ABSTRACT
The ways in which different experts define the causes of global climate change tell a great deal about their training, their worldviews, and the limitations of the partitioned knowledges we have inherited from the nineteenth-century division of the world into physical, natural, and social sciences. Anthropology offers the scope and sweep of time, stepping back and offering a bigger picture of how the human species got itself into its present dilemma of rapid growth in greenhouse gas emissions. Global climate change has brought the issue of consumption forward into public and academic attention, but it was the so-called first energy crisis in the early 1970s and the OPEC oil boycott that gave the American public its first taste of what a world with energy scarcity and higher prices would be like. 'Sustainability is a term like truth or beauty', says Fred Kirschenmann, a senior fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.
