Cosmopolitan Climates: Hybridity, Foresight and Meaning

This essay argues for the fruitfulness of Beck's idea of cosmopolitanism for understanding the changing political, sociological and psychological attributes of climate change. This argument is illustrated through brief examinations of how climate change is contributing to the dissolution of three modern dualisms: nature-culture (ontology), present-future (epistemology) and global-local (geography). Not only does the cosmopolitan perspective help to understand the ways in which science and society are mutually constructing the phenomenon of climate change, it also offers us a way of asking 'what can climate change do for us?' rather than 'what can we do for climate change?' Sociologists are needed for answering this question. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]