Cooling Down : Local Responses to Global Climate Change

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. Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction. Scaling Down in Order to Cool Down Part I. Ways of Knowing Chapter 1 Environmental Pluralism: Knowing the Namibian Weather in Times of Climate Change Chapter 2 How a Storm Feels: Storying Climate Change in the Eastern Himalayas Chapter 3 Who Is Perturbed by Ecological Perturbations? Marine Scientists’ and Polynesian Fishers’ Understandings of a Crown-of-Thorns Starfish Outbreak Chapter 4 Urban Transformations in the Hydric Landscapes of Belém, Brazil: Environmental Memories and Urban Floods Part II. Situations and Decisions Chapter 5 Climate Change and Mitigation in Bangladesh: Vulnerability in Urban Locations Chapter 6 Localizing Climate Change: Confronting Oversimplification of Local Responses Chapter 7 “The Times They Are A-Changin’” but “The Song Remains the Same”: Climate Change Narratives from the Coromandel Peninsula, Aotearoa New Zealand Chapter 8 Climate Change and East Africa’s Past: Three Cautionary Tales Chapter 9 “Our Existence Is Literally Melting Away”: Narrating and Fighting Climate Change in a Glacier Ski Resort in Austria Part III. Politics, Policies, and Contestation Chapter 10 Where Floods Are Allowed: Climate Adaptation as Defiant Acceptance in the Elbe River Valley Chapter 11 Climate Resilience through Equity and Justice: Holistic Leadership by Tribal Nations and Indigenous Communities in the Southwestern United States Chapter 12 The Return to What Has Never Been: A View on the Animal Presence in Future Natures Chapter 13 Emitting Inequity: The Sociopolitical Life of Anthropogenic Climate Change in Oaxaca, Mexico Chapter 14 Disaster and Climate Change Afterword. Toward Eco-Socialism as a Global and Local Strategy to Cool Down the World-System Index