Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change

by Hannah Knox

In Thinking Like a Climate Hannah Knox confronts the challenges that climate change poses to knowledge production and modern politics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among policy makers, politicians, activists, scholars, and the public in Manchester, England—birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—Knox explores the city's strategies for understanding and responding to deteriorating environmental conditions. Climate science, Knox argues, frames climate change as a very particular kind of social problem that confronts the limits of administrative and bureaucratic techniques of knowing people, places, and things. Exceeding these limits requires forging new modes of relating to climate in ways that reimagine the social in climatological terms. Knox contends that the day-to-day work of crafting and implementing climate policy and translating climate knowledge into the work of governance demonstrates that local responses to climate change can be scaled up to effect change on a global scale.

Genres: Nonfiction, Environment

328 pages, Paperback

Published October 2, 2020

Reviews

[Tomasup · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hannah Knox’s Thinking Lika a Climate is a book about translations. It explores how to deal with an incommensurable event, an “hyperobject” (Morton 2013) such as climate change, into understandable forms and concrete practices both at institutional and individual levels. The book is based on the story of a city like Manchester that, in its efforts to reduce its carbon emissions, has to deal with existing logics, operations, and dynamics that do not always allow addressing satisfactorily the challenges that climate change, as a global and highly interconnected phenomenon, imposes at local levels. But it is also about contestation and alternatives: how the gap between climate plans and actions are sometimes fulfilled by actors that do not necessarily operate at a governmental level and, by doing so, propose new forms of political engagement.

The central question the author aims to answer is “what happens when climate change as a form of thought collides with other forms of thought” (p.24). Based on the work of authors like Gregory Bateson (2000) and Eduardo Kohn (2013), Knox proposes understanding climate as a thinking practice, an entity that, “through [its] formal properties, communicate[s] with other entities” (p.6). As a techno-nature (Escobar 1999) – “a phenomenon that does not fall neatly into a category of either immediate materiality or abstract representation” (p. 5), the climate is the expression of numerical operations materialized in objects, data, models, and signs. Thinking like a climate, under these terms, is not an action but an effect that is strong enough to produce its own coherence, patterns, and forms. When faced with other forms of thought to be found in the urban governance of Manchester, like city-scaled bureaucracy and market-based practices, climate reveals its properties and resistance to be successfully incorporated into those logics. Moreover, it exposes the incapacities and partial ways these forms of thought present when dealing with the challenges imposed by climate change and carbon emission reduction.

Knox’s ethnographic work is sustained in eight years (mostly between 2012-2013) that the author spent with a group of public officials and citizen activists trying to develop a post-industrial and low-carbon Manchester City. Although porous, the distinction between city hall officers and grassroots environmentalists is not arbitrary. In the book’s first section, Knox gives a detailed overview of the challenges and difficulties that the city hall, based on its 2009 plan Manchester: A Certain Future, deals with for reducing carbon emissions – taking into consideration IPCC and scientific recommendations. After a historical review of how the city came to define its carbon emission reduction goal of 41% by 2030 (Ch.1), the author shows the difficulties that the practice of governance in Manchester, highly influenced by market and bureaucratic logics, has when reacting to the challenges of carbon emission in terms of transport, energy, and, concretely, buildings (Ch.2). It then explores the problems of assessing the footprint of productive areas and commodities (Ch.3) due to the endless relations among carbon emitters and how to estimate and communicate properly the efforts expected by citizens in terms of consumption (Ch.4). The section concludes by reflecting that no matter how “ubiquitous within urban climate change mitigation policies” (p.160) calls to action are, they always seem to be insufficient and inadequate to respond to the city’s carbon emission goal, creating frustration and a gap between the strategies and actions proposed at a governmental level.

Section 2, moreover, moves in another direction: how the work of environmental activists comes to contest, but also complement, efforts made by the city hall after seeing the city’s slow progress to reduce carbon emissions. Throughout this section, Knox presents three different counter versions of climate thinking. Firstly, it explores the ecological demonstration homes: houses adapted under residents’ “vernacular engineering” efforts (in what the author defines as processes of trial instead of experimentation) to incorporate thermodynamics as a political driver and show how to reduce notoriously the footprint of houses without compromising habitability (Ch.6). Then, the author introduces the work that activists have been conducting for developing an alternative to Manchester’s governmental Call to Action plan by turning it, instead, into a Call to Real Action (Ch.7). Finally, Knox explores how residents, when learning about energy monitoring at their homes and how to hack electric infrastructure to improve efficiency, also learn to deal with climate change as a practice of diagnosis (Ch.8). All these cases, the author suggests, exemplify how climate change leads to new forms of activism that, despite being rejected elsewhere as examples of post-political action (e.g. Swyngedouw 2010), challenge bureaucratic practices while integrating scientific work into concrete forms of engagement that residents are invited to join.

Throughout the book, thinking like a climate is presented as a consistent ethnographic method to explore the translation practices emerging both from public policies and grassroots efforts dealing with climate change . However, the book’s biggest asset is perhaps also its main limitation. By explicitly taking distance from the notion of weather, Knox aims to deal with the climate not as a form of environmental relating or, more precisely, as atmospheric endurances and changes in “nature” shaping people’s life. The author is foremost interested in exploring how climate, as a modelled, infrastructural, technological, and political-economic phenomenon, a “vast machine” assembled globally (Edwards 2010), can be freed from weather’s materiality. But this distinction dismisses the fact, as suggested elsewhere (e.g. Simonetti 2019), that people can experience short- and long-term environmental changes even without scientific abstraction and modelling (based, for example, on oral stories or even own experiences of climate oscillation across life), turning the rigid differentiation between weather and climate into a somehow false dichotomy . In other words: climate can be much more than models and mathematical averages materialized in graphs, data sets and, ultimately, action plans. Although this point does not cloud one of the author’s main achievements, namely, to show the practices, challenges, and controversies arousing around climate plans and action, it does restrict, at least conceptually, the multiplicity of expressions that the notion of climate can elicit, focusing only on its manifestations as a conceptually stable entity. Precisely because of the author’s emphasis on dealing with climate change “not as a natural fact but as a shape-shifting multiplicity of processes” (p.234), her approach to the matter seems to be limited.

Considering this, it is worth asking what other forms of thinking like a climate can we find out there. This inquiry might not be easily answered through Knox’s case study: a city that, as the birthplace of the industrial revolution, carries a historical debt for contributing dramatically to the catastrophic consequences left by centuries of industrial carbon emissions. But it is also a city that, so far, has scarcely suffered the lashes of the climatic crisis, making it somehow expectable that the only approaches that we can get to climate change from there are primarily related, at least as a starting point, to scientific work on the matter. Perhaps the question about climate thinking, then, needs to be raised in other places as well, like the islands of Tuvalu and Vanuatu in the Pacific, where rising sea levels have already started to show the dramatic consequences of carbon concentration in the atmosphere. Or maybe in Jacobabad, Pakistan, where maximum temperatures of 51°C reached in May of this year, combined with reduced drinking water availability, are threatening the life of its almost 200,000 inhabitants. Or perhaps in Australia, where bushfires between 2019-2020 burned more than 24 million hectares, putting at risk entire settlements in what is considered the worst megafire (the “Black Summer”) in the country’s history. All of them are a few examples, among many, where climate change is not only an untranslatable modelling practice for governing plans and actions but already a direct threat, a catastrophe, to diverse modes of existence. How do governmental and grassroots efforts cope with the already existing consequences of climate change – modelled, true, but with a clear “weatherly” reality – in those cases? Little has to say Manchester, and Knox’s way of thinking like a climate, in this regard.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are moments here where I was nodding eagerly and waiting for the breakthrough insight that would find Knox pushing through toward a fascinating conclusion, but too often she left those moments unresolved. For instance, she notes the conflict between the targets and data that provide the substance of commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, which are generated from the "above" of climate science, and the bottom-up process of trying to understand how to meet these targets - but she fails to attempt a theoretical resolution and does not carry over what the consequence of this fundamental incommensurability means for the rest of the climate change activities she discusses. She points out the mis-firing relationship between mitigation and adaptation, but then passes quickly on to speak about activism which, frankly, is one of the least interesting parts of her study. Too often, Knox settles for making points about scholarly study itself rather than conclusions about the objects of her study at hand.

All told, I found a lot here to be interesting and good, but it's missing that keen eye and theoretical ambition to push from observations to conclusions. Conceivably, this study seeks to intervene in scholarly discussions of ethnographic theory and not, in fact, the policy and practice of mitigating and adapting to climate change, but I would find that a pallid substitute as someone reading from outside the ivory tower.