Nature Is for Trees, Culture Is for Humans: A Critical Reading of the IPCC Report

Abstract

In this article, we problematize conventional views regarding culture presented in the assessment report entitled Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. This report is a contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We posit that when culture is seen as a stable category and imagined as a space composed of humans—and, more precisely, only certain humans—an epistemological, ontological, and ethical order is reproduced in which (a) nature is framed as a passive and apolitical “out there”, (b) knowledge based on this division is misleading and partial (e.g., social scientists study culture and natural scientists study nature), and (c) dominant humanist assumptions become common-sense explanations for inequalities. We conduct a critical discourse analysis of the IPCC report to better understand which assumptions produce the conceptualization of culture as a stable category. In our conclusion, we offer an example of a semiotic-meaning intervention of a section of the report to demonstrate the vitality of the concepts presented in this document. Subsequently, we discuss the consequences of omitting the vital traffic between the biological, social, and cultural realms from discussions on climate change to reexamine the production and reproduction of inequalities.