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Code, Lorraine --- "Doubt and denial: epistemic responsibility meets climate change scepticism" [2015] ELECD 854; in Grear, Anna; Grant, Evadne (eds), "Thought, Law, Rights and Action in the Age of Environmental Crisis" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015) 25

Book Title: Thought, Law, Rights and Action in the Age of Environmental Crisis

Editor(s): Grear, Anna; Grant, Evadne

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784711320

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Doubt and denial: epistemic responsibility meets climate change scepticism

Author(s): Code, Lorraine

Number of pages: 23

Abstract/Description:

Three themes run through the questions I will address in this chapter: my purpose is to suggest some insights that emerge from exploring their interconnections. First, I will read a stand-off between ecological thinkers/activists, climatologists, and climate-change sceptics as one way of indicating how questions central to the epistemology and politics of testimony bear, directly and indirectly, on debates surrounding climate crisis, gender justice, and development projects. In so doing, I use the label ‘ecological thinkers’ to refer to theorists and activists who work from an ecologically-informed stance towards understanding climate change, where thinking ecologically encompasses broad considerations of the implications and effects of historical-geographical ‘situatedness’ for citizenship and politics, broadly conceived. It is about critically imagining, crafting, and endeavouring to enact principles of ideal cohabitation with one another, and in and with the wider world. In taking my point of entry from a contrast between climate change sceptics and ecological activists, I am not presuming that this contrast alone is definitive of the matters I will address, but that framing the questions thus facilitates one plausible way of approaching the specificities and generalities of these multiply tangled issues. In the stand-off I refer to, the debate often comes down to a contest – to fighting science with science – and, for lay persons, to a contest between/among conflicting expert testimonies in which decisions about where it is reasonable to place belief and trust are at once epistemologically and ethically-politically fraught.