Abstract
As the physical manifestations of climate change become more pronounced, the political, social and economic implications will become an increasing source of conflict. This is already evident in the partisan political battleground which has emerged over attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, new ‘unconventional’ fossil fuels (e.g. ‘tar sands’ development or the ‘fracking’ of coal and shale gas) and even renewable energy sources (e.g. the astroturfing opposition to wind farms). In developing a special issue around a topic as all-encompassing and confronting as climate change, we believe that it is important to seek out voices beyond the academic community of organizational scholars. As guest editors, we are particularly keen to include the perspectives and insights of those who are at the ‘front line’ of these emerging climate conflicts. In this section, we present insights from three individuals who, in different ways, articulate the urgent need to confront the threat of climate change.
The first of these is Bill McKibben. Bill is one of the world’s best known environmental authors and activists. His book, The End of Nature (McKibben, 1989), is regarded as one of the first books alerting a general audience to the dangers of climate change, and his subsequent books and numerous articles have highlighted his role as one of the world’s most prominent voices on the dangers of anthropogenic climate change. This has carried over into activism through the founding of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Most recently, Bill has been at the forefront of campaigns against fossil fuel developments such as the Keystone XL pipeline (a crucial conduit across the US for ‘tar sands’ oil) and the highly successful campaign for US universities to divest from fossil fuel companies (McKibben, 2013). In the following gripping commentary, Bill highlights the urgency of the current climate crisis, the central role of the fossil fuel industry and some of the recent forms of protest and civil disobedience which seek to challenge ‘business as usual’.
Our second contributor comes from the natural science community that first provided documented evidence of the very real dangers posed by escalating greenhouse gas emissions. Michael Mann is the Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University in the US. As one of the world’s leading climate scientists, he is well known as lead author of the 1999 paper on temperature trends over the last thousand years which produced what came to be known as the ‘hockey stick graph’ (Mann et al., 1999). Michael’s ground-breaking research into the long term history of Earth’s climate featured prominently in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report published in 2001 (IPCC, 2001). However, as a result of his work, Michael also became a central target of conservative politicians, industry groups and the climate change denial industry. As documented in his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (Mann, 2012), this smear campaign included personal threats and political challenges to his job tenure. We interviewed Michael in October 2012 and asked him about his personal story as a leading climate scientist ensnared in the divisive politics of the climate wars. His answers provide compelling insights into the political conflict over different future imaginings surrounding climate change.
Our third contributor, Paul Gilding was the former head of the environmental NGO Greenpeace and later a strategic advisor to some of the world’s largest corporations. Most recently, Paul has written a timely and confronting book The Great Disruption (Gilding, 2011), which posits that the social and economic order has reached it ecological limits and is currently unravelling. We interviewed Paul in January 2013 and asked him about climate change and how he sees the future of a climate-shocked world after the ‘great disruption’. While interpreted by some as a more optimistic vision of humanity’s response to the climate crisis, as Paul outlines, the scale and magnitude of such a disruption in terms of human life and suffering are likely to far exceed previous human experience.
These contributions provide insight from a variety of perspectives: environmental activist, climate scientist, business advisor and futurologist. Taken together, their narratives highlight the increasingly political nature of organizing responses to climate change, and at the same time demonstrate the need for collective imaginings of how to solve an issue that will define the totality of human organization in coming decades. These voices also prompt us to imagine how to navigate through different, complex and heavily contested climate futures.