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Apologue and Introduction
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Apologue and Introduction: Imagining the Unimaginable*
Jim Norwine
Texas A&M University-Kingsville
Kingsville, Texas
John Davenport
ACS Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Studies,
Centenary College of Louisiana
“What is essential is invisible to the eyes.” (Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince).
“No one knows enough to undertake a book like this….” (Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971, p. xi.)
Aspirations, Assumptions, Approach.
The 21st century will mark the start of one of those very rare “hinge” periods of human history,
perhaps even comparable to Karl Jaspers’ famous “axial age” of 800-200 BC. In this book, more
than 30 scholars from locales as diverse as Japan, Germany, Australia, Turkey, and Israel,
respond to the premise, that two powerful change-agents and their double-whammy
consequences will profoundly influence the course and outcome of our century and beyond.
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The first of these powerful agents is climate change. By century’s end, the world, as well as
human experience and apprehension of it, will have been significantly altered both by the
process and direct effects of anthropogenic global warming as well as by our adaptations,
mitigations and other responses to it. The only remaining question is the magnitude of the change
and how disruptive it will be to human and natural economies and ecologies.
The second of the change-agents is culture-shift, i.e., the “dueling Weltanschauungen”
(Norwine, 2008, 2009) of postmodern, modern, and traditional worldviews and values, and the
likely eventual ascendency, perhaps even hegemony, of “postmodernity” as the normative
cultural condition of the developed world (as, one might argue, it already is in much of Europe
and parts of the United States). While conflicting value-systems can express themselves in
sudden and extreme outbursts like the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center towers by the
al-Qaeda terrorist group, or Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal
building, their effects tend in general, like those of climate change, to be somewhat
“downstream”—gradual, incremental— but with ever-gathering pace and power such that our
ways of thinking and doing are so transformed as to be almost unrecognizable.
Change-agents on this order are exceptional. The last comparable culture-shift was the
transformation set in motion by the onset of the modern, scientific worldview beginning about
half a millennium ago with Galileo et al. And arguably the last equivalent climate change—one
with salubrious consequences for the new human invention of agriculture—was the ending of the
most recent ice age as the warmer Holocene epoch commenced about 10,000 years ago. To
experience the simultaneous and combined effects of two such drivers is truly extraordinary, the
likes of which have perhaps never been experienced previously in human history, or at least
human memory. Accordingly, it seems reasonable to believe that the 21st century will be, or will
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at least initiate, one of those very rare “hinge” periods of human history, perhaps even
comparable to Karl Jaspers’ famous “axial age” of 800-200 BC.
Thus, a “double whammy,”1 driven by our pair of change-agents, is beginning to unfold:
first-order environmental change in the form of global warming, and a shift to a postmodern
worldview or“social imaginary”(Taylor, 2004) as the dominant and “default” cultural condition.
The “double whammy” will be felt as a collision between two trends moving in opposite
philosophical directions: climate change, which is constricting the limits of possible behaviors,
and postmodern culture, which is enlarging them to infinity. This, in a civilization which some
would say already shows signs of suffering systemic weakness. Can a world after climate change
and culture-shift be imagined and, if so, what will it look like? I brought together the team of
scholars listed in the appendix in order to attempt to answer those questions.
The first “whammy”: global warming
The first negative change-engine is anthropogenic global warming. Notwithstanding the
revelation of shockingly self-serving emails between some leading climate scientists (referred to
as "climategate" in the USA, see Boganowski, 2010), most dispassionate studies have concluded
Earth’s climate:

Is warming due to increasing levels of atmospheric “greenhouse gases” such as
carbon
dioxide due to the burning of fossil fuels; is likely to warm by 3-5oC by the end of thiscentury,
nearly as much temperature increase in a century or so as
was experienced during the last
10,000-year warm phase known as the Holocene Epoch; and, consequently,

is very likely to cause very significant economic, ecological, and other disruptions, most
of which will almost certainly be significant and negative, some probably regionally catastrophic
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(e.g., the impact of sea-level rise on low-lying islands). (See Norwine, 2007; National Research
Council, 2009; Freedman,2009.)
Geographically speaking, the economic problem will be due to what we might call
"geographic inertia," or the fact that infrastructure is in the wrong place in the new warmer
world. Rearranging the human geography of affluent countries like the USA and Israel will be
vastly expensive, but almost inconsequential compared to the potential cost of the rearrangement
of the human geography of the rest of the planet. The dislocation of millions of people in
Bangladesh due to rising sea levels is but one example. Such alterations will create jobs, but may
not add much to human capital, at least directly, since we do not end up with two cities where
there was one, but rather one new facility, city or system replacing the previous one. Further
complicating such dislocations is the likelihood that, in many instances, recipient cities and
arriving populations exhibiting a different demographic makeup may be resistant to the idea of
cultural assimilation. This dynamic is already seen in nation states where the transnational
migration of people has given rise to disputes over multiculturalism.
And, this is only one part of the story: the transformational effects of human-induced climate
change on the non-human realm are likely to represent at least the same scale of almost
unthinkable challenge.
The second “whammy”: postmodernity
Broadly speaking this refers to a transformational shift from the former dominant Western
cultural condition, characterized by the technology and traditions of modernity, to that of
postmodernity.
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Consider that a century ago it was not uncommon for working-class Americans and
Europeans to have in their homes a personal “library” of the King James Bible and a singlevolume Shakespeare collection, books that for many were far more than mere mantelpiece
adornments. Turn of the (20th) century middle-class people, being somewhat better educated as
well as more affluent, typically owned and used these works as well as novels like Uncle Tom’s
Cabin and Ben Hur, U.S. Grant’s biography, the famous 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, even Darwin’s The Origin of Species, as well of course as one or more daily
newspapers. All these were read and reread for, yes, entertainment, but more: as sources of
authority about questions great and small.
How strange by comparison are the assumed modalities of diversion and authority of late
modernity or postmodernity and its attendant technologies. The locus of authority concerning
almost anything is a curious hybrid of the personal and the collective, that is, of self-reference
informed by/tested against, not Aristotle or the Bible, as in traditionality, or objective scientific
evidence, as in modernity, but via cyber-connection with, well, seven billion other
experiences/opinions. Surely a visitor from Mars or ancient Rome would hardly find these early
days of trans-humanity or anti-humanity no more alien than would someone from only a century
past.
While it is almost impossible to sketch postmodernity in a stroke or two, a heightened selfreferentiality and dubiety toward received wisdom are defining aspects. The most basic
proposition is Nietzsche's “God is dead,” meaning that a) there is no single “truth” but only
culturally-specific “convenient fictions”, b) therefore there is no verifiable moral authority (e.g.,
that compassion is better than cruelty), hence c) there is no objective limits to human ambition
and action. Viewed positively, the ascension of postmodern assumptions, values and attitudes
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like toleration over older certainties and hegemonies potentially represents an unparalleled
advance of human and even non-human freedom and well-being. Viewed negatively,
postmodernity seems a move toward an abyss (to borrow again from Nietzsche) of solipsistic
nihilism.
Even if it is the case that postmodernity is the rising new, and potentially hegemonic
worldview “star,” on the way from here to there a conflict between older dueling worldviews,
one traditional and one modern, is likely to be a century-defining struggle. Both traditional
religion and modern secular disbelief are “thick” worldviews of absolutes that reject
postmodernity’s “thin” relativism. That is, sharing as they do a belief in a single authority or
meta-theory means they vie for the same intellectual ground in people’s lives and hence tend to
view their conflict as a zero-sum game with only one winner.
Triangulating: Looking Back to Look Ahead
Perhaps it might be useful to begin by looking back a hundred years or so to around the year
1900. By that time it was self-evident that people living in the developed world had already
crossed, or were in the process of crossing, a boundary into modernity. Fair enough, but many or
perhaps even most thinkers confidently assumed that crossing this threshold marked the
beginning of a triumphant new age of reason and progress with archaisms like nationalism and
religion left in history’s dustbin. “Just look around,” they might have said. “The world is being
humanified via the forces of science and technology, that is, by modernity itself. Who knows,
perhaps human nature is even self-evolving to a higher plane of development and consciousness.
Moreover, if asked in 1900 to project modernity’s downstream consequences two hundred
years hence, c.2100, surely more intellectuals than not would have been sanguine rather than
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gloomy about the future. What strikes us now with the wisdom of hindsight is how much we
would agree about modernity’s package of technologies, efficiencies, and values as the last
century’s preeminent change-agent, yet how much we would disagree whether on balance it was
a story of loss or gain.”
On one hand, it was a wonderful century. By 2000 AD, vast numbers of people were living
far longer and richer lives than in 1900, such that by some measures the world held more obese
than hungry people, perhaps even more "middle class" (as definded rather generously) than poor
or "working class," people. On the other hand, it was arguably a terrible century. Nietzschean
prescience not withstanding, few of us would in 1900 have foreseen the slaughter of 100
millions, the creation of the ultimate existential weapon, environmental destruction on a global
scale, and so on, all only made possible because of the application and efficiency of modern
methods and technologies.
Whether the last century was more terrible or more wonderful remains unclear, in part
because some aspects like population growth could be added to either side of the ledger, positive
or negative. What is clear is that both the best and the worst features of the century were largely
the products of a single great change-driver we could have foreseen in 1900. They were not the
consequences of “natural” forces such as plate tectonics or meteoric impacts but rather of the
maturation and full flowering of a cultural condition we have come to call modernity, one in
which human nature increasingly seemed to have trumped “nature-nature”, in Yi-Fu Tuan’s
memorable turn of phrase.
Then to Now, Now to When...
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Now let’s fast-forward to the present, the early 21st century. One intriguing parallel with the
early 20th century is that like 1900 we, too, intuit that we have crossed a one-way threshold, in
our case from modernity to a postmodern world.
What is different? First, the future no longer seems to be “all about us” but to a very great
degree now appears to be about our relationships with the natural world, i.e., “the environment.”
Second, our vision of the future is much darker than the naively optimistic “glorious new world”
assumption of unstoppable progress most of us would have shared a century ago. Why these
changes? Simple: on the way to now the 20th century happened. The grey opacity of our present
vision of the future owes much to that experience; think World War I, eugenics, the Holocaust,
and environmental destruction, for starters. That brings us to our quest in this volume to
“imagine the world” after climate change and culture-shift. We believe these are the two forces
of change that together will, more than anything else2 determine the lineaments of the future
c.2100.
Our Scheme
We begin by constructing a foundation of current thought, upon which we then impose various
scenarios to “imagine a world” circa 2100.
Section A: Setting the Stage includes a geosophical “primer” by Stephen Hoelscher and Steven
Silvern; an explanation and characterization of the most likely late-21st century climate(s) of the
Northern Hemisphere, particularly Europe, the Middle East, East/Southeast Asia and USA3 by
Gerald North; a chapter addressing “culture-shift,” including a sketch of contemporary
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competing “thick” (e.g., traditional religion, secular naturalism) and “thin” (postmodern
relativism) worldviews, by Michael Bruner, John Davenport and myself.
Section B: Imagining the Future: General Impacts and Implications begins with a chapter
dealing with Consequences of Climate Change by Michael Jennings et al; a discussion of
demographic and social resilience aspects by Koko Warner et al; and, a meditation by John
Davenport addressing some important potential “downstream effects” of climate- and culturechange—both good and ill—for human and natural economies and ecologies.
Section C: Regional Impacts and Implications is the book’s centerpiece, its reason to be. It
consists of four chapters in which “new lifeways/lifestyles” c.2100 are imagined for
Europe (Anke Uhlenwinkel, Germany, and Niem Huynh, USA); Middle East (Ahmet K.
Han and Ilhan Khan, Turkey; Pinhas Alpert et al, Israel); East and Southeast Asia
(Darlene Occena-Gutierrez, the Philippines; Minori Yuda, Japan; Wen Lin and Niem
Huynh, USA) ; and, USA (Mark D. Bjelland, Michael Bruner, and John Davenport, all
USA).4
These authors were given free rein to sketch and explain their imagined future worlds
according to their own lights, but with the proviso that the emphasis should to the extent possible
be on the lived-lives of ordinary people.
Section D: Three Interpretations, the final section, consists of three very different but, I think,
equally provocative, reflections on the “meaning” of the future worlds imagined in the previous
section. In the first of these chapters, David “Jim” Nemeth suggests how and why a positive
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response to the climatic and cultural change-agents—especially courageous decisions and shared
sacrifice—and favorable fortune could make for a better fin de siècle world. This chapter
explores ways in which the 21st century could prove to be a bridge toward what Mathew Arnold
called “civilization made pervasive and general” or even to a “post”- or “trans”- human future
world of ever-greater sanguinity (Scruton, 2010).
The second reflection, by Jonathan M. Smith, presents an opposing position, that this century
could as easily prove to be a hinge to undesirable outcomes. Consider that the world will be
warmer in 2100, possibly such that Earth is no longer hospitable to human habitation. Also, the
tensions and conflicts already evident between traditional, modern and postmodern values could
turn out to be a zero-sum game with disastrous (i.e., violent) consequences. Also, the
combination of the “sins of late modernity” in the form of a degraded environment along with
those emerging trends of postmodernity —self-referentiality, narcissism, and nihilism —have the
potential to create undesirable or unpleasant (or worse, perhaps anti-human rather than transhuman) possible futures.
Section D closes with a “radical manifesto” by Arran Gare. This chapter’s provocative
passion and distinct point of view will strike some readers as extreme, as, I confess, it does me as
an ideological centrist. However, whether one agrees with Gare or not, the hard truth is that the
challenges posed by this hinge century are “extreme,” potentially even existential. Hence the
inclusion of Aaran’s articulate “heart’s cry.”
In short, After Climate Change and Culture-Shift: Imagining a World is an attempt by an
international team of geographers and other scholars to anticipate and “imagine” this postdouble-whammy world and some of its most important impacts in a way that you find credible,
useful, and most importantly…thought provoking.
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When you near your end, you leave your dreams behind in small and seemingly
worthless, old-fashioned things, which betray no secrets before they perish in turn. And
not because they keep quiet, but because they sing their sentimental songs in a language
which no one left alive can understand, for which there is no dictionary and no teacher.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1898/The Paris Review, 2009).
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Appendix “Climate-Gate”: A 21st Century Case Study
The aforementioned “climate-gate” episode offered a proving ground where the traditional locus
of scientific authority was further contested and various hybrid-truths proposed. Climate-gate
became the central issue about which diverging narratives were written and reproduced to either
support or avenge competing interpretations of the climate data. Here, the politics of knowledge
production were evident as public discourses adopted, appropriated, and re-conceptualized
scientific information for varying purposes. Unpacking the intentions behind “climate-gate” is
perhaps less important to the present discussion than attempting to understanding the episode’s
broader implications on environmental discourse. Specifically, the case is instructive of how
certain strains of thought, which helped inform the debate over how and if scientific results were
falsified, also provided a questionable basis for the claims of climate change skeptics and
possibly the ideological fuel necessary for weakening response efforts. The weathering of public
confidence that came as a result of the disputation of scientific authority – itself a primary
achievement of modernity – helped ignite more passionate voices amidst climate-gate’s
ideological cross-fire in the press. The counter-narratives that emerged dealt an untimely pseudointellectual punch to the environmental project of curbing global warming.
From a philosophical perspective, it seemed to many an observer that realism was on trial
affront a jury of postmodern peers. No single truth, no precise numerical value upon which an
identifiable set of climate scenarios could be based, was available for the formation of sound
environmental policy. Hence, the possibility of developing clearly defined policy objectives,
based not only on the data in question but for rhetorical purposes any data derived from a
supposedly fraudulent scientific establishment, was in doubt. A politically mandated “search
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party” was metaphorically sent out not to find the rigorously obtained data needed to establish a
reliable historic baseline. Rather, the investigation at hand sought to locate and identify the
increasingly ephemeral object of scientific authority amidst broader allegations of rampant
subjectivity in the environmental research field.
Such criticism was nothing new in scientific circles. Going as far back as the Enlightenment
Era a certain level of self-policing had been practiced by scientists who were well aware of the
reflexivity necessary for conducting reliable experimentation. For early proponents of the
scientific method like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “good scientists had to approach nature with
self-knowledge if they were going to differentiate between their own subjective contributions to
the experiment and nature’s own activity” (Tantillo, 2002, 3). Yet, in the science of climate
change observing nature’s activity, as understood through the evidence unearthed by
paleoecological studies, remains if not unseen by the scientist then dislocated and delayed. This
point is important given the nature of how predictive scenarios are devised and the inability of
scientists, much less anyone, to metaphysically relocate the autonomous self to a future time and
space when/where individual data points along the line of present trajectories actually manifest
as discrete environmental conditions. Hence, first-person observations that carry the needed
weight of authority are by their very nature impossible. As a result, environmental benchmarks
(e.g., those which aim to return future levels of atmospheric carbon to pre-1991 levels) turn on
the reliability of past observations and their capacity to metaphorically “connect” with future
outcomes. In terms of constructing collective geosophies, these projected outcomes represent
shared system states or eventual realities that make up potentialities in the broader narrative of
human existence.
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We seek clarification of our place-based geographies, both imagined and real, by building
narratives that serve as a basis for lived action. Whether factually true or false such collective
mythologies place us and otherwise our fellow human beings wholly or partially in nature or
history. As noted elsewhere throughout this volume and in Norwine’s Dueling Weltanschauunen
Part I (Religion and Education, 2008), this indicates an attempt common among “transmodern”
variants of postmodernity to restore the balance between competing visions of our embeddedness
or alienation from natural systems. On the basis of weaving such narrative threads a selfconstructed “storyworld” emerges in which the rhetorical structures necessary for dictating how
logical (i.e., based on experimental evidence) statements about real events are either discarded or
gain traction amidst the cacophony of public discourse. Studies in posthuman narratology,
having their roots in Lacanian theory, have advanced the idea that a “storyworld” contains points
of view which continually compete to gain greater control over the “focalization” circulating
around a given text, be it scientific or otherwise. The climate data that were brought under
scrutiny during climate-gate indicates a form of scientific text around which the development
and contestation of larger rhetorical claims concerning global warming took shape.
In struggling over the meanings associated with climate data, different factions attempt to
orchestrate their own storyworld upon which humanity’s collective and un-variegated geosophy
is built. True, the un-tampered data do represent an accurate account of reality, but in the
narratological storyworld, this reality is of secondary importance when compared with
imaginative notions of what historically was and in the future will be. The episode of global
warming, itself a figurative “climax event” associated with one of our aforementioned “double
whammies,” possesses all of the tensions and requisite characters needed of virtually any well
conceived tale. E.g., the ambitious if not slightly obsessed scientist disseminating specialized
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knowledge, the common-sense critic looking out for the interests of the common-man, and then
there is the data itself, an inanimate character of sorts telling the narrative of natural histories
spanning the breadth of human history, past millennia, and beyond. In one sense, the data are the
narrative text while the characters commenting upon its efficacy provide narration and counternarration directed at solidifying focalizations within the larger discourse. Consistent with
postmodern thought, each narrator offers one of an infinitely diversifying array of viewpoints
concerning the narrative text, the climate data. Scientific authority, a vestige of modernity, is
thereby destabilized in the search for an expanding frame of reference, which accounts for the
perceived experience of individual narrators, each having their own claim to authority via the
experiential nature of human over-existence. Additionally, in an important turn over how the
discourse is structured, narrators move away from commenting on the data itself in an effort to
narrate the characters themselves. The story world shrinks in scope, loosing connection with the
primary text, and takes on a life all of its own characterized by elements of character selfreference. As such, the points of view presented by a narration are storybound in a way that the
narrative text is not. But because focalizations – the perceptual possibilities and selections
actually communicated by the narrator and the characters narrated – constrain the text that
creates them, focalizations tell a story about the text, running alongside the story told by the text.
One can call the implications encoded across textual levels, an instance of narrative selfreference. By pressing on the discursive selections both text and story – communicative
presentations and omissions, and perceptual openings and closures – the unity of the narrationfocalization distinction expands the observability of narrating systems while helping to make
sense of narrative blind spots” (Clarke, 2008, 32).
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Accordingly, during climate-gate and immediately after the discourse over global warming
became increasingly dominated by individual focalizations telling a story about the narrative
text, the data. Rather than allowing the data to figure prominently in the contested “tale” of
global warming now secondary stories (culturally-specific “convenient fictions”) exacted their
own decisive influence on the “postmodern storyworld.” Alongside the actual transgressions of a
small group of scientists involved was the equally scandalous campaign – perhaps a sign of
resurgent anti-intellectualism in the public sphere – against proponents of climate change
mitigation. Focalizations ordinarily intended to shed light on any “blind spots” present in the
narrative text, the data, instead served to multiply the number of “perceptual openings” operating
in the storybound narrative. “Thin” relativism abounded. As scientific authority became
dislocated and public confidence eroded a multiplicity of raucous actors flooded the dialogue. If
the data were not to be trusted, as the logic goes, then a more experiential, even self-referential
basis for making rigorous observation was to be found. This distinction concerning what counts
as valid evidence is of primary interest to those interested in the epistemology of science, yet
also helps to determine the ontological status of past and therefore future changes in Earth’s
climate system:
What is again at issue is the ontological status of events as inducted into the milieu of
narrative stories (fabulae), where it is generally understood (unless otherwise stipulated) that the
events in question, however much they may resemble or take their cue from real events, are
imaginary, or at least re-imagined (Clarke 2008, 32-33).
When conceived as mere fabulae the historic climate data, which are in truth connected to real
events in the world, are re-conceptualized as imaginary episodes making up constructed and
therefore partial scientific knowledge. Any discernment between what is truly or conditionally
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real becomes less important than the communicative potential of individualized narratives to
influence received opinion across the rhetorical domain. As such, political spin-doctors are
placed on equal footing with those among the scientific field with both strong credentials and a
clean track record of ethical conduct within the profession. Amidst a postmodern condition
stories told about the text take precedence over stories told by the text. The preceding example
offers a further elaboration on how the notion of absolute truth is continually disrupted and
fractured by a process of narrative framing and re-framing common to the politicization of
aesthetics. Accordingly, in the postmodern storyworld the inability to definitively know anything
concrete about climate change, with all of its seen and unseen “blind spots,” frames the ability to
know the truth about global warming. To re-contextualize Tuan’s observation, the unreal and the
real coalesce as human-nature trumps nature-nature.
The above discussion concerning the impact of postmodern thought on climate-gate helps
make operational Clarke’s theoretical observation that “narrative embedding is the primary
textual analog of systemic self-reference” (Clarke 2008, 94). This process of narrative
embedding offers us a rich tapestry of competing ideas over climate change and global warming
through which the transition from a modern to postmodern condition may be assessed. For some
this transition represents a tentative and self-conscious step in the ongoing evolutionary synthesis
of human, social, and Earth systems. I say tentative because it is not yet clear how the choice to
either take or not taking this step will ultimately shape the human condition across the 21st
century and beyond. Clarke offers a more definitive account of the importance of taking this
step: “Whether it wants to or not, humanity will have to posit itself to the Gaian conception of its
embeddedness within geobiological phenomena that are planetary and cosmic in scope. It will
earn its continuation only by metamorphic integration into new evolutionary syntheses” (Clarke,
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2008, 196). The capacity of technological innovation to partially buffer evolutionary processes
against punctuated change via increased environmental stress caused by climate change is an
important aspect of the extended transition from modernity to postmodernity. This does not mean
that there are not other unidentifiable changes to the human condition which may come as a
result of combined culture shift and climate change. Indeed, further understanding and resolving
the discrepancies that arise between the embeddedness of our narratives and our embeddedness
within geobiological phenomena stands as a significant learning opportunity available to
humanity. With these ideas in mind one might perceive another less tangible dimension of
human development worthy of our collective energies. For some this dimension may be
characterized as the continued search for a harmonious relationship with nature.
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Author Note
*John Davenport and Colleen Norwine (separately) suggested important and insightful
improvements to drafts of this text. I am deeply indebted.
1
Slang for a combination of two unfortunate or negative circumstances or events, from
the mid-20th century American comic strip “L’il Abner” by Al Capp.
2
Other than the transformations potentially wrought by outlier “singularities,” e.g., the
abrupt onset of a biotechnical “transhuman” utopia/dystopia (choose one) (see Vance, 2010), or a
regional- or global-scale war involving the use of weapons of mass destruction.
3
Among the questions to be explored will be whether a thick new, alternative
“environmentalist” worldview is emerging and, if so, its form. My previous research has
indicated that most contemporary undergraduates, whose overarching worldviews tend toward a
pronounced hybridity of traditional, modern and postmodern values, privilege “green” values (to
varying degrees) but it has also revealed that they also mostly tend to “privilege” personal
freedom and lifestyle. Recent survey research by Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale University
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (2000; see also Astin) confirms this “dissonance”
between sacrifice in principle and in practice: while most people surveyed affirmed that global
warming is real, that humans are the main cause and the need in principle of making changes
such as sharply reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, when confronted with the question of raising
taxes on electricity consumption 71% disagreed (49% strongly) with only 29% agreeing (11%
strongly), and to the question of higher gas taxes to reduce driving, 67% disagreed (48%
strongly) with only 34% in favor (18% strongly). (Leiserowitz, 2007) An even more recent
Stanford University survey (Krosnick, 2010) points to the same value-conflict: most Americans
Apologue and Introduction
23
surveyed (75%) affirmed the reality of human-caused warming but opposed increased taxes on
electricity (78%) and gasoline (72%) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
4
Although these twin forces will almost certainly eventually transform states of mind and
being throughout the world, this work focused principally on the subtropical and adjacent areas
in the USA, the Middle East and Europe. This emphasis owed partly to my own subtropical
location and interest, but mostly to the fact that various studies suggest that the “downstream
effects” of climate change seem likely to be particularly acute in such locales (Seager, 2007; Fu,
2006). Southeast Asia was added because I decided given that the right contributors agreed to
undertake the challenge. Fortunately, such was the case. Since Asia will probably hold a
dominant 21st century role, it was essential to include at least one Asian region with respect to
inclusion of the Southern Hemisphere subtropics,