will leave such further discussion outside this paper, but I hope to have established, with this comparative reading, that art forms can represent the significance of cli-mate change outside of pedagogic and docu-mentary forms, and are currently doing so. We need not underestimate the extent to which art, whether it may at first glance be serious or frivo-lous, esoteric or commercial, provides material for the shaping of the future from the present.

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T. Vanderkemp Howard

1 Yergin, D. (1991): The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money and Power. Simon & Schuster.2 Ibid., p. 655.3 Von Trier’s work has faced accusations of misogyny throughout his career; for a critique of the racial dynamics of Beasts of the Southern Wild see e.g. Reed, A. Jr. (2013): “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How ‘Cultural Politics’ Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why” in Nonsite 9, available at http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why4 Toulmin, S. (1992): Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. University of Chicago Press.

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As early as late May, the heat on Fyllingen started to get troublesome. The whole district lay under a heat wave that just went on and on. Experts speculated whether the cause could be chemical emissions and exhaust gases from the industry, heating and traffic that were creating interruptions in the atmo-sphere which in turn caused meteorological irregularities, locally in the beginning, but which would undoubtedly have consequenc-es that would spread out. The reports indi-cated that half of the continent was affected by drought.

“Carbon dioxide in the air increases the inten-sity of solar radiation; that was a well-known fact even back in my days”, Doc explained

sullenly. “Now it seems we’ve managed to change the whole nature of the earth’s atmo-sphere. First we get this heat, then drought, years of scarcity, water shortage, food short-age… Just wait and see…”1

This may sound like a description of last year’s severe drought in most parts of the US that led to massive crop losses. It is, however, an excerpt from Norwegian writer Knut Faldbakken’s two connected novels Uår: Aftenlandet and Uår: Sweetwater, published in 1974 and 1976. Many fictional texts have taken up environmental questions since the beginnings of the environ-mental movements in Western countries around 1970. Uår is, however, remarkable in the respect

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Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in Norwegian

Literary Fiction

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that it addressed the problem of anthropogenic climate change very early. With increased atten-tion towards global warming in recent years, more and more writers are now using literary fiction as a medium for discussing possible im-plications for humanity and the non-human environment.

The main options for dealing with climate change are different forms of mitigation and ad-aptation. Climate change mitigation, as under-stood here, refers to any measures that are taken in order to restrict the process of global warming itself. The term adaptation, on the other hand, refers to all measures taken in anticipation of or in reaction to impacts of climate change.

Unsurprisingly, fictional descriptions of both mitigation and adaptation can be found in works of literature. In the following, I want to examine how the novels of two Norwegian writers are addressing these issues: Faldbakken‘s aforementioned Uår-books from the 1970s and Jostein Gaarder‘s recent Anna (2013). What do these texts tell us about the possibility of miti-gating climate change? Which measures of adap-tation do they depict? And can we say anything about the effects these narratives might have on the thinking and actions of their readers?

A sTudy of AdApTATion

The title of Faldbakken’s aforementioned texts already hints at the worst-case scenario they contain. Uår (literally, “un-year”) is a term used in Old Norse literature to designate years of natural disasters, failed harvests, famine and epidemics. The novels’ setting is the (geographi-cally unspecified) formerly prosperous megacity Sweetwater, which suffers from environmental pollution and increasing resource scarcity. The main protagonists, a handful of former inhabit-ants of Sweetwater, flee to the city’s enormous landfill, Fyllingen, in order to escape the loom-ing collapse. However, as the megacity’s supply system and with it, public order, break down completely, life becomes unbearably hard even

for the small community on Fyllingen. Their struggle for survival is made even more difficult by a changing and unpredictable climate. The final collapse of Sweetwater, featuring pandemic diseases, famine and violent conflicts, is accom-panied by an extraordinarily fierce winter. In the end, the few survivors, malnourished and culturally degraded to the behaviour of animals, leave the ruins of civilisation in order to begin anew.

Uår can be read as a literary study par ex-cellence of what kinds of adaptation might be required in a future characterised by ecological collapse, resource depletion and climate change. The protagonists’ adaptation begins with their migration from Sweetwater to Fyllingen, which can be seen as an anticipatory measure in expec-tation of the city’s collapse. In the beginning, the need to adapt to their new environment leads to a surge of creativity: The protagonists build an improvised rainwater harvesting system and start recycling materials that they find on the landfill. Gradually, however, as environmental conditions worsen, they become more and more reactive in their behaviour. While they still rely mostly on the ‘traditional’ food of city dwell-ers – cans and convenience products – in the outset, they are soon forced to radically extend their diet, as the supply of supermarket garbage from Sweetwater dwindles. From then on, they effectively eat anything that is available on the landfill, including birds, rats and lizards. Only human flesh remains taboo, at least for most of the protagonists. Psychologically, their decreas-ing use of spoken language and a general bru-talisation of all social intercourse can be viewed as reactions towards the hardships they are suf-fering. With Sweetwater’s complete collapse, the landfill dwellers’ limits of adaptive capacity become obvious: With survival on Fyllingen no longer possible, they migrate back to the city, where they are confronted not only with other bestialised humans, but also with an extremely hard winter, which catches them completely

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unprepared. They are not equipped for such weather conditions, the likes of which they had never experienced before, and are therefore “un-certain as to how they should cope with this new situation, this new trick that the unpredictable, man-manipulated climate conditions played on them.”2

culTurAl pessimism fAcing gloBAl WArming

The Uår novels were obviously inspired consid-erably by the Club of Rome’s famous report The Limits to Growth. Published in 1972, it warned that if world population growth, environmental pollution and resource exploitation continued their unabated increase, planetary limits would be reached and an uncontrollable collapse of the environment, the economy and thereby hu-man societies would be the consequence. The authors also voiced concern over the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, but hoped – from a present day perspective, naively – that serious ecological and climatic consequences would be avoided rather easily through switching to nuclear power in the near future.3 However, whereas The Limits to Growth was written in an optimistic spirit and with the belief that hu-manity’s course could be changed in time so that a sustainable equilibrium would be reached, ca-tastrophe is portrayed as being unavoidable in Uår. The subtitle of the first volume, Aftenland-et, refers to Oswald Spengler‘s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (“The Decline of the West”, 1918/1922) – a work of comprehensive cultural criticism, according to which human cultures evolve, grow and die like organisms, which ar-gues that Western urban civilization is at the beginning of the final stage of an inevitable de-cline. Uår shares this deterministic view of hu-man culture and therefore presents efforts to in-troduce counter-measures against the process of decline as futile. One of the novels’ characters, old Doc, actually embodies undeterred ideal-

ism, as he continues – against all odds – to hope for a reform of society that would bring it into harmony with nature again. Sweetwater’s de-cline, however, is unstoppable, and in the end, the other dwellers on Fyllingen kill Doc in order to steal his food storage. The only chance of sur-viving the final breakdown, it seems, is to adapt radically to the changing circumstances – even if this means abandoning basic rules of social coexistence. To be sure, there is a glimpse of a new, more sustainable society in the last chap-ters of Uår. The premise for this new beginning is, however, the complete collapse of the previ-ous system.

ApocAlypTic emoTions

What might be the effect of such an apocalyptic narrative on readers? There are almost no studies on how environmental literary fiction influenc-es the thoughts and behaviour of its audiences. One advantage of fiction over non-fiction with regard to predictions of environmental change is rather obvious: Fiction can much more vividly depict what could happen if, for example, one of the scenarios in The Limits to Growth should turn out to be true, compared to the complex models and often rather dry descriptions in the study itself. After having read Uår, imagining what the collapse of a modern urban society through the transgressing of the planet’s ecologi-cal boundaries could be like, is quite easy. A log-ical assumption would be that apocalyptic fic-tional scenarios thus encourage action precisely in order to prevent them from becoming true. This is what Lawrence Buell obviously supposes when he writes: “Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contempo-rary environmental imagination has at its dis-posal.”4 Thus fictional texts like Uår, although implicitly denying the usefulness of mitigating efforts, would somewhat paradoxically encour-age their readers nevertheless to commit them-selves to mitigation.

The opposite might be equally likely, how-

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ever, as a recent study by sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard shows (see her own contribution in this issue). Norgaard interviewed the inhabit-ants of a medium-sized Norwegian town in order to find an explanation for their inaction concerning global warming. Despite a high level of education, general political engagement and material wealth, and despite the community being itself economically affected by the chang-ing climate, people failed to address the issue of global warming both on a political and on a personal level. Nothing was done in favour of mitigation efforts by the community mem-bers, while on the other hand – as a reaction to changed weather conditions – some adaptation measures were initiated, such as the use of snow making machines in order to allow the contin-ued use of the local ski slopes. In the interviews, people expressed feelings of fear, guilt and help-lessness when climate change was mentioned. As Norgaard shows, most of those interviewed had developed a whole set of strategies to avoid these unpleasant emotions, which consequently led them to avoiding the topic of climate change in general – and thus to failing to take any ac-tion on behalf of climate change mitigation.5

Faldbakken’s Uår-novels obviously have a potential to evoke the same negative emotions that Norgaard observed. The extremely undesir-able future scenario itself is likely to cause fear. The consciousness of being oneself part of the society and culture responsible for the depicted problematic development certainly can lead to feelings of guilt, and the implied inevitability of decline may easily generate a feeling of helpless-ness. Environmental apocalypticism in fictional texts might thus lead to passivity and pessimism instead of encouraging commitment and miti-gating action. Dystopian future scenarios could in this way become self-fulfilling prophecies.

A fABle for TomorroW

Almost 40 years after the publication of Uår, an-other Norwegian writer is now confronting this

predicament. In February 2013, Jostein Gaarder published a book with the title Anna. En fa-bel om klodens klima og miljø (“Anna. A Fable about the Planet‘s Climate and Environment”).6 Gaarder is world-renowned for his novel about the history of philosophy, Sofies verden (“Sofie’s World”, 1991), which by now has been trans-lated into about 60 languages.

The new book’s setting is Norway as of 2012. 16-year-old Anna frequently has dreams in which she is incarnated as her own great-grandchild, the likewise 16-year-old Nova, in the year 2082. The world in Nova’s time dramat-ically differs from Anna’s. Catastrophic climate change has taken place and global warming still continues, as several tipping points have been passed. Large parts of the world are uninhab-itable because of drought and desertification. Hundreds of millions have died from famine, climate change induced weather catastrophes and in desperate resource wars. Biodiversity is extremely reduced through the devastation of the earth’s ecosystems. In a key scene, Nova furi-ously accuses her own great grandmother – who is nobody else than 86-year-old Anna herself – for having been part of the generation respon-sible for this catastrophe and not having done enough to prevent it. Old Anna holds, however, that there might be a chance of changing the course of history. When young Anna wakes from this dream, she feels that it is now herself who has both the responsibility and the chance for creating a different future. She consequently gathers all kinds of information on what has to be done and starts an environmental group at her school.

Anna provides rather little information about processes of adaptation that must have taken place between 2012 and 2082. The men-tioned catastrophes indicate, however, that most ecosystems and large parts of the world popu-lation soon reached limits of adaptability and subsequently perished. In any case, the novel mentions large numbers of climate refugees

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from regions that have become uninhabitable (40, 182). Compared to this, the adaptation measures which Norwegians in Nova’s time are forced to conduct seem rather harmless: They have to pollinate fruit trees by hand, as the bees have become extinct and the ecosystem services they provided are thus lost (101). Nova always

carries around a large umbrella, as precipitation has markedly increased (124). Trees are felled with axes, as there is no fuel for chainsaws any longer (108-110), and pack animals are used for the transport of goods (70-71). Ecosystems in Norway have not collapsed, but adapted to the warmer and wetter climate: Hardangervidda is now completely grown over by birch woods (116).

Unlike Faldbakken, however, Gaarder does not limit himself to drawing a future scenario of decline and adaptation. This becomes clear as early as one of the first chapters, when he lets a psychiatrist state that it would be necessary to cure people “from the lack of worry about global warming. We should surely not gradually get ac-customed to this threat. On the contrary! We have to try to eradicate it” (22). This can be read as a statement against adaptation and in favour of mitigating measures.

environmenTAl eThics versus pessimism

Anna certainly does not deny the need to help those who are already hit by climate change con-sequences today to adapt. The text’s main focus, however, is on the need for an ethical attitude, not only towards other people living now, but also towards future generations. In a newspa-per article that Anna reads, it is stated that the principle of mutuality – to treat others in the way oneself would wish to be treated – has to be extended into the future: “You shall act towards

the next generation the way you had wished that the previous generation had acted towards yourself ” (57). The conclusion from this ethical attitude is:

We are therefore not permitted to hand over a planet which is worth less than the one we

were allowed to live on ourselves. Fewer fish in the sea. Less drinking water. Less food. Less rainforest. Less mountain nature. Fewer coral reefs. Fewer glaciers and ski trails. Fewer species of plants and animals... Less beauty! Less wonder! Less splendour and joy! (58)

Here, Gaarder clearly draws upon elements from what has been called strong sustainability and the constant natural capital rule: Natural re-sources should not be diminished, so their avail-ability is ensured not only for the present, but for the long-term future as well. This rule refers, just as Gaarder’s quote above, not only to the material values and ecosystem services available in nature, but also to aesthetical and recreational values.7 The practical implementation of such an ethical stance would make considerable ef-forts of mitigation necessary today.

Consistently, Anna – unlike Faldbakken’s protagonists – does not regard the present status quo of the economy, of politics and of culture in general as being unalterable. Knowledge of potentially catastrophic changes of climate and environment in the future does not lead her to passivity or to the idea of adaptation. On the contrary: After waking up from the dream about Nova, she realises that what in the dream had been the great grandmother’s responsibility, is now her own: “Suddenly it is me who has to do something to fight climate damages” (135). She is of course aware that global warming has

Environmental apocalypticism [...] might thus lead to passivity and pessimism instead of encou-

raging commitment and mitigating action.

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noTes1 Faldbakken, Knut (1974): Uår: Aftenlandet. Oslo: Gyldendal, p. 85. My translation.2 Faldbakken, Knut (1976): Uår: Sweetwater. Oslo: Gyldendal, p. 172. My translation.3 Meadows, Donella, et al. (1972): Hvor går grensen? MITs forskningsrapport om verdens fortsatte vekst. Transl. by E. A. Kristof-Transl. by E. A. Kristof-fersen. Oslo: Cappelen, p. 65.4 Buell, Lawrence (1995): The Environmental Imagination. Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, p. 285.5 Norgaard, Kari Marie (2011): Living in Denial. Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.6 Gaarder, Jostein (2013): Anna. En fabel om klodens klima og miljø. Oslo: Aschehoug. All translations of quotes from this book in the following are my own. 7 Compare Ott, Konrad (2010): Umweltethik zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, pp. 170-178.

already begun and that millions of species are in danger of extinction. “But it was still not too late to save the Earth’s biological diversity. The world had got one more chance!” (55)

Instead of the deterministic view of the ines-capable decline and the consequent fatalism of Sweetwater’s inhabitants, Anna is characterised by hope and a belief in the possibility of chang-ing the future. She calls herself an optimist and holds that “it is immoral to be a pessimist” (208). In her opinion, “pessimism is just an-other word for laziness. I can be worried, that is something entirely different, but the pessimists have given up” (208).

Admittedly, an apocalyptic rhetoric similar to that of Uår can also be found in the future chapters of Anna. The 2082-scenario also has a potential to evoke unpleasant emotions such as

fear, guilt and helplessness. However, the use of the two time-levels allows Gaarder to reveal the catastrophic decline as being preventable. Un-like Uår, Anna also invokes positive emotions such as hope and commitment. Consequently, while adaptation to a changing environment is not precluded, the main emphasis in Anna lies on both the necessity and the possibility of mitigation. Whether this optimistic narrative will be as appealing to readers as Uår’s fatalistic worst-case scenario was in the 1970s remains to be seen. In any case, there can be no doubt con-cerning what Gaarder would like his audience to do: A list of websites about climate change and biodiversity as well as internet addresses of several environmental NGOs at the end of the book is clearly intended to prod the readers to start taking action themselves.

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Mitchell Anderson, the featured photograp-ger in this issue, is a US-american activist and writer currently based in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Here he works for ClearWater, a non-profit organisation whose dual goal of strengthening local campesino and indigenous communities and providing clean uncontaminated water was spurred by one of the worlds worst environmental disasters.

During the last 40 years the Northern Ecua-dorian Amazon has been the site of the still ongo-ing Chevron-Texaco oil spill. The contamination, consisting of more than 68 billion litres of pro-duced water and oil, leaking from unsecured pits or flushed directly into nearby rivers and streams, covers more than 4,400 km2.

The affected area was up until the oil age one of the most pristine and biodiverse in the world. Now, local indigenous peoples like the Secoya, Siona, Co-fan and Kichwa are struggling to continue their tra-ditional way of life. The oil production and its side effects of contamination, colonisation, and defor-estation have wreaked havoc on the fish and wild-life the indigenous groups have based their subsis-

tence on. Other bi-products of the disaster include heightened levels of cancer, miscarriages, infertility, skin deceases and diarrhoea — maladies which have plagued indigenous and more recently established campesino communities alike.

Anderson’s photos, presented here, chronicle the lives of the people living at the intersection of a pristine natural environment and an environmen-tal catastrophe. More than anything they tell stories about adaptation. About adapting to the destruc-tion of the forest, their “home”, as well as the advent of modern society. About the necessity of adapting to an environment without safe drinking water. And about people being forced to adapt to condi-tions not of their choosing.

In this way the pictures bring to light both a grain of hope for the future as well as a warning. The hope both the photos and the ClearWater project testifies to is the possibility for humans to overcome great difficulties and adapt to new circumstances. The warning; that adaptation is never optimal, and that the preferred option is to tackle problems be-fore adaptation is needed.

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Page 52: Cofán children play under clean water from a ClearWater rain catchment system. After passing through a bio-sand filtration system, this rainwater is fit to drink. – Mitchell Anderson

This page: Lydia Aguinda and another Kichwa community member force oil to the surfaceof a pond so that it can be swept up. – Mitchell Anderson

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Page 53: The rivers and streams of Ecuador’s northern Amazon have been contaminated by decades of reckless oil operations. Here a woman bathes with her child under a tangle of oil flow lines. – Mitchell Anderson

This page: Oil infrastructure forms a part of daily life for many in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon. Here, a young Kichwa girl sets clothes to dry on an oil pipe. – Mitchell Anderson

For more photos and information about the Clear Water project: www.giveclearwater.com/project

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For nearly three decades natural and physical scientists have provided increasingly clear and dire assessments of alteration in the biophysi-cal world around which human social systems are organized. Just a few months ago the world atmosphere reached a carbon dioxide concentra-tion of 400 parts per million. Yet despite these urgent warnings from the scientific community, human social and political response to ecological degradation remains wholly inadequate. Instead climate change is like a proverbial “elephant in the room.” Climate scientists may have identi-

fied global warming as the most important is-sue of our time, but for urban dwellers in the rich and powerful Northern countries climate change is seen as “no more than background noise.”

New evidence indicates that it is not just the radical right wing politics of those who don’t believe that climate change is happening that slows action on the climate. Perhaps even more important for our lack of forward movement on climate change is the more everyday practice of the majority of people in Norway, the United

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United States

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Illustration: Sahar Ajami

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States and other Western democracies who know about climate change but manage to just ignore it.

With its wealth from oil and gas that goes directly to benefit the public, Norway is in a particular paradox regarding this political si-lence. Most Norwegians have been aware of cli-mate change since before the age of 12 years old. Norwegians are aware that their high quality of life comes from the wealth of an active oil and gas industry. Norway may be a small country, but as the fifth largest oil exporter and the sec-ond largest exporter of natural gas, it is a big player on the global emissions stage.

But Norway is not alone in the act of ev-eryday ignoring, this gap between the severity of the problem of climate change and its lack of public salience is visible in most Western na-tions. Indeed, no nation has a base of public citi-zens that are sufficiently socially and politically engaged to effect the level of change that predic-tions of climate science would seem to warrant. Instead we are confronted with a series of para-doxes: as scientific evidence for climate change pours in, public urgency and even interest in the issue fails to correspond. What can explain the misfit between scientific information and public concern? Are people just uniformed of the facts? Are they inherently greedy and self-interested?

My original and most extensive fieldwork was set in a small farming community in Nor-way. High levels of wealth, education, standard of living and political engagement, together with the nation’s location in the northern lati-tude make Norway a very useful place to explore questions about the apathy and political silence in the face of climate change. If any nation can find the ability to respond it must be in a place such as this, where the effects are visible, the population is educated, cared for, politicized and environmentally engaged. I use the voices of people in this community in Norway, dur-ing a recent very dry and warm winter, in order to make visible the narratives and cultural con-

structions that can inform a larger story behind worldwide public paralysis in the face of predic-tions from climate scientists.

As it happened, in this rural community there was unusually warm weather during my stay. November brought severe flooding across the entire region. The first snowfall did not come until late January – some two months later than usual.

As a result of these conditions, the local ski area only opened in late December with the aid of 100% artificial snow – a completely un-precedented event with dramatic recreational effects and measurable economic impacts on the community. The local lake failed to freeze sufficiently to allow for ice-fishing. Casual com-ments about the weather, a long-accepted form of small talk, commonly included references to unusual weather, shaking of heads, and the phrase “climate change.”

It was not just the weather that was unusual that winter. As a sociologist, I was perplexed by the behavior of the people as well. Despite clear social and economic impacts on the community, no social action was taking place. People could have reacted differently to that strange winter. The shortened ski season affected everyone in the community. In the words of one taxi driv-er: “It makes a difference if we move from five months of winter tourism to only three. It af-fects all of us, you know, not just those up on the mountain. It affects the hotels, the shops in town, us taxi drivers, we notice it too.” Why didn’t this awareness translate into social action? Community members could have written let-ters to the local paper, brought the issue up in one of the many public forums that took place that winter, made attempts to plan for the lo-cal effects of climate change, put pressure on local and national leaders to develop long term climate plans or short term economic relief, decreased their automobile use, or at the least, engaged their neighbors, children, and politi-cal leaders in discussions about what climate

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change might mean for their community in the next ten and twenty years. The residents of this town could have rallied around the problem of the lack of snow and its economic and cultural impacts. But they did not.

“We don’T reAlly WAnT To KnoW” The winter of my fieldwork I attended public meetings, read the newspapers, spoke with peo-ple on the street and conducted 46 interviews. Global warming was frequently mentioned and people seemed to be both informed and con-cerned about it. Yet at the same time it was an uncomfortable issue. People were aware that cli-mate change could radically alter life within the next decades, yet they did not go about their days wondering what life would be like for their chil-

dren, whether farming practices would change or whether their grandchildren would be able to ski on real snow. They spent their days think-ing about more local, manageable topics. In the words of one person who held his hands in front of his eyes as he spoke, “people want to protect themselves a bit.” Other community members described this sense of knowing and not know-ing, of having information but not thinking about it in their everyday lives. As one young woman told me “In the every day I don’t think so much about it, but I know that environmen-tal protection is very important.” As a topic that was troubling, it was an issue that many people preferred to avoid. Thus community members describe climate change as an issue that they have to “sit themselves down and think about,” “ don’t think about in the everyday,” “but which in between is discouraging and an emotional weight.” Vigdis, a college age student told me that she was afraid of global warming, but that

it didn’t enter her everyday life:

I often get afraid, like – it goes very much up and down, then, with how much I think about it. But if I sit myself down and think about it, it could actually happen, I thought about how if this here continues we could come to have no difference between winter and spring and summer, like – and lots of stuff about the ice that is melting and that there will be flooding, like, and that is de-pressing, the way I see it.

Since members of the community did know about global warming but did not integrate this knowledge into everyday life, they experienced what Robert Lifton calls the absurdity of the double life.1 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 melt-ing and the predictions for future weather sce-narios. In the words of Kjersti, a teacher at the local agricultural school in her early 30’s: “We live in one way and we think in another. We learn to think in parallel. It’s a skill, an art of living.”

The term ‘denial’ is sometimes used to de-scribe the phenomenon of outright rejecting in-formation as false, as in the case of climate skep-tics. But this is a very different and more literal use of the term denial. The denial metaphor of the elephant in the room is useful because it re-minds us that ignoring a serious problem is not easy to do. Ignoring the obvious can be a lot of work. In her work on apathy in the United States, sociologist Nina Eliasoph observes, “We often assume that political activism requires an explanation, while inactivity is the normal state

Dr. Kari Marie Norgaard

“We live in one way and we think in another. We learn to think in parallel.

It’s a skill, an art of living.”

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of affairs. But it can be as difficult to ignore a problem as to try to solve it, to curtail feelings of empathy as to extend them. . . If there is no exit from the political world then political silence must be as active and colorful as a bright sum-mer shadow”.2 Instead, people actually work to avoid acknowledging disturbing information in order to avoid emotions of fear, guilt and help-lessness, follow cultural norms, and maintain positive conceptions of individual and national identity. As a result of this kind of denial, people describe a sense of ‘knowing and not knowing’ about climate change, of having information but not thinking about it in their everyday lives.

Information from climate science is known in the abstract, but disconnected from, and invis-ible within political, social or private life. How did people manage to outwardly ignore what was happening in the community? Did they manage to ignore it inwardly as well?

In my book length project Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life I trace the three disturbing emotions of guilt, fear of the future and helplessness, as well as how people in both Norway and the United States normalized the idea of climate change in order to avoid these emotions. I describe how people changed the topic of conversations, told jokes, tried not to think about it, and kept the con-cept off the agenda of political meetings all by following the “rules” of normal behavior. As a result, what happened in this Norwegian town, and indeed what we can all observe in the public silence on climate change in United States and elsewhere, was not a rejection of information per se, but the failure to integrate this knowl-edge into everyday life or transform it into social action.

The view from this town in Norway portrays global warming as an issue about which people cared and had considerable information, but one about which they didn’t really want to know and in some sense didn’t know how to know. Al-though individual people experience these emo-tions, this denial is not individual. Rather it is something that people do together as a commu-nity. I draw upon the work of sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel who coined the term “socially orga-nized denial.”3 Community members collec-tively held information about global warming at arm’s length by participating in cultural norms of attention, emotion, and conversation, and by

using a series of cultural narratives to deflect dis-turbing information and normalize a particular version of reality in which “everything was fine.”

Many of the same emotions were at play in the United States, yet denial also looks different in the United States than it does in Norway. The United States is obviously a much larger and much less homogenous society. Also clearly dif-ferent are some of the particular reasons for ig-noring climate change (such as the fact that our greater carbon emissions make our involvement harder to face) and the extent of social structural support for us to ignore it. Denial in the United States also looks different due to the presence of corporate-funded campaigns of skepticism and the increasingly successful cultural challenge they have launched to the legitimacy of science in the public sphere.4,5

One lesson from the American context con-cerns the hazard of individualism. The power-lessness and fear about the future described in both Norwegian and American interviews were exacerbated in the United States by a general discourse of individualism coupled with aware-

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There are so many actions the Norwegian go-vernment can take, but it clearly will not do so without significant public pressure.

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ness that individual action was not enough. An-other issue at play in the United States is mis-trust of government. Both themes are present in the sense of helplessness articulated by one American student here:

We’d hear all this information and get all riled up, and then they’d be, like, “contact your legislator,” and I’d be, like, “Aw, really? Can’t you give us a little more?” That’s, like, where I feel the most helpless; it’s like I know all this stuff, I have all this information, [but] what the hell do I do with it? I don’t know where to turn, I don’t know who to talk to. Yeah, I can write my congressman a letter, but in all honesty . . . I am not sure that one person can make such a difference.6

It would seem that a combination of lack of trust in their political system (political alienation) and a culture of individualism leave Americans uniquely at a loss in terms of what to do about climate change. In many respects and for large segments of the population, however, denial in the United States looks and feels very much the same as it does in the small community in Nor-way. Many of the hopes and fears articulated by people in each country are remarkably similar. The widespread nature of the missing response to climate change itself indicates that there are cross-cutting, universal elements to people’s ex-perience of climate science. It is generally true, in the United States as well as in Norway and in many countries around the world, that despite new information about the fragility of our plan-et, life goes on “as normal.” Across many sectors of U.S. society, people know facts about climate change that they believe to be true, but they live their lives without integrating this information into their decision making, political activities, or sense of daily reality. Thus, there appear to be lessons for all of us to learn from this one com-munity in Norway. Life is different there, but for many of us around the world it is also very much the same.

Can such socially organized denial be over-come? And if so, how? One implication of so-cially organized denial of climate change is that as individuals we must struggle to imagine the reality of our current situation. With socially or-ganized denial, the question becomes not how do we better educate and inform the public, but under what circumstances are people able to move beyond a sense of helplessness, guilt or fear of the future and take actions that are in their collective, long term survival interest? Climate change requires large-scale reduction of emissions, but our current political economic structure is intimately embedded in our petro-leum-based economy. We need democratic en-gagement and response, yet individuals retreat out of a sense of helplessness. Part of what pres-ently makes people feel helpless is an assessment of this very serious problem in a context where nobody else is acting, an assessment that politi-cal actions are socially unacceptable or politi-cally unfeasible, and that larger international ef-forts are even more unlikely. How can we escape this circular pattern?

Must we go into the streets? Probably a lot more people do need to march with signs down Karl Johan street and the main streets of every town in Norway and the United States in order to break the cycle of invisibility around climate change. But for those with different instincts there are many other things that can and must be done to make climate change visible and to show each other and our political leaders that we demand action.

If socially organized climate denial is a cy-cle held in place by individual fear and silence, complicit cultural norms and a state logic based on fossil fuel extraction and economic profit at any politically acceptable cost, then the cycle can be interrupted at many places. In any po-litical struggle there are key strategic possibili-ties. Fortunately the Norwegian people are in a unique position to make an enormous positive impact on the reduction of global emissions.

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Norway may be a small country, but it is a big player in the global discursive politics of oil and gas production. Few oil companies around the world are publicly owned. Few oil-producing nations are so democratic or environmentally oriented. National wealth, strong environmen-tal and humanitarian cultural values, and high levels of both education and access to media are all qualities that can be leveraged for social change. Furthermore, Norway has a very posi-tive reputation globally as an environmental and humanitarian leader.

With both the material and symbolic power from the above circumstances, Norway has the opportunity to change the rules of the game. The world watches what Norway does. The world will also watch what Norway decides not to do. Norway can build upon its positive repu-tation as an environmental leader, and easy ac-cess to the media spotlight in order to signal to the world what is acceptable on climate change. Take for example the Canadian tar sands. The extraction of bitumen in Canada has devastat-ing impacts on both the land and Native people who live there. Because Norway has a reputa-tion for strong environmental standards, other companies engaging in Canadian tar sands production point to Norway’s involvement as an indication that the practices are not so bad. The Norwegian public can however pressure the Prime Minster to insist that Statoil withdraw from the Canadian tar sands production. This would not only reduce Norway’s direct involve-ment in the emissions of climate gases on these projects, Norway’s withdrawal would signal a powerful challenge this existing narrative that the extraction of tar sands is socially or envi-ronmentally acceptable. In this way, Norway could use both its material and symbolic power to change the rules of acceptability on the global playing field.

Ending Norwegian involvement in the Ca-nadian tar sands, withdrawing support from

questionable emissions trading schemes, setting real targets for emissions caps, taking leadership within climate negotiations, reinvesting oil rev-enue into renewable power sources rather than the oil and gas industries, making Oil Fund in-vestments accountable to strong environmental and humanitarian criteria, each of these would have consequences that are both real and sym-bolic. There are so many actions the Norwegian government can take, but it clearly will not do so without significant public pressure.

Individual people can get involved in local political efforts; even talking about it with fam-ily and friends is an important way to break the silence. For another kind of example: Norwe-gian farmers take seriously the politics of “local patriotism.” Although they are not enough in isolation, local efforts to make climate change visible in the community, to plan for coming changes, to reduce emissions at the county and regional levels that are based on existing com-munity ties and sense of place and identity may provide a key for breaking through climate deni-al from the ground up. There is already a global movement building for communities to uncover how climate change is manifesting in their lo-cal contexts. Local political renewal cannot be enough on its own, but it may be the important next step for individuals in breaking through the absurdity of the double life and for renew-ing democratic process. As people participate in thinking about what is happening in their own place and how they will respond, they will begin to see why the facts of climate change matter to them and to develop a sociological imagina-tion at the same time as they reconnect the rifts in time and space that have constructed climate change as a distant issue. Working together may over time create the supportive community that is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for people to face large fears about the future and engage in large scale social change. Facing climate change will not be easy. But it is worth trying.

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noTes1 Lifton, R. (1982): Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism. New York: Basic Books.2 Eliasoph, N. (1998): Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 63 Zerubavel, E. (2006): The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press.4 Jacques, P., R. Dunlap, and M. Freeman (2008): “The Organisation of Denial: Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental Skepticism.” Environmental Politics 17 (3):349–385.5 Jacques, P. (2009): Environmental Skepticism: Ecology, Power, and Public Life. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.6 Norgaard, K. M. (2011): Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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What role can the environmental movement play to make climate change a local, concrete issue? To understand this, I have studied two of Scandinavia’s biggest and oldest environmen-tal organizations – The Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature (NNV from now on, their Norwegian acronym) and the Danish Conservation Society (DN from now on) and their nascent local climate activism. My stud-ies suggest that environmental organizations can and should focus their efforts on creating and facilitating climate change activism at the local level. The environmental movement’s role in making climate change a local issue can be crucial, not least to create the political capital

necessary to undo the current gridlock in inter-national politics. In democratic societies, power seeps ideally upwards, in small streams of legiti-macy and urgency. If we cannot adapt the issue to the system, we stand little chance to make real change.

Climate change is a scientific term for the physical effects of global warming, a complex process that is only fully conceptualized and un-derstood through mathematical models in the ‘global knowledge infrastructure’ we call climate science.1 Understanding climate change requires information from several disciplines, and is based on myriad observations all over the globe. This global knowledge infrastructure has been

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coordinated by the United Nations Interna-tional Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988. Their reports lay the scientific foundation for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and are used as an important framework for national climate policy. In the public discourse, climate change is also an ‘issue’ – a matter of public concern, which is understood in a political and cultural context. While our scientific conception of cli-mate change may change through observations and modeling, climate change understood as a political and social ‘issue’ is even more mal-leable. The social conceptualization of the issue affects the organization’s ideas about how, and at what political level, it can be addressed effi-ciently. Over time, these analyses may change, or be broadened to include new forms or levels of political action.

Climate change has predominantly been conceptualized as a ‘global’ issue. As with the depletion of the ozone layer and the creation of acid rain, effectively addressing climate change requires international cooperation, as the greenhouse gas emissions are widely, if not evenly, distributed between all the nations of the world. While some issues are clearly more global in scope than others – climate change be-ing a prime example – the conceptualization of an issue as ‘global’ is also the result of a political strategy, both from politicians and NGOs. The ‘global-ness’ of an issue is “significantly a mat-ter of labeling and, so to speak, social construc-tion”.2 This process can be witnessed on other issues.

Biodiversity has traditionally been champi-oned through national or municipal policy, but has, since the 1974 Stockholm Conference and the 1992 Rio Summit increasingly become a global concern. A recent example is an article published in Nature June 2012, in which ecosys-tems all over the globe were seen as a whole and the authors discuss whether a global “tipping point” is underway.3 Different conceptualiza-

tions of issues may serve different political goals. An understanding of biodiversity as an urgent ‘global’ concern may underpin the ongoing at-tempts at creating a more effective global frame-work to preserve biodiversity through the Unit-ed Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. As the climate issue has mainly been understood as ‘global’, the political response has largely been in the form of a top-down global effort.

The experience from the successful mitiga-tion of the depletion of the ozone layer was the main foundation for the international response to climate change, which has taken shape as a UN-led convention – the United States Frame-work Convention on Climate Change - which binds countries to emission targets.4 Experience so far suggests that this top-heavy process has been deeply flawed. Despite over 20 years of negotiations, the concentration of CO2 is rising more rapidly than in the 90s. The issue of ozone depletion was by far easier to tackle through this top-down framework than climate change has proven to be. While climate change has been seen as one of the most ‘global’ environmental problems of our age, understanding climate change as strictly global can be problematic. As Tsing (2005) has argued, this perspective can serve to undermine local understanding and conditions:

The global scale is privileged above all others. In contrast to Linnean Plant Classification or Muir-inspired nature appreciation, the global scale is the locus of prediction as well as understanding. Local conditions can be predicted from the global model; that is the point of its globality. Local data may adjust the global model but never defy it. Its global-ity is all-embracing.5

Similarly, Yearley (2005) points out that there are problems with how the label ‘global’ is used on environmental issues. The ‘global’ label im-plies that the issue is equally urgent for all, but in practice, it can have an opposite effect: the

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idea of ‘globality’ can be an excuse for inaction among developed countries, while it may be used to justify foreign meddling in developing countries. Deforestation in the Amazon rain forest is seen as a global concern, which other countries have a stake in; the same is not the case for forests in more developed countries.6

The ‘global’ framework can also become a hindrance to effective policy action. Victor ar-gues that the current climate change framework has become ‘gridlocked’. By focusing too much on an issue’s ‘global-ness’, we may make it harder to implement policy, and implementation may become insensitive to uniquely local concerns or hindrances. A bigger problem is that this cre-ates a policy bottleneck when the global model and global understandings of climate change do not lead to the formulation of effective na-tional policy responses. Universal, global efforts to mitigate climate change have been slow, and plagued by conflict and setbacks.7 To make mat-ters worse, the lack of popular support - which may reasonably be traced back to the lack of popular understanding of climate change – cre-ates meager soil from which to reap the amount of political capital needed to make drastic steps towards climate mitigation. As an anonymous negotiator at the Climate summit in Doha in 2012 quipped: “We can solve climate change, but we cannot do so and be re-elected”.

Understanding climate change as ‘global’ may also create a fixation on global, one-off so-lutions, to be decided in pivotal international meetings. Victor (2005) urges us to think of climate change as a development issue, not an environmental issue:

It isn’t so much a Manhattan project – a crash effort focused on a specific goal without re-gard to cost. It is more like economic devel-opment – a slow, subtle process of profound social change.8

Similarly, North (2011) argues that climate change and resource crises are urgent problems,

but they are not problems that can be solved eas-ily or quickly.

There is no one point of pressure, passing a civil rights act, no decision not to deploy Cruise or Trident missiles, no decision not to invade Iraq that could have the same effect. No one demonstration could ever be seen to ‘succeed’.9

The role of The environmenTAl movemenT

A profound social change made through count-less small, incremental decisions requires action on the national and local/municipal level, and inclusion and involvement of political actors on several levels, to be effective. And like most ‘global’ issues, both the causes and the effects of climate change will still be tied to places. Stein-berg and Vanderveer point out that the new kinds of environmental problem, which are in-creasingly global in nature, will still have to be addressed by specific movements and organiza-tions within and across borders.10 The question is whether the environmental movement is able to live up to this ambition.

On the governmental level, a process of ‘localization’ of climate change is already un-derway. Governments in several countries have mandated municipal climate plans in the past years, both on issues of climate mitigation and adaptation, and made efforts to inform the pub-lic about the effects of climate change and the ways they can be mitigated or must be adapted to. But what role will the environmental move-ment take in this inevitable process of ‘localiza-tion’?

While the environmental movement should not be lumped together with other movements, their experiences are important. The environ-mental movement has not generally been driven by a strong ideological framework, but by sci-entific knowledge, paired with relatively com-monsensical ethics. While much could be (and has been) said about the merits of non-anthro-

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pocentrism, the most successful rallying cries of the environmental movement has been based on simple anthropocentric goals. Most forms of nature preservation rhetoric feature strong anthropocentric emphasis. We preserve nature to maintain ‘eco-services’, to avoid depleting resources, and to maintain access to beautiful recreational areas.

This pattern is strong in the countries I have studied. The Danish Conservation Society has throughout its century-spanning existence been a strong champion for preserving nature as a source of recreation. This may not be surprising, as Denmark is among the most heavily altered countries in Europe. Flat farmland constitute 60 percent of the total surface of the country – an even higher amount than in the Nether-lands – and the country is densely populated. The Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature on the other hand, has seen a stronger non-anthropocentric streak in the watershed conflict over the damming of Norwegian rivers for hydro power in the 1960s and -70s. How-ever, the later successes in forest preservation, especially in the powerful Oslo and Akershus chapter, has been achieved by a heavy emphasis on human recreation, in addition to the more nature-oriented goals of preserving biodiversity. While the “land ethic” of Aldo Leopold and the “deep ecology” of Arne Næss et al. remains important, they are not the bedrock of the en-vironmental movement, but rather offshoots, which may be of little use when the environ-mental movement wants to adapt its tactics to climate change work.

Environmentalism’s peculiar character, then, lies not chiefly in a separate ethos, but rather in methodology and form of argument. Un-like movements that base their arguments and/or demands on stated rights or grand theories, environmentalism is a much more empirically based movement, less dependent on both prin-ciple and theory, for better or worse. While the precautionary principle is important, it is not as

absolute as the principle of human rights, and the aforementioned theories of Leopold, Næss and others have never approached the status of, say, a Marxist perspective on the economy. The Scandinavian environmental movement has staked their claims based on empirical research, and is therefore tightly connected to the natural sciences, and prone to make strategic alliances with other groups.

My study of two of Scandinavia’s biggest en-vironmental organizations, NNV and DN, re-vealed that the climate issue has caused a certain generational and political split in the organiza-tions. I talked to ten local leaders in Denmark, and 18 in Norway (Norway being less central-ized, NNV has more regional chapters), as well as several other members of the organizations at different levels, around 50 informants alto-gether. For many of the local leaders, concerns about climate change were seen as an indirect threat to their local preservation work. The strong reliance upon empirical evidence, makes the organizations vulnerable to internal division when different observable issues compete with one another. Different observations may also underpin different forms of argument. While traditional conservation of nature is largely an issue of being conservative and protesting rapid change and development – as the Sierra Club slogan goes: not blind opposition to develop-ment, but opposition to blind development – climate change may require a radical change of society. In the case of green energy, it may also require new development in the form of wind mills, hydro plants and green industry. Opposition to local renewable energy projects in their communities, predominantly wind-mills in Denmark, and a mixture of windmills and hydro plants in Norway, caused a conflict between nature preservation and climate cuts through renewable energy production. Nine of the Norwegian chapters reported that there was conflict between climate change and nature preservation, and six more argued that they were

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critical of the national political leadership and secretariat, usually referred to as the “central level”, on this issue. In Denmark, six of the local leaders argued that there was some conflict, and that windmills were the main source. In both

countries, empirical evidence of destruction of nature through new development collided with scientists’ more abstract observations about CO2 levels and the need for new energy production. However, the conflict in Norway was voiced more loudly by several of the local leaders, es-pecially leaders in some of the largest chapters.

Too gloBAl

The people at the “central level” also saw the cli-mate issue as problematic to work with. This was mainly attributed to its abstract character. The empirical evidence for climate change is harder to gather for a layperson than the observations of other environmental issues. As the leader of DN, Ella Maria Bisschop argued:

The primary reason for us being bigger in the 70s was that the questions we addressed was about visible pollution. I mean, you could see it in the water, you could see it in the fields, you could see the smoke in the air. Yellow smoke, red water by the slaughter houses, the dye plants (laughs). Those were visible pollu-tion issues. Today […] there are other kinds of pollution problems, and they are actually harder to work with, climate change includ-ed. It’s harder to communicate non-visible pollution.

Climate change is at the top of the agenda of the central level in the two organizations, but not fully integrated in the organization’s local work. New forms of climate work inspire little activ-ism, and take the form of more professionalized

advocacy, with the exception of “Oil Free” – a campaign to phase out the use of oil for heat-ing in Norwegian homes. But the organizations have only tried to implement climate change at the local level for a relatively short time, focus-

ing the brunt of their climate-related advocacy at the central level. It is too early to conclude whether the results thus far indicate that climate change cannot be ‘made local’. The climate issue is not approached in a vacuum, but disseminat-ed in a structure with existing cracks and fault lines, among activists with established prefer-ences and capacities, and within local contexts. A closer look at the local leader’s own assess-ment revealed that the issue of climate change itself was hard to pin down. The local under-standing and assessment of the issue is largely dependent on context, both geographical and political. Perceiving climate issues, and inter-preting them, depends on both your outlook, your knowledge and the political context. For some, climate change was an imminent physi-cal threat. For some, it was a theoretical concept far removed from their surroundings. For some, it was a car. For some, it was an oil tank. For some, it was a distraction from the “real” issues, and for some, a symbol of the centralization and professionalization of their organization. I will only be able to give a glimpse of some of the more representative or striking arguments made by the informants.

For many of the informants, the climate issue was simply ‘too global’ to work with lo-cally. Four of the local leaders in Denmark argued that the issue was better handled on the national or international level, which they did not feel that they could play a part in. As Arne Hastrup from Vestsjælland argued: “We see climate as something that is global and not

Denmark is among the most heavily altered co-untries in Europe. Flat farmland constitute 60

percent of the total surface of the country.

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local”. In Norway, a larger portion of the local chapters saw themselves as important, but not all. In Rogaland, the local leader Erik Thoring saw their chapter as being a “sparrow”, too small to make a difference on such a big issue. In the Oslo and Akershus chapter, which include 1/3 of the organization’s members, the local leader Gjermund Andersen did concede that the local chapters had a role to play, but he also saw the issue as too big and vague to approach, with the possible exception of road development.

The local leader of NNV in Kristiansand, Marthe Ulltveit-Moe, summed up the differ-ences in how climate change appeared for local activists:

I think the climate is two things: it’s ‘high up’ – the climate negotiations, the climate goals and so on. Some of the local work is also ‘up there’. I was on a seminar with the Norwe-gian Church Aid about climate. It was all ‘up there’. Thinking about the children in Africa, we should write to our politicians and ask them to cut emissions, and things like that. Then there are the emissions that are ‘down here’. I think they are the most important. All emissions are local. They are from some-where. All emissions are by definition small, all of them. Even a Chinese coal plant is a small part of the big problem […]. We must get down at the concrete level. That bike, that highway, that oil furnace, that train. I feel lonely, because too many people talk ‘up there’.

seeing climATe chAnge

How do we take the “up there” issues “down here”? One way is to emphasize the imminent dangers of climate change. In the flat peninsula and islands of Denmark, the rising tides were an especially clear threat. Both DN and the Danish government have created maps and vi-sualizations of how Denmark can be affected by rising sea levels, including damage to farmland and coastal natural habitats. Local activists also

incorporated this perspective in their work. In Vestjylland, for example, the work to preserve Linfjorden, a local fjord, was seen as both an is-sue of nature preservation and climate adapta-tion. Local leader John Bjerregaard Clausen was worried about the effects of rising oceans: “We focus a lot on climate and the possible rise in sea level, how to think about both nature and protection, and include climate and high tides”. Here, the existing preservation efforts were “re-framed” in light of climate adaptation. How-ever, some of the activists saw the adaptation ef-forts in a more anthropocentric light, fearing the effects of heavier rains and higher tides on their local communities. In Nordjylland, the local leader Thorkild Kjeldsen pointed to local work to reduce local vulnerability to extreme rainfall, and in Østjylland, the leader Søren Høyager argued that the regional capital Aarhus is vul-nerable: “The center of town is very low […] Part of it is below sea-level. This place will look like Holland unless we change our minds.” Such worries have the potential of making new issues visible, as not only nature, but also “civilization” comes under threat.

When it comes to climate adaptation, the Danish Conservation Society has largely re-framed their existing efforts to protect local nature as a means of climate adaptation. This is easier because large parts of Denmark’s un-spoiled nature are found along the seashore. In addition, large areas of continuous nature will be better equipped against the climate problems than small, scattered areas. In other words, these efforts do not necessarily do much to shift the perspective of the organization or its activists. But rather add a new domarsim to their current efforts.

In Norway, the ‘visible’ aspects of the cli-mate issue are still predominantly mitigation projects, although NNV is underway with a campaign to underline how many natural habi-tats may be harmed by climate change. Several of the activists I talked to pointed out that their

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local work helped make the issue tangible, by providing means of mapping out local emis-sion sources. This was the case for the “Oil Free” project, which was launched by the regional chapter in Hordaland. “Oil free” refers to the many oil-based heating systems in the country, and the goal is to promote energy conservation in homes, replace old-fashioned oil furnaces, and spread to other local chapters in coopera-tion with the central level. The project works on several levels. It fills a niche between small business, local government and consumers, and gives the local chapters expertise in conserva-tion. Importantly, the goal of energy conserva-tion is more compatible with the residual ideals of the local chapters – conservation and reduced consumption instead of new energy projects, green or not.

The project also helped as a visualization aid in more direct ways: In Sør-Trøndelag, the local activists launched the program by displaying a used oil tank, usually buried in the garden of the house owner, on the main street in Trondheim. According to local leader Steinar Nygard, the visibility was a great benefit. “When you see the old, battered oil tank we have dug up, you un-derstand that this [energy efficiency] is a ques-tion of [reducing] pollution”.

Another example of ‘emission mapping’ as a visualization aid was a small-scale action by the local chapter in Vest-Agder. Marthe Ullt-veit-Moe, the local leader in Kristiansand had taken a young activist with her for a simple ex-ercise – counting the amount of cars entering Kristiansand with only one passenger, so-called ‘lunch bag drivers’, transporting nothing but themselves and their food. The pollution from the ‘lunch bag drivers’ was visible to the activ-ists, and the resulting statistics were equally vis-ible and understandable for the public. Both “Oil Free” and the car-counting action gave the activists a chance to map out climate emissions in their local environment, and create empirical evidence of a climate problem occurring in their

local area. This reverses the flow of informa-tion: instead of being mouthpieces for ‘global’ climate knowledge, the activists had created climate knowledge on their own, useful to cre-ate political pressure from below. While climate change may not (yet) be directly visible, much of the traditional work of the environmental movement has served to make ‘invisible’ issues visible in the form of statistics, models or facts. Both through maps of rising sea levels (in Den-mark), dirty oil tanks, and statistics showing the unnecessary number of empty car seats, climate change-related issues are made visible and un-derstandable for both the activists and the pub-lic at large.

climATe AcTivism As A ThreAT

However, the clash between nature preservation and green, supposedly climate-friendly energy production, has also created other conceptions of climate change. As mentioned above, the Norwegian Conservation Society saw the big-gest controversy over this issue. Since January 2012, a larger controversy about renewable en-ergy production has been sparked in connection to the discussion about ‘green certificates’. This is a new regulatory program, introduced in Janu-ary 2012, in which the Norwegian Government subsidizes commercially unviable electricity production to boost renewable energy produc-tion in Norway. One official goal of this policy is to export electricity to Europe. The program is also connected to the planned “electrification” of Norwegian oil platforms, to phase out the small gas-powered generators which power them, which would require more power production on land, and a large increase in development of wind mills, hydro plants and new power lines, especially in the western and northern parts of the country. The calculations of the climate ef-fect are difficult and contested. NNV officially supported the program, as long as it did not lead to increased pressure on the rivers of Norway. Unfortunately, the program has turned out to mainly be a subsidy of new hydroelectric power,

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to the chagrin of local activists who cut their teeth during the struggle for river preservation in the 70s. In addition, the program has caused a boom of new wind power development, which many local chapters oppose. The Green Certifi-cates program has therefore increasingly caused internal conflict, especially between the local and the central level.

As a result of the internal conflict over re-newable energy production, some Norwegian leaders saw climate change as something akin to a metaphor for the central level. Arguments about nature preservation intermingled with arguments about the centralization of the or-ganization, where climate change was seen as an issue that hogged up resources at the cen-tral office for lobbying and campaigns, at the expense of the nature preservation work of the local chapters. Gjermund Andersen, the leader of the important Oslo and Akershus chapter, representing nearly a third of the organization’s total members, have been among the strongest voices in this discussion. In his view, renewable energy production and nature preservation are more or less incompatible goals. In the local member magazine “Grevlingen” (The Badger), Gjermund Andersen criticized the climate-relat-ed work as a part of a centralization of the orga-nization. He argued that “green energy” is often on edge with these goals locally while “climate emissions is not the acute threat to nature”. He pointed out that The Conservation Society’s role is different from others, and warns against “rid-ing two horses.” The debate has also been taken to larger forums: in February of 2013, the Oslo chapter arranged a public meeting with the title “Wind power and loss of nature, or energy con-servation and nature preservation?”

For members of the central secretariat, this division was seen as largely generational, for ex-ample by Steinar Alsos, organizational secretary in NNV:

There are two very distinct schools in NNV, one is classical nature preservation, which

was our starting point. Conserving biodi-versity and conserving areas. It’s really quite conservative […]. The second school is more radical and has a political involvement which is just as much about justice, and a more global engagement. I belong to that school. […] That stream is much more radical, and wants to change the societal structure to a larger degree. Sometimes these schools clash when we make policy, and I think the first school is stronger at the local level. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

This conflict has been less sharp in Denmark, where local leaders did not report outright hostility to the central leadership’s policies. This may be partly a result of a more cohesive structure, and differences in the organizations’ histories. While NNV first established much of their current form of local environmental activ-ism through the protests against hydro power in the 60s and 70s,11 the Danish environmental movement has played a more proactive part in green energy production, most notably by creat-ing “wind mill partnerships” to encourage local ownership of windmills from the 70s onwards.12 Still, many local leader felt conflicted about windmills. A clear pattern was that climate argu-ments connected to wind mill production were less welcome if put forth by commercial actors, or if they demand sacrifices that do not seem to benefit the local population. As local activist Arne Hastrup pointed out, noise or destruction of landscapes was more acceptable when local activists owned the windmills themselves.

[jokingly] If you own a wind mill, you don’t hear the noise as well, you accept the distur-bance in the landscape.

If seeing climate change is a matter of perspec-tive, it follows that different perspectives may give any number of interpretations within the organization of the same issue or the same proj-ect. A particularly striking example could be

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found in Denmark, where the high population density means that single projects may be liter-ally within eyesight of several local chapters of

the Conservation Society. In Norway, such con-flicts are rare, as local chapters are usually several miles, mountains or fjords apart. This has led to a stronger conflict between the center and the periphery, even within the organization, as we have seen in the discussion of Green Certificates above. The Mejlflak wind park is one such ex-ample. This planned park of oceanic windmills will be placed close to the shore within eyesight of four different local chapters of DN, and has caused some internal disagreement. The Mejl-flak project is still disputed through the ongo-ing implementation phase. According to Nina Saarnak, coordinator of local affairs in DN, it has split the local chapters in DN. Surpris-ingly, a slight majority of the members in the climate-conscious local chapter at the carbon neutral island Samsø opposed the development, on aesthetic grounds. The Aarhus chapter ap-proved of it, but the chapter in the eastward municipality of Odder opposed it. In Syddjurs, where the project had originated, there were also mixed feelings, but they generally approved of the project as long as there were small adjust-ments on the placement. The building can be seen as somewhat of a zero-sum game, where all aspects of the windmill conflict played in. The wind park that is planned will be built between Samsø and the shore, with Syddjurs to the north, Samsø to the South, Odder to the West and Aarhus to the northwest. The windmills can be seen from all chapters, and a change in lo-cation can mean that some are more bothered by the placement than others. Aesthetic prefer-ences were pitched against each other, as well as

the interests of energy consumers in the Aarhus area and those who would prefer to keep the horizon clear of further disturbances. The four

different chapters had two different perspectives on the wind farms. For the chapter in Syddjurs and Aarhus, it represented a local effort to re-duce climate emissions. For Odder and Samsø, it represented an eyesore. Unsurprisingly, the chapters that directly benefit from the building also had an easier time focusing on the climate effects, and overlooking the visual damage to the landscape.

Several of the efforts to engage local chapters in climate work have seen little success. A cen-tral problem is that the efforts have not given the activists the necessary tools to make their own observation, to serve as the foundation of their activism. In Denmark the central office initiated a climate municipality-project. This project represents a relatively top-down effort to work with climate change at the local level. The project was initiated by the central secretariat in 2006. A stated goal was to utilize the 96 local chapters, to “do something that other organiza-tions don’t do”. The goal was to convince all mu-nicipal governments to cut their emissions by at least two percent anually.

While the project has been largely success-ful on its own terms, with 75 municipalities pledging to cut their emissions by two percent annually so far, the project has not been very successful in activating the member mass. Few of the local leaders I talked to had taken an ac-tive part in the project beyond the initiating phase. This usually meant encouraging their lo-cal municipality to join. Five of the local lead-ers saw the project as the responsibility of the central level, and had not taken an active part

Eivind Trædal

The climate issue remains abstract, and the job of mapping out and understanding local climate emissions or vulnerabilities is largely left to the

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beyond encouraging their local municipality to join the campaign. Two of the chapters did not feel that they had adequate resources to follow it up, but wanted to participate more actively. Some, like Michael Løvendal Kruse, regional leader in Storstrøm, was unsure if it would yield big results. “I won’t comment on whether they do anything in between the nice ceremonies with our president and the mayor drinking wine (laughs)”. The program gets results, but it does little to enhance the understanding and percep-tion of climate change among local activists. The climate issue remains abstract, and the job of mapping out and understanding local climate emissions or vulnerabilities is largely left to the local bureaucrats.

While the leader of DN may be right that climate change is less ‘visible’ than previous is-sues, the different conceptions among the local activists in these two organizations show that the issue can become visible. The major challenge may be to ensure the ‘uncovering’ of climate change emissions and possible cuts, through lo-calizing them and making them tangible. If not, climate change as an issue may well become a perceived threat against preservation efforts, a lightning rod for internal disagreement, or a dis-traction from “real” preservation work.

relABelling climATe chAnge

The conceptualization of climate change as a ‘global’ issue is an important reason for why lo-cal activists do not engage it. But we can assign other labels to climate change. This is not to say that some issues are not at their core more ‘glob-al’ or ‘local’ than others, but that perspectives may shift, and cause many issues to become ap-parent. Sometimes, as the old saying goes, you can’t see the forest for the trees, or in this case – the trees for the forest. Climate change requires adaption, and it requires us to adapt our con-sciousness of the world – to think globally and act locally.

No political issue can remain untainted by

the strategic needs of its time. The environmen-tal movement must realize that it does not suf-fice to be right; that being right is seldom the key to political victory. Many academics have grasped at this, issuing calls for narratives, uto-pias, green ideology. These efforts should not be discarded, though they are of little use without a foundation. The labor movement was not effec-tive mainly because of Marx and Engels’ prose, nor was the feminist movement the offspring of feminist theory. The movements offered tan-gible goals, combined with practical modes of action which fostered the development of politi-cal awareness, and made people stakeholders in the political struggle. To be a feasible political issue, the issue of climate change must itself be adapted to fit our political models. In the case of the environmental movement, this means enlisting volunteers as important agents in un-covering and battling local emissions, not sim-ply as agents for environmental organizations’ ‘prepackaged’ solutions. Only when local activ-ists see local climate emissions or adaptation ef-forts as their business, and their responsibility, can the grassroots-based environmental work of established environmental organizations be combined with the existing centralized and pro-fessionalized advocacy of established environ-mental organizations.

Inertia or even outright opposition hampers the transition. Studying the local climate work of environmental organizations, I have met with a worrying trend: thinking globally has become an effective hindrance for acting locally. To adapt to climate change, we must adapt the issue of climate change itself. Climate change must be localized. To counter this gridlock, we must re-visit the ideas present at the first Rio Summit, which fostered Agenda 21, brought forth from decades of political practice in the new social movements: that true political and cognitive changes cannot be enforced from above.

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noTes1 Edwards, P. N. (2010): A Vast Machine. London: MIT press. p. 82 Yearley, S. (2005): Cultures of Environmentalism - Empirical Studies in Environmental Sociology. London: Palgrave Macmil-lian. p, 523 Barnosky, Anthony E. A. Hadly, J. Bascompte, E. L. Berlow, J. H. Brown, M. Fortelius, W. M. Getz, J. Harte, A Hastings,P. A. Marquet, N. D. Martinez, A. Mooers, P. Roopnarine, G. Vermeij, J. W. Williams, R. Gillespie, J. Kitzes, C. Marshall, N. Matzke, D. P. Mindell, E. Revilla & A. B. Smith (2012): “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere.” (2012): Nature 486: 52-58.4 Victor, D. G. (2011): Global Warming Gridlock. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. p. 2035 Tsing, A. L. (2005): Friction - an ethnography of global connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 1026 Yearley 2005, p. 477 Victor 2011, p. 488 Victor, 2011, p. 549 North, P. (2011): “The politics of climate activism in the UK: a social movement analysis.” Environment and Planning 43: 1581 - 1598. pos 1569 (Kindle version)10 Steinberg, P. F. Vanderveer, S. D. “Comparative Environmental Politics in a Global World.” in Steinberg, P. F.; VanDeveer, S. D. (ed.) Comparative Environmental Politics. MIT press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. : pos 3100 (Kindle version)11 The organization was not strictly supporting the most iconic civil disobedience-based protests, but a significant part of the member base took part in one way or the other.12 Here, too, this form of activism was mainly championed by other organizations than the Danish Conservation Society, but a large part of the member base has a background from this movement.

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Being transboundary, nature has its own pat-terns, it moves beyond borders.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the global mean temperature will rise between 1.1° and 6.4º by the year 2100. We have already experienced more frequent and severe extreme weather events as a result of climate change. Heat waves, earthquakes, windstorms, and floods are exam-ples of natural disasters that suddenly affect us. Climate change is also to be blamed for gradu-al crop failures and for the loss of ecosystems, biodiversity and livelihoods around the world. These are examples of more slow, ongoing catas-trophes, that gradually evolve and are exacerbat-ed as a result of a changing climate. This article

is about our Master’s thesis at NTNU in 2012, where we have tried to set focus on two specific ecosystems, one threatened by floods and the other by droughts, and the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on their existence and sustainability. It is an attempt to visualize cli-mate change beyond statistics and distant pros-pects of the future.

By its nature, architecture is site-specific, and evolves from the unique cultural and envi-ronmental conditions of the place. Often it is shaped according to the topography on site and built on stable ground. This intertwined relation between built and natural forms the basis of our architectural approach. But how do we design for a future where the surroundings are con-

Blue Border

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demned to change radically? How do we design for a landscape in constant change?

TWo ecosysTems

A trip to the Middle East summer 2011 be-came the starting point of our project. We wit-nessed how the Dead Sea is slowly vanishing. Located in the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea is an ecosystem shared between Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan. As a result of climate change and a redistribution of the fresh water supply, the water level drops at an average of one metre per year, and the surface of the water body has

been reduced by one-third since the beginning of the last century. The disturbed water balance is causing an ecological, social and economical disaster. Arid regions, like the Middle East, will become even drier in the forthcoming years.

In other parts of the world, sea level rise rep-resents the biggest threat caused by a changing climate. Sea level rise will submerge low-lying areas of the coastal zone in the Bay of Bengal, where the great rivers from Himalaya meet the ocean. Located on the Bengal delta, Sun-darbans is an ecosystem shared between India and Bangladesh. The ecosystem is unique be-cause of its immensely rich mangrove flora and mangrove-associated fauna. The root system of the mangrove trees also has great importance as a climatic buffer against floods and cyclones. Consisting of low-lying terrain and waterways, the area is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. A one metre rise will submerge the whole eco-system. That would not only mean a great loss of biological diversity, but also the loss of lives and livelihoods for the millions of people living just outside the forest.

The sloW deATh of A unique seA

The water in the Dead Sea is exceptional because of its rich mineral and salt concentrations. The Dead Sea water contains 21 different minerals, and 12 of these can not be found elsewhere in the world. The Dead Sea contains ten times as much salt and minerals as the Mediterranean, and got its name because it was believed that no life could survive in the salty water. On both sides of the shore, industry related to mineral extraction, together with tourism, represent the major industries. Because of its widely purport-ed health effects, millions of people (both local

and international tourists) come each year to take a dip in the salt water.

It is a combination of climate change and an overconsumption of the freshwater resources that has caused the drastic changes of the Dead Sea. A rise in temperature has increased the pro-cess of evaporation, at the same time as massive withdrawals for irrigation, rapid population growth, and a paralysing regional conflict have drained nearly all the water from The Jordan River, the only source of inflow into the Dead Sea. As a consequence of the decreasing water level, the Dead Sea has been split into two sepa-rate water bodies. The drop in water level has also triggered the formation of sinkholes and widespread land subsidence along the Dead Sea shoreline, resulting in severe economic loss and infrastructural damage.

The sloW deATh of A unique foresT

In the Bengali language ‘Sundarban’ literally means ‘beautiful forest’. The Sundarbans feature two eco-regions, Sundarban freshwater swamp forests, and Sundarban mangroves. The area is the largest mangrove forest in the world, be-ing home to almost 500 species of reptile, fish,

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bird and mammals, including the endangered Bengal tiger. Besides containing a rich flora and mangrove-associated fauna, the trees of the Sundarbans also function as a climatic buffer against floods and cyclones. The root system of the mangroves becomes a stabilizer of the coast as it binds the soil. The Sundarbans itself is un-inhabited, but more than three and a half mil-lion people make a living from the activities and resources linked with the forest.

The Sundarbans is being gradually destroyed by erosion, rising sea levels and storm surges. Researchers at Jaipur University’s School of Oceanographic Studies (JUSOS) in Kolkata say that in another 15 years the sea will lay claim to a dozen islands in the Sundarbans, six of which are populated, rendering about 70,000 people homeless. And even worse, natural protection from tidal waves and cyclones for the areas with-in Sundarbans will be degraded.

TWo sTories – one World

We’ve tried to identify the nerve between imagi-nation, speculation and reality in these complex situations with multiple, uncertain, and some yet unknown parameters. In our project, both proposals include a shared space on the border, an act that reflects their symbiotic dependency on the ecosystems, and a shared responsibility for their sustainability. The chosen programs for the sites; a public bath functioning as a spatial, water level instrument in the Dead Sea, and a

training and research centre in the Sundarbans, become places for social and cultural interac-tions, abreast the historically tense borders.

Borders of conflicT/Borders of peAce?There are several examples of border-projects that already exist or are planned to be built in the areas of the border zones, both in the Middle East and on the border between India and Ban-gladesh. These projects are optimistic signs of a development seeming to go towards more inter-action and cooperation abreast the borders.

Despite conflict in the region, Israel, the West Bank and Jordan have started to cooper-ate to prevent the Dead Sea from dying. There are also several smaller projects planned on the border initiated by, among others, Friends of the Middle East, an organization consisting of Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli environmen-talists. These transboundary protected areas, known as peace parks, are meant to sustain bio-logical, natural and historical resources in the area, as well as encourage regulated tourism, sustainable development and goodwill between neighbouring countries.

These protected areas span across bound-aries of multiple countries, where the political borders that are enclosed within these areas are abolished. All forms of physical boundaries are removed, such as fences, allowing free move-ment of people and animals within the defined area. A boundary around the area prevents un-

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authorized border crossing. The border area between India and Bangla-

desh has also been an area of conflict and vio-lence, and India is currently building the world’s longest border fence there. The subcontinent was divided in 1947 on the basis of religion, and this has caused great distress for people on both sides, particularly the huge migration of people leaving their ancestral homes. Today, the people in the villages outside the Sundarbans are living the same way on both sides of the border; they are sharing the same resources, and the same predictions for the future.

But there are positive signs to be seen; since 2011, India and Bangladesh have re-established several markets on the border, known as border-haats, meant to boost local trade and business. These bazaars were shut down after Bangladesh became independent in 1971, and the revival of this trans-border commerce is regarded as a new beginning for the relationship between the two countries.

A puBlic BATh As A sToryTeller Because of its drastic changes, geologists are us-ing the Dead Sea as an instrument to measure climate change impact in the Middle East. The chosen program for the site is linked with the widespread tourist industry in the area. Both Israel and Jordan have developed tourist-des-tinations along their shores, but without any connection or communication with the other

side. As a symbolic act, the project is situated on the border, on the land that has arisen as a consequence of the declining water level. The land that now divides the former sea into two water bodies.

The bath functions as a spatial measur-ing instrument that emphasizes the water level changes. The bath itself is composed of six lev-els that follow the topography, each level dug seven metres down into the terrain, allowing the water from the Dead Sea to naturally fill the pools of the bath. As the water level is declin-ing, this man-made, geometrical landscape will be changed over the days, weeks, months and years. And as the time passes, the pools will be emptied, one by one, if the pace of the declining water level continues.

Two parallel walls with consistent height are creating a reference for the dropping water level. The solid walls define the border, creating a shared space of interaction. As with the peace parks, a boundary around the bath prevents unauthorized border crossing. Once you have crossed the check-point in the entrance area, you are allowed to move freely within the bath. The water that fills the pools flows freely regard-less of the border. Can that inspire people to do the same?

The WATer surfAce As A neW ground for consTrucTion And culTivATion

In the Bay of Bengal, sea level rise will lead to

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salt water intrusion and increased salinity both in the water and the soil further upstream in the coastal area. Therefore, there is a need for ag-ricultural education and research to be able to adapt to the consequences of the rising sea. It is essential to introduce salinity tolerant species and to find new methods of cultivation to face the changing conditions.

As a response to the foreseen challenges, the project developed into a system of floating gar-dens. This is part of an old tradition that now has been set into practice again by local farm-ers. The gardens are made out of invasive weed water hyacinth, together with a bamboo frame.

It is simple to put together and the materials are local and free.

The system of floating gardens is linked to a research and education centre situated at the border. The research and education centre en-ables them to share their experience and knowl-edge together, and to face the foreseen chal-lenges jointly. As with the peace parks in the Middle East and the border-haats on the border between India-Bangladesh, the idea is to allow people from both sides to move freely within an enclosed area.

Inspired by local building techniques, the bridge connecting the research centre to the land on both sides is made of piled steel col-umns, to make a stable structure. On top of this structure, we have proposed to build guest-houses associated to the centre. In Bangladesh, we saw several examples of government-initiated projects where people were provided with just a stable framework that could handle floods and hard weather conditions, and this became the foundation for their house. These structures often consisted of a concrete frame, lifted from

the ground. The houses they shelve were built by the families, put together local materials. In-spired by this, our project has parts that are left uncompleted, meant to facilitate further devel-opment and local involvement.

AdApTing To A chAnging reAliTy In our research for the project we found several examples, on all social levels and scales, of how people adapt to the changing climatic condi-tions. We saw how people in these areas have learned to adapt to surroundings where seasonal and unpredictable changes have become a part of life.

Around the Dead Sea, the owners of the tourist-resorts need to move all their equip-ment every month as the water-level decreases; parasols, sun beds, chairs and showers need to be mobile and easy to handle. Hotels that used to be located along the waterside now have to transport their guests in shuttle-buses down to the water, as the distance from the waterline is getting longer every year. There are many aban-doned houses and hotels to be seen far off shore which now, only function as points of reference of the changing sea, as the people continuously pursue the waterline.

On a higher level, the politicians in Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel are working on a large scale project to prevent the sea from disappear-ing. The project is known as the Two Seas Canal. The idea is to bring water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. Those who support the project claim that it will not only solve the problem of the disappearing sea, it will also be a physical manifestation of cooperation and peace. Envi-ronmentalists are critical to this kind of adapta-tion, as it likely will ruin the unique qualities of

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The water that fills the pools flows freely regardless of the border.

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the Dead Sea, where the outcome of the new situation is hard to predict. Rather than bring-ing in a new element, in this case water from the Red Sea, the focus should be on ecologically rehabilitating the lower part of the Jordan River.

For the people living between the tidal and cyclonic activity from the Bay of Bengal on one side and the network of the rivers from the Hi-malayas on the other, adaptation is a matter of

survival. Their way of living depends only on what nature offers, but they have also learned to protect themselves from the hard weather conditions that occur. In the rural parts of Ban-gladesh, a characteristic of the landscape is how the road network is built up, as a layer above the rest of the landscape. A series of costal em-bankments have also been constructed to pro-tect low-lying lands from tidal inundation and salinity penetration. Many of these lands have now become high productivity agricultural ar-eas and are valued considerably more than lands outside the embankments. But their houses, of-ten constructed of bamboo and leaves, are vul-nerable when extreme natural phenomena, such as storms and cyclones, hit land. Government-initiated projects are a way of helping people to build houses able to cope with floods and hard weather conditions. The government is also building cyclone-shelters in the local villages of the coastal zone, to provide its citizens with a safe place to take shelter.

fuTure scenArio

The intention of our project is to put focus on these ecological and social disasters, by illustrat-ing the challenges that people are facing on lo-cal scales. Our physical proposals are meant to visualize different future outcomes, and by this

elasticity, both raise attention and questions concerning the future of the ecosystems.

What lies in the future for the Dead Sea? Will the bath be standing like an empty me-morial over the lost sea, or is there will on both sides, and in the world in general, to save it? With today’s pace, the water will be gone from the first level of the bath within four years, and the whole bath will be empty within year 2020.

But the project also opens up the possibility that the development can change. Maybe the struc-tures will be flooded again, and re-discovered in a distant future, as a reminder that history is about to repeat itself?

What will the future bring for the Sundar-bans and the areas within? If The Sundarbans together with the rest of the cultivated land are flooded, are there ways to sustain life and liveli-hoods in the area? Is it possible to adapt to the consequences of a changing climate, and pre-vent disaster from happening?

ArchiTecTure As A Tool To deAl WiTh fuTure chAllenges of climATe chAnge

The challenge is to always keep asking ques-tions. Architects are not only the builders of what society demands, we are also the build-ers of questions that still need to be asked. To keep on questioning, keep on providing alternative futures, that is the task.Eva Franch, founder of OOAA, Barcelona, di-rector for storefront for art and architecture in New York.

Our project explores the potential of architec-ture to comment upon ongoing debates con-cerning adaptation and mitigation to climate

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Around the Dead Sea… there are many abando-ned houses and hotels to be seen far off shore. Now, they only function as points of reference of the changing sea, as the people continuously pursue the waterline.

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change. We have tried to draw attention to two specific situations by giving a physical and spa-tial response to the existing and foreseen chal-lenges. Through a design-oriented agenda we believe architecture and the other design-fields can play an important role in addressing some of the challenges of our time. Not necessarily by giving solutions, but with inventive and vi-sonary minds, making contributions. It is about conveying stories, as well as generating new ones.

Through speculative design and the explo-ration of idealistic scenarios, we’ve envisioned what could potentially become the future. In

that way, unrealised and unbuilt projects can have a value that goes beyond reality as each can give people an imagined place. A place that can be the origin of possible stories. Stories that can create hope. Hope that in the end can affect the way we perceive and act upon reality.

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Klimaendring og klimatilpassing framkallar stadig bilete av stigande havnivå, katastrofar og menneskje på flukt. Modellane som spår fram-tida er mange og varierte. Dei viser raude strekar som skyt i veret, oransje tal som gløder åtvarande og blå kakediagram som dryp av nysmelta breis. Modellane er viktige men skal dei kunne bru-kast til noko må ein og tenkje på folk. Folk med alle sine kjensler, verdiar, livssyn, språk og ikkje minst personleg tilknyting til omgjevnader og lokalsamfunn.1 Når klimaet endrar seg, må også folk endre seg. For folk flest er endring skum-melt, det nye skremmande og tilpassing ei utfor-dring. I El Salvador har organisasjonen Centro Bartholome de las Casas jobba med å undersøke

slike subjektive aspekt av ein tilpassingsprosess. Gjennom eit forskingsprosjekt som omhandlar lokal tilpassing til klimaendringar, har dei brukt eit deltakande fotoprosjekt for å få folk til å pre-sentere visuelle forteljingar om kva klimaendrin-gar er for dei og korleis desse påverkar kvardagen deira.2 Arbeidet kan vere med på å skape ei brei-are tilnærming til klimatilpassing.

KlimAendring uTAn folK

I El Salvador må folk forholda seg til tørke ei årstid og flom den neste. Som i mange land har tilpassing til ekstreme klimaførehald blitt ein del av kvardagen. Resultata av endringar i klima er ofte øydelagde avlingar og mangel på såkorn,

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dyrefôr og mat. Andre gonger sit ein att med fullstendig øydelagde lokalsamfunn. El Salvador er kanskje mest kjent som eit land med utbredt fattigdom, stor grad av miljøøydelegging, etter-krigstraumar og mykje kriminalitet og vald. På ei anna side representerer El Salvador alternative modellar for samfunnsorganisering i kooperativ, modellar for folkeleg utdanning på grasrotnivå og frigjeringsteologi med fokus på sosial lik-skap.3 Dette delte biletet er eit godt utgang-spunkt for å utforske ulike sider av sårbarhet og styrke i prosessar der folk tilpassar seg endringar i klima og omgjevnader.

Klimaendring som omgrep er komplekst og vanskeleg å forstå. Tidsspennet for utvikling av klimaendringar er langt, årsakssamanhengane er oftast usynlege, og det er så mange faktorar som påverkar desse at det ikkje er mogeleg å studere dei uavhengig av kontekst.4 I fotoprosjektet i El Salvador kom det fram at folk hovudsakleg portretterer klimaendringar som natur. Dei fleste bileta som vart tekne, særleg i byrjinga av prosjektet, var utan folk. Det kan vere at dette skjedde grunna forventningar til kva som bør portretterast på eit «klimaendringsbilete» då klimaendringar elles ofte vert avbilda som na-tur og naturkatastrofar. Bileta seier likevel kan-skje noko om korleis folk set seg sjølv utanfor prosessen, som observatørar eller offer, heller enn som deltakande aktørar i samhandling med verda og naturen.

Klimaendringar går hardast utover verdas fattigaste: dei som er sårbare for å miste livsg-runnlaget sitt når det er flom eller tørke, og dei som må flykte frå heimane sine når ekstremver øydelegg lokalsamfunna dei bur i. Den mang-lande forståinga for usynlege årsakssamanhen-gar mellom menneskeleg handling og endring i klima er ei utfordring når det fører til passivitet og handlingslamming. Den åtferdsendringa ein treng for til dømes å bremse global oppvarming vert hemma av fastgrodde verdsyn, vanskar med å ta inn over seg konsekvensar av klimaendrin-gar, samt manglande leiarskap. I diskusjonar om

kor vidt klimaendringar er menneskeskapte eller ikkje, forsvinn mennesket på same måten ut av biletet, og ein pasifiserer folk med forteljin-gar om uunngåeleg apokalypse eller framtidig teknologiutvikling som einaste mogelege re-spons. Set ein folk utanfor biletet kan det vere lettare å marknadsføre offer-baserte tilpassing-stiltak som ikkje bidreg til nødvendig endring. Ein djupare og meir praktisk forståing av folk si eiga påverkande rolle i klimaendringsprosessar og på naturen, kan kanskje hjelpe folk til å sjå seg sjølv som handlande aktørar med kontroll over eigne liv og samfunn, i staden for at dei reduserast til passive offer og tilskodarar.

vern Av nATur – vern Av KulTur I ei gamal skulestove nord i El Salvador, no omgjort til krigsmuseum, ligg ei rekke meir eller mindre runde kvitmalte steinar forma som ordet Memoria på eit slite murgolv. Steinane er frå stader i nærområdet der massakrer og drap skjedde under borgarkrigen som vart avslutta i 1992. I livet på flukt som landsbybebuarane i regionen opplevde under krigen var dei døde kroppane for tunge til å bære med seg. Dei som vart drepne måtte gravlaggast der dei fell, ein liten minnestein var alt ein kunne ta med seg. Memoria kan omsetjast til minne på norsk, men betyr uendeleg mykje meir i lokalsamfunn der minna frå krigen er ei drivkraft for samfunnsut-vikling også i dag. Memoria kan beskrivast som ein emosjonell og politisk nøkkel til å forstå kva verdiar som er viktige i avgjerder om til dømes vern av naturområder eller utvikling av lokalt næringsliv. Eit fjellområde kan lettare verte verna mot utbygging i kraft av å vere ein heilag gravplass for uidentifiserte døde offer frå krigen heller enn som sårbart økosystem. Det i seg sjølv er ikkje eit poeng som må utnyttast utan å ten-kje på naturvern når det er det ein ynskjer, men kan vere verdt å reflektere over.

Sårbarhet for klimaendringar vert påverka av den økonomiske, sosiale, psykososiale og poli-tiske konteksten i eit samfunn. Eit lokalsam-

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funn med sterkt utbreidd fattigdom og dårleg infrastruktur vil vere mindre rusta til å handtere naturkatastrofar. Samtidig vil folk og lokal-samfunn som har tilpassa seg andre vanskelege situasjonar tidligare kanskje kunne ta nokre av dei same «forsvarsmekanismane» og erfaringane

med å leve i ein ekstrem kontekst med seg inn i ein tilpassingsprosess til ei ny utfordring. Grensa mellom berekraftig tilpassing og desperate tiltak for overleving kan vere hårfin, og å løyse større klimautfordringar på lang sikt er ein klimatil-passingsstrategi som er meir førebyggande enn å konstant måtte reagere på det ein vert utsett for av klimarelaterte katastrofar.

Eit element som kom fram i undersøkinga var korleis lokal identitet, tilknyting til heim og familie, og forholdet til eiga jord trumfa dei fleste vanskar både når det kom til utfordringar under krigen og med klimaet. Folk bur på dei raraste stader på jorda av så mange ulike grun-nar. Noko som verkar som det viktigaste er at ein kan kalle ein stad heime. I lokalsamfunna nord i El Salvador har folk tidligare vorte drivne vekk grunna krig, massakrer og tvangsflytting. No slit mange med at jorda ikkje gir dei det dei treng for å overleve. Etter krigen kom dei til-bake og bygde opp att skulen, kommunehuset og kyrkja. No overlev stadig fleire på å sende frå seg ein einsam slektning som jobbar livet av seg i USA og som sender pengar heim så familien kan bli på familiegarden.

Når folk skal presentere forteljingar om vêr og vind og klimaendringar, vert minna ofte knytt til viktige sosiale hendingar, som den gon-gen flommen tok brua så ingen kom seg på min-nemesse for ein av dei største lokale massakrane i området. Dette er ein flom som ”alle” hugsar, og som ”alle” er einige i var den verste i manns minne. Om det faktisk var den verste, målt i li-

ter vatn og fysiske øydeleggingar, er vanskelegare å vite. Klimaendring er eit abstrakt omgrep. Det er eit globalt fenomen som resulterer i ulike lokale utfall. Oppfatningane av kva som er al-vorleg skil seg frå stad til stad og frå hushald til hushald. Skal ein kome forbi barrierane i kli-

matilpassing må det abstrakte gjerast handfast. Klimaendringar og klimatilpassing må knytast nærare folks kvardagsliv og lokalmiljø, og slik gjerast meir mentalt handterbart.

KvA er eigenTleg gloBAle KlimAendringAr?Mange av bileta i undersøkinga viste aukande hete, vassmangel og følgjeleg øydelagt jordbruk-sproduksjon. Undersøkinga føregjekk i skiftet mellom tørr og våt årstid, akkurat på den tida det er vanleg å så første avlinga for året, noko som vart vanskeleg då regnet lòt vente på seg. Forklaringane på kvifor regnet ikkje kom var mange. Nokre meinte ein berre måtte vente på at Gud skulle finne det for godt å la det regne, andre meinte at tørka kom av menneskeleg påverknad. Dei som meinte det siste viste bi-lete som fortalde korleis tørka var påverka av hogg-og-brenn-jordbruk, at ein brenn land-bruksjord for å drepe skadedyr og for at asken skal gi jorda næring. Denne koplinga mellom lokal påverknad på lokal natur og eit regionalt tørkefenomen der det ikkje er mogeleg å sjå heile årsaksrekkja er interessant. Å brenne skog i jordbrukssamanheng kan sjølvsagt vere ein kjelde til forureininga som bidreg til eit større fenomen, men det er heller ikkje slik at å slutte med brenning vil løyse problemet på ein rask og effektiv måte i den aktuelle regionen. At nokon presenterer eit lokalt miljøproblem som lokalt nedbrent skog som klimaendring, illustrerer kor viktig nære band til eigne omgjevnader er for å forstå sosio-økologisk samspel. Det viser

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og kor lett det er å lage eigne koplingar mellom ulike fenomen som påverkar miljø, og finne eigne forklaringar på årsaksrekka til globale kli-maendringar.

Klimatilpassing er ein viktig del av men-neskeleg påverknad på natur og klima, og er noko som skjer overalt og på alle nivå av sam-funnet, også der folk aldri har høyrt eit ord om korkje klimaendringar eller tilpassingsstrategiar. Når bønder i El Salvador mottar såfrø frå statlege program for å kunne så etter at flom eller tørke har øydelagt mais- og bønneavlingane, er dette ein måte å tilpasse seg klimaendringar på. Det er ein strategi som gjerne har som mål å vere berekraftig og gjere bøndene mindre sårbare, men er nok eit døme på at gode intensjonar ik-kje alltid er nok. Er det utdelte såfrøet til dømes importert frå Etiopia der mangel på lokal kjøpe-kraft har gjort at eit anna lokalsamfunn står utan såfrø og mat, kan ein slik tilpassingsstrategi føre til auka sårbarhet for menneske og miljø på lang sikt og på andre stader.

Undersøkinga om kva klimaendringar er og gjer i eit lokalsamfunn i El Salvador viser at det kan vere vanskeleg å skilje mellom kva som skjer med natur og miljø grunna lokal handling, og kva som skjer grunna globale klimaendrin-gar. Ofte er det ein god kombinasjon der men-neskeleg handling i eit lokalsamfunn, også gjen-nom ulike velmeinte klimatilpassingsstrategiar, påverkar evna til å handtere resultat av større endringar. Undersøkinga viser og kor viktig in-dividuell tilknyting til lokalmiljøet er for å ta en-dringar i klima på alvor. Når årets flom tek hu-set ditt, vert resultata av klimaendringar veldig konkrete. Kjem flommen av at du har brent ned heile skogen for å drive jordbruk bak huset ditt, så all jorda vert vaska vekk i ein tung regnskyll, er dette kanskje ein enklare samanheng å forstå enn om vêret endrar seg grunna CO2-utslepp frå fabrikkar og bilar du aldri har sett snurten av ein heilt anna stad på kloden.

folK inn på BileTeT

Folk påverkar natur og miljø rundt seg både med og utan intensjonar om endring, og sjølv med intensjonar om å oppnå bestemte resul-tat er det vanskeleg å spå kva som faktisk vert utfallet av eigne handlingar fordi ein ikkje har kontroll over alle faktorar.5 I rike samfunn der personleg forbruk og livsstil er endå fjernare frå konsekvensane av klimaendringar vil det gjerne vere endå vanskelegare å praktisk forstå koplinga mellom menneskeleg handling og klimaendring enn i samfunn som kjenner desse endringane på kroppen. I fattige samfunn er det ofte naudsynt å handle på kort sikt slik at sårbarhet aukar i ei framtid ein ikkje har råd til å tenkje på. Det er heller ikkje sjølvsagt at folk i fattige samfunn ville leve berekraftig berre dei kunne.6 Igjen er det meir som skal til for at folk skal forstå år-sakssamanhengane til klimaendringar, sjå si eiga rolle i desse, og i tillegg handle i tråd med denne forståinga.

Sjølv når ein rasjonelt sett forstår at men-neskelege handlingar påverkar miljø og klima er åtferdsendring vanskeleg. Mange menneske ser på seg sjølv som miljøvenlege og med grøne verdiar, sjølv om dei har ein livsstil som inne-ber høgt personleg forbruk. Ein kan vere god på sykling og resirkulering, men ikkje tenkje seg om to gonger før ein flyg til andre sida av verda på feltarbeid, miljøkonferanse eller ferie.7 Å op-pleve samanheng mellom verdiar og handlingar er eit grunnleggande menneskeleg behov. Det psykologiske konseptet «kognitiv dissonans» beskriv ein spenningstilstand som oppstår når haldningar og verdiar ikkje samsvarer med han-dlingane eit menneske utfører. Når folk handlar på ein bestemt måte, vil dei få behov for å rett-ferdiggjere handlingane sine grunna behov for samsvar mellom desse ulike kognitive elementa. Studiar viser at dette kognitive behovet for in-dre rettferdiggjering gjer at handlingar påverkar haldningar meir enn omvendt.8 Mange miljøak-tørar operer ut ifrå ein tankegang om at berre folk får nok informasjon, så vil alt løyse seg. Det

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vil det mest sannsynleg ikkje gjere utan vidare arbeid. Å bli informert om verdas tilstand av ein formidlar medan ein sjølv er passiv vil i liten grad kunne skape medvit eller bidra til engasje-ment og åtferdsendring. Ein må aktivt vere ein del av informasjons- og læringsprosessar for å kunne ta kunnskap i bruk praktisk.9

Som poengtert innleiingsvis er dagens vits-kaplege klimamodellar med sine talbaserte framtidsspådommar viktige for å finne løysin-gar på utfordringar rundt klimaendringar og

miljøproblem. Undersøkinga frå El Salvador illustrerer viktige subjektive element som bør inkluderast for at eksisterande kunnskap skal kunne nyttast betre. Klimaendringar og klima-tilpassing må knytast nærare folks kvardagsliv og lokalmiljø, og slik gjerast meir mentalt og prak-tisk handterbart. Ein må i større grad prøve å få folk inn i modellane og ikkje berre prøve å få modellane inn i folk.

Hanna Kvamsås

noTer1 O`Brien, K. & G. Hochachka. (2010): «Integral Adaptation to Climate Change.» Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, 5, 1 2 Hochachka, Madrigal, Flores, Cáceres, Tenney, Núñez, Tejeda and Delgado. (2012): ClimateResilience: A Field-Guide for Photo Voice in Climate Change Adaptation Engagement. A shared publication of Drishti and Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas.3 Hochachka, G. (2006): Integral Community Development in Post-War El Salvador. Drishdi-Centre for Integral Action4 Bhaskar, R. (2010): «Contexts of Interdisciplinarity». Bhaskar, R. (ed.) Interdiciplinarity and Climate Change. Routledge, Oxon 5 Hukkinen, J. (2008): Sustainability Networks - Cognitive Tools for Expert Collaboration in Social-Ecological Systems. Routledge, London, New York6 Pelling, M. (2011): Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation. Routledge, London, New York7 Høyer, K. G. (2010): Epilogue: The Travelling Circus of Climate Change. Bhaskar, R. (ed.) Interdiciplinarity and climate change. Routledge, Oxon8 Festinger, L. (1957): A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California9 Freire, P. (1999): De undertryktes pedagogikk. Ad Notam, Gyldendal, Oslo

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Assessing policies for mitigating greenhouse gases demand aggregating costs and benefits that “accrue over long time and to different generations” (Kaplow et al. 2010, p. 1). The im-pact on policy choices is highly sensitive to the choice of discount rate. A seminal contribution by Ramsey (1928) offered a transparent way to argue for discounting the future. For example, as future generations are expected to be richer, considerations for equity demand consumption units to be evenly spread. Another example has to do with consumption units being valued less tomorrow than today. However, among experts there is no consensus on how to motivate the values of parameters within the domain of the

Ramsey equation (Arrow et al. 2012). Issues related to the variables of the Ramsey equa-tion were ranked 2nd and 4th in terms of gaps in knowledge by IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report (2007).

In this essay we examine different interpreta-tions of the Ramsey equation. The essay is orga-nized as follows. Section 1 derives and explains the Ramsey equation as well as clarifies what motives it provides for discounting future costs and benefits. In Section 2, arguments for and against positive and normative interpretations of the Ramsey equation in an intergenerational context are explained. The essay is closed in Sec-tion 3 by briefly reflecting on some limitations.

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1. The rAmsey equATion And iTs moTives

Gollier (2011) argues that the interest rate in fi-nancial markets and the marginal rate of return on productive capital are both invalid to use to assess costs and benefits in an intergenerational context. Thus, we need to rely on a framework developed by Ramsey (1928), and later general-ized by Koopmans (1965) and Cass (1965). In this essay, a simpler model is presented.

Suppose that the units of a closed economy are non-overlapping generations (Dasgupta 2008), and that their activities, or more precise-ly, costs and benefits accruing from a project of interest, are converted into consumption units and embodied in the vector C. We can think of Ct as the total level of consumption units for generation t ∈ [0, ∞], thus neglecting distribu-tional issues within generations.

We abstract away from issues such as lim-ited substitutability between different goods in the consumption bundle (Hoel and Sterner 2007). Also, we assume that consumption units are known with certainty. By construct, we ig-nore issues such as choices between working and leisure or the time profile of each generation’s consumption.

A generation’s utility is then only a function of its level of consumption units in the single period it lives, implying U = (Ct). U (∙) is an increasing, strictly concave function of Ct. A further restriction is that the utility function has constant relative risk aversion (Arrow et al. 2012). This means that:

The first is a power utility function and the sec-ond is a logarithmic function of Ct. It follows that

θ can be interpreted as the coefficient of relative risk aversion and the elasticity of marginal util-

ity with respect to Ct, meaning the curvature of U(Ct). This can be shown formally by taking the derivate of the utility function; U ’(Ct ) = Ct

–θ > 0 for the relevant domain. For completeness, U ’’(Ct ) = θCt

–θ-1 < 0 for the implied values, hence the statements about the utility function made above are true. We will inspect the impli-cations of θ later.

It is assumed that the social welfare func-tion takes an additive separable utilitarian form. There is in other words no path dependence (Gollier 2011). Assume further that the popula-tion is constant and normalized to unity, which is in line with Ramsey (1928). If δ ≥ 0 and constant, intergenerational wellbeing at t = 0, which we write as W0, is understood to be the present-value of the U (Ct )s. We end up in this special case securing time consistency:

The above equation tells us that the social wel-fare function is the discounted sum of utilities derived from benefits and costs of the project, converted into consumption units, from the present to infinity. δ can be interpreted as the utility discount rate, meaning the rate the social planner discounts the utility of future genera-tions (Arrow et al. 2012). An equivalent formu-lation is the rate of pure time preferences. As with θ, we look into the implications of δ later. Note that

implying that social welfare is increasing in con-sumption units and decreasing in the utility dis-count rate.

Plugging in for U (Ct )s in (2) and maximiz-ing social welfare yields1

For small values of ρt, δ and g (Ct), and taking logarithms of both sides, the above equation re-duces to2

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ρt is the welfare-preserving rate of interest or equivalently the social discount rate and g (Ct) is the growth rate in consumption units. δ and θ are non-negative constants and are as defined before.

Now that the Ramsey equation is formal-ized, we can assess what motives it provides for discounting. According to Fisher, δ and θ entails the role of preferences, while g (Ct) cap-tures the role of technology (Weitzman 2007). It should be stressed that the preferences that are captured in the model derived in this essay are not those of single individuals, but of a social planner.

It follows that implying that the so-cial discount rate is increasing in the utility dis-count rate. A more applicable formulation of δ is the social rate of pure time preferences or the probability of extinction of society (Stern 2007). The above derivation implies that a project miti-gating greenhouse gases imposing costs today and producing benefits only for the future, will be less desirable from the point of view of the social planner the higher the value of δ. Also, δ > 0 and sufficiently low g (Ct) implies that Ct → 0 in the very long run, which is in line with Das-gupta and Heal 1974).

Now we limit the discussion to the special case g (Ct) > 0, noting that results are reversed if not. The term θ g (Ct) captures the effect of wealth (Gollier 2011). By the above equa-tions and the implied values of the parameters, it follows that meaning that the social discount rate is increasing in the elasticity of marginal utility with respect to consumption. Equivalently, the larger the value of θ, the more averse is the social planner to inequality in con-sumption over time. Therefore, a project such as mitigating greenhouse gases will be less desirable to implement. The fact that we have modeled only a single individual living in each period of time do not give any room for inequality aver-

sion in consumption in the same time period.3 For completeness, we note that θ ≥ 0 implies that meaning that the social discount rate is non-decreasing in the growth rate of con-sumption units. Also, we observe that as g (Ct) → 0, ρt → δ.

Following Weitzman (2007), it is clear that a carbon tax should grow at the social rate of interest. This is in line with a simple Hotel-ling extraction problem (see below). Yet, by the stringent assumptions used to derive the Ramsey equation, this reasoning possesses some limitations. One needs to take into account un-certainty about g (Ct) (Gollier 2008, Pindyck and Wang 2012, Weitzman 1998). This will be commented upon in the last section.

2. posiTive And normATive inTerpreTATions Based on the above derivation of the Ramsey equation, we now look into the arguments on how to parameterize δ and θ. We start by mo-tivating positive interpretations. Afterwards, the same procedure is repeated for normative inter-pretations. This section is closed by a discussion of remaining arguments for and against these interpretations.

2.1. moTivATing A posiTive frAmeWorK Koopmans (1965, p. 226) stated that “the prob-lem of optimal growth is too complicated, or at least too unfamiliar, for one to feel comfortable in making an entirely a priori choice of [a util-ity discount rate] before one knows the implica-tions of alternative choices”. Also, prescriptions of the elasticity of marginal utility with respect to consumption tend to differ. Therefore, a rel-evant question is how the future actually is dis-counted.

The idea is that the relevant social welfare function for making intergenerational deci-sions, and thus parameters such as δ and θ, are revealed by actual decisions (Manne 1994). As argued by Nordhaus (2007, p. 292), one should examine the scope for improvements within

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“the context of the existing distribution of in-come and investments across time and space”. The implication of such an approach is assessing the returns of alternative investments (Nord-haus 2007), though, ρt will only equal “the mar-ginal product of capital along an optimal path” (Arrow et al. 2012, p. 10). We discuss this later. Note, however, that source of funding might be-come relevant.

There are good reasons for using market ob-servations to motivate the choice of the discount rate. An illustration is presented by Weitzmann (2007): The approach of Stern (2007) calls for rapid and strong action on mitigating climate change, contrary to what one would expect by applying a Hotelling logic in which the intensity of climate action is increasing at a smaller rate. The last statement is also in line with what one observes in the market (Nordhaus 2007).

Suppose we take a production-side ap-proach and want to estimate the market return on capital. One way of doing this is to estimate the social discount rate as the rate of return on Treasury bonds. Such assets are long-term and can be treated as if they are risk-free (Groom 2010). Thus, estimates can reveal preferences for intergenerational discounting. However, we are now estimating something equivalent to the left-hand side directly and not basing it on the provisions of the right-hand side of the Ramsey equation.

Taking a consumption-side approach, we stick to the structure of the Ramsey equation. Assuming that market behavior is informative, δ and θ define the shape of the social welfare function. It is argued that one can estimate δ from savings behavior (Nordhaus 2007), and it is generally found that δ = [1,3]. Since this is the savings behavior of single individuals, it does not take into account issues such as the prob-ability of extinction of society, but only their “awareness of finite lives” (Groom 2010, p. 13). Motivated by Rees (2003), this argument was integrated in Stern (2007).

Using market data, one generally observes θ > 1 (Groom 2010). Another approach is con-ducting surveys, but this has not been appre-ciated in the literature (Groom and Maddison 2012). Methods using stated preferences tend to yield outcomes inconsistent with revealed pref-erences.

2.2. moTivATing A normATive frAmeWorK

Pigou (1932, p. 29) argued that “the State should protect the interests of the future in some degree against the effects of our irrational discounting and of our preference for ourselves over our de-scendants”. In line with the critique of the posi-tivist approach, Dietz and Stern (2008) come to the conclusion that markets cannot reveal clear answers on how to discount. Hence, we are left with a normative framework. We need to ask ourselves how much we should discount. We define the answer as policy parameters, in the sense that it should be based on provisions from ethics or observed behavior in public policy.

The output of this way of reasoning relates to consumption and not production. Following Arrow et al. (1996), there are good ethical reasons for imposing values on the pa-rameters, but also disagreement on what values they should take: δ might reflect emphatic dis-tance (Schelling 1993) or agent-relative prefer-ences, meaning that it will be non-negative and changing over time. This violates the approach by Stern (2007) and Nordhaus (2007) which take δ to be constant. Ramsey (1928, p. 544) argued for δ = 0 because δ > 0 “is ethically in-defensible and arises merely from the weakness of imagination”. This reasoning is in line with the utilitarian approach in which there is no reason to treat people differently (Gollier 2011). Broome (1992) states that setting δ > 0 is to dis-criminate against generations not present. On the other hand, δ ≥ 1 is observed in the market.

There are decent reasons for θ ≠ 0 within a utilitarian framework since the opposite may imply extremely low level of consumption to-

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day and an infinite stream for future generations (Arrow et al. 1996). By letting θ = 0, current consumption would be lower than preferred (Koopmans 1966, Mirrless 1967). One moral argument for θ = ∞ comes from Rawls (1971), which will maximize the outcomes of the worst-off generation. Dasgupta (2005) shows that the

implications of Rawls’ theory are not in line with intuition. However, Dasgupta (2008) argues for θ = [2,4], but his justification is a quite stylized economic model. An alternative, axiomatic ap-proach is Harsanyi (1955) who argues for maxi-mizing a weighted sum of utilities. According to Heal (2005), θ will then be a positive, finite number. This implies larger transfers to poorer countries than observed (Arrow et al. 1996).

A different axiomatic approach is the one set forth by Koopmans (1960). Establishing the ax-ioms “separability” and “stationary”, Koopmans was able to rank wellbeing. Heal (2005) argues that these axioms are restrictive and not in line with how people behave. Consequently, ethical or axiomatic reasoning cannot fully guide our choice of θ.

Under the assumptions of equal sacrifice and specific utility functions, one can approximate the government’s inequality aversion through the progressivity of tax systems and thereby de-cide on θ (Evans and Sezer 2004, Groom and Maddison 2013). These approaches recommend θ = [1,2].

2.3. A BroAder discussion

What we discussed so far is a concept of the dis-count rate appropriate for determining wheth-er a given policy is maximizing social welfare, rather than offering a potential Pareto improve-ment (Nordhaus 2007). In other words, we have studied an approach making our policy choice

as efficient as possible rather than just choos-ing policies that are better than existing ones. Goulder and Williams (2012) argue that not distinguishing between these concepts is one of the main reasons for the disagreement on whether or not it should be based on positive or normative interpretations. This relates well

to the observation that positive discount rates tend to be larger than normative discount rates. As indicated earlier, the larger the discount rate, the smaller our willingness to undertake projects yielding costs today and benefits in the future.

Some fundamental problems prevail when considering discounting in an intergenerational setting. Implicitly, the claims of positivists are based on optimal compensation between gen-erations. Since this is not feasible, markets are inefficient (Diamond 1965). Therefore, “value judgments built on interpersonal comparisons of welfare are required” (Groom 2010, p. 20). This is a strong argument in support of a norma-tive framework.

Contrary to Broome (1994), we have sup-posed that we are able to compare preferences across time. If we are not, who should the so-cial preferences represent? Although, Becker-man and Hepburn (2007, p. 190) use the words “impersonal consequentialist” when arguing for a normative approach to social welfare, there are strong arguments against such an approach. Dasgupta (2008, p. 158) used the concepts “Philosopher King” and “Government House Utilitarianism” to describe the approach of Stern (2007). This is a valid critique against most ethi-cal foundations of discounting. Even though arguing that δ and θ are ethical parameters, Dasgupta (2008, pp. 157-158) states that “there is a fine dividing line between ethical thinking and authoritarian impulses” when doing welfare

The larger the discount rate, the smaller our willingness to undertake projects yielding costs

today and benefits in the future.

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economics. Thus, if readers are not convinced by the ethical basis for choosing δ and θ, results cannot be justified. In many cases, there is a significant distance between outcomes of reflec-tive processes and what is observed in market or public policy. Therefore, we should be critical to normative approaches.

Dasgupta (2008, p. 158) points to the strengths of the approach of Nordhaus, arguing that it is an “interesting, democratic move” to infer values of δ and θ from individual behav-ior. On the other hand, Sen (1982) states that the preferences revealed are only those of the current generation. Further, it might be argued that the preferences are only representing those active in the relevant markets and the propor-tion of activities between these people (Arrow et al. 2012). There are also other issues consider-ing whether markets are aggregating preferences in a desired manner (Beckerman and Hepburn 2007).

Reading Ramsey (1928), his approach is mixed. He sets off answering a normative ques-tion. Still, after making some postulates, meth-ods of determining remaining quantities are in line with those of positivists. It looks like Ramsey (1928) is trying to approximate the preferences of individuals planning over infinite time hori-

zons rather than those provided by ethics. This is in line with the unsuccessful approach of some positivists. However, philosophers or other ex-perts have not agreed on values of δ and θ either (Arrow et al. 2012).

3. conclusions And limiTATions

After deriving the Ramsey equation, we looked into how to parameterize the utility discount rate δ and the elasticity of the marginal utility of consumption θ. Noting that recommenda-tions from the normative approach were diverse and also differed from those of the positive ap-proach, we focused the discussion around two spheres. These were how the positive and nor-mative discount rates related to welfare eco-nomics and how information for deciding upon them was aggregated. Which framework to base the Ramsey equation on remains unsettled.

It should be noted that in assessing the as-sumptions made and discussing the role of the parameters, we have neglected the role of g (Ct) and how to aggregate Ct. Hence, we have ignored issues of uncertainty and declining dis-count rates. We have also abstracted away from substitution between goods and intra-genera-tional preferences.

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explAnATion And symBolsC = Consumption units.Ct = Total level of consumption units for generation t.t = Generation.∈ = A sign in set theory, meaning “is an element of” a set [ ].∑ = A mathematical sign, meaning “to sum up”.

= Sum up for a function or number (n) starting from generation t=0 (present) going to infinite. U = Utility.U(Ct ) = A generations utility ( a function of total level of consumption).θ = Coefficient of relative risk aversion ( the larger the value the more averseness to inequality in C over time).δ = Utility discount rate (the larger the value the less desirable for a planner to act to the benefit of future generation).W = Intergenerational wellbeing.W0 = Intergenerational wellbeing at present time.ρt = The welfare-preserving rate of interest or equivalently the social discount rate.g = Growth rateg(Ct ) = The growth rate in consumption units.

noTes

1 Suppose , and the above condtions, we get (3), as shown in Dasgupta (2008).2 If x is small, then ln(1+x)≈x. 3 There is a literature on disaggregation of preferences for aversion to risk, inter-temporal substitution, and aversion to inter-generational inequality (see Epstein and Zin 1991, Sælen et al. 2009).

referencesArrow K.J., M.L. Cropper, C. Gollier, B. Groom, G.M. Heal, R. Newell, W.D. Nordhaus, R.S. Pindyck, W.A. Pizer, P.R. Portney, T. Sterner, R.S.J. Tol, and M. Weitzman (2012): “How Should Benefits and Costs Be Discounted in an Intergen-erational Context?” Resources for the Future Discussion Paper 53.Arrow K.J., W.R. Cline, K-G. Mäler, M. Munasinghe, R. Squitieri, and J.E. Stiglitz (1996): “Intertemporal Equity, Dis-counting, and Economic Effciency” in J.P. Bruce, H. Lee, and E.F. Haites (ed.): Climate Change 1995: Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change, Contribution of Working Group III to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.Beckerman W. and C. Hepburn (2007): “Ethics of the Discount Rate and the Stern Review.” World Economics 8: 187-210.Broome J. (1992): Counting the Cost of Global Warming. Cambridge: White House Press.Broome J. (1994): “Discounting the Future.” Philosophy and Public Affair 23: 128–156.Cass D. (1965): “Optimum Growth in an Aggregative Model of Capital Accumulation.” Review of Economic Studies 32: 233-240.Dasgupta P. (2005): “Three Conceptions of Intergenerational Justice” in H. Lillehammer and D.H. Mellor (ed.): Ramsey’s Legacy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Dasgupta P. (2008): “Discounting Climate Change.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 37: 141–169.Dasgupta P., and G.M. Heal (1974): “The Optimal Depletion of Exhaustible Resources.” Review of Economic Studies, Sym-posium on the Economics of Exhaustible Resources. Edinburgh: Longman Group Ltd. Diamond P.A. (1965): “The Evaluation of Infinite Consumption Streams.” Econometrica 33: 170.Dietz S., and N. Stern (2008): “Why Economic Analysis Supports Strong Action on Climate Change: A Response to the Stern Review’s Critics.” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 2: 94-113.Epstein L.G., and S.E. Zin (1991): “Substitution, Risk Aversion, and the Temporal Behavior of Consumption and Asset Returns: An Empirical Analysis.” Journal of Political Economy 99: 263–286.Evans D.J., and H. Sezer (2004): “Social Discount Rates for Six Major Countries.” Applied Economics Letters 11: 557-560.Gollier C. (2008): “Discounting with Fat-Tailed Economic Growth.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 37: 171-186.Gollier C. (2011): Pricing the Future: The Economics of Discounting. Princeton: Princeton Press.Goulder L.H., and R.C. Williams III (2012): “The Choice of Discount Rate for Climate Change Policy Evaluation.” Climate Change Economics 3.Groom B. (2010): “Social Discounting and Intergenerational Justice” in Doing Economics: People, Markets and Policy. The Open University.Groom B., and Maddison D. (2012): “Estimating the Elasticity of Marginal Utility: Revisions, Extensions and Problems.” Working Paper.

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Harsanyi J.C. (1955): “Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility.” Journal of Politi-cal Economy 63: 309–321.Heal, G.M. (2005): “Intertemporal Welfare Economics and the Environment” in G. Mäler and J.R. Vincent (ed.): Handbook of Environmental Economics. Elsevier.Hoel M., and T. Sterner (2007): “Discounting and Relative Prices.” Climatic Change 84: 265–280.IPCC (2007): Synthesis Report. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Kaplow L., E. Moyer, and D.A. Weisbach (2010): “The Social Evaluation of Intergenerational Policies and Its Application to Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change.” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 10. Koopmans T.C. (1960): “Stationary Ordinal Utility and Impatience.” Econometrica 28: 287-309.Koopmans T.C. (1965): “On the Concept of Optimal Economic Growth.” Academiae Scientarum Scripta Varia 28: 225-287.Koopmans T.C. (1966): On the Concept of Optimal Economic Growth, Econometric Approach to Development. Chicago: Rand McNally. Manne A.S. (1994): “The Rate of Time Preferences: Implications for the Greenhouse Debate” in N. Nakicenovic, W.D. Nordhaus, R. Richels, and F.L Toth (ed.): Integrative Assessment of Mitigation, Impacts and Adaptation to Climate Change. Laxenburg: International Institute for Applied System Analysis.Mirrless E.J. (1967): “Optimum Growth when Technology is Changing.” Review of Economic Studies 34: 95-124.Nordhaus W.D. (1993): “Optimal Greenhouse-Gas Reductions and Tax Policy in the ‘DICE’ Model.” The American Eco-nomic Review 83: 313–317. Nordhaus W.D. (2007): “A Review of the ‘Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change’.” Journal of Economic Lit-erature 45: 686–702.Pigou A.C. (1932): The Economics of Welfare. London: Macmillan.Pindyck R.S. and N. Wang (2012): “The Economic and Policy Consequences of Catastrophes.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.Ramsey F.P. (1928): “A Mathematical Theory of Saving.” The Economic Journal 38: 543–559.Rawls J. (1971): A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Rees M. J. (2003): Our Final Century. London: Heinemann.Schelling T.C. (1993): Intergenerational Discounting. Mimeo, University of Maryland. Sen A. (1982): “Approaches to the Choice of Discount Rates for Social Benefit-Cost Analysis” in R. Lind (ed.): Discounting for Time and Risk in Energy Policy. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future.Stern N. (2007): The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. New York: Cambridge University Press.Stern, N. (2008): “Richard T. Ely Lecture: The Economics of Climate Change.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 98: 1-37. Sælen H., S. Dietz, S. Helgeson, J. Hepburn, and G. Atkinson (2009): “Siblings, not Triplets: Social Preferences for Risk, Inequality and Time in Discounting Climate Change.” Economics 3.Weitzman M.L. (1998): “Why the Far-Distant Future Should Be Discounted at Its Lowest Possible Rate.” Journal of Envi-ronmental Economics and Management 36: 201–208. Weitzman M.L. (2007): “A Review of The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.” Journal of Economic Litera-ture 45: 703–724.

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The current ecological challenges we face re-quire a cultural, societal and individual tran-sition towards a mind-set in which we see ourselves as part of the living systems that sustain us, putting planetary needs first. The need to shift to a new global ecological re-gime that encourages and reinforces posi-tive ecological values is widely acknowledged,

,but the pathways to achieving these changes are complex and replete with uncertainty. This article examines processes through which we can understand the world and remain resilient

whilst adapting to change, and applies a com-bined systems and values based model to Car-bon Conversations to demonstrate its viabil-ity as a method to motivate carbon reduction though adaptive change.

ThinKing our WAy ouT of The ecologicAl crisis?How do we make sense of our world? Carl Jung described four ways of knowing; intu-ition, sensing, thinking and feeling, positing how mental and physical health develop as a

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Myrtle Cooper

Illustration: Sahar Ajami

Towards Developing Ecological Resilience Through Psychological

Resilience

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consequence of awareness of all four functions.

However, in the West validity is given pre-dominantly to thinking, premised on the mechanistic worldview that understands hu-manity as decoupled from and superior to the non-human world, capable of managing our environment through rational decision making.

The ecological crisis we find ourselves in is a product of a complex anthropogenic web of deeply psychologically and culturally embedded and inextricably interlinked human activity.

Ensuring our species’ chance of long term survival and prosperity necessitates thinking in different ways; it means mov-ing from competition to cooperation, from objects to relationships, towards embed-ding systemic social-ecological resilience.

Crucially, this requires individual adaptation through lifestyle changes. While the economic and technical aspects of the changes required are important, these are dependent on the knowl-edge and motivation of people to develop and interact with them. As David Orr writes:

The crisis we face is first and foremost one of mind, perceptions, and values; hence, it is a challenge to those institutions presuming to shape minds, perceptions, and values. It is an educational challenge. More of the same kind of education can only make things worse.

Moreover, Peter Reason describes the need to move towards a ‘participative worldview’ within education, reframing the human relationship with the living earth to enable the participative ecological citizenship that is central in develop-ing resilience.

ToWArds A pArAdigm shifT: moTivATing chAnge

There are numerous definitions of resilience; broadly, resilience is the ‘adaptive capacity of a system to respond to sudden shocks by recover-ing its normal state’.But focusing on the tradi-tional notion of resilience-as-adaptation I be-

lieve is a qualitatively insufficient aspiration at the individual level, indeed here our propensity for personal resilience through adaptation can produce unhelpful outcomes. For example, one can argue that the widespread apparent apathy regarding environmental issues is a function of our psychological adaptation in the face of the threat of change. Adaptation here can be expressed as a coping mechanism in individuals aware of the threats; where fear or denial due to the scale of the ecological crisis produce inac-tion manifested through disengaging our intel-lectual knowledge from the emotional meaning of the problems.

,This psychological adaptation supports our ability to continue to function in our ‘normal’ state, maintaining our immediate psychological resilience, whilst providing a barrier to making necessary sustainable lifestyle changes.

Similarly, Values-Based Research has ar-ticulated the process by which we can be-come ambivalent and tend towards inaction due to experiencing tension between differ-ent types of held values. Our values are fun-damental to the way we perceive the world and inform our motivation and behaviour.

Therefore in building individual resilience to-wards motivating and managing change, we must understand the relationships between values and ecological behaviour, and how val-ues shape identity, reasoning and actions. Cross cultural research by Schwartz adapted by Com-mon Cause suggests that the same spectrum of ten universal values exists within us all, and specific values and therefore certain behaviours are reinforced and made dominant depend-ing on context, internal and external forces.

, Figure 1 illustrates how our values are divided along two major axes, where the top half of the circumplex represents intrinsic values; those that are inherently rewarding to pursue (includ-ing ecological values), and the bottom half rep-resents extrinsic values, dependent on external approval or rewards.

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The Common Cause aproach, along with its precursors. argues that Western society rein-forces conservation and self-enhancement norms (extrinsic) through advocating con-sumption and materialism, which undermine our capacity for those universalism and benevolence norms (intrinsic), which are key to engaging with ecological issues. The need to build and reinforce ecological values to initiate and sustain change is widely acknowledged, with a range of methods developed to motivate this change.

Of course simply making salient ecological values does not guarantee ecological actions. Research into the value-action gap demon-strates the prevalence of claimed ecological values not being translated into actions, often due at least in part to external barriers includ-ing a lack of knowledge, time, money and support.

relATionship mAnAgemenT: complex proBlems And complex people require complex solu-Tions

The relationship between our com-plex ecological problems and the way our behaviour is mediated by both internal and external factors means that the types of solutions must reflect and engage with such complexities. Focusing on these relationships lies at the core of ‘Systems Thinking’: an approach that shifts attention from objects to the relationships between them, where knowledge is under-stood as contextual not objective and the emergent properties of the system are more than the sum of its parts.

One Systems Thinking theory of-fers valuable insight here. Hart-mut Bossell’s Orientor Theory

,adapted as ‘System Viability’ by Mistry

and Tschirhart, shows us that any healthy system (social or ecological)

must have characteristics or ‘system properties’ able to cope with distinct environmental condi-tions including resource scarcity, environmental variability and change. Resilience in this context is the ability to maintain a viable system through having the flexibility to adapt parts of the system in response to external challenges.

For a viable system, the ability to allocate re-sources to each of these system properties is essen-tial to managing both fundamental needs and ‘change’. However there will often be tensions between properties; particularly where they are naturally opposed (as illustrated in figure 2), for instance there may be tension between the need to adapt and to resist.

There may be the requirement to shift a greater proportion of resources and attention to different properties in different contexts. For ex-ample, investing savings into creating a highly energy efficient home to reduce environmental

Myrtle Cooper

Figure 1: Ten groups of universal values are represented in a circumplex, divided by 1. Self enhancement (pursuit of personal status and success) as opposed to self-transcendence (concerned with the wellbeing of others). 2. Openness to change (Independence and readiness) as opposed to Conservation (order, self-restriction, and resistance to change).Opposing values on the circumplex are more likely to be in tension with each other (Schwartz, 1992, Holmes et al, 2012).

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impact and protect against increasing fuel bills (adapting), as opposed to saving money in the short-term by not doing so, resulting in high on-going energy bills and a cold draughty home (resisting). System viability therefore defines resilience as negotiating the tension between managing environmental changes without un-dermining the ability to meet existing resource needs. Moreover, to the extent that future changes can be forecasted, more resources can be invested in specific areas as required.

inTegrATing sysTems ThinKing WiTh vAlues BAsed ApproAches

This model also seems directly applicable at the individual level particularly because of the similarity in terms of system tensions compared with values tensions, and mapped together cor-respondingly in figure 2.

There are clear similarities between the fun-damental needs of ecosystems, social systems and individuals and the relationships between them, but little reference to this exists in the literature; socio-ecological models tend to focus on wider societal level relationships with eco-

logical systems2. This synthesised model directly links the properties of a viable system with our univer-sal value set. In doing so, it illus-trates both our ability and the ad-vantages of increasing our resource distribution to specific values in response to differing contexts. Re-source re-distribution to reinforce specific intrinsic values therefore has the capacity to effect positive ecological change in a manner that is directly linked to the capacity for individual change. The impli-cation is that such changes must be balanced with the existence and influence of other values because our understanding is mediated by a whole array of values whilst we

make sense of and interact with the world.3,4

Of course, focussing solely on values in iso-lation from, for example, context based motiva-tion, enabling environments, and finances (to name but a few), can neither comprehensively predict nor change behaviour. It must be rec-ognised therefore, that individual actions and changes are a product of the complex interac-tions between these factors, where values pro-vide an emotional guiding influence, and this model synthesis takes a step towards illustrating the relationships and interdependence within and between systems.

Applying the values based resilience mod-el: Carbon Conversations and participatory learning for adaptive change: “The remedy (or psychotherapy) against sadness caused by the world’s misery is to do something about it.”5

Carbon Conversations is an educational method designed for use in community settings, aiming to support participants in reducing their carbon footprint by half in 4-5 years. Trained facilitators support groups of 6-10 people through a series of participative meetings, with a range of fact-based activities, group discussions, exercises and

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Figure 2: Properties within a system may be naturally opposed to each other, causing tension (adapted from Tschirhart et al.29

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games engaging group members collectively, practically, creatively and emotionally with climate change mitigation through CO2e reduction, whilst monitoring their personal impact.6,7 The method’s key approach is to address areas that contribute to climate change through working with people’s underlying values and beliefs and how these are manifested through lifestyle and personal identity. This is based on the understanding that people’s psychological reactions to the challenging reality of climate change are complex and often char-acterised by denial, fear and grief.8

Carbon conversation is a col-laborative, participant led process that acknowledges and allows space for values across the spectrum:

… the openness of the experience, and the encouragement to share and explore the emotional as well as rational responses to the challenges ahead all reflect the intrinsic values embodied in the desire to address environ-mental issues.9

With reference to the combined system vi-ability and values model, the process of reinforc-ing intrinsic values (ecological concerns) acts as a balancing force against the dominant social norms of power, achievement and conformity (extrinsic values) that result in high carbon im-pact behaviour. The process does not dismiss these extrinsic values, actively spending time recognising their role and helping participants explore and reduce the tension between wanting to protect the environment with the need and desire to take part in carbon intensive behav-iours. In this way it provides a context that re-inforces the intrinsic values necessary for action along with a practical, goal directed focus that

both acknowledges and reduces the tension be-tween those extrinsic values that increase carbon intensive behaviours. Significantly, as illustrated in figure 3, our resilience increases as our ability to balance the tension between opposing values increases.

A significant strength of carbon conversa-tions is its focus on making salient a broad range of intrinsic and extrinsic values and the conflicts between them, providing a safe space for group members to explore both their ability to make carbon reductions, and to choose those appro-priate to the individual. Through this process they may resolve some of the core conflicts as-sociated with the value action gap, as well as the motivation to explore ecological lifestyle chang-es in greater depth.

The collective challenges we face are daunt-ing, and the transition towards a positive and resilient paradigm requires both the ability and resources to navigate challenges individually and collectively. It means moving beyond reac-tive adaptation towards practical and dynamic

Myrtle Cooper

Figure 2: Synthesised values based resilience model of system viability and universal values. Reinforcing certain values is dependent on, and mediated

by our whole array of ‘essential’ values.

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noTes1 Lovelock, J. (2000): Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary medicine. London: Gaia Books.2 Harding, S. (2009): Animate Earth: Science Intuition and Gaia. Dartington: Green Books Ltd.3 Jackson, T. (2009): Prosperity without growth: Economics for a finite planet. London: Earthscan.4 Capra, F. (1997): The Web of life. New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. London: Flamingo (Harper Collins). 5 Harding 2009, p. 36.6 Capra 1997.7 Walker, B. and D. Salt (2006): Resilience thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington: Island Press.8 Orr, D. W. (1994): Earth in mind. Washington, Island Press: DC. p. 27.9 Reason, P. (2005): Living as Part of the Whole: The Implications of Participation. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2(2): 35-41.10 Walker, B., Gunderson, A. Kinzig, C. Folker, S. Carpenter, & L. Schultz (2006): “A Handful of Heuristics and Some Propositions for Understanding Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems.” Ecology and Society 11(1): 14. Available from: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art13/ [Accessed 28 January 2013].11 Gotts, N. (2007): “Resilience, Panarchy, and World-System Analysis.” Ecology and Society 12(1): 24-38.

models of resilience, able to respond both to existing needs and future changes. At the heart of an ecologically prosperous future are the peo-

ple who will shape their world based on their minds, perceptions and values. It is our collec-tive responsibility to co-create this future.

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12 Randall, R. (2005): “A New Climate for Psychotherapy?” Psychotherapy and Politics International 3(3) Available from http://carbonconversations.org/about/what-carbon-conversations/evaluation-and-research Accessed [2 June 2012].13 Doherty, T. & S. Clayton (2011): “The psychological impacts of climate change.” American Psychologist 66 (4): 265-276. Available from: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-66-4-265.pdf [Accessed 20 January].14 Holmes, T., E. Blackmore, R. Hawkins, and Wakeford. (2012): The Common Cause Handbook. Available from: http://valuesandframes.org/ [Accessed 21 January 2012].15 Crompton, T. (2011): Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values. WWF. Available at: http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/common_cause_report.pdf [Accessed 21 January 2013].16 Schwartz, S.H. (1992): “Universals in the content and structure of values: theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries” in M.P. Zanna, (ed.): Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25. Orlando: Academic Press.17 Rokeach, M. (1973): The Nature of Human Values. New York: The Free Press.18 Kasser, T. (2002): The high price of materialism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.19 Crompton 2011.20 Diamond, J. (2005): “How Societies Fail-And Sometimes Succeed.” Available from: http://longnow.org/seminars/02005/jul/15/how-societies-fail-and-sometimes-succeed/ [Accessed 25 January 2012].21 Macy J. [no date]. Joanna Macy and her work: website [online]. Available at http://www.joannamacy.net/ [accessed 24 January 2013].22 Randall, R. (2011): Carbon Conversations Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge Carbon Footprint.23 Kennedy, E., T. Beckley, B. McFarlane, & Nadeau, S. (2009): “Why We Don’t ‘Walk the Talk’: Understanding the Envi-ronmental Values/Behaviour Gap in Canada.” Human Ecology Review. 16(2): 151-160.24 Capra 1997, Harding 2009.25 Bossel, H. (1999): “Indicators for Sustainable Development : Theory, Method, Applications.” Available at: http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/STAFF/Tom/bossel.pdf [Accessed January 28, 2013].26 Bossel, H. (2001): “Assessing Viability and Sustainability: a Systems-based Approach for Deriving Comprehensive Indica-tor Sets.” Conservation Ecology 5(2): 12. Available at: http://www.consecol.org/vol5/iss2/art12/ [Accessed 6 February 2013].27 Mistry, J.; A. Berardi, M. Simpson, O. Davis and L. Haynes (2010): “Using a systems viability approach to evaluate inte-grated conservation and development projects: assessing the impact of the North Rupununi Adaptive Management Process, Guyana.” The Geographical Journal 176(3): 241–252.28 Tschirhart C., A. Berardi, J. Mistry and E. Bignante (2013, forthcoming): “From resilience to viability: a case study of indigenous communities of the North Rupununi, Guyana.”29 Berardi, A. (2010): “The Challenges of Transformational Learning at a Distance: a year in the life of an Open University learning unit on the environment.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 5: 135-142. Available at: http://insight.glos.ac.uk/tli/resources/lathe/Documents/issue%205/case%20studies/Lathe_5_A%20Berardi.pdf [Accessed 26 January 2013].30 Walker and Salt 2006, Walker et al 2006, Gotts, 2007.31 McGilchrist, I. (2010): “The Divided Brain” [online]. Available from: http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/iain-mcgilchrist [Accessed 22 January 2013].32 Bortoft, H. (2012): Taking Appearances Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought. UK: Floris Books.33 Naess, A (2005): The Selected Works of Arne Naess. Netherlands: Springer.34 McLean, P. (2011): “The impact of a values-based change method on the environmental performance of anOrganisation.” Unpublished Essay. Available from http://carbonconversations.org/about/what-carbon-conversations/evalu-ation-and-research Accessed [2 June 2012].35 Hargreaves, T. (2012): “Carbon Conversations: An Innovation History.” Available at: http://grassrootsinnovations.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/carbon-conversations-ih-final.pdf [Accessed 14 February 2013].36 Randall 2005.37 Holmes et al. 2012, p. 48.

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Ingeborg Ulvund Barlaup holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Norwegian University of Sci-ence and Technology, NTNU (2012).

Myrtle Cooper is studying for a MSc in Sustainable Food Production at Schumacher College and facili-tates values-based carbon reduction courses with community and corporate groups. Holding a BA Hons. in Psychology, she has a background in environmental behaviour change, permaculture and low-input farming.

Reinhard Hennig is a PhD Candidate at the Department for Scandinavian Studies at the University of Bonn. He is holding a fellowship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and was a visiting researcher at SUM from February to June 2013. His main research interests are ecocriticism, cultural ecology, postcolonial studies, contemporary Scandinavian literature and Old Norse studies. In his PhD project, he analyses envi-ronmentalist literature from Iceland and Norway from 1970 to present day.

Theodore Howard is a Master’s student in Culture, Environment & Sustainability at the University of Oslo (UiO) and an editor of Tvergastein.

Hannah Kvamsås received a Master’s degree in Human Geography from the University of Oslo in 2012, where she wrote her thesis on “Challenging Current Approaches to Climate Change Adaptation”. She was the chair of Latin-Amerikagruppene i Norge (LAG) for 2012, and recently completed an internship at the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Hanoi.

Erik Martiniussen is co-editor of Verdensmagasinet X and a journalist. He covers climate issues for Nor-wegian newspapers. His book on climate policy is to be published this fall. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science from UiO.

Ingrid Marie Martinsen has a Master’s degree in architecture from NTNU and RIBA part one from AA School of Architecture, London.

Frikk Nesje is a postgraduate student in economics at the UiO and in environmental economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Kari Marie Norgaard is Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at University of Or-egon. Her research on climate denial, tribal environmental justice and gender and risk has been published in Sociological Forum, Gender and Society, Sociological Inquiry, Organization and Environment, Rural Sociology, Race, Gender & Class, as well as by the World Bank. Her first book “Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life” was published by MIT Press in 2011.

Peter Gofu Oba is a Professor at Noragric, Department of International Environment & Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB) in Ås, with a PhD in Range Science from UiO.

Eivind Trædal is a communications adviser in The Norwegian Conservation Society (Naturvernforbundet) and an editor of Tvergastein. He holds a Master’s degree in Culture, Environment & Sustainability from UiO.

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