ABSTRACT
The Earth’s climate is changing. We hear this message loud and clear from the vast chorus of scientists around the world. Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) sounded the clarion cry long before this issue was on the radar of the general public, even before many environmental scholars (at least in the humanities) were attuned to this most fundamental of concerns. And then the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing its periodic assessment reports in 1990, affirming the reality and significance of anthropogenic climate change and unleashing a firestorm of controversy … and attracting an ever-broader constituency. Why should a physical, environmental phenomenon such as climate change
require “a constituency,” a community of believers or supporters? The phenomenon is happening, whether human beings support it or not, and whether or not people even believe it exists. Many would argue that climate change represents perhaps the gravest threat to the future of our species on this planet and that, as Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael Nelson assert in the 2011 volume Moral Ground, it is simply our ethical responsibility, having belonged to generations contributing heavily to climate change, to do what we can to mitigate biospheric changes and leave an inhabitable planet for future generations. Thus we have organizations such as 350.org coordinating lectures and holding rallies, mobilizing the American public to think about individual lifestyle changes and broader policy reform in the interest of reducing the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide levels from approximately 400 parts per million (ppm) to at most 350 ppm, which could pull us back from the current tipping point.
