Major new research on climate change, global warming and environmental collapse, how they connect with what men do, and what to do about it has just been published by a team including the University of the Western Cape’s Professor Tamara Shefer, The South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) Chair of Blue Humanities and Gender Justice, and Extraordinary Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Professor Jeff Hearn.

Double issue

A new double special issue of the journal Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, features the research in the article “Men, masculinities, and the planet at the end of (M)Anthropocene”.

The journal’s double special issue is edited by Shefer and colleagues from around the world – professors Kadri Aavik (Tallinn University, Estonia), Jeff Hearn (University of Huddersfield and Hanken School of Economics) and Martin Hultman (University of Gothenburg, Sweden).

It brings together new research by 22 researchers from 13 countries on questions as diverse as climate denial in Canadian pipeline politics, environmental impacts of Chinese policies in the Pacific Ocean, pro-meat online influencers in Finland, and positive action by men activists in Africa, Latin America, UK, and globally.

Negative impact

Hearn, professor of sociology in Huddersfield’s Department of Social and Psychological Sciences, says: “There is now plenty of research that shows clear negative impacts of some men’s behaviour on the environment and climate; what is astonishing is how this aspect does not figure in most debate and policy on a more sustainable world.”

The team’s findings include that men tend to have a greater carbon footprint and greater environmental impact through consumption, especially travel, transportation, and tourism, men tend to have less concern with climate change, and less willingness to change everyday practice to ameliorate it, men tend to be less ambitious and less active in environmental politics, and less supportive of political parties that work for environmental justice. Men also tend to be more involved in owning, managing, controlling heavy, chemical, carbon-based, industrialised agriculture, high environmental impact and extractive industries, and militarism, with its own devastating environmental effects.

For more information contact Tamara Shefer at tshefer@uwc.ac.za

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