Reimagining Climate Change

This edited collection questions established categories, routines, and practices that presently constitute accepted solutions to tackling climate change—a regime the authors call, ‘Climate, Inc.’—and offers alternative routes forward. Key to the enterprise is unleashing the political imagination: the ability to grasp a larger arc of collective experience and interpret its meaning for the choices we face. This involves disciplined inspiration, creativity, and ingenuity that can help us cognitively and emotionally enter into alternative futures. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, global environmental politics and environmental studies in general.

Responding to climate change has become an industry. Governments, corporations, activist groups and others now devote billions of dollars to mitigation and adaptation, and their efforts represent one of the most significant policy measures ever dedicated to a global challenge. Despite its laudatory intent, the response industry, or ‘Climate Inc.’, is failing.

questions established categories, routines, and practices that presently constitute accepted solutions to tackling climate change and offers alternative routes forward. It does so by unleashing the political imagination. The chapters grasp the larger arc of collective experience, interpret its meaning for the choices we face, and creatively visualize alternative trajectories that can help us cognitively and emotionally enter into alternative climate futures. They probe the meaning and effectiveness of climate protection ‘from below’—forms of community and practice that are emerging in various locales around the world and that hold promise for greater collective resonance. They also question climate protection "from above" in the form of industrial and modernist orientations and examine large-scale agribusinesses, as well as criticize the concept of resilience as it is presently being promoted as a response to climate change.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, global environmental politics, and environmental studies in general, as well as climate change activists.