The Culture Gap in the Climate Crisis

This paper considers the inability of Western materialist approaches to make substantial progress on climate in terms of a culture gap, proposing that the culture gap in the crisis may be larger than the knowledge gap, policy gap, technology gap, or other obstacles to a climate friendly world. We define the cultural gap as the difference between a society’s need to engage with itself at the level of ontology or ‘being’ and the capacity of its discourse and institutions to do so. We see the consequences of this in the persistence of information deficit approaches to climate action and environmental communication, despite long-standing awareness of their inadequacy. We interpret growing calls within sustainability discourse for transformation and transformative change as an intuitive response to this circumstance, a recognition of the persistent inadequacy of knowledge-action approaches to complex social challenges. This inadequacy exposes the culture gap in stark relief, pointing research agendas in a promising direction. To navigate transformative change, we must re-activate notions of being within the Western imagination and develop the cultural capacities to operationalize such notions within our sustainability efforts.