Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism
Top Cited Papers
- 1 January 2011
- journal article
- Published by University of Chicago Press in Osiris
- Vol. 26 (1), 245-266
- https://doi.org/10.1086/661274
Abstract
This article traces how climate has moved from playing a deterministic to a reductionist role in discourses about environment, society, and the future. Climate determinism previously offered an explanation, and hence a justification, for the superiority of certain imperial races and cultures. The argument put forward here is that the new climate reductionism is driven by the hegemony exercised by the predictive natural sciences over contingent, imaginative, and humanistic accounts of social life and visions of the future. It is a hegemony that lends disproportionate power in political and social discourse to model-based descriptions of putative future climates. Some possible reasons for this climate reductionism, as well as some of the limitations and dangers of this position for human relationships with the future, are suggestedThis publication has 32 references indexed in Scilit:
- Linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico–US cross-border migrationProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010
- Warming increases the risk of civil war in AfricaProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- Resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation: A cross-cutting theme of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental ChangeGlobal Environmental Change, 2006
- Extinction risk from climate changeNature, 2004
- Debating Destiny: Nihilism or Hope in Guns, Germs, and Steel?Antipode, 2003
- Climate Stabilization: For Better or for Worse?Science, 1974
- The Revival of Climatic DeterminismGeographical Review, 1958
- Toynbee and Huntington: A Study in DeterminismThe Geographical Journal, 1952
- Climate in Everyday Life.C. E. P. BrooksThe Quarterly Review of Biology, 1952
- On the Scope and Methods of GeographyProceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, 1887