The Social Life of Blame in the Anthropocene

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”The Social Life of Blame in the Anthropocene”—comes from Volume 6 (2015). In his article, Peter Rudiak-Gould shows how life in the Anthropocene reconfigures blame in four ways—it invites ubiquitous blame, ubiquitous blamelessness, selective blame, and partial blame—and reviews case studies from around the world, investigating which climate change blame narratives actors select, why, and with what consequences

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Seven of the 1,225 Marshall Islands (© Peter Rudiak-Gould). Despite having a population of only 60,000 and per capita emissions less than a tenth that of Americans, and despite being aware of their country’s small size compared to “the big countries” of the world, Marshallese civil society tends to espouse a Proposition 1-like “universal blame” for climate change, with a special emphasis on their own complicity, and to favor local mitigation over protest of other countries’ emissions.

PETER RUDIAK-GOULD is Assistant Professor Status-Only in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at McGill Univeristy. An environmental anthropologist and Oceanist, he has conducted long-term fieldwork on the human dimensions of climate change in the Marshall Islands. He is the author of Climate Change and Tradition in a Small Island State: The Rising Tide (Routledge, 2013) and coeditor of a forthcoming volume on the reception of climate science in Pacific Island societies.