Abstract
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Anthropogenic climate change is a quintessentially modern problem in its historical origins and discursive
framing, but how well does modernist thinking provide us with the tools to solve the problems it created? On
one hand even though anthropogenic climate change is argued to be a problem of human origins, solutions to
which will require human actions and engagements, modernity separates people from climate change in a
number of ways. On the other, while amodern or more-than-human concepts of multiple and relational
agency are more consistent with the empirical evidence of humans being deeply embedded in earth surface
processes, these approaches have not sufficiently accounted for human power in climate change, nor articulated
generative pathways forward. We argue that recent research in human geography has much to offer
because it routinely combines both deconstructive impulses and empirical compulsions (ethnographic, material,
embodied, practice-based). It has a rather unique possibility to be both deconstructive and generative/
creative. We bring together more-than-human geographies and cross-scalar work on agency and governance
to suggest how to reframe climate change and climate change response in two main ways: elaborating human
and non-human continuities and differences, and identifying and harnessing vernacular capacities.