Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change by Hannah Knox

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change by Hannah Knox Sydney Giacalone Hannah Knox. Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 328 pp. What does it mean to study climate change as a material-discursive entity ethnographically? What can anthropology lend to this topic, and what do we as a discipline need to learn from it? In Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change, Hannah Knox proposes a methodological as well as theoretical approach to attending ethnographically to the "scale-sliding, time-destroying, knowledge-undoing," ecosystemic relationality of climate change (268). Drawing on Eduardo Kohn and Gregory Bateson's applications of Peircean semiotics, Knox considers climate change as a form of thought, a process that manifests as an "ecology of signs" within social practices of numbering, classifying, modeling, and experimenting with how we might live in a climate-changed world. Understanding climate change as a signifying phenomenon, a form in continual negotiation with our representations of its meanings, points to how we might "extend our description of climate change into practices, minds, and activities that ultimately aim to change the climate from within by acting on and in an ecosystem of sign relations" (23). Knox draws upon her fieldwork from 2011 and 2018 in Manchester, England, an exemplary city seeking to position itself as low-carbon and postindustrial, with city politicians, activists, residents, and business people. Her methods resist what could come off as a traditional STS critique of the city's technopolicial forms of governance. Instead, she asks what it means to attend empirically to where and how climate change emerges, as urban communities in Manchester attempt to respond to it. [End Page 765] Approaching climate change as an encounter between climatological thinking and other ways of being in the world, the book is divided into two parts. Part I tackles existing techniques of governance in Manchester, demonstrating how the city's existing practices of linear, evidence-based planning and expert knowledge production struggle to engage with the socio-environmental entanglements inherent in climatological thinking. Chapter 1 provides background on the city's political interventions into climate change, which have centered around establishing an index of proportionality for the city's response to (and responsibility for) climate change. This reframing of climate change designates disaggregated parts of the city as legible to intervene in. Focusing on one of these parts, Chapter 2 shows how buildings have come to signify the conflicting intersection between a biopolitical approach that limits political authority over private property and a climatological approach to reducing carbon emissions that demands such intervention. Shifting from top-down thinking to bottom-up methods of carbon footprinting, Chapter 3 describes the challenges that arise when attempting to trace the ecosystemic entanglements of climate relations. Knox demonstrates how the city's total carbon footprinting efforts resulted in participants' grappling with how two versions of reality can exist simultaneously. In the first, commodities are understood as stable objects of neoliberal market exchange. In the second, however, participants come to understand commodities relationally as containing echoes of unfolding energetic exchanges and carbon impacts. Footprinting, therefore, becomes a form of representation that explodes the previous ontological stability of objects, those interacting with them, and their place in private and public spheres. Chapter 4 tackles the city's efforts to think into the future through climate modeling. Tracing the city's labor-intensive processes of climate modeling and extrapolation to Manchester's built environment, Knox shows how within the translation process of the model to local conditions, the signifiers lose efficacy and come to be read as irrelevant alongside present concerns and practices. Chapter 5 grapples with the resulting sense of paralysis felt by both officials and observers due to continual bureaucratic strategy creation with little resulting tangible action. Knox productively pulls together this first section in a discussion of why such paralysis is still pervasive in the context of Manchester's desire to act. She argues that 20th century techniques of governance and urban planning contrast [End Page 766] sharply with the ecological relationality and category transgression (which each of these...