Global Environments Working Group: "This Doomsday: The Climate of Conspiracy"

Please join us in discussing Jesse Robertson's paper titled "This Doomsday: The Climate of Conspiracy." Professor Joyce Chaplin will serve as respondent.

Please email nathanielmoses@g.harvard.edu to RSVP and receive a copy of the paper. 

Abstract:

Asked to consider the relationship between conspiracy theories and climate change, one will most likely imagine skeptical cranks sparring with scientists over the factuality of warming data. But to take today’s politically charged denialism as a monolith overlooks a more complex historical relationship between conspiracism and the environment. Two theories that were frequent topics of discussion on the Coast to Coast AM radio show in the mid-1990s warrant particular attention: That the government was controlling the weather through a mysterious military installation called HAARP in Alaska; and that the Earth itself was changing in fundamental ways, a line of thinking that filtered Y2K’s millenarian anxieties through a kind of hopeful apocalypse. The former grew in the shadow of well-documented experiments by the US military into weather control and modification, and the latter gelled with an aesthetic form of world-making that sought to reimagine what it meant to be a “public” in a transitional moment. Importantly, they both engaged critically, if erroneously, with the reality of a changing environment. And they pushed back on the government’s consensus, which, through an ecosystem of think thanks and private corporations, downplayed the effects of human-driven climate change and sowed the seeds of contemporary denialism. Attending to this period of flux reveals both the contingency of camps that now appear entrenched, and that given the veils of secrecy and alienation shrouding the US political and military establishments, thinking in terms of conspiracy was not so left field. Given the inaction of today’s ruling class in the face of looming catastrophe, perhaps there is an actionable politics that can be resurrected from conspiracism's latent critique of the status quo.