Climate hegemony : confronting the politics of environmental impasse / Laurie Parsons.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Parsons, Laurie (Lecturer in human geography), author.

Series:

RGS-IBG book series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Climatic changes--Political aspects.

Climatic changes.

Climatic changes--Social aspects.

Climate change mitigation.

Physical Description:

1 online resource ([xiii], 222 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London : LSE Press, 2026.

Summary:

Climate action is at an impasse. Its political opponents are stronger than ever, its advocates powerless. Almost every major government and corporation expresses their commitment to tackling climate change, yet decades of discussion, governance, and action have failed to stop carbon emissions advancing to record annual levels. How has so little been achieved for so long on such an urgent issue? In Climate Hegemony: Confronting the Politics of Environmental Impasse, Laurie Parsons shows how the architecture of environmental thinking has been locked into ineffective pathways. We don’t need to be coerced into inaction on climate, because our understanding is constrained by metaphors, rhetoric and assumptions so embedded we have long since ceased to see them. To confront this, Climate Hegemony brings us a human’s-eye view of the climate crisis, building up from lived experience to reveal the interests and politics that underpin the impasse. Drawing on almost two decades’ research at the frontline of global development in Cambodia, Parsons reveals the chasm between how climate change appears in a newspaper, or a policy bulletin, and how it appears to those immersed in the places it affects. From this perspective, the limitations of current environmental thinking become clear, but so too do a great many alternatives. In this powerfully argued work, Parsons set out how, if we were to rethink the perspective from which we understand climate change, we can build knowledge from and for marginalised communities, from the ground upwards, challenging the impasse and creating new pathways to address and adapt to the social impacts of climate breakdown. -- publisher description.

Contents:

1. Introduction

1.1 Climate control

PART 1: SUBJECTIVITY

2. The tyranny of environmental metaphors

2.1 Climate change and metaphorical fallacy

2.2 Container metaphors and climate change geographies

3. I, climate migrant: science, security and stigma in the analysis of environmental mobility

3.1 Climate migration in Cambodia: from ‘great mobility’ to the geopolitics of adaption

3.2 Climate migration in global discourse: securitisation, embodiment and stigma

3.3 Climate migration in theory: the birth of a discourse

4. Categorical domination: segregating disasters from the global economy

4.1 Categorising under the carpet

4.2 Uncategorising the climate

PART 2: PARTIALITY

5. Narratives and rhetoric in contemporary climate policy

5.1 The politics of climate change narratives

5.2 Sophistry and rhetoric in communicating climate change

6. The wicked problem of climate change on the Tonle Sap Lake

6.1 Climate change in a complex environment

6.2 Narrative adaptation

6.3 Cutting through the wickedness: media accounts of complexity

7. Irrigation, rhetoric and scale

7.1 Contestation and scale

7.2 Scalar sophistry

PART 3: CHOICE

8. Thumbnail knowledges: the geography of the un- and half-known

8.1 Uneven geographies of tacit knowledge

8.2 Thumbnail knowledges in climate discourse

9. What do you know: the politics of environmental ignorance

9.1 The politics of dissemination

9.2 The politics of data creation

9.3 The politics of data sharing and the power of the unknown

10. Confronting our dragons: new perspectives on environmental change

10.1 One place, many climates: interpreting environmental subjectivity

10.2 Climate thumbnails: from the subjective to the disciplinary

11. Climate control: over to you

Notes:

This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivatives 4.0 license. Copyright is retained by the author(s).

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9781911712640

9781911712657

9781911712664

Access Restriction:

Unrestricted online access