Introduction: Carbon and Culture Change

This introduction and the volume as a whole discuss the transformational role that carbon has come to play in social and cultural life. As a proxy for greenhouse gas emissions, carbon has become a phenomenon that can no longer be accounted for solely within the technoscientific vocabulary of climate scientists or as an economic externality to human modes of production. As a new value form, carbon has entered individual and collective imaginaries across the globe. We contend that this entrance is by no means uniform. The introduction thus attends to carbon as a range of diverse phenomena in human lives and, second, to the way that it can be approached as culture. It continues with a discussion of carbon's potential for generating or promoting change, before turning to the different contributions to this volume, and how they provide unique perspectives on the topic of carbon as a cultural phenomenon. The chapters are thus framed through a focus on the diverse meanings ascribed to carbon in different cultural contexts. In sum, in the introduction, together with the volume as a whole, we demonstrate how paying attention to carbon as a cultural phenomenon allows for a more profound appreciation of when, how and why carbon enables (or sometimes disables) change in the form of green transitions or transformations.