Why Climate Breakdown Matters

Cover
Praise
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Preface
Prologue: The Attention-shift from Climate to Corona – and Back Again?
Introduction: On Climate, Ecological and Societal Breakdown
	A place to start
	Times when we almost destroyed the world
	What this chapter introduces to you
	Why does this book matter?
	Climate is only the canary in the coalmine: On the need for eco-logical thinking
	How did we get to this pretty pass?
	On ‘soft’ denialism – and adaptation
	The will to face the truth confronting us
	On – and beyond – scientism and technophilia
	What is in this book
1 Just How Much do you Care About the Future of Humanity?1
	Our most fundamental care
	How could the future matter as much as the present?
	Our loving care iterates down the generations
	Protecting our children collectively
	Objections
	An obstacle to ‘enoughism’: human health as, paradoxically, a ‘limit’ to limits to growth19
	Looking forward . . .
2 Is Climate Breakdown a White Swan?
	The spectre haunting our world
	Climate science is to geo-engineering as genetics is to GM food
	Does ‘climate-attribution science’ remove the need for the precautionary principle?
	Human-triggered climate breakdown is a white swan
	Climate denial: Our common failure?
	Facing up to climate reality collectively
3 Is Th is Civilization Finished?1
	The elephants in the room, charging towards us
	The failure of the Paris Agreement
	On those who deny planetary boundaries – on the ‘Left ’ as well as the ‘Right’11
	Civilization and ‘civilization’
	Three possible futures
	Towards a ‘successor civilization’
4 The Great Gift of Community that (Climate) Disasters Can Give Us1
	Disasters and their discontents, from Hobbes to the Anthropocene
	Disaster as gift ?
	Disaster experience, and Disaster Studies
	Anti-Hobbes
	A potential objection: am I ignoring those already living everyday ‘disaster’?
	Concluding remarks: The wake-up call(s)
5 How Climate Grief May Yet be the Making of Us
	The personal is philosophical
	A philosophy of grief
	Grief beyond liberal individualism
	Grief is living with a rip in the fabric of the lived world
	Climate grief as living with an ongoing rip in the fabric of our shared world
	The coming vast crisis of mental ill-health
	In this crisis, we need love – and (that means) grief
6 Can We Understand Cetacean Society? Can We Change Ourselves?
	Individuals or in-dividual?
	The enduring relevance of Peter Winch
	Understanding a cetacean society
	The cultures of social whales and dolphins
	From a distance, of the right kind
	An anthropomorphic rhetoric?
	Being ‘internally related’ to ‘others’25
	Human society as non-understandable
	The right to believe in ourselves
7 How to Live in Truth Today
	No guarantees
	Seven ways to do what we need to
	Vulnerability – and vision
	Are there any precedents for what we need to do? The case of the Byzantine Empire
	Why does climate breakdown matter?
	We are the light in the tunnel
	The whales might inherit the Earth
	The politics of paradox
Notes
Bibliography
Index