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Imagining resilience: situating perceptions and emotions about climate change on Kamchatka, Russia

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Abstract

Global environmental change shapes places and people through ongoing transformation of ecological, socioeconomic, political, and cultural phenomena. One region construed as highly vulnerable to global environmental change, particularly anthropogenic climate change, is the North. Recent research about human communities in Western arctic and subarctic places revolve around vulnerability to anthropogenic climate change, focusing on loss of the ability to pursue traditional livelihoods, threats to ecosystems sustaining human communities and the need to adapt to new environmental regimes. Fewer studies address Russia and the perceptions and emotions related to climate change. To understand how people of the Russian North engage with climate change, I conducted ethnographic research in two rural and remote communities in subarctic alpine Kamchatka, Russia in 2009–2010. Local narratives about climate change largely reflect climate skepticism, and anthropogenic climate change is rejected as explaining environmental changes because: (1) climate is considered as naturally and cyclically changing, (2) humans are not considered a large enough force to alter natural climate cycles, (3) environmental problems are solvable with technology and (4) there is a lack of knowledge about climate change science. Thus, perceptions and emotions about transformation focus on other realms—socioeconomic, political, cultural—that are perceived as more critical to everyday life in the present and near future. Here, I describe these narratives and place the regional understanding of climate change in greater context to explain resistance to imagining environmental transformations due to climate change.

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Acknowledgments

I thank the American Council of Learned Societies and Colgate University for financial support of this research and Jonathan Oldfield for correspondence regarding climate science in Russia. I am deeply indebted to numerous people on Kamchatka, including Liliya Bakanova for her assistance navigating Esso and Anavgai, and to Olga Shiryaeva, Viktoria Zhezherova and Elena Andreeva at Kamchatka State University who made this research possible in logistical and scholarly ways.

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    Jessica K. Graybill

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Correspondence to Jessica K. Graybill.

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Graybill, J.K. Imagining resilience: situating perceptions and emotions about climate change on Kamchatka, Russia. GeoJournal 78, 817–832 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-012-9468-4

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