ABSTRACT
Elke Weber and her colleagues at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia have pioneered studies that examine what and when we are moved when it comes to warnings about the pending danger of climate change. But much of the foregoing has been devoted to arguing that such a strategy is not as self-evident as might seem at first, both philosophically and psychologically. For the truth of the matter is that the short-term features of climate change are not likely to be drastic enough to upend a calculus of self-interest that points in the other direction. Transcendentalism on this variant invites the idea that people efface the boundaries of the self with each other across time in an attempt to expand the reach of their self-interest. The end goal of the resulting fusion is the creation of a unitary subject that reaches into the future, albeit restricted to their own species.
