Value as ethics : climate change, crisis, and the struggle for the future
Abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I contribute novel ethnographic insights into how oil and gas experts understand notions of value. I show that prevailing notions of value are normatively defined in economic terms and closely tied to understandings of an American ‘way of life’. Questions of value, I suggest, reveal our idiosyncratic and shared ethical orientations toward what we think is important and the futures we are fighting to create. The climate crisis, as such, is not a crisis of emissions or hydrocarbons, but a crisis of the ways value is assigned to worldly things. I conclude by arguing that until we address questions of value we are unlikely to address the existential crisis of anthropogenic climate change.
Citation
Field , S 2023 , ' Value as ethics : climate change, crisis, and the struggle for the future ' , Economic Anthropology , vol. 10 , no. 2 , pp. 177-185 . https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12286
Publication
Economic Anthropology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2330-4847Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2023 The Author. Economic Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
Funding: H2020 European Research Council - 715146.Collections
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