Climate Reductionism is Truly Man-Made
Climate Reductionism is Truly Mad-Made
      Consider this imagery: a young man has been experiencing troubling pain around his gut and stomach. He decides to visit a doctor, whom she explains to the young man that what he’s feeling are symptoms of excessive drinking, and that he needs to reduce his alcohol intake before it leads to liver disease and failure. The young man doesn’t want to hear this, he’s in his early twenties and drinking (excessively) is part of his lifestyle. So instead he continues drinking before deciding to see another doctor for a second opinion. This time around, the doctor diagnoses that he has potentially permanent liver damage from his current behaviors, and that he must stop drinking alcohol entirely as liver failure will be inevitable as well as the further deterioration of his overall health. Still, the young man dismisses the doctor’s expert opinion. Drinking is part of almost every social interaction that he partakes; to him it is unreasonable to expect him to stop. So he goes on, still drinking as he seeks a professional medical opinion that gives him alternatives from discontinuing alcohol use. The young man remains hopeful for a technicality in his diagnosis or a technical solution for his problems while unable to accept that it is his lifestyle choices that are the problem. The third, fourth, fifth and so on of expert opinions  all tell him the same thing, with variations of language and medical jargon- his drinking is slowly killing him.
      This allegory symbolizes the emergency of the global climate destabilization that is currently at hand. The scientific evidence is clear and sound in that Western civilization’s reliance of fossil fuels is destroying the planet, yet as a global community we remain defiant in our refusal to transform society toward a path of sustainability while holding onto a dangerous optimism that the issue of climate change itself can simply be fixed by some miraculous technological feat. According to NASA, global temperatures will continue to rise, mostly due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities (Global Climate Change). There have already been considerable observable effects on the planet resulting from climate change: glaciers have shrunk, longer and more intense heat waves, plant and animal population ranges have shifted, and accelerated sea level rises. But it is the damaging outcomes for the future of the planet that should bring even greater concern: decreased water availability from droughts, longer and more extreme heat waves, sea level will rise up to four feet by 2100 leading to erosion and increased ocean acidity, hurricanes will become stronger and more intense, increasing wildfires, insect outbreaks and spread, widespread tree die-offs, the artic will be become essentially ice-free- all of which will take heavy tolls on ecosystems, agriculture, fisheries, infrastructure, human health, and the economy. The thing is, most people are generally aware that climate change is real threat among us, but modern societies tend to view it as a simple issue that can be solved by science and technology. This has been reinforced by the lack of media coverage on the real science of the impending climate collapse as well as the failure of first world governments to effectively address and enforce policy on the issues of humanity’s carbon imprint and dependence on fossil fuels. This reductionist mentality that which reduces the earth to usefulness only as a source of raw materials for commodities and profits in support of a market economy is a masculine paradigm of dominance, created from the ideologies of European colonial expansion. To confront climate collapse we must first begin to unravel the layers of our mechanical thinking that which has reduced the value of the natural world to artificial structures.
      In the preface of Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse, environmental studies and politics professor David W. Orr posed two questions in regards to climate change: How do we think about the issue of climate destabilization? And, what do we do about it? Orr responds to the first question throughout his book in a recurring fashion stating that most people perceive climate destabilization as merely another problem to be solved by improvements in technology (Orr xiii). Furthermore, in regards to technological solutions to climate change, Orr states, “Despite their differences, these schemes all share the assumptions that Earth is a machine and that it can be fixed my other machines, a variant of the kind of thinking that got us in the mess in the first place” (Orr 158-159). What is it that leads humanity into reductionist ideologies, in which the belief and practice of reducing nature and the Earth from the source of life to a machine, useful to us only for raw materials for further technological commodities and a source of profits?  Is this way of thinking innate in humanity, are we doomed to never break the cycle of apathy and violence toward nature as we continue to fuel an artifice economy? Or is there a better path, one that has already been proven by human culture?
The social construction of gender has led to a patriarchal society whose worldview reduces everything, including nature, to individual components and as such is the way Western society believes in how the world operates- the parts and pieces are interchangeable and can be replaced or removed. Renowned physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva explains this concept in her book Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. While referring to the politics of food in conjunction with ecological destruction, according to Shiva, the current model of progress through capitalist expansion at the expense of nature’s livelihood is fueled by gendered institutions beginning with European colonialism and continuing to our modern era of Western globalization (Shiva 1-2). This way of operating reduces everything to the market economy, and value is only attached to that which is paid for or produces a profit (Shiva 94). Furthermore, Shiva sees to the sheer concept of Western progress as actually bringing negative outcomes. Using the term maldevelopment, Shiva points to modern society’s insistence on patriarchal development in its viewing of women, non-Western peoples and of nature as deficient components has resulted in social anti-progress by homogenizing knowledge, culture and diversity through uniformed simplicity and superimposed “advanced” technology (Shiva 5).  Nature is seen as unproductive unless it can be used as a source of profits or fuel industrial processes for development. Also, many of these advancements for development typically have a devastating effect on nature, from mountain fracking for oil shale to industrial chemical runoffs to local soil, air and water supplies to the obliteration of rain forests for the paper industry.
For one to be able to grasp the idea that gender can be applied to large-scale societal institutions, including business and government practices, one must first realize how gender is formulated not as a natural condition but rather as a human production that is created and reinforced through social interactions. In the book Paradoxes of Gender, Judith Lorber, retired professor of sociology and women’s studies and foundational theorist of gender differences being socially constructed, explains this process as “doing gender,” in that everyone participates in creating and reinforces gender construction in our daily lives through familiar, internalized beliefs and habits (Lorber 13-14). Gender is first assigned from our sex at birth, and people are taught the basis of how to experience life in accordance to the expectations of their gender. According to Lorber:
As a social institution, gender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities. As part of a stratification system that ranks these statuses unequally, gender is a major building block in the social structures built on these unequal statuses (Lorber 24-25).
This concept was further examined by Australian sociologist R.W. Connell in the sociological journal Men and Masculinities. Connell suggests that very large-scale institutions such as the state are part of a world gender order, and in this way, international relations, international trade, and global markets are inherently gendered in their formation and politics (Masculinities and Globalization 3-4).  Like Shiva, Connell argues that the structure of colonial economies produced the framework for masculinity’s dominance in industrial globalization. The colonial world had systems holding the man is the wage-worker and provider and the woman as domestic caretaker, which has led to the modern identification of masculinity with the public realm and market economy and femininity with domesticity (Masculinities and Globalization 7). To break this down we should look at common assumptions of gender and society. It is commonly believed that men are strong and women are weak, therefore dominant forms of masculinity are often associated with major forms of social power.  When placed in the realm of industrial capitalism and the global market, the most powerful institutions are transnational corporations and major states such as the U.S. and European Union, thus the most powerful institutions are essentially patriarchal (Globalization and Business Masculinities 347).
Masculine thinking views the world as fundamentally mechanical, and that the world functions through the sums of its parts. These parts are often interchangeable or replaceable in mechanical thinking- everything can be fixed or improved upon. It is also assumed by this patriarchal dominance that we live and benefit by being a consumerist society and that capitalism survives by expanding profit-driven consumerism. Consumerism is fueled by an addiction to commodities that which require natural resources for their production. Â To a patriarchal society it is acceptable that nature can and should be broken down into parts to provide for the production of commodities. Consequently, commodities are dispensable, as are all other parts of the machine-world. Therefore, it is the masculine nature of our modern society that has contributed to the impending climate collapse as it devalues and destroys nature while also maintaining the belief that any potential threat to humanity, including climate destabilization, can simply be fixed just like any other part of the machine.
      To refrain from this mindset of climate reductionism, society must learn to adapt to the climate holism approach as offered by American journalist and senior fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute Richard Heinberg. According to Heinberg, climate holism begins by understanding its relationship to the complexity of disorders that increasingly plagues the global ecosystem, including industrialized agriculture, human population expansion and economic expansion through fossil fuel dependence. If we continue through the path of reductionism in which we use technical strategies to reduce carbon emissions, there still remains the other complexities of global warming which will continue to worsen until it overwhelms the biosphere and humanity (Post Carbon Institute). Heinberg sees reductionism as relentless in its offering of technofixes, in that if one technofix fails or doesn’t work just continue to offer more technofixes instead of responding to the entirety of the system. On the other hand, climate holism argues for systematic proposals to diagnose and treat climate change (Post Carbon Institute).
      The qualities of holism that holds the idea of systems and their properties to be viewed as wholes and not a collection of parts are themselves attributes of the feminine principle. According to Shiva, the feminine recovery principle is based on inclusiveness in sustaining humanity in conjunction with nature, and values the entirety of nature as living organism whose health is necessary for the health and survival of humanity (Shiva 53). This principle is still followed to this day by less developed countries and non-Western peoples, including indigenous groups, that participate in practices of women’s agriculture that aim for production in respect to and in harmony with nature. In a study titled Is There A Gender Angle to Climate Negotiations by the United Nation Environmental Program, UNEP officer Njeri Wamukonya and Dr. Margaret Skutsch of the Univeristy of Twente determined that there is much to gain by involving women’s participation in matters of emissions and mitigation activities (United Nations Environmental Programme).
      Through embracing the feminine recovery model, and finding a way to adapt this holistic approach into modern society, is key to disrupting the mechanical dominance of masculine reductionism that which is the primary stimulus of climate collapse. While changing the beliefs and transforming the assumptions of an entire society may seem too challenging, to continue on the same path while we hope for humanity’s big fix to come, will ultimately end in humanity’s demise.
Connell, R. W. "Globalization and Business Masculinities." Men and Masculinities 7.4 Â (2005): 347-64. Web.
Connell, R. W. "Masculinities and Globalization." Men and Masculinities 1.1 (1998): 3- Â Â Â Â Â Â 23. Print.
"Global Climate Change." Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. NASA, n.d. Web. 2 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â May 2016.
Heinberg, Richard. "Climate Holism vs. Climate Reductionism." Post Carbon Institute. Â N.p., 14 Jan. 2016. Web. 6 May 2016.
Lorber, Judith. Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Print.
Orr, David W. Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford       UP, 2009. Print.
Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. 2010 ed. London: Â Zed, 1988. Â Print.
Wamukonya, Njeri, and Margaret Skutsch, Dr. "Is There a Gender Angle to Climate  Negotiations." (2001): n. pag. United Nations Environmental Programme.  Web.
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