Introduction: Reinhabiting the earth

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between habit and climate change. It would be hard to overestimate the role of habit in people's lives. At one level, this is all well and good. There are, of course, bad habits, which people try to kick, but people's daily life would collapse without the scaffolding of habit. Still, when one contemplates climate change and the catastrophic future it presages, it is hard not to conclude that “business as usual” simply cannot continue for long. “Business as usual” means the common cloth of people's Western daily lives, their normal practices, in large part consisting of habits—personal, collective, economic, and intellectual. Forms of life, patterns of dwelling, other than the current consumerist model are undoubtedly possible. But whether people can get there from here voluntarily is another matter. If reinhabiting the earth means changing some of people's deep habits, habits reflecting historical sedimentations and congealings, then unearthing the forces in play, seeing how they operate and what is at stake in reconfiguring them, is a historical task to which philosophy can at least contribute. Economists are also central to imagining other economic orders, such as that of degrowth.