ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a growing divide between contemporary mainstream visions of climate action and contrasting imaginations associated with many successful earlier environmental mobilisations. Past resistance to toxic chemicals, industrial agrifood, ecological degradation and nuclear power all tended to rest strongly in ‘ideologies of care’ – around pluralistic, values-driven, horizontally-organised, relational political struggles, entangling knowledge and action towards hoped-for futures. These were resisted by incumbent business, government and academic mobilisations more with ‘ideologies of control’ – asserting singularising, vertically-structured, categorical policy visions of science-based action to avert overbearing fears. What is notable about contemporary climate advocacy, is that it has tended to develop over time towards the kinds of controlling imaginary that characterised these (typically unsuccessful) efforts to obstruct earlier environmentalism. By examining not only how truth speaks to power but also how power shapes truth, Science and Technology Studies may help make visible and tractable this shift of ‘politics in knowledge’, perhaps helping enable greater success in crucial climate struggles. To strengthen efforts at halting climate-disrupting pollution, a framing of control over a notionally fixed global mean temperature might shift towards a commitment instead to caring for the flourishing of human and other life in a naturally uncertain and variable climate.
