A field report on the critical anthropology of global warming: a view from a transplanted American downunder

Abstract

During the hot Northern hemisphere summer of 2005, Merrill Singer and I began writing Introducing Medical Anthropology (AltaMira Press 2007), a textbook designed for undergraduate students. I was still teaching in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies directed by the formidable James Hansen, who had courageously defied the Bush administration on matters related to the gravity of global warming, reported that 2005 was the warmest year ever on record. The World Meterological Organization and the U.K. Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, however, concluded that 2005 was the second warmest year, behind 1998. Yes, I remember 1998 was extremely hot as I made my way in my red Mitsubishi Mirage from Tempe, Arizona, where I had done a year-long visiting stint at Arizona State University back to Clinton country. At any rate, in the division of labor for the book, I assumed primary responsibility for the chapter on "Health and the Environment." As I perused the burgeoning literature on the impact of global warming on health, I quickly realized that it would not only impact health in significantly adverse ways, but also posed a threat to human settlement patterns, subsistence, and the lifeways of peoples around the world. While I had been aware of global warming, I had not quite wrapped my head around it. Prompted by my concern, I feverishly began to read climate science, as well as the existing social science literature on global warming, climate change, and climate regimes. There was not much in anthropology at the time. Since then things have changed quickly. An anti-global warming or climate justice movement has emerged around the world since the beginning of this century, one that has built upon warnings about the dangers of global warming or climate change over the past two decades from