Can Climate Nationalism Save Us?

Abstract

Anatol Lieven brings considerable experience in foreign affairs and journalism to the topic of climate change and responses to the risks and dangers that a changing earth climate demands of humans and human institutions. In his book Climate Change and the Nation State, he argues that focusing on the interests of nations is a way out of inaction on climate change: a strong civic nationalism is necessary and must rely on the sovereign territorial state for meaningful action on climate change. He further argues that the imagined community that makes up a nation can create the spatiotemporal political space that can envision and ‘demand the sacrifices necessary to combat climate change’ (p. xx). I will focus my comments around a framework that takes climate change to be a ‘wicked problem’ and that its roots lie in economic, political, cultural, and social problems that demand attention, justice and reparation to truly be addressed. I also note that the broad term ‘climate change’ serves as a shorthand term that encompasses a complex set of planetary processes that humans now influence through terraforming, the burning of fossil fuels, and overand misuse of shared resources (Woods, 2014). This is a crisis of our own making and, furthermore, some states and regions are more responsible than others for causing, and responding to, the issues of concern in Lieven’s book. Climate change is not only a policy puzzle (a very complex one, but more on that shortly), it also reveals a crisis at the root of world order and our treatment of one another, nonhuman animals, and the natural world and its resources. While it is tempting to respond to the urgency of the climate crisis using the tools already present, this moment affords humans an opportunity to interrogate the ways in which we arrived at this crisis. To repeat a quote attributed to Albert Einstein ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them’. We must be very mindful in our solutions that we do not unthinkingly slip in the poisons that made us sick to begin with. Pragmatically, of course, with the urgency of the problems we face, we cannot reinvent all institutions from the ground up, but we do need to be cautious, thoughtful, and aware of history. This includes listening to and respecting the experiences of those who have suffered through colonialization, resource extraction, and the postand endocolonial vestiges of the very nation states to which Lieven turns to as a solution to climate change response (Christ, 2013; Yusoff,