Planetary Design: Climate 3.0
Climate change impacts currently strain existing political, technological, legal and social systems, and by most accounts, the challenges will become amplified over the coming decades. Whether the concern is with pressures on energy infrastructures, food networks, or water resources, environmental disruptions are anticipated to necessitate novel forms of technical and social innovation. The urgency to innovate is readily conceptualized in the rhetoric of the Anthropocene, which implies both new powers and new responsibilities. Knowing that emerging technologies do not arise in a vacuum, nor are they devoid of politics, or as Langdon Winner has put it “technologies act as forms of legislation”, only sharpens the import of responsibly adapting in the Anthropocene.
Adapting to temperature increase through solar radiation management or adapting to rising levels of CO2 through carbon dioxide removal are means of deliberately manipulating Earth systems, and are not merely techno-scientific projects but involve a nested array of legal, economic, social and environmental issues. Grouped under the banner of geo-engineering or climate engineering, numerous studies have evidenced how such climate technologies are bound to contested politics, divisive public opinion, ethical issues, and socio-economic barriers to implementation (Oldham et al. 2014). Assessing emerging climate technologies thus involves tending to the human and social dimensions, alongside of more conventional questions of safety, efficacy, and feasibility. What is needed, at this early stage of wrestling with the role of technical innovation in coping with global climate change, is intensive dialogue and collaboration across the disciplines, knitting discussions of the social and the technical in one.
Yet, convening dialogue and instigating collaborations across the disciplines is complicated because each discipline maintains its own epistemological commitments, norms and values, and professional agendas. Each discipline works on different time scales, maintains different theories of change, and thus operates with different, and often incommensurable, worldviews. In order to create bridges across disciplines, we organized in 2016 a two-day event that drew together nearly 100 scholars, scientists, artists and engineers across Arizona State University to consider what it means to conceptualize climate as a design problem and to chart forth preferred futures of the Anthropocene. A holistic and transdisciplinary approach to emerging climate technologies requires that we think not only about altering present and future conditions of Earth systems, but also that we envision and develop alternative modes of social organization, values and priorities for living within the physical constraints of those systems.
Our intent with the design of the workshop was to enable a diverse group of researchers to confront, unpack, and reorganize competing (often disciplinary) worldviews in order to develop a vision of climate design that could provide a platform for collaboration. At stake is working out how an interdisciplinary group can understand the notion of climate design and critique implicit visions of the Anthropocene. In doing so, we explore the relevance and fruitfulness of climate design as a ballast to investigate the interface between technological innovation and climate, and offer up some methodological reflections to facilitate such an interdisciplinary dialogue about emerging climate technologies.
Adapting to temperature increase through solar radiation management or adapting to rising levels of CO2 through carbon dioxide removal are means of deliberately manipulating Earth systems, and are not merely techno-scientific projects but involve a nested array of legal, economic, social and environmental issues. Grouped under the banner of geo-engineering or climate engineering, numerous studies have evidenced how such climate technologies are bound to contested politics, divisive public opinion, ethical issues, and socio-economic barriers to implementation (Oldham et al. 2014). Assessing emerging climate technologies thus involves tending to the human and social dimensions, alongside of more conventional questions of safety, efficacy, and feasibility. What is needed, at this early stage of wrestling with the role of technical innovation in coping with global climate change, is intensive dialogue and collaboration across the disciplines, knitting discussions of the social and the technical in one.
Yet, convening dialogue and instigating collaborations across the disciplines is complicated because each discipline maintains its own epistemological commitments, norms and values, and professional agendas. Each discipline works on different time scales, maintains different theories of change, and thus operates with different, and often incommensurable, worldviews. In order to create bridges across disciplines, we organized in 2016 a two-day event that drew together nearly 100 scholars, scientists, artists and engineers across Arizona State University to consider what it means to conceptualize climate as a design problem and to chart forth preferred futures of the Anthropocene. A holistic and transdisciplinary approach to emerging climate technologies requires that we think not only about altering present and future conditions of Earth systems, but also that we envision and develop alternative modes of social organization, values and priorities for living within the physical constraints of those systems.
Our intent with the design of the workshop was to enable a diverse group of researchers to confront, unpack, and reorganize competing (often disciplinary) worldviews in order to develop a vision of climate design that could provide a platform for collaboration. At stake is working out how an interdisciplinary group can understand the notion of climate design and critique implicit visions of the Anthropocene. In doing so, we explore the relevance and fruitfulness of climate design as a ballast to investigate the interface between technological innovation and climate, and offer up some methodological reflections to facilitate such an interdisciplinary dialogue about emerging climate technologies.
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