Gus Speth is often called the “Dean of the environmental movement.” In a recent manifesto published in Orion Magazine (2012), this consummate technocrat makes a startling admission:

Regarding the language we use and the messages we seek to convey, I can see clearly now that we environmentalists have been too wonkish and too focused on technical fixes. We have not developed well the capacity to speak in a language that goes straight to the American heart, resonates with both core moral values and common aspirations, and projects a positive and compelling vision. Throughout my forty-odd years in the environmental community, public discourse on environment has been dominated by lawyers, scientists, and economists – people like me. Now we need to hear a lot more from the preachers, the poets, the psychologists, and the philosophers. And our message must be one that is founded on hope and honest possibility.

Speth is not alone in moving from the “hard” world of policy to the “soft” world of culture. In both academic and popular environmental debate, there has been a clear cultural turn of late. Talk of “iconography” and “ideology” abounds; “myths,” “frames,” and “symbols” are common currency. Today it has become something of a clich´e, even in scientific circles, to describe climate change as first and foremost a “cultural problem.”

So culture shapes the perception and politics of climate change. But just how? This is not so clear. Scholars and critics offer a number of competing answers. In this chapter, we try to cut through the confusion by presenting a theory of climate change as social drama. Our approach is deceptively simple. Most theories look to root causes rather than surface effects. Some blame controversy and inaction on conflicting worldviews, value systems, and cosmologies of nature. Others blame the ideological influence of “carbon class power” (Urry 2011), with its deep impacts on commonsense expectations about lifestyle and ethical behavior.