Learning to see climate change : children’s perceptions of environmental transformation in Mongolia, Mexico, Arctic Alaska, and the United Kingdom
Date
27/12/2019Metadata
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Abstract
What are the factors that render environmental concerns salient in people’s lives, and under what conditions do people make connections between an abstract concept such as climate change and concrete experiences in their own daily circumstances? Taking as our focus ethnographic work with children in several different ethnographic settings (Barrow, Alaska; Oaxaca, Mexico; Tuv aimag and Uvurkhangai aimag, Mongolia; and East Anglia, United Kingdom), we explore how the children come to articulate environmental knowledge as a process of “figuring out” and the extent to which the children engage with the changing climate as a matter of concern. The paper provides an ethnographic account of the main themes that emerged in each region, before developing a comparative discussion of some key factors that gave shape to how climate change comes to matter in the lives of the children. Three dimensions are explored: the effect of climate change on livelihoods and the proximity of children’s experience to those livelihoods, the political salience of the narrative of climate change, and the temporal depth invoked by the environment.
Citation
Irvine , R D G , Bodenhorn , B , Lee , E & Amarbayasgalan , D 2019 , ' Learning to see climate change : children’s perceptions of environmental transformation in Mongolia, Mexico, Arctic Alaska, and the United Kingdom ' , Current Anthropology , vol. 60 , no. 6 , pp. 723-740 . https://doi.org/10.1086/706606
Publication
Current Anthropology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0011-3204Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright 2019 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at https://doi.org/10.1086/706606
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