Peter Rudiak-Gould’s research while affiliated with University of Toronto and other places

The United Nations’ REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) mechanism has provoked sharply divergent assessments in the academic community. This paper employs Cultural Theory to investigate how a sample of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and ideological stances evaluate REDD, and the extent to which these sampled scholars reach out to other disciplines and ideologies to formulate REDD policy solutions. A sample of academic assessments of REDD from three groups of disciplines (ecological/political economics, environmental sciences, and anthropology) was analysed in terms of the implied ideological stance of the author (‘hierarchist,’ ‘individualist,’ and ‘egalitarian’) and the extent to which the author’s policy prescriptions offered concessions to ideological stances other than the authors own. Sampled authors from ecological/political economics and environmental sciences shared a hierarchist orientation, and were willing to make concessions to individualists but not to egalitarians. Sampled authors from anthropology shared an egalitarian orientation, and were unwilling to make significant concessions to any other ideological style. Disagreements on the issues of hegemony and eco-colonialism impeded the theoretically possible collaboration between disciplines in formulating suitably “clumsy” REDD policies that satisfy multiple value systems. This paper shows how Cultural Theory could be used as an effective heuristic device in policy-making processes for identifying some of the ideological divergences which underlie disagreements on REDD, and finding spaces for concession and collaboration on this and other hotly contested areas of environmental policy.

The Anthropocene can be understood as a crisis of blame: it is not only a geological era but also a political zeitgeist in which the marks of human agency and culpability can be perceived nearly everywhere. Treating global climate change as a metonym for this predicament, I show how life in the Anthropocene reconfigures blame in four ways: it invites ubiquitous blame, ubiquitous blamelessness, selective blame, and partial blame. I review case studies from around the world, investigating which climate change blame narratives actors select, why, and with what consequences. Climate change blame can lead to scapegoating and buck-passing but also to their opposites. Given that the same ethical stance may lead to radically different consequences in different situations, the nobleness or ignobleness of an Anthropocene blame narrative is not a property of the narrative itself, but of the way in which actors deploy it in particular times and places.

By politicizing the last bastion of "untouched nature," climate change makes blame ubiquitous and therefore infinitely malleable. Onto this moral blank slate, critical anthropologists and political ecologists inscribe industrial/ Northern blame rather than universal/ pan-human blame. This article queries what our analytical stance ought to be when our field partners-those who seem to best exemplify the inequity of climate change-disagree with this reading of climate change. The Republic of the Marshall Islands contributes minimally to global climate change yet faces nationwide uninhabitability at its hands. Despite awareness of their tiny carbon footprint, grassroots Marshall Islanders (if not their government) have strongly favored a response of guilt and atonement rather than outrage and protest. I argue that various delegitimizing explanations of this perception-ignorance, denial, performance, false consciousness-are ethnographically untenable or unsatisfying. Instead, Marshallese self-blame should be understood as the local appropriation of global warming discourse in terms of a preexisting narrative of seductive modernity and cultural decline. Such an analysis allows us to appreciate how indigenous climate change self-blame, while undoubtedly problematic in many of its implications, may also carry empowering, postcolonial, counterhegemonic potentialities that should not be discounted by those searching for radical counternarratives of climate change.

Citizens receive information on global climate change through both observation of local impacts and reception of climate science. This article presents a quantitative analysis of the interplay of these two sources of information in an indigenous population: residents of Majuro, the capital city of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. While Majuro residents’ reports of local environmental change are partly the result of firsthand observation of changing conditions, survey data robustly demonstrates that environmental change reports are also strongly influenced by awareness of climate science; scientific awareness is a better predictor of environmental change reports than exposure to the environment. This provides a rare quantitative demonstration of the openness of ‘local’ knowledge to foreign scientific information; challenges research methodologies for the study of indigenous climate change perceptions that exclude the role of scientific communication; and suggests a novel, and overlooked, rationale for the dissemination of climate science to frontline communities.

Climate communicators should target specific ideological obstacles to belief rather than panhuman psychological biases or scientific ignorance. The first would be to attempt to convince skeptics that the social system is not actually good, the world not truly just, progress not so assured. This would be an unforgivingly difficult task, considering how steadfastly people hold onto core ideological commitments. The second, less ambitious way to proceed would be to mold climate change to the audience's worldview rather than vice versa; to recast climate change belief as an ideological windfall and victory. The 'deficit model' of science education would assume that people reject man-made climate change because they are not sufficiently scientifically literate. A more enlightened perspective, advocated by researchers in Science and Technology Studies (STS), assumes that scientific misconceptions arise not from publics' ignorance but from their knowledge, the cultural frameworks, intuitive concepts, and moral visions with which people take up and interpret scientific issues.

The citizens of the Marshall Islands have been told that climate change will doom their country, and they have seen confirmatory omens in the land, air, and sea. This book investigates how grassroots Marshallese society has interpreted and responded to this threat as intimated by local observation, science communication, and Biblical exegesis. With grounds to dismiss or ignore the threat, Marshall Islanders have instead embraced it; with reasons to forswear guilt and responsibility, they have instead adopted in-group blame; and having been instructed that resettlement is necessary, they have vowed instead to retain the homeland. These dominant local responses can be understood as arising from a pre-existing, vigorous constellation of Marshallese ideas termed “modernity the trickster”: a historically inspired narrative of self-inflicted cultural decline and seduction by Euro-American modernity. This study illuminates islander agency at the intersection of the local and the global, and suggests a theory of risk perception based on ideological commitment to narratives of historical progress and decline.

Can the phenomenon called "global climate change" be witnessed firsthand with the naked senses? The question provokes sharply divergent answers from different individuals and ideational communities. Physical scientists and experimental psychologists tend to regard climate change as inherently undetectable to the lay observer, while others, such as anthropologists, indigenous advocates, and environmentally inclined Western citizens, often claim that the phenomenon is not only visible in principle but is indeed already being seen. A third understanding of the visibility of climate change is held by some scholars who portray climate change as invisible at the outset but capable of being made visible via communication tactics such as the miner's canary. This paper queries the motivations for and consequences of these divergent answers to a deceptively simple question, ultimately suggesting that the dispute between climate change "visibilism" and "invisibilism" is not scientific so much as political, being a proxy war for a larger debate on scientific versus lay knowledge and the role of expertise in democratic society.

Previous research has sought to explain public perception of climate change science in terms of individuals' "prior commitment" to such ideological stances as just-world belief, system justification, and liberalism/conservatism. One type of prior commitment that has received little formal attention in the literature is narratives of the moral trajectory of society. A theory of climate science uptake based on beliefs in societal progress or decline is more easily portable to non-Western settings; in a case study of global warming attitudes in the Marshall Islands, trajectory narratives indeed account for public belief, concern, blame, and response more aptly than existing theories, and accord well with qualitative analysis of Marshallese climate change discourse. In Western settings, progress/decline narratives may explain much of the variation in climate change attitudes previously accounted for by other ideological variables, promising a more penetrating explanation for the divergence of climate change attitudes within and between societies.

Public knowledge of global warming depends on the translation of climate science from specialist communities to citizens, and from scientific language to the vernacular; yet, no two cultures or languages being perfectly commensurable, this process of translation necessarily entails a transformation of the climate change concept. I explore this transformation, and the unexpected consequences it spells for local acceptance and understanding of climate science, through a case study in the Marshall Islands, a low-lying nation endangered by sea level rise and other climate change impacts. Various framings of this threat have been communicated to Marshall Islanders via local media, NGO, and government outlets. ‘Climate’ is here translated as Marshallese mejatoto, the closest equivalent in this Austronesian language. Yet mejatoto refers not only to climate/weather but also to the environment or cosmos in general, including the social sphere, a result of the Marshallese conceptual conflation of ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ As a result, locals point to processes as disparate, and un-‘climatic,’ as a solar eclipse, accelerating time, and weakening tradition as examples of, and evidence for, climate change. In a society already vigorously possessed of narratives of change, this ‘promiscuous corroboration’ makes the prediction of climate change extremely easy to trust. While this ‘mistranslation’ carries with it certain dangers, when viewed instead as a reinterpretation it is rife with opportunity. Climate change communicators both abroad and at home must therefore carefully consider the transformations introduced by various translations of ‘climate change,’ yet also appreciate ‘mistranslation’ for its ability to render concepts meaningful to local actors and to stimulate citizen–scientist dialogue.

Climate change anthropology to date has devoted itself primarily to ‘observation studies’: investigations of how communities perceive and respond to the local physical impacts of global warming. I argue for the utility, and necessity, of a complementary research programme in ‘reception studies’: investigations of how communities receive, interpret and adopt the global scientific discourse of climate change that is now spreading rapidly to even the most remote societies. Using the Marshall Islands as a case study, I demonstrate the powerful influence of this discourse on local views of environmental change, belying recent arguments that anthropologists wishing to access emic notions of climate change must exclude the influence of foreign scientific education from their analysis.