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Apologue and Introduction 1 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. Apologue and Introduction 2 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 Apologue and Introduction 3 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 Apologue and Introduction 4 (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. Apologue and Introduction 5 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 Apologue and Introduction 6 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 Apologue and Introduction 7 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... Apologue and Introduction 8 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 Apologue and Introduction 9 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 Apologue and Introduction 10 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. Apologue and Introduction 11 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). Apologue and Introduction 12 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 Apologue and Introduction 13 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. Apologue and Introduction 14 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 Apologue and Introduction 15 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). Apologue and Introduction 16 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 Apologue and Introduction 17 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, Apologue and Introduction 18 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. Apologue and Introduction 19 References Astin, A. W., Astin, H.A., & Lindholm, J. A. (forthcoming). Assessing students’ spiritual and religious qualities. Journal of College Student Development. Bojanowski, A. (2009). How the Science of Global Warming Was Compromised. Spiegel Online, Retrieved May 15, 2010, from http://www. spiegel.de/international/world/o, 1518.695301.00.thml/ Freedman, A. (2009). Scientist: Consensus Withstands Climate E-mail Flap—Interview with Gerald North. Washington Post. Retrieved December 1, 2009, from http://voices. washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2009/12/gerald_north_interview.html/ Fu, Q. et al. (2006, May 26). Enhanced Mid-Latitude Tropospheric Warming in Satellite Measurements, Science, 312. Hansen, J. et al.(2010, June). Global Surface Temperature Change, Review of Geophysics (draft version via person communication with author. Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and Postmodernization, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jensen, R. W. (2008, September). How the World Lost Its Story. First Things. Krosnick, J. A. (2010). The Climate Majority. The New York Times, Retreived June 9, 2010 from www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/opinion/o9krosnick.html/ Leiserowitz, A. (2007). American Opinions on Global Warming. A Yale University / Gallup / ClearVision Institute Poll. New Haven, CT: Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Apologue and Introduction 20 Mavrodes, G. (1986). Religion and the Queerness of Morality. In R.Audi and W.Wainwright (Eds.), Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment. (pp. 213-226). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McGreevy, P. (1987). Imagining the future at Niagara Falls. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77 (1), 48-62. Meinig, D.W. (1983). Geography as art.Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers N.S., 8 (3), 314-28. Moghaddam, F. (2010). The New Global Insecurity. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Moreland, J.P. (2007). Kingdom Triangle (pp 26-31). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Muller, E. K. (2009). Review of: The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 4: Global America (pp. 810-817). Annals of the AAG, 99 (4) . National Research Council (2009). America’s Climate Choices. http://www.americas climatecoices.org/index.shtml/ Norwine, J. (2008/2009). Dueling Weltanschauungen: Contemporary Collegiate Worldviews Part I. [Monograph]. Religion and Education. Dueling Weltanschauungen: Contemporary Collegiate Worldviews Part II. [Monograph] Religion and Education, Spring 2009. Norwine, J. & John K. (Eds.). (2007). The Changing Climate of South Texas: 1900-2100, Kingsville TX: Texas A&M University-Kingsville, South Texas Environmental Institute. Norwine, J., Giardino J. R. & Krishnamurthy, S. (Eds). (2005). Water for Texas, College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. Norwine, J. & Smith J. M. (Eds.). (2000). Worldview Flux, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Apologue and Introduction 21 Norwine, J., North, G., Giardino, J., & Valdés J. (1998). The Changing Climate of Texas: Predictability and Implications for the Future, College Station, TX: GeoBooks, Texas A&M University, . Norwine, J. & Gonzalez, A. (Eds.). (1998). The New Third World (2nd ed.)., Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Parry, M.L. et al. (2007). Contributions of Working Group 11 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rilke, R. M.(1898/2009). Interiors. The Paris Review, 190, 22-23. Scruton, R. (2010). Gloom Merchant. The New Humanist, 125( 3) Retrieved May/June 2010, from http://newhumanist.org.uk/2283/gloom-merchant/ Seager, R.et al. (2007, May 25). Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America. Science, 316, 1181-1184. Smith, J. K. A. (2009). Desiring the Kingdom. Ada, MI: Baker Academic. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2. Tuan, Y. (2006). Personal communication with the author. Vance, A. (2010). Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday, Retrieved June 11, 2010, from The New York Times Online, www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13smg.html/ Apologue and Introduction 22 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,