The Ecology of Fear and Climate Change: A Pragmatist Point of View

Jerome Ballet, Damien Bazin and Emmanuel Petit

Environmental Values, 2023, vol. 32, issue 1, 5-24

Abstract: The ecology of fear has become a common rhetoric in efforts to support climate mitigation. The thesis of the collapse is an extreme version, asserting the inevitable collapse of the world. Fear, then, becomes the ultimate emotion for spurring action. In this article, drawing on the work of the pragmatist John Dewey, we show that fear is an ambiguous emotion. Dewey stressed the quality of an emotion. Following his reasoning, this article draws a distinction between intense and moderate fear. Intense fear annihilates action, while moderate fear fulfils the conditions for an emotion of quality (in the Deweyan sense), which enables action. For this reason, the thesis of the collapse must be rejected, while an ecology of fear, drawing on moderate fear, may be maintained.

Keywords: Climate change; collapse; John Dewey; emotions; fear (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3197/096327122X16452897197711 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Ecology of Fear and Climate Change: A Pragmatist Point of View (2023)
Working Paper: The Ecology of Fear and Climate Change: A Pragmatist Point of View (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envval:v:32:y:2023:i:1:p:5-24

DOI: 10.3197/096327122X16452897197711

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environmental Values
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().