Mick Smith, Professor of Philosophy jointly appointed with Environmental Studies, has been awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant to pursue his project, ''Atmospheric Agency' and Ethical Responses to Climate Change'.
Climate change is literally ‘world-changing’, but although philosophical approaches identify key moral issues, most frame problems and solutions within humanist paradigms that incorporate assumptions about human agency, autonomy, and exceptionalism that are actually deeply implicated in producing the societal forms responsible for the current crisis. For example, from this perspective the very idea of the Anthropocene, now widely adopted to designate these epochal climatic and ecological shifts, is misplaced. Rather than entering a new anthropogenic epoch, we might more accurately be regarded as beginning to suffer the consequences of the modern suppression of non-human agencies. This project coalesces around a concept of ‘atmospheric agency’ developed across scales from place to planet as a way of articulating both sensitivities / responses to our immediate environs and ethical responses to climate change. What does it mean to take the materiality of atmospheric changes seriously in terms of their philosophical implications? How is it that experiential / phenomenological sensitivity to localized atmospheres does not carry over to global climatic changes? Might we suggest ways to link (phenomenal) experiences of atmospheric agency to evaluational / ethical responses that encourage different and better social and ecological outcomes at all scales?