Including and Differentiating Among Perspectives: An Integral Approach to Climate Change

Abstract: Among the principles of Integral Ecology (IE), two are particularly important: 1) include multiple perspectives not only in regard to characterizing and proposing remedies for environmental problems, but also in regard to determining what counts as a serious problem in the first place; and 2) differentiate from one another the domains studied by various methods, for example, natural science vs. policy formation. I use these features of Integral Ecology to examine critically the contemporary debate about climate change. Even if IPCC scenarios about rising global temperatures are plausible, an important issue remains: Should resources be directed to adapting to coming climate change, or should they be directed to efforts to cut dramatically anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, especially CO2? How are we to know how billions of different people with many different perspectives would answer this question?

Climate change, a term whose extension in this essay includes "global warming," is an incredibly complicated phenomenon that must be investigated from multiple vantage points in each of the quadrants demarcated by integral theory. According to integral ecology, inclusiveness is needed to insure that an adequate set of perspectives is called upon to allow a given state of affairs to manifest itself in all its complexity. Not surprisingly, however, much of the climate change debate is dominated by natural science and economics, each of which operate primarily in what integral theory calls the "lower right quadrant." Recently a well known British climate change scientist and founder of Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Mike Hulme, has called for adopting what amounts to an outstanding integral analysis of climate change, even though he is evidently unfamiliar with integral ecology. Although convinced that human use of fossil fuel plays a significant role in recent climate change, he warns against the "hegemony" of the climate or Earth systems scientists and the rise of "meteorological fundamentalism." (Hulme 2009, 18) Instead, he maintains that climate change must be examined using the concepts, tools and languages of the sciences, social sciences and humanities, and the discourses and practices of economics, politics and religion. As we examine climate change from these different vantage points, we begin to see that—depending on who one is and where one stands—the idea of climate change carries quite different meanings and seems to imply quite different courses of action. (Hulme, 2009, xxxvii)

Climate change must be understood not only as a physical phenomenon, then, but also as a signifier conditioned by important historical, cultural, psychological, and religious factors that are capable of evoking a wide range of human responses. Casting climate change as a "problem" that we must somehow "solve" follows from viewing it almost exclusively from the objective, third person, science perspective that is central to the modern worldview. Modern humankind regards itself as capable of mastering nature, up to and including Earth's climate, even though it is a chaotic system that is unlikely to be tamed by such efforts. According to Hulme, the predominantly scientific dominating climate change discourse prevents us from framing climate change as an opportunity to change our cultural narratives and the norms pertaining to how we relate to one another.

That Hulme has independently arrived at many of the same conclusions as have integral ecologists suggests that integral thinking is beginning to grow in strength as a strange attractor, what used to be called der Zeitgeist (the spirit of the times), drawing an increasing number of people to move beyond the limits of modernism and postmodernism alike. In the format of an essay, I cannot hope to cover the same amount of territory as does Hulme, so I will restrict myself to answering the following questions: How well do contemporary discussions of climate change adhere to two of integral ecology's primary directives: to be inclusive of as many pertinent perspectives as possible, and to differentiate between methods or perspectives that are sometimes confused with or collapsed into one another?

In part one of this essay, I examine whether the consensus view of climate change has been sufficiently inclusive of alternative scientific views, including skeptical ones.

In part two, I examine an instance of how left-hand perspectives, especially values, worldviews, and beliefs, are often elided or ignored in climate change discourse. Alleged scientific facts about climate change—the way things "are"—are routinely used to justify eliminating political discussion about what ought to be done by people faced with climate change. This widespread failure to differentiate between the domain of fact-formation (science) and the domain of value-formation and value-dispute threatens to undermine the importance of value discourse and thus in effect to exclude it from political debate. The conviction that "Science has spoken; we must do what it says" is behind many current environmentalist slogans. Failure adequately to differentiate between is and ought, fact and value, is a characteristic tendency of modernity, which often tends toward positivism and technocracy, in which "experts" are invited to devise binding public policy. Even some environmentalists with a postmodern (green) center of gravity, environmentalists who are otherwise often critical of techno-industrial modernity, have embraced technocratic attitudes when it comes to climate change.

In part three, I address another question pertaining to inclusiveness: Who had a seat at the table when it was decided that the defining issue of the 21st century is climate change? Why must there be only one defining issue? What competitors are there for urgent issues?

Finally, in part four, I discuss briefly how an integral ecologist might answer the question: What ought to be done in the face of global warming?

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