A World After Climate Change and Culture-Shift

In this book, an international team of environmental and social scientists explain two powerful current change-engines and how their effects, and our responses to them, will transform Earth and humankind into the 22nd-century (c. 2100).


This book begins by detailing the current state of knowledge about these two ongoing, accelerating and potentially world-transforming changes: climate change, in the form of global warming, and a profound emerging shift of normative cultural condition toward the assumptions and values often associated with so-called postmodernity, such as tolerance, diversity, self-referentiality, and dubiety replaced with certainty. Next, the contributors imagine, explain and debate the most likely consequent transformations of human and natural ecologies and economies that will take place by the end of the 21st-century.


In 16 compellingly original, provocative and readable chapters, A World after Climate Change and Culture-Shift presents a one-of-a-kind vision ofour current age as a hinge or axial century, one driven by the most radical combined change of nature and culture since the rise of agriculture at the end of the last Ice Age some 10 millennia ago. This book is highly recommended to scholars and students of the environmental and social sciences, as well as to all readers interested in how changes in nature and culture will work together to reshape our world and ourselves.


" I cannot think of a book more geared to advancing the art and science of geography. " - Yi-Fu Tuan, J. K. Wright and Vilas Professor Emeritus of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison


" Outstanding, " " unique, " and " exceptional timeliness of topic and ambition ofvision" . - Richard Marston, University Distinguished Professor, Kansas State University; past president, Association of American Geographers

Chapter 1 Introduction: Imagining the Unimaginable by Jim Norwine. - Section A Setting the Stage: Chapter 2 Estrangement: A Beginner s Guide to the Strangeness of the World by Jonathan M. Smith. - Chapter 3 Global Climate Change by Gerald R. North. - Chapter 4 An Evolving Worldview: Culture-shift in University Students by Michael Bruner , John Davenport , and Jim Norwine: Section B Imagining a World: General Impacts and Implications: Chapter 5 Field Notes from the Future: Environmental Conditions at Four Locali- ties in 2100 by Michael Jennings. - Chapter 6 Getting from Here to There: Policy Pathways to Address Human Mobility in the Context of Climate Change by Koko Warner. - Chapter 7 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Thoughts on Possible Outcomes by John Davenport: Section C Imagining a World: Specific Regional Impacts and Implications: Chapter 8 Europe 2050-2100: Imagining New Lifeways/Lifestyles by Anke Uhlenwinkel and Niem Huynh. - Chapter 9 The Projected Death of the Fertile Crescent by Pinhas Alpert, Fengjun Jin, and Akio Kitoh. - Chapter 10 The Future of the Middle East by Yilmaz Ari, Ilhan Kaya, and Hakki Yazici. - Chapter 11 Imagined Lifeways in North America ca. 2100 by Mark Bjelland, Michael Bruner, and John Davenport. - Chapter 12 Climate Change and Its Impact on Cultural Shifts in East and Southeast Asia by Niem Huynh, Wen Lin, L. Renee

Ness, Darlene Occena-Gutierrez, and Duy Xuân Tr n: Section D Inhabiting an Imagined World: Better or





Worse? Four Interpretations. - Chapter 13 The Postmodern Environment by Gladden J. Pappin. - Chapter 14 Blissful Devolution: Our Rolling Judgment Day by David J. Nemeth. - Chapter 15 The Guilt of Hollow Men: Global Warming as Postmodern Apocalypse by Jonathan M. Smith. - Chapter 16 Colliding with Reality: Liquid Modernity and the Environment by Arran Gare. - Chapter 17 Epilogue: The End of the Artic as We Know It by Robert Harriss. - Index.