Late in 2009, the United Nations convened a great meeting in Copenhagen on an issue being defined as the greatest challenge of our time. Specialists in climate science had warned for years about the growing turbulence and risk resulting from human activities that change and especially heat the atmosphere. After two weeks of bitter wrangling, the governments of the world went home, having agreed on almost nothing. Developing countries, led by China, refused more restrictions on their high-pollution drive for economic growth; rich countries, led by the United States, refused the demand to wind down their high-consumption way of life. The theories most widely used in social science come from Europe and North America. This is increasingly recognized as a problem. We have become conscious of the imperial history of social science itself and the limitations of vision in even the greatest thinkers of the global North.