Join us for an evening with Mike Hulme, an important voice in the too often overheated debate about climate change. He will be joined by Boulder Integral member, Michael Zimmerman, co-author (with Sean Esbjorn-Hargens) of Integral Ecology.Hulme is professor of climate change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, academic home of many leading scientists implicated in the Climategate affair last December. Hulme has publicly criticized his colleagues not only for sopmetimes engaging in unprofessional practices, but also for overemphasizing the importance of the natural science perspective in regard to thinking about climate change.

Hulme’s book, Why We Disagree about Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2009), brilliantly embodies an integral approach to climate change. He insists that in additional to the perspectives offered by natural science, many different perspectives—cultural, religious, political, economic—must be brought to bear on the issue of what is to be done about climate change.

The fact that Hulme had never even heard of integral theory while writing the book is a sign that an integral Zeitgeist may be emerging. I hope you will be able to attend Hulme’s presentation.

Mike Hulme

Mike Hulme explores the idea of climate change using historical, cultural and scientific analyses, seeking to illuminate the numerous ways in which climate change is deployed in public and political discourse. He believes it is important to understand and describe the varied ideological, political and ethical work that the idea of climate change is currently performing across different social worlds. His research interests are therefore concerned with representations of climate change in history, culture and the media; with how knowledge of climate change is constructed (especially through the IPCC) and the interactions between climate change knowledge and policy; and with the construction, application and evaluation of climate scenarios for impacts, adaptation and integrated assessments.

His two most recent books are Why We Disagree About Climate Change: understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity (2009) and, with Henry Neufeldt, the edited volume Making Climate Change Work For Us (2010) which is a synthesis of the research findings of the EU FP6 Integrated Project ‘ADAM: Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies’. He has earlier prepared numerous climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government, the European Commission, the IPCC, UNEP, UNDP and WWF-International. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed journal papers and over 35 book chapters on these and other topics, together with over 240 reports and popular articles about climate change. He is editor-in-chief of the newly launched review journal: Wiley’s Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs): Climate Change.

Michael Zimmerman

Michael E. Zimmerman is currently Director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where is also a Professor of Philosophy, and a Professor in Environmental Studies. Before coming to Boulder, Zimmerman spent 31 years at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he was co-director of Environmental Studies for a decade. Author of about one hundred scholarly articles and book chapters, Zimmerman has also published a major anthology–Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology (4^th edition)–and four books: Eclipse of the Self; Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity; Contesting Earth’s Future; and most recently, Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World (co-authored with Sean Esbjorn-Hargens). In Integral Ecology, Esbjorn-Hargens and Zimmerman argue that to characterized adequately and to develop plausible solutions to environmental problems, many different points of view must be represented, including not only the natural and social sciences, but philosophy, religion, cultural norms and values, as well perspectives that belong to first-person experience, as in the case of people offering personal testimony about the consequences of environmental hazards.