Any response to climate change, positive. ambivalent or negative, will require people to become involved. Which people are likely to participate and which are not? There are terrific conversations on the Internet about the physical issues: mineral availability, and the replacement of one kind of energy with another. But there is less conversation about the need for people to be involved for anything to happen at all, and who those people might be. I have been struck by four overlapping domains: the nation-state, civilizations, communities, and cultures. They overlap, but not completely. People’s response to climate issues probably depends on which example of each they are part of. Civilization seems aspirational. Culture seems emotional and deep. The nation state seems rule-bound. All four are part of a person’s identity but in complex ways. My question is how each is likely to move people towards reactions to climate catastrophe.
Community might seem most important, but imagine wealthy people living in a threatened community will more easily pick up and move somewhere else and their choice will depend upon their relationship with the other three.
Imagine a policeman surrounded by civil unrest that is responding violently to rising prices and lack of availability of essentials. Will that person stick in their job and their embeddedness in the nation state or will they leave and join an emerging pit? An important question is how the professional class will respond to emerging crises. It seems to me that as a group they will be opportunistic, and this will threaten all the bureaucracies. just as there will not be sufficient material to make an alternative energy system, so there will not be enough people in crucial roles to keep society functioning.
On the other side, as writers like Rebecca Solnit emphasize, bad times bring the best out of many people – but not all. The 1929 depression for example brought many people into extended sociability, mostly around shared food preparation and shared habitat. I think we can expect a lot of that to happen, but the process is so complicated in no community building that it is hard to see how it will happen, with whom, and when. Each of us, connected to our local communities, has a sense of what can happen, but it is hard to summarize it at the level of society or of the species.
I am struggling to see where I can take this analysis of the social in reaction to climate issues.