Climatology/Ideology
Unacknowledged Struggle among Global Warming Movements
first published 9 June 2019
What is it to be a climate movement? That depends on how climate change is defined. The tensions dividing today’s climate movements are also tensions among different conceptions of climate. Building better alliances around global warming action means first recognizing that there are ongoing conflicts over what climate is.
When educated classes imagine that climate is defined by climatology, that itself is a problem for political organization. At no time has it been more urgent to wade into other understandings of climate, when so many people outside the scientifically-sophisticated intelligentsia – peasants, forest dwellers, fenceline communities, children and working-class aunties, to name a few – are ready to take so many risks to find a way to move forward on the issue.