Cooling Down: Local Responses to Global Climate Change

by Susanna Hoffman (Editor), Thomas Hylland Eriksen (Editor), Paulo Mendes (Editor)

Overview

Climate change is a slowly advancing crisis sweeping over the planet and affecting different habitats in strikingly diverse ways. While nations have signed treaties and implemented policies, most actual climate change assessments, adaptations, and countermeasures take place at the local level. People are responding by adjusting their practices, livelihoods, and cultures, protesting and migrating. This book portrays the diversity of explanations and remedies as expressed at the community level and its emphasis on the crucial importance of ethnographic detail in demonstrating how people in different parts of the world are scaling down the phenomenon of global warming.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781800731905
Publisher:	Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/11/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	402
Sales rank:	752,690
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Susanna Hoffman is an internationally recognized expert on disaster. She is the author, co-author, and editor of twelve books, including Disaster Upon Disaster: Exploring the Gap Between Knowledge, Policy and Practice (Berghahn, 2019). She initiated the Risk and Disaster Thematic Interest Group for the Society for Applied Anthropology and is the founder and chair of the Risk and Disaster Commission for the International Union of Anthropology and Ethnographic Sciences.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Foundation. Among his recent books are Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (Pluto Press, 2016), and the co-edited, with Astrid Stensrud, Climate, Capitalism and Communities (Pluto Press, 2019).

Paulo Mendes is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) and researcher at Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA). His recent books include The Sea Commands (Berghahn, 2020).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Scaling Down in Order to Cool Down
Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Paulo Mendes

Part I: Ways of Knowing

Chapter 1. Environmental Pluralism: Knowing the Namibian Weather in Times of Climate Change
Michael Schnegg

Chapter 2. How a Storm Feels: Storying Climate Change in the Eastern Himalayas
Alex Aisher

Chapter 3. Who is Perturbed by Perturbations? Marine Scientists’ and Polynesian Fishers’ Understandings of a Crown-of-Thorns Starfish Outbreak
Matthew Lauer, Terava Atger, Sally J. Holbrook, Andrew Rassweiler, Russell J. Schmitt, and Jean Wencelius

Chapter 4. Urban Transformations in the Hydric Landscapes of Belém (PA): Environmental Memories and Urban Flood
Pedro Paulo de Miranda Araujo Soares

Part II: Situations and Decisions

Chapter 5. Climate Change and Mitigation in Bangladesh: Vulnerability in Urban Locations
Tasneem Siddiqui, Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder and Mohammad Rashed Alam Bhuiyan

Chapter 6. Localizing Climate Change: Confronting Over-simplification of Local Responses
Brian Orland, Meredith Welch-Devine, and Micah Taylor

Chapter 7. 'The Times They Are a-Changin' but 'The Song Remains The Same': Climate Change Narratives from the Coromandel Peninsula, Aotearoa New Zealand
Paul Schneider and Bruce Glavovic

Chapter 8. Climate Change and East Africa's Past: Three Cautionary Tales
A. Peter Castro

Chapter 9. “Our Existence is Literally Melting Away”: Narrative and Fighting Climate Change in a Glacier Ski Resort in Austria
Herta Nobauer

Part III: Politics, Policies, and Contestation

Chapter 10. Where Floods Are Allowed: Climate Adaptation as Defiant Acceptance in the Elbe River Valley
Kristoffer Albris

Chapter 11. Climate Resilience Through Equity and Justice: Holistic Leadership by Tribal Nations and Indigenous Communities in the Southwest United States
Julie Maldonado and Beth Rose Middleton

Chapter 12. The Return of What Has Not Been Gone: A View of Animal Presence in Future Natures
Guilherme José da Silva e Sá

Chapter 13. Emitting Inequity: The Socio-Political Life of Anthropogenic Climate Change in Oaxaca, Mexico
Roberto E. Barrios and Amanda Leppert

Chapter 14. Disaster and Climate Change
Susanna M. Hoffman

Afterword: Toward Eco-Socialism as a Global and Local Strategy to Cool Down the World-System
Hans A. Baer

Index

Editorial Reviews

“This is a remarkable read for three reasons. First, the breadth of topics addressed, second, the tacking back and forth from the micro to the macro perspective, and third, the particular attention paid in many of the chapters to concrete actions that could, if taken, help ameliorate the devastating consequences of climate change.” • Steve Kroll-Smith, University of North Carolina

From the Publisher