Climate Change, Complexity, Representation. Edited by Hannes Bergthaller

Climate change has emerged as the defining environmental issue of our time. It has superseded or subsumed many of the concerns that had animated modern envi- ronmental movements since their emergence in the 1960s and 70s – e.g. overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, or loss of biodiversity – and has occasioned almost unprecedented levels of anxiety, apocalyptic fear, guilt, moral outrage, public hand-wringing, rhetorical hyperbole, and political controversy. More than any other issue, it has become an emblem of the ways in which ecological problems muddle the boundaries between science and politics, scramble the distinction between fore- and background, short-circuit the public and the private, and generally play havoc with established categories. More than any other issue, climate change encapsulates the political, cultural, and psychological challenges of living in the Anthropocene – a concept whose rapid embrace by the humanities closely tracks the parallel ascendancy of climate change as a principal matter of concern.
Given its current “supremacy”, as Jonathan Franzen warily put it in a controversial New Yorker essay (“Carbon Capture”), it is easy to forget that climate change hovered at the outer edges of ecocritical attention until as recently as a decade ago. For the longest time, ecocritics were preoccupied with vindicating first-hand, embodied experience of the natural world against the depredations of a postmodernist orthodoxy which seemed to deny its saliency. Ecocriticism championed the real over the virtual, the concrete over the abstract, the local over the global. Yet the peculiar phenomenology of climate change utterly confounded this critical project. Its effects are spatially and temporally smudged out in such a way that its relationship to the realm of everyday action and experience must necessarily remain oblique. As climate scientists never tire to point out, climate change is a matter of mean distributions and statistical probabilities, such that no particular incident of “strange weather” could ever prove or disprove its reality. In order to understand it, we must employ computer models which compare actual climate data with counter- factual scenarios projecting what the global climate might have looked like in the absence of human intervention – and are then forced to act on the basis of these scientific fictions.
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