Making Sense of Life-long Memories and Experiences in the Time of Climate Upheavals
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | While the theory of anthropogenic climate change is considered by the overwhelming majority of scientists as an obvious fact, in society, one can find much less certainty about the causes and consequences of climate processes we can witness. This discrepancy fuels debate in environmental anthropology about the link between climate change as a kind of abstract, global and long-term phenomenon and its concrete, locally and biographically-based perceptions. My paper studies these tricky connections from the perspective of ageing people. It asks how interactions with the environment and the changes it has been undergoing are contextualised within biographies that span seven or eight decades. The research my paper is built upon took place in two rural settings in the Czech Republic. Localities of the field research were chosen in cooperation with the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences as places where impacts of climate change are becoming particularly apparent in recent years. Our attention focused on our interlocutors’ memories, attitudes, feelings, experiences, and coping strategies. Four distinctive areas where the connections between individual perceptions and climate change became salient have been identified: decreasing snow cover, the collapse of spruce forests, long-term drought, and the extraordinary appearance of a tornado. However, even in those cases, the scientific theories represented just one possible – and marginal – explanatory framework. |
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