Lea Schick is the editor and moderator of this debate forum. During the RETHINK exhibition she will facilitate the RETHINK NATURE discussions here on her blog. We will very much encourage you to participate in the debate!

Don’t fear climate change

“Why are we so frightened of a change in the climate?  Why do we want our climates to stay the same, to offer us the same old weather we have grown up with?  We welcome change and novelty in many other areas of our human experience: new technologies to captivate us, new places to visit, new people to love.” (Mike Hulme).

Hulme writes that the climate has been made the symbol of the pure natural, the innocent and fragile–- Eden, something we have to save and protect. But how can we keep on holding on to a myth like that, when everything around us seems to be mutated by humans? In his article Learning to Accept Re-created Climates Hulme argues that climate is not what we would call a pure, natural nature but it is an artificial nature – a hybrid nature co-created by humans.

We cannot talk about a natural nature, but we have to accept our new (if we can call this new, but that is another question) role of co-creaters of nature. “Should we fear this new role?  Should we indeed be frightened of a change in climate?  I think not.  Or at least we need to learn to think not.  We need to ‘Rethink’ climate change.” (Hulme).
 

Read the article Learning to Accept Re-Created Climates and share your opinnion of wether we should fear climate change or not!

Comments

Add a comment

Contributions for RETHINK NATURE

 

ABOUT RETHINK NATURE

Discussions about climate change often seem to be centered around the concept of nature as ‘the Other’ – something that is outside of us. Sometimes lost, sometimes distant, often something we have left behind, and something to which we should perhaps return, in one form or another. But thus nature is also something, which we have been largely able to happily forget over the course of our industrial revolutions, and to omit almost entirely from consideration in conventional human planning and development.

But the reality of climate change – a force of Nature so all-pervasive and profound in the severity of its realized and projected effects that it is compelling us to rethink practically every aspect of life on our planet – makes this romanticization and idealization of ‘Mother Nature’ difficult to maintain, and demonstrates that our perception of any meaningful distance from nature is shockingly illusory. We have not returned to nature; nature is returning to us, forcing us as it did our ancestors to transform our methods of devising and executing every sphere of human existence. When we can (un)intentionally change the weather, when water and air are commodities that we can own, and when the very climate has become a subject of intense political debate at every level, then nature again becomes a complex and ambiguous phenomenon.

How does climate change force us to rethink our notions of nature? And how does our perception of nature affect how we deal with climate change? Through a number of articles approaching different aspects of what we call ‘nature’, we encourage you to share your opinions and thoughts with the writers and with other interested.

 

BLOG

Debate the RETHINK NATURE contributions on the blog to the left.