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Introduction
Scientists across disciplines have identified climate change as the greatest threat to human and non-human life on the Earth in the immediate future, a danger now so perceptible that it has been identified as such by the usually conservative World Economic Forum.1 This awareness began at least 30 to 40 years ago (Rich 2018) with the first theoretical hypothesis and observations dating back to 1956 (Plass 1956).2 The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), a watershed report, was the first attempt to critically evaluate the limits of the dominant economic model. Immediately, the report was attacked by both business interests and the mainstream Left.
Yet, the reality of climate change only recently became accessible to the broader public. After years of orchestrated neglect verging on censorship (Oreskes and Conway 2010; Rich 2018)3, a global movement to catalyze political action belatedly sprang up in 2018–2019 with the first demonstrations heralded by Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, fossil fuels disinvestment campaigns, and countless other initiatives across the globe. These have occurred with varying intensities, with the largest simultaneous demonstrations reaching at least six million across the world, the largest of which occurred in Montreal, New York, Berlin, Rome, and other cities in September 2019 (Laville 2019).
Meanwhile, the global situation has rapidly deteriorated. Scientific research is churning out increasingly alarming reports of investigations revealing that the previous estimates of climate change scientists were far too optimistic (Ripple et al. 2020). In other words, climate change is developing at a much faster pace than initially expected while the human knowledge necessary to address the problem advances at a much lower speed than is required.
In this predictably cataclysmic scenario, it is difficult to keep up with the continuous flow of scientific research, let alone be psychologically prepared to absorb and transform it into a constructively shared narrative. Climate change is an uncontainable phenomenon that knows no class, ethnic, geographical, or national boundaries and hence cannot be comprehended within the limits of a nationalist Weltanschauung (worldview).
This article reassesses this circumstance but also reexamines it by focusing on the situational and adaptive plasticity of nationalism, characterized by its notorious Janus-faced comportment.
I first identify and address a methodological stumbling block which precludes scholars...