Science’s erasures of local specificity, similar in many respects to the knowledge dynamics that

accompanied the emergence of ‘state’ and ‘society’ as analytic categories in the 19th century (Skocpol
and Rueschemeyer, 1996),1 are an important source of the conflicts that have arisen around climate
change – which many see as the pressing problem for humanity in our era. This article reflects on the
nature and implications of the pull between abstraction and specificity, objectivity and subjectivity, in
representations of climate change. It shows how those polarities come into play at four levels of
conceptual organization: community, polity, space and time. It explores what is at stake when an
impersonal, apolitical, and universal imaginary of climate change, projected and endorsed by science,
takes over from the subjective, situated and normative imaginations of human actors engaging directly
with nature. It points to current environmental debates in which a reintegration between global
scientific representations of and local social responses to the climate are taking place; and it suggests
how the interpretive social sciences can lead to a fuller understanding, if not a resolution, of humanity’s
climate predicament.