Climate Pessimism and Human Nature

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20249248
AutoresDavid Higgins (0000-0001-8136-6466, University of Leeds, autor correspondente)
Ano2022
Volume11
Fascículo5
Páginas129
Data de publicação2022-10-20
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
EditoraMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h11050129
OpenAlexW4306925906
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas29

This article builds on scholarship that understands climate change not only as a geophysical phenomenon, but also as a complex idea. It argues for a historicised analysis of what it terms “climate pessimism”: the belief that catastrophic global heating cannot be prevented. Focusing especially on nonfictional texts by Jonathan Franzen and Roy Scranton, it suggests that climate pessimism draws on a Western intellectual tradition that takes a sceptical view of human capacities and the possibility of progress. At the same time, climate pessimism tends to evoke an idea of atomised human nature associated with capitalistic modernity. Franzen draws on ideas from evolutionary psychology in a rather simplistic way. Scranton, a more complex thinker, engages not only with Buddhist thought but also with the philosophies of Benedict Spinoza and Arthur Schopenhauer. Although often criticised as a “doomer”, he sometimes moves towards an epistemological pluralism and sense of human potentiality. The concluding section brings in the concept of the pluriverse as both a corrective to climate pessimism’s tendency to Westerncentrism, and a point of connection to Scranton’s work

Buddhism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Modernity · Pessimism · Skepticism · Sociology · Theology · Climate Change and Geoengineering · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics

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