Climate Emergency

How Societies Create the Crisis

By: Mark Harvey

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Paperback | 28 July 2021

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256 Pages

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13 x 19.8 x 1.8

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The recognition that climate change is now a climate emergency has been endorsed by a wide range of scientists and the United Nations. Natural scientists focus on the aggregate impacts of human activity resulting from burning fossil fuels and producing food, and hence speak of anthropogenic climate change. Climate Emergency analyses the socio-economic and political forces driving the climate emergency, developing the complementary concept of 'sociogenic climate change' to show how societies both create the crisis and are challenged by it in different ways. Harvey demonstrates how societies inhabit different resource environments, whether for fossil fuel reserves, or for land, sun, and water, differences which condition their histories and cultures.
In introducing the sociogenic approach to climate change, Harvey re-examines history through the lens of climate change, re-writing the climate impact of the British industrial revolution; US settler colonialism; slavery and Native American genocides; the electrification of societies and infrastructures for fossil-fuelled transportation; and changes in our eating habits. In the big historical picture, different societies and political economies have both created an unequal world and so continue to make an unequal contribution to climate change. This can only be understood by showing how societies have come to distinctively exploit planetary resources in different ways. Societies create the crisis and have to be politically involved in addressing the crisis.

Industry Reviews

Mark Harvey applies a wide-angle lens to the ultimate global crisis - climate change - demonstrating that a social scientific understanding of the historical development of societal ecologies is crucial. An original contribution of importance to all concerned with understanding problems and solutions. -- Alan Warde, Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester, UK
Working with and building upon the generative insights of Karl Polanyi, Mark Harvey delivers a penetrating and original analysis of the climate emergency, grounded in an integrative, historical, and comparative method. Climate Emergency establishes a new benchmark, and provides new tools, for the critical social-scientific study of global climate change. -- Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia, Canada
Coping with anthropogenic climate change requires us all to 'follow the science'. This must include the insights of historical and social sciences, which are epiphenomena of the planetary degradation of recent centuries. Mark Harvey's concept of sociogenesis is a landmark contribution, which he operationalizes in this book to explicate the emergency we now face. He highlights the economic and ethical dilemmas not of humanity in the abstract, but of concrete political societies around the world with very unequal endowments and histories. -- Chris Hann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany

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