Cooling Down

Climate change is a slowly advancing crisis sweeping over the planet and affecting different habitats in strikingly diverse ways. While nations have signed treaties and implemented policies, most actual climate change assessments, adaptations, and countermeasures take place at the local level. People are responding by adjusting their practices, livelihoods, and cultures, protesting and migrating. This book portrays the diversity of explanations and remedies as expressed at the community level and its emphasis on the crucial importance of ethnographic detail in demonstrating how people in different parts of the world are scaling down the phenomenon of global warming.

Susanna Hoffman is an internationally recognized expert on disaster. She is the author, co-author, and editor of twelve books, including Disaster Upon Disaster: Exploring the Gap Between Knowledge, Policy and Practice (Berghahn, 2019). She initiated the Risk and Disaster Thematic Interest Group for the Society for Applied Anthropology and is the founder and chair of the Risk and Disaster Commission for the International Union of Anthropology and Ethnographic Sciences.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Foundation. Among his recent books are Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (Pluto Press, 2016), and the co-edited, with Astrid Stensrud, Climate, Capitalism and Communities (Pluto Press, 2019).

Paulo Mendes is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) and researcher at Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA). His recent books include The Sea Commands (Berghahn, 2020).

Paulo Mendes is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) and researcher at Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA). His recent books include The Sea Commands (Berghahn, 2020).

“This is a remarkable read for three reasons. First, the breadth of topics addressed, second, the tacking back and forth from the micro to the macro perspective, and third, the particular attention paid in many of the chapters to concrete actions that could, if taken, help ameliorate the devastating consequences of climate change.” • Steve Kroll-Smith, University of North Carolina