The Politics of Humanity

the more diffuse humanitarian gains illustrated in the previous section. As such, it
seems appropriate to characterise climate change as an incipient “meta-
emergency” or “meta-crisis” in the conventional sense of “humanitarian crisis”.
But in Chapter 2 it emerged that frequently, behind a “humanitarian crisis”,
we can identify a “crisis of humanity”. This either grounds the concern with
suffering that characterises our interaction with future “humanitarian crises”, in the
sense that professional humanitarians’ sense of the fragility of common humanity
revealed by Auschwitz conditions their understanding of, say, the Rwandan
Genocide. But a “crisis of humanity” can also be found within the fabric of a
“humanitarian crisis”, as was also the case in Rwanda. The argument I wish to make
here, is that, more than a “meta-humanitarian crisis”, climate change also
represents a “crisis of humanity” in that second sense. That is, the likely “meta-
humanitarian crisis” of climate change reveals in a new way a human capacity to
endanger the very terms of a common humanity.^27
Crucial here is the well-established scientific consensus on the
anthropogenic nature of climate change.^28 As Randolph Kent, now director of the
Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) at King’s College, wrote in a tour d’horizon
of humanitarian crises:

Among the hallmarks of the present age is the fact that human beings have

become a force that in many ways dictates the course of nature. The

relationship between nature and humans has to that extent altered

significantly. Throughout most of history, human beings were subject to

nature’s whims. Now the actions of humankind not only affect the prospects

27
Another important example of a possible “crisis of humanity” in this sense would be the
invention of the atom bomb. 28
Naomi Oreskes, "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We're
Not Wrong?" in Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our
Grandchildren , ed. Joseph F. C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman (London: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 2007).