By Adam Fleischmann

The site is easy to access. Just a short walk and I’m there, immediately confronted with two large rectangular windows. The large window up high and on the right is mostly opaque, save one dominating feature: a single, dark line scorches across its surface like a comet’s tail, bottom left to top right. The window on the left is less subdued, less ominous. Graceful curving layers of color arc to the right and skyward, almost topographical in their technicolor. Later, the layers will change shape, sloping hills, climbing ever-upwards or back down, until 2100.

I click on the “Graphs” menu above the two windows, switching the window on the left to a graph of “CO2 Emissions and Removals” rather than “Global Sources of Primary Energy.” I move the “Carbon Price” lever on the Energy Supply table and the lines on both windows plunge dramatically.

This field site, of course, is a website, and I’m visiting it from the desk in my bedroom that has served as my home office for over a year, due to the public health measures surrounding the novel coronavirus pandemic and thanks, in no small part, to my own privilege allowing me to work from home. The website is the online space of non-profit Climate Interactive’s climate change solutions simulator, En-ROADS. This simple climate model is free, runs on a laptop in less than a second and is available in nine languages. It is a climate policy System Dynamics (an approach to systems science) model that can show “how changes in the energy, economic, and public policy systems could affect greenhouse gas emissions and climate outcomes” (Climate Interactive). Just a click away from the Climate Interactive (CI) homepage, En-ROADS is the model to match the Climate Action Simulation role-playing game.

Last Thursday, April 15, 2021, I joined 316 other people on Zoom in a giant game of the Climate Action Simulation. Before it started, I went to refresh my memory on the En-ROADS model, whose refaced and expanded version was released about eighteen months ago along with the game, a non-role playing workshop and a guided assignment for the classroom and elsewhere. Last year CI converted the Climate Action Simulation, which is usually played in-person, for online play during the pandemic and beyond. Originally set up to play with twenty to fifty people (same as the in-person version), last Thursday’s giant game was an experiment to see just how scalable it could be.

Following my own experiences with remote, online and event-based research—some of which I’ve previously written about here on anthro{dendum}—this giant online climate change game has inspired me to ask questions related to anthropology and the shared circumstances of the global pandemic. For remote research methods, can a website act as a placeholder? Can a website be part of a field site? More broadly, for many, including many academics and educators, the past year has been spent Very Online It’s a year that has forced us all to think about our individual actions in relation to our communities and a larger virally interconnected globe. It’s also been a year that’s further demonstrated the inequities of our political, economic and medical systems. Could the experiences of the pandemic provide gateways into another possible world, ways of seeing and being in the world that emphasize our relations, in spite of the distances between us? Climate Interactive’s in-person games allow people the opportunity rethink their relationships with larger systems through learning experiences that are embodied, social and affective. I was curious how these learning experiences could function online in ways that give insight into building a better world post-pandemic.

The scalability experiment opens by unmuting everyone and having them say “hi” in their language. Among the 317 participants, I count people and languages from North America, Europe, South Asia, South America, Central America, East Asia, Africa and Pacific Islands. CI co-director Drew Jones briefly introduces the model, its confidence-building methods and the work of CI to “apply systems thinking as a framework for addressing climate and climate-related justice and equity issues.” He then breaks down how we’ll play the game. Players assigned alphabetically to one of the teams of stakeholder groups will negotiate their team’s positions among four to six fellow players in Zoom breakout rooms. Each stakeholder team is represented in the main Zoom room by a Team Leader, played by a CI staff member or associate. For Climate Justice Hawks, it’s Swedish activist Greta Thunberg; for Conventional Energy, former Exxon Mobil CEO and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Land, Forestry and Agriculture is represented by someone playing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and World Governments, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina. Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors leads Industry and Commerce, while Clean Tech is led by Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX fame. After breakout room negotiations, each team will be polled on which policy lever in the En-ROADS model their Leader should move, and each Team Leader will advocate for their team’s chosen climate policy change back in the main Zoom room. Drew will then share his screen and show us all in En-ROADS what difference that policy change makes. Together, all teams will work toward the goal of reducing global temperature increase to below 2°C, and ideally below 1.5°C—just like the goals of the actual UN Paris Agreement on climate change.

I’m assigned to the Conventional Energy team. I’ll have to negotiate for the continued relevance of the fossil fuel industry. We’re given five minutes to read our role-play briefings, change our Zoom names and backgrounds to align with our teams. Drew returns, now sporting a jacket and tie as UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, and sends us to our breakout rooms with gusto. By chance, all but two players in my room are from Conventional Energy, including Team Leader Rex Tillerson, played by CI staffer Bindu Bhandari, based in Nepal, who is wearing a necklace of money symbols from different world currencies. Myself, Yvonne in Switzerland and Paula in the U.S. round out the Conventional Energy team. Rory from Ireland represents World Governments and John plays team Land, Agriculture and Forestry from Hong Kong. Much as Rory tries to be the voice of reason, John quietly backing him up, we from Conventional Energy dominate the debate, arguing for carbon capture and storage technologies—a solution that allows us to keep producing our existing products even though those technologies do not yet exist. A pop-up appears telling us we’ve got 30 seconds before Zoom sends us back to the main room.

Up first in the main room is Clean Tech, who vote to increase the carbon price. Elona Musk, a woman in a sharp red blazer with an eastern European accent, steps up to the Zoom mic, riles up her Clean Tech teammates, and rallies the rest of the stakeholder groups for carbon pricing. “Electrify everything! Make them pay! Let’s put a carbon price on everything, we can do it by ourselves!” Before Drew-as-Guterres shows us how a carbon price of $50/ton CO2 would lower global temperature increase, he asks all the players “run your mental model,” to mentally simulate what we think our actions will do to the global temperature. The CI team then releases another poll, asking us, “What are the equity considerations that concern you with this policy? Or equity-related co-benefits you’d hope to capture?”

A $50 carbon price in the model leaves +3.2°C temperature rise, a relatively small reduction from business-as-usual 3.6°C.  The Conventional Energy and Industry and Commerce teams thwart a higher carbon price. Bolsonaro pledges some afforestation (planting trees), but it doesn’t do much to reduce emissions since carbon-absorbing trees take so long to grow. Team World Governments proposes some mild investment in renewables, but that, too, only reduces the global temperature by 0.1°C, since Clean Tech’s carbon price already drastically reduced coal use. During the whole first round of negotiations and proposals, the Zoom chat feature is figuratively on fire, the debate raging among what feels like all three-hundred-plus participants. Drew spurs us on with urgency, “This is terrible! We’re only at 3.4°, we started at 3.6°!”

In our second-round breakout room, Paula from my Conventional Energy team breaks the ice. “Out of character, this role-play is amazing. I want all my meetings to feel like this!” Rory, representing World Governments, agrees: “Three things: first,” he addresses our Rex Tillerson, “you in character are amazing. Two, how are you going to pay for carbon capture and storage? Third, you mentioned your engineering expertise and expressed concern for developing nations, Rex. Allow them to piggyback on your clean energy technology! You could be leaders!” Yvonne from Switzerland provides a counter argument for our dominant Conventional Energy team, but suggests conceding to a $50/ton carbon tax. Then I interject to reclaim the power dynamics. “I feel like I need to simply say: ‘Fossil fuels keep the lights on.’” I fidget, smirk. When Tillerson nods and repeats my phrasing, the rest of the breakout group all smile at the repetition of a phrase we all hear but suspect Bindu and I don’t actually believe out of character.

Brought back after the second breakout room, we have twelve minutes left. Drew-as- Guterres asks Team Leaders for just one sentence on the one policy their team will advocate for. Eventually we do get the temperature down to 1.8°C, using a combination of carbon pricing, electrifying the transport sector, regulating methane and other greenhouse gases and even carbon dioxide removal technologies (which, Drew reminds us, don’t exist yet, despite their appearance in countries’ real-life Paris Agreement pledges).

Drew stops the game there, and acknowledges what we’ve just accomplished. The team shares a link to our simulation, where our results can be viewed. He tells us we’re going to shift into a mode of reflection, removes his tie and suit jacket and asks everyone to remove background images saying what team they’re on. He asks us how we’re feeling, how it feels to go through this, to play a different role. A word cloud is produced on the polling website based on our answers: “hopeful,” “frustrated,” “overwhelmed” and “complex” loom largest. “I want to acknowledge the legitimacy of whatever you’re feeling,” he says. We’re then asked to take a 60-second moment of silence to reflect on what we would love about being part of a world on track to making something like our scenario happen. During the silence, I can hear only Drew’s quiet breathing, my roommate speaking in the room next door, my own thoughts. Other players have closed eyes, or are staring up in contemplation, hands on chins, ponderous. This time, instead of a word cloud, the screen lights up with dozens of responses. “Justice” and “future” are two words I note repeat. The simulation debrief ends with a question about what we’re going to do next to help fight climate change.

Ideally, this climate-policy simulation is meant to teach people some of the dynamic complexity of the climate-policy system, relating their own lives to broader systems and equity issues, while teaching them to connect delayed and distant climate causes and effects that are not intuitive. If the giant online game of the Climate Action Simulation is any indication, this form of climate change education and communication can work even with increasing levels of abstraction. Perhaps this unsurprising, given the success of the large Zoom call setting that is not unfamiliar to many students and educators during the past year or more of much teaching and learning from home. However, the longevity of online Zoom-style games for climate action work like CI’s remains unknown; there have clearly been advantages and challenges to hybrid and online learning during the pandemic. As for websites as field sites, many ethnographers contend that remote fieldwork works best when combined with some element of in-person research, and it’s true that my own has involved both. Some learning moments can be gateways to the possibility of making the world anew, independent of the learning or research venue.

In a recent talk organized by Trent University’s Anne Pasek, UCL anthropologist Hannah Knox talked about “the magic of scalar shifting” available when understanding global climate change action through a technological lens. Knox also noted how for the bureaucrats, engineers and scientists with which she did fieldwork, climate change was close to home—not far away, distant and global. Knowing climate change entailed a rethinking of people’s relationships with themselves and larger systems. I’ve experienced this gateway opening among my students, and also as a student, in anthropology and other classes that taught me to see the world anew. I’ve also experienced this new possibility through the lens of photography as an early teen. For many people, Climate Interactive’s games and models make global climate change about “immediate, material relations to the world and knowledge about the future,” as Knox put it in her talk. Through engaging learning experiences (“I want all my meetings to feel like this!”), CI’s work like the giant online Climate Action Simulation allows people to form those immediate relations between their lives, the global climate and future ways of being in the world. As Drew put it in his closing remarks, “We’re going to need to find the arguments, voices, ways of being that bring others together to get to the solutions we need.” I’m hoping that the strangeness and distance of the past year can, counterintuitively, help us do that.

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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by Dr. REDACTED, Professor of Anthropology, REDACTED University

Dedicated to Dell Hymes, who once said, “One should react to the utterance of ‘That’s not anthropology,’ as one would to the omen of an intellectual death. For that is what it is…. Either one has something to say about [a subject] or one does not.” 

#1: “Leadership in Scholarly Activities”

“It is laudable that Professor REDACTED
has chosen to engage
with the public
on a matter of great importance.

However,
a leadership position within the academy
presupposes leadership in
scholarly activities.…
Without greater scholarly engagement
with the scholarly questions and debates
within
the field of anthropology…

The Committee finds
that Professor REDACTED’s scholarship
does not meet
the Department of Anthropology’s Criteria for Promotion.”

#2: “Advancing the Field”

“Scholarly knowledge…
is knowledge that advances
the empirical and conceptual development
of the field….

Because my own orientation
is to scholarly knowledge,
I will make reference to this
in what follows….

Professor REDACTED’s
achievement
in the world
is beyond dispute.

Professor REDACTED’s passion lies in pointing out
the injustices in the world
that have been visited on
the relatively disenfranchised….

Still, Professor REDACTED is evidently someone
who could be capable of more sustained
scholarly work,
judging from Professor REDACTED’s ability to engage with these issues.

Professor REDACTED’s passion, however….
is a passion for creating and maintaining a voice
in public debates
that promotes the immediate interests of less fortunate populations.

The central issue…
concerns the extent to which Professor REDACTED’s writings
advance the empirical and conceptual development
of the field….
The work is written for
popular consumption,
not
for the field.

It does not
do much
to advance anthropology
as a discipline….”

Dr. REDACTED is Professor of Anthropology at REDACTED University in REDACTED, USA. They received a Ph.D. and M.A. in anthropology from REDACTED University. 

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“What does it mean to know climate change?” ask Henderson and Long in a 2015 piece for this site’s Anthropologies #21. Researchers on science education, they ask this question to explore what we can do to ensure “knowledge of climate change” becomes “knowledge for social action.” This is no small task—for educators or anthropologists. It has largely shaped my own research, the preoccupations of those with whom I work and climate politics in North America writ large.

As Henderson and Long duly explain, for at least two decades anthropology, psychology, communications, sociology and related fields have agreed: socio-cultural community values and experiences, not merely information, are what shape people’s perceptions of and actions on climate change. This research dumps an assumption that has pervaded the mainstream discourse: that people who don’t care about or believe in climate change are just lacking information. If only we could inject more scientific knowledge into the public, they would understand and take appropriate action on climate change. This latter, defunct model of communication has been called the information or science deficit model.

∆∆∆

In other words, “Research shows that showing people research doesn’t work.” This is a recent mantra of MIT professor John Sterman (e.g. Climate Interactive 2016). Sterman is a key figure of one of the organizations with whom I’ve done anthropological research in the realm between climate science and politics: US-based non-profit, Climate Interactive (CI).

This past winter and spring, I had the opportunity to work with CI, conducting interviews with the users of their tools from all over the world. The people at Climate Interactive know extremely well that new information about climate change alone doesn’t change people’s minds and hearts. Even before he was CI co-founder and co-director, Drew Jones tells me that he recognized a problem: the climate is a complex system in which cause and effect are distant in time and space. Instead of asking what it means to know climate change, Drew asks: “What are interventions that help people viscerally experience the delayed, distant impacts of their actions in ways that create new possibilities?”

He tells me that the best way he figured out how to do this at meaningful scales is computer simulations, and games built around them. Simulation-based role-playing games “offer the potential to compress time and reality, create experiences without requiring the ‘real thing’” (Ledley et al. 2017). Enter CI’s World Climate role-play simulation.

Designed for three to sixty participants, this United Nations climate negotiations simulation has been run a registered 800 times, with over 35,000 participants in seventy-four countries worldwide (Climate Interactive 2017b), from school children to Obama’s climate-change team. Although it is run similar to a model UN event, World Climate benefits from one major pedagogical and design advantage: CI’s C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support) climate policy simulator—a computer model. Deemed an “instant climate model” (Tollefson 2009), combined with their simulation-based exercises it is CI’s biggest innovation, Drew tells me. Compared to the massive supercomputer models of the global climate that take weeks to run, C-ROADS is free, interactive user-friendly and runs online or from any laptop in about one second.

Following my work with CI this last year, and after observing Sterman running the simulation with executive business students at MIT, I was able to participate and observe World Climate in action at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco during the Global Climate Action Summit.

∆∆∆

On the last day of the Summit, I take the California Street Cable Car up the long, steep hill. Jerking all rickety and wooden like an old-fashioned rollercoaster, the car has fewer tourists and more San Francisco locals than I expect. I’m the only one that gets off at Grace Cathedral, my eyes drawn upward. The front-facing rose window of the giant Episcopal church has been cradled on either side by the two halves of an equally giant globe, the brilliance of our blue planet hanging in contrast to the sandy grey of the cathedral’s stone. My eyes track even higher. A bright blue banner of a sky hangs taut over the city, rippled in surreal ridges of opaque white.

The World Climate simulation is being held in an intimate room off the main cathedral. It is facilitated by Reverend Fletcher Harper of the interfaith environmental group, GreenFaith. The group of us, about fifteen or twenty people, range in age from late twenties to sixties and skew toward an educated, white, older, religious demographic. Moved into groups of two to five, with each group representing a country or grouping of countries, we prepare our negotiating approaches based on the provided position briefing. My group, the US, is made up of the three youngest people in the room and a white-haired man named Abe.

For each negotiating round, we move across the room, gather in groups. We make our demands and concessions then joyfully scuttle, whispering, back to our huddle of teammates. After each round, we go back to our groups and record what we’ve negotiated: 1) our intended reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, 2) our monetary contribution to the Green Climate Fund and 3) how much we’ll reduce deforestation and increase afforestation (planting trees). A representative announces the group’s proposals and Fletcher quickly enters the numbers into the instant climate model, C-ROADS. Changes appear in global temperatures, CO2 levels, sea level rise and more. Our goal is under 2ºC warming by 2100.

At first the negotiations are polite, not too urgent, playing into the stereotypes I’d constructed in my head about soft-spoken older religious folks. Soon, though, as participants realize how little their countries’ modest contributions are changing the results in C-ROADS, negotiations get nastier, more urgent. The representative from the European Union, a short haired middle-aged woman in sharp glasses, delivers a tough but impassioned plea for climate action; Chinas makes an articulate and very serious case for the US, EU and Other Developed Countries to contribute more to the Green Climate Fund.

The stakes continue to rise through the third and final round as participants attempt to successfully lower emissions below 2º. Heads huddle, quickly crunch numbers with their teammates, weighing options. Someone makes a plea to people of faith—“diverse faiths!” Someone else negotiates “woman to woman.” People run across the room, making in-game deals outside the parameters of the game—promises for the exchange of technology, contracts for domestically manufactured energy infrastructure. As the timer runs out, delegates negotiate urgent positions “in character,” with their country’s interests in mind, but aiming for the global temperature goal.

By the time the debrief comes around and we step out of our roles as delegates at the UN, everyone’s appealing to Fletcher to have another round. “I wanna get that number down!” the former EU delegate shouts. Heads nod in agreement across the room, faces creased in consternation. Someone formerly from the Chinese delegation says they could see this lasting all day. Participants talk about how they felt empowered or caught up by the role they were playing. Abe’s disappointed, he says, because he was playing to win for the position of the US. We go over what it would have taken to get down to 2º and Fletcher shows us in the model.

∆∆∆

As an embodied, social and affective experience, the World Climate simulation at Grace Cathedral had us participants riled up. People were smiley, angry, stubborn, gleefully ornery and downright upset. A sense of urgency pervaded the room once we realized just what it would take to turn the temperature down. Recent research (led by a CI collaborator and Director of the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative, Juliette Rooney-Varga) indicates that this urgency is part of what makes World Climate so successful. World Climate users experience statistically significant increases in knowledge about climate change, emotional engagement with the issue and an increased desire to learn and do more about climate change—even those with political ideologies linked to climate change denial in the US (Rooney-Varga et al. 2018). As a statistical construct describing participants’ feelings about climate change, gains in urgency were closely related to the desire to learn more and intent to take action; gains in knowledge were not.

World Climate acts as the common idiom for diverse participants’ experience of learning and feeling something so distant from normal human scales. The game is embedded in relations, built through playing a role with others in the compressed time of the in-game reality. For some, it acts as a bridging experience between delayed and distant cause and effect, between climate science and climate politics, between knowledge of something and knowledge for action.

The task Henderson and Long introduce to us–ensuring knowledge of something becomes knowledge for social action–has been a challenge not only for those working on climate change. Public anthropology blogs such as this one aren’t published simply for knowledge’s sake. Last month I asked what role anthropologists can play as the world warms toward 1.5ºC. After playing a role in World Climate in San Francisco, I have no prescriptive, right answers to that provocation. Yet as I walked away from Grace Cathedral, sky hung with the blue halves of our one Planet Earth, I remember wondering: what would it mean if anthropologists played the role not merely of translators, interpreters, advocates or witnesses, but bridges between parts of a whole?

References

Climate Interactive. (2017a). C-ROADS. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/c-roads/

Climate Interactive. (2017b). World Climate Simulation Grows in 2017. Retrieved February 28, 2018, from https://www.climateinteractive.org/blog/world-climate-simulation-grows-in-2017/

Climate Interactive. (2016). John Sterman addresses UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon [Vimeo upload]. United Nations, New York. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/190290108

Ledley, T. S., Rooney-Varga, J., & Niepold, F. (2017). Addressing Climate Change Through Education. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.56

Rooney-Varga, J. N., Sterman, J. D., Fracassi, E., Franck, T., Kapmeier, F., Kurker, V., Johnston, E., Jones, A.P., Rath, K. (2018). Combining role-play with interactive simulation to motivate informed climate action: Evidence from the World Climate simulation. PLOS ONE, 13(8), e0202877. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202877

Tollefson, J. (2009). Instant climate model gears up. Nature News, 461(7264), 581–581. https://doi.org/10.1038/461581a

Adam Fleischmann

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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“There are many reasons why people in our field work remotely,” one data analytics coordinator tells me. We are talking on the phone one afternoon, me from the far East Coast, him from the flat Midwest, having met each other at the Global Climate Action Summit on the West Coast. He continues. For one, it’s more sustainable. Plus it’s 2018, he says, we have the technology, so why not? This allows them to draw from a diverse and well qualified pool of staff and collaborators from all over the globe. Climate change is a global issue. He mentions the practical reason that you need people on the ground in and from local communities to understand the socio-political, economic and environmental issues related to his organization’s work on climate. Sure, he finishes, the staff get together twice a year, and they appreciate this face-to-face time, but they really value cutting down on travel. They are a climate change communication and mitigation organization, after all. I nod periodically. Remembering he can’t see me, I grunt or “hmm” at the appropriate times, thoughts racing at these mundane revelations.

Is this what fieldwork in the “murky middle” between political practice and scientific or technical knowledge looks like? I ended my first post this month with a series of questions about how an anthropology of climate change manifests when it explores other venues than the impacts of climate change. In this post I go deeper. What does anthropological research look like not among climate scientists or international policy negotiators, but, rather, with conveners of states and regional governments interested in working on climate change? Or the technicians who provided the data analytics and interactive computer tools for decision support among high-level leaders and middle schoolers alike? Or even the experts that provide the scientifically accurate and public-appropriate messaging for the latest viral piece of climate journalism?

Here, I introduce the shape that this field, and therefore this kind of fieldwork, between climate science and action can take. I also consider where this work takes place and how this milieu forces a change in the shape of research—or at least the shape it has taken during my own ongoing PhD research. This is also an attempt to open up a space for conversations in upcoming posts about the politics and affect (or emotions) of graduate student fieldwork, before leading to ethnographic anecdotes and reflections on the future.

Returning to the opening phone call, at the time I remember thinking that what my interlocutor was saying made perfect sense to me. It was completely reasonable, and perfectly quotidian. But the normality of it was surprising, and a bit disappointing. I became aware that I was hoping for more. I was holding out for a grand organizational philosophy or a complex strategic insight for why he and his colleagues, like so many others in this space, work remotely. Writing down his response in my notebook, I come to this realization. The mundane logic of telecommuting has largely structured my work and emotional life for the last year.

This is because my interlocutor’s organization, a non-governmental organization working on non-national climate action, is not unique in this regard. The murky middle ground of climate change work is made up of a diverse community of actors and techniques. Some are conveners, bringing together sub-national or national and international stakeholders from different states, in the face-to-face venues governments prefer. They often work closely with others who are policy coordinators and analysts, making sure climate policies add up and are consistent with scientific understandings. Others do data analytics or are technology developers, providing the tools and analysis to move knowledge and practice between what are deemed scientific and political realms. Yet others are science communicators, playing the role of translator for the public and leaders.

While most of these actors come from the non-profit world, academics are strewn throughout, collaborating and complementing existing work. Most people play multiple roles and the different types of climate actors often co-exist within the same organization. Yet most of the organizations I’ve followed so far are made up of people spread out across North America.1

They are staffed, if sometimes only partly, by telecommuters, who work remotely together—over conference calls and email. They periodically meet in person. Often these reunions occur at the diplomatic and organizing summits that are the culmination of months of work: this year’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco; the Climate Group’s Climate Week New York City; the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)’s meetings of scientists, or; the yearly COP (Conference of Parties) meetings of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). This is the case at a 10-person U.S. non-profit modeling and communications think tank, as it is at the Canadian branch, consisting of 4 full time staff, of a large international non-profit network, and even some large, international climate NGOs. The exceptions are either the biggest international environmental NGOs or those that have small offices staffed by just a handful, often shared with other environmental or climate groups. A different interlocutor tells me that, in his organization, “the operations/logistics person and the domestic policy person stay home, but the rest of the staff move around a lot because this is what the work demands.”

Anthropologists attempt to let the shape of what they study dictate the shape of their research. In academic speak, this means that we allow our objects of study and their manifestations to provincialize us, as Povinelli (2016) has recently put it. In other words, how we do fieldwork should follow after what we work on. In my case, the structure and logic of how my chosen object of research organizes itself out in the world has inevitably and necessarily changed the shape and methods of my doctoral fieldwork.

I realized early on that if much, but not all, of the work of the organizations working to bridge the gaps between climate change science and climate politics is realized remotely, my fieldwork would have to be follow suit. This has meant conducting interviews and casual conversations over the phone and video chat; sitting in and participating in conference calls and webinars; engaging in fleeting in- person meetings over coffee and between presentations; and travelling to conference and summits, the culmination of months of my field collaborators’ work. Currently in the murky middle of my research on the murky middle, the shape of this research is bound to continue to transform.

Before we dive into the ethnographic detail of a case study later this month, in the next post I explore how “murky” plays out as an affect for this type of fieldworking itself. I muse over the complicated nature–and the potential limits—of conducting first (doctoral) fieldwork like this; I reflect on power, positionality and the ethics of “studying up.”

References

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016 Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke Univ Pr.

1.  Note that, although anthropogenic climate change is a global issue, I’ve focused my PhD research on actors working mainly from North America. This was a strategic and methodological choice. ↩

Adam Fleischmann

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Adam Fleischmann

Early Saturday morning, October 6, 2018, push notifications lit up phones across the eastern half of North America just as the rising sun hit the weekend coast. Messages were coming in from a time zone more than half a day away–from Incheon, South Korea. The 48th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just come to a close. North American climate civil society organizations—never a cohort accused of respecting normal business hours—were writing home in exhausted celebration. The victory being celebrated? The approval of the IPCC’s Special Report on the impacts of 1.5ºC (or 2.7ºF) of global warming.

They were not celebrating the results of the research, per se. The report outlined new and disturbing revelations for the very future of humankind: if we keep on the current trajectory, we will reach a global temperature increase of 1.5ºC much sooner than anticipated, some time between 2030 and 2052. This 1.5ºC warming, the report warned, is more dangerous than we ever knew. An Earth of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels is an Earth of intensified droughts, wildfires and food shortages, inundated coastlines, increased poverty and a likely loss of 70-90% of tropical coral reefs. At 2ºC, we would very likely lose 99% of coral reefs. The situation is more dire than we ever thought, the report read; we have to get our act together now.

So what was good about this news, worthy of writing home about so early on a Saturday morning? In fact, the victory for civil society groups was their successful effort to meaningfully include a powerful and honest description of the impacts of 1.5ºC in the report (specifically in its Summary for Policymakers). Hard-won was the inclusion of the very real human and non-human suffering, ecosystem devastation and biodiversity loss due by around 2040 if we as a species continue living together as we currently do.

And, importantly, the report laid out the scope of efforts needed in order to halt warming below the 1.5º threshold: nothing short of an overhaul of our economic, social and cultural institutions.

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What role can anthropologists offer as the world warms toward 1.5º?

Considering the stakes of the transformations it demands, anthropologists have had something to say about anthropogenic climate change for some time. In 2015, anthro{dendum} published (under its previous heading) the 21^st issue of its Anthropologies series, the Climate Change Issue. In his introduction, Jeremy Trombley notes how anthropologists have for decades been at “the forefront of studying the ‘human dimensions’ of climate and environmental change,” in all their diverse forms. “Recently,” he continues, “with the release of the AAA [American Anthropological Association] statement on climate change (Fiske et al. 2014), it has become solidified as an important concern” for the entire discipline. As both Trombley and Sean Seary (who provides a review of some representative topics) note, the foremost focus of anthropologists’ work on climate change has been local impacts and adaptations.

Indeed, research in the anthropology of anthropogenic climate change has tended to concentrate its efforts on impacts on threatened communities, their vulnerability and adaptation to, and their resilience in the face of, climate change. Such research has been called “ethnographic climate change response research” (Baer and Singer 2014: 63). Studying the human dimensions of climate change has been instrumental in lifting up the stories of those who have often contributed the least to climate change, but suffer the most from it. This is a trend that will only intensify as we writhe toward 1.5ºC. At the same time this focus has allowed anthropologists to converse in the language of international negotiations and broader environmental change research, all while conducting research predominantly in what have been anthropology’s “traditional” field sites, in indigenous, small rural or otherwise marginal(ized) communities.

For a decade anthropologists have called for heightened focus on climate change and increased involvement in (and research on) natural science climate research (Crate 2008; Jasanoff 2010; Hulme 2011; Fiske 2012; Barnes et al. 2013; Fiske at al. 2014; etc.). Only recently, however, have calls to study the “power brokers” (Lahsen 2008) of climate change—scientists, researchers, journalists, government decision makers and business leaders—taken hold (e.g. Callison 2014; Whitington 2016; Howe and Pandian 2016). These power brokers are “much more important in shaping climate change and associated knowledge and policies than are the marginal populations we are accustomed to studying” (Lahsen 2008:587). Hall and Sanders in their piece for Anthropologies #21 suggest the way forward is “to anthropologise the myriad Euro-American contexts in which climate change knowledge is produced and put to work.”

So what does an anthropology of climate change look like if it moves explicitly outside the important work on impacts, vulnerability, adaptation and resilience? To what part of the massive climate change knowledge-producing apparatus does it look? In fact, anthropologists have turned their gaze to diverse sites. For example, Myanna Lahsen (2002) has looked to Brazilian climate scientists, science administrators and government officials; Candis Callison (2014) has pointed her analysis toward climate change journalists, scientists, denialists, business, religious and indigenous leaders; Jerome Whitington (2016) has considered carbon accounting, markets and trading in Asia, North America, at the UN and with activist groups. My colleague Jonathan Wald has worked with state environmental analysts in Brazil as they strategize and design for unprecedented change.

When it comes to the current state of global environmental change research, “we have developed a fair amount of scientific and technical knowledge on one level,” wrote P.J. Puntenney in 2009. “On another level,” she continued, “we have made real progress in sorting out the application of practical knowledge. It is between these levels, where managerial and scientific knowledge meet…that things are murky” (322). Who inhabits these borderlands? Can anthropology investigate this murky middle space?

This month at anthro{dendum}, I explore these questions and more. I’ll start by looking through the prism of my own research with non-state actors inhabiting the spaces where climate research meets organizing, policy and advocacy work. I examine what can be learned from those working on climate change in the United States in this time of rapid change. I will also ask what these spaces demand of graduate student “first research” and the ethics of “studying up.” The month will wrap up with reflections on the future of anthropological work on climate change. What politics and ethics does climate change demand of the anthropologist and their broader world?

References

Baer, Hans A., and Merrill Singer, eds. 2014 The Anthropology of Climate Change: An Integrated Critical Perspective. 1st ed. Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group/Earthscan from Routledge.

Barnes, Jessica, Michael Dove, Myanna Lahsen, et al. 2013 Contribution of Anthropology to the Study of Climate Change. Nature Climate Change 3(6): 541–544.

Callison, Candis. 2014 How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Experimental Futures. Durham: Duke University Press.

Crate, Susan A. 2008 Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology’s Role(s) in Global Climate Change. Current Anthropology 49(4): 569–595.

Fiske, Shirley J. 2012 Global Climate Change from the Bottom up. In Applying Anthropology in the Global Village. Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler, and Jacqueline Copeland-Carlston, eds. Pp. 143–172. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Fiske, S.J., Crate, S.A., Crumley, C.L., Galvin, K., Lazrus, H., Lucero, L. Oliver- Smith, A., Orlove, B., Strauss, S., Wilk, R. 2014 Changing the Atmosphere: Anthropology and Climate Change. Final report of the AAA Global Climate Change Task Force. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.

Howe, Cyemene, and Anand Pandian, eds. 2016 “Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Website. Cultural Anthropology. Theorizing the Contemporary,. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/788-introduction-lexicon-for-an-anthropocene-yet-unseen, accessed July 17, 2016.

Hulme, Mike. 2011 Meet the Humanities. Nature Climate Change 1(4): 177–179.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2010 A New Climate for Society. Theory, Culture & Society 27(2–3): 233–253.

Lahsen, Myanna. 2002 Brazilian Climate Epistemers’ Multiple Epistemes: An Exploration of Shared Meaning, Diverse Identities and Geopolitics in Global Change Science. Discussion Paper – 2002-01 presented at the Environment and Natural Resources Program, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass, January. http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/2792/brazilian_climate_epistemers_multiple_epistemes.html.
2008 Commentary on “Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology’s Role(s) in Glocal Climate Change” by Susan A. Crate. Current Anthropology 49: 587–588.

Puntenney, P.J. 2009 Where Managerial and Scientific Knowledge Meet Sociocultural Systems: Local Realities, Global Responsibilities. In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, eds. Pp. 310–325. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Whitington, Jerome. 2016 Carbon as a Metric of the Human. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39(1): 46–63.

Adam Fleischmann

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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The biggest mistake, by far, is a total failure to campaign for a new policy before introducing it at a faculty meeting. If you want to get your colleagues to do something differently, take some time to speak to each of them individually about your idea before the meeting. Even the people most likely to support you will be better prepared to offer that support if they know what is coming in advance. And many who would normally be on the fence will be happy to support you if you just take the time to ask. It is true that doing this might also harden the opposition, but having some advance discussion with your colleagues (even if it is just sending out an email outlining your thoughts) will greatly increase the chances of success.

The second biggest mistake is to fail to account for unintended consequences of your proposed changes. No mater how noble and well-intentioned your proposal might be, there will almost certainly be some negative consequences as a result of the change. The most obvious example is with regard to money. Rarely does funding a new program happen without cuts being made elsewhere. But it could also be an increase in the administrative workload for everyone involved, or perhaps just the administrative staff. For these reasons it is important to not just talk to those making the decision (i.e. other faculty) but also the support staff involved in budgeting and administration, as well as the students themselves. If they can offer concrete suggestions for how to make your program work it will not only have a greater chance of success as a result, but your anticipation of these problems will help persuade your colleagues that your plan is achievable.

The third mistake is to make everything into a crisis. Institutions are resistant to change, and academic institutions (still modeled in many ways on ancient monasteries) are particularly bad in this regard. For this reason, expecting them to change overnight doesn’t help, and can often make things worse. It is like trying to steer a semi-trailer the way you steer a motorcycle. You have to settle in for the long haul and plan on exerting steady pressure over an extended period of time. Sure, there may be particular junctures where creating a crisis might help energize a movement for change, but nobody has the energy for constant crisis and making everything a crisis will likely exhaust your allies as much as it alienates your enemies.

The fourth mistake is to assume that it is enough to be on the right side of history. Politics is an art, and it takes skill. Just having the moral and intellectual high ground is never enough. Unfortunately people are often so convinced of their essential rightness that they take any suggestions with regard to the art of politics as an attack on their goals.¹ Intellectuals of all political stripes suffer from this problem more than others. We would rather be “right” than win.

At this point I should pause and acknowledge what many academics will say in response to the last two points, which is that institutional barriers to change and discussions over political tactics are often used as excuses to sideline and delegitimize reforms. This is true. But the truth of this statement doesn’t mean that one can ignore these factors either. The need to exert steady pressure over a long period of time (mistake number three) requires one to essentially build a movement (mistake number four). This requires allies, it requires skill, and it requires patience. Having an atmosphere of constant crisis in which everyone has to acknowledge the essential rightness of your claims does none of these things and will likely undermine your goals.

Finally, the fifth mistake is to expect others to do your work for you. While it may be arguable that they should implement the changes you are asking for, in my experience only those truly committed to the success of any proposed project will actually see it through. For this reason, it is generally a bad idea to propose any changes unless you yourself are willing to do the work to ensure its success. Yes, in an ideal world others would be persuaded by your arguments and would embrace your goals as their own. This might happen sometimes, but the most likely scenario and the one most common in academic institutions is for others to give lip service to your goals while quietly ignoring them or even actively undermining them. If you want it to succeed, be prepared to follow through. Even worse, if you constantly come up with more ways to make other people’s work more difficult without stepping forward to help, you will find that very few people are left who are willing to go to bat for your proposed solutions. On the other hand, if you volunteer to do the work, people will be surprisingly willing to support you in doing the job however you think best.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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Imagine if, when writing a paper on Donald Trump, you had to start your paper by saying the following:¹

The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast of North America. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, and the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776. The United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century. . .

Now imagine you had to write not just one boring paragraph, but several pages or even a whole chapter like that … every … single … time you wrote about the United States. And imagine every article you read about the United States did the same thing. And in pretty much the exact same words as well. Wouldn’t it begin to drive you up the wall after a while? Well, that is exactly what is it like to be a Taiwan scholar!

I recently quipped about this on Facebook and a number of Taiwan scholars chimed in with experiences of being forced to add such sections to their papers. Others who, like me, work on indigenous issues in Taiwan said that they had to further justify their use of the word “indigenous” to describe those people who on whose behalf a national political movement was waged in the nineties specifically to gain the right to use this term. And still others offered examples from other disciplines or regions where they too had to provide such explanations every time they wrote about their subject matter.

Recently movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #metoo have politicized the act of offering explanations. Both women and people of color are fed up with having to explain racism and sexism to white men, and one can sympathize with the burden of being forced into the role of educator just because you have chosen to speak out against your own oppression. In an age where information is just a Google search away, surely we can expect people to show that they’ve done their homework before they ask to be educated? While having to write a short history of Taiwan for a book or journal article isn’t comparable to the experiences of oppression that are at the center of these movements, engagement with these movements online has had the side effect of making me more aware of how the demand for explanations can be political.

As an academic one often feels it is one’s job to provide explanations whenever they are requested, but now I have begun to wonder if there aren’t times when we should put our foot down and say that certain forms of ignorance are the reader’s responsibility to rectify, not that of the author? I sometimes wish I could just include a link to “Let me Google that for you!” instead of having to predigest Taiwanese history for my audience. But the real problem is that nobody would demand these histories if it wasn’t for the fact that Taiwan’s own government (until the end of Martial Law in 1987) and the government of the People’s Republic of China both had a shared interest in sowing confusion about the history of Taiwan in order to portray Taiwan as part of China.

There is even confusion over the source of confusion with regard to Taiwan’s history. One of the explanations you’ll often see is that Taiwan is a “small” country. But that isn’t true at all. Taiwan’s population is close to that of Australia and more than twice that of Greece or Sweden. Economically, Taiwan is ranked number 22 by GDP, just between Argentina and Sweden. In terms of area Taiwan is larger than Belgium or Haiti. Nobody is expected to explain Greece, Sweden, Argentina, Belgium, or even Haiti in the same way that they are expected to explain Taiwan. Taiwan only seems small because on most maps it generally appears alongside China whose size overshadows Taiwan.

Which brings us back to the politics of explanation. How should we as scholars respond to this disinformation campaign? Should we welcome the opportunity to continually remind people of Taiwan’s unique history? Or should we refuse to explain anything beyond what is absolutely necessary for the specific argument we are making in any given academic publication? Personally, I frequently try to adopt a third approach: explain Taiwan’s history but in a way that challenges even the standard official histories one finds in most publications. The question, “How does Taiwanese history look different when viewed from an indigenous perspective?” is one that has driven much of my academic work. But, as I can attest, this is difficult and time consuming. Many scholars, however, seem to welcome the necessity of constantly having to regurgitate the contents of the Wikipedia page on Taiwan history. The obligation to do so means that many articles on Taiwan have about one fifth to one quarter less original content because so much space is taken up with historical background. For a scholar eager to get out numerous publications in a short amount of time, this can be something of a relief, and I think it explains the cookie cutter feel to much Taiwan scholarship. I can’t help but feel that eliminating these de rigueur histories of Taiwan from our scholarship will lead to a general improvement in the quality of those publications as well.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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