Monica Tennberg, University of Lapland
Climate Change and Globalization in the Arctic: Compressing Time and Space?
Globalization
theorists argue that our understanding of space and time is changing rapidly and
fundamentally: these two dimensions of our world are being compressed. The
transformation of the qualities of time and space forces us to change how we
represent the world to ourselves. Climate change as a scientific, social,
political and cultural issue is embedded in a complicated set of spatial and
temporal relations. The present research studies the representation of and
changes in temporal and spatial relations in climate change discourse as
reflected in maps, political documents and newspaper articles. The analysis
suggests that these relations and representations are asymmetrical and
conflicting. Most globalization discourses assume that the path towards a
globalized world is a strictly linear one.
In the Arctic, there is a sense in much of the climate literature that
the end of an era has come, a development bringing with it the threat that what
we know as the Arctic - something unique and special - will disappear from the
world as global warming occurs, never to be replaced. One way to unlock the
unidimensionality of the debate on globalization is to take the temporal
dimension more seriously. A
simplistic, materialistic and reductionist understanding of time in
international environmental politics does not cohere with the multitude of
temporal and spatial relationships found in the different discourses dealing
with climate change in the Arctic.