Displacements of Care in Climate Crisis: The Case of Tipping Points

ABSTRACT

In this paper, the relationship of care and crisis is discussed with respect to tipping points and strategic mobilizations of the concept by climate communicators including scientists, policymakers, and activists. The displacement of care in our conceptions of crisis is evident during key moments of intermediation for the tipping point concept, a series of historical developments usually bracketed off in stories about the onset of climate change as a public concern. These moments include the use of broken windows and bystander invention theories to popularize the tipping point concept. These displacements have been generalized across a range of sites including academic research into bystander inaction during emergencies, the network design of online spaces, and climate communication strategies. By bringing recent work by Chun and Rentschler together with Pezzullo’s provocation to expand considerations of care in the field, I encourage historically-informed engagements with care-based traditions, knowledges, and practices currently displaced in climate communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Bystander
• care ethics
• climate emergency
• homophily
• network science

Questions of climate change and care are often linked by those disappointed to learn that crisis, no matter how visibly obvious or intensely felt, does not compel climate action. An absence of care or concern is commonly assumed to explain inaction, a question worth re-examining given the scope now accorded to crisis. Instead of an event to be averted, climate change has received what Naomi Klein (2014) once called “the crisis treatment,” and climate crisis is often described as underway, inescapable, and changing of everything (p. 5). It is a conception of crisis attracting quasi-acceleration perspectives that have a variety of new names including post-apocalyptic environmentalism (by those disposed to it) and doomerism (by its numerous critics), but it also reflects longer-arcing debates about science, data, and culture – at minimum.¹ There is, for example, Robert Cox’s (2007) arguments for a “crisis discipline.” In developing his position, Cox drew on examples of cancer and conservation biology to join crisis and action in the ethical obligation of scholars to enable societal response. The obligation to respond in concert with practices of care, not simply those techniques for raising alarm and anxiety, is playing out across various sites of climate communication. These include “extreme events,” when researchers are asked to attribute the incidence, impacts, and harms of crisis to climate change in ways foregrounding concern with those most affected (Russill, 2023), and the examples of care-based climate advocacy discussed by Phaedra Pezzullo (2020), as well as other contributions to this issue.

The tipping point concept occupies an interesting position within these debates. Surging forward as a description of climate crisis two decades ago, the metaphor figured catastrophe as unavoidable if inaction persisted much longer (Russill, 2015; Russill & Lavin, 2012). It was hardly novel to suggest irreparable consequences might follow from indecision or a lack of rapid response on a global scale. Yet, the discourse of a “tipping point” articulated by climate scientists and communication strategists was unique in some respects: it linked science, policy, and politics in a holistic framework for societal transformation and inflated the capacity of symbolic communication to precipitate rapid forms of social change. Key moments could gain symbolic significance, go viral, and push society onto new trajectories in an unstoppable way whether or not people were informed or concerned with climate change.

As I elaborate on below, the novelty of these claims to climate crisis distracted from the pervasiveness of this thinking in post-war US social science. Our conceptions of crisis – and of action and inaction in these situations – are still shaped by theories, technologies, and environments that have these concepts inscribed within them. In this respect, the integration of tipping points into climate communication reflected not simply a novel framing strategy, as I initially thought, but the legacies of US social science that mediate our thinking on communication, crisis, and social change. The concepts in question sit at the intersections of urban planning and network design of digital spaces, shaped by a series of exchanges and intermediations that are complex and variegated, but also evincing a tendency to displace questions of care for those of control.

This is a harder story to tell. In revisiting these legacies, the example of tipping point discourse can illuminate the displacements of care inherent to popular conceptions of crisis, displacements that are epistemic (absent from our thinking and knowledge production) and material (encoded into our technical and living environments). They carry a history often bracketed off in the stories told about the emergence of climate change as a public concern and, now, as a generalized crisis. Tipping points illustrate how ideas about inaction during crisis were attributed to a lack of care by influential intermediaries that translated the concept into rules and principles for our communicative and environmental surroundings.

In what follows, I analyze two moments in the intermediation and mainstreaming of the tipping point concept before it carried over into climate communication. More specifically, I consider how tipping points were figured by “broken windows” theorists, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson (1982), as a problem of crisis precipitated by displaced care before British-born Canadian journalist, Malcolm Gladwell generalized their perspective into a communicative framework. Following the examples of feminist digital media scholars Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2021) and Carrie Rentschler (2022), I re-engage with primary texts to illuminate the institutional and political investments shaping the stories we tell about inaction and crisis. These stories animate our current thinking about networked communication and digital connection, but also extend older ideas about control and care in urban environments.

The broken window was the tipping point. (Gladwell, 1996)

It is no secret to historians that the tipping point metaphor emerged from intellectual engagements with the racialized nature of inequality, injustice, and urban crisis in the United States. The idea was mobilized in conservative sociology to reframe debates around white flight (in the 1960s–1970s) and community policing (in the 1980s–1990s) as a problem of complex systems change. Accounts of segregation and urban crisis that foregrounded systemic racism were reformulated as questions of maintaining order within complex systems that could veer (or “tip”) into chaos and disorder (Russill, 2015). Homophily, broken windows, bystander effect, weak ties, and tipping points have all been used to explain social interaction in these contexts (see Chun, 2021; Kurgan et al., 2019).

Malcolm Gladwell’s popular account situates tipping points with respect to contemporary examples of public health and policing to draw general conclusions about communication and societal change. In his initial article for the New Yorker, Gladwell (1996) mused over a surprising decline in violent crime before attributing it to policing strategies embraced by William Bratton, a New York City police commissioner. An attention-seeking ideologue for broken windows theory, Bratton believed that violent crime was linked to environmental disorder. Minor instances of deviance, like graffiti or panhandling, were symbols of disorder that could multiply, escalate, and spiral out of control if unchecked before the tipping point was reached. Gladwell’s work blended a celebratory account of this policing with examples of social-psychological research to amplify its communicative elements.

Gladwell’s account included a story about a social science experiment told by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson (1982) in their influential article, “Broken Windows,” which summarized the assumptions, arguments, and evidence for this policing strategy. As the title of their piece suggests, Kelling and Wilson use the metaphor of broken windows, a symbol of community neglect, to explain the dynamics of disorder and crime in communities. A broken window is a symbol or message that an environment is bereft of care. It is this perception of indifference that invites growing disorder, a consequence that becomes frightening to people. These fears generate withdrawal from community spaces, a situation in which disorder can escalate into more serious and violent crimes (and more fear and withdrawal among inhabitants). Policing professionals and social psychologists, Kelling and Wilson suggest, are familiar with this dynamic and know that a broken window, if unaddressed, leads to the breakage of all windows (Ansfield, 2020). The avoidance of crisis is about restoring the stability of public order before a lack of care carries the community across a “tipping point,” after which an ability to control crisis is circumscribed or lost.

Kelling and Wilson attempt to prove their point by describing an experiment designed by Philip Zimbardo. It involved two cars that were parked in the Bronx and Palo Alto respectively. The first car was left with indicators of disrepair and abandonment and it was attacked within 10 min, stripped by passerby for parts, and subject to “random destruction”; the second vehicle was left untouched for a week until a window was broken by the researchers after which the car was vandalized and destroyed within hours. In this telling, the crucial point is the broken window, not the location of the car, which links the perception that no one cares to instances of disorder that can cascade into violent crime. Communities anywhere could tip into unmanageable crisis. In this way, the racialization of urban crisis is recast as a general problem of not caring and addressed by substituting order and control for the informal acts of care necessary to community life.

This is much to say about this description of Zimbardo’s research. As Bench Ansfield (2020) has noted, it isn’t accurate, it draws conclusions contrary to those drawn by Zimbardo himself, and it uses this story to legitimate programs of policing that have had disastrous consequences. Ansfield recounts how the broken windows associated with urban decline reflected a history of landlord arson and neglect, not the indifference or criminalized routines of city residents, and discusses how Zimbardo’s evidence was “manipulated and distorted” by Kelling and Wilson to support their policing recommendations (p. 104). In addition, Collings-Wells (2022) has shown that broken windows theory originates in a foundation-funded, consultant-led research program to transform the role of metropolitan policing by those worried about the growing influence of the civil rights and Black Power movements. By 1982, Keeling and Wilson had data from a decade plus of pilot projects and intervention programs from multiple US cities (Collings-Wells, 2022) meaning this was not a case of applying academic social science handed down from the ivory tower (as is sometimes suggested). The work of Ansfield, Collings-Wells, and others have addressed these distortions and their enduring consequences in subjecting communities and especially racialized people to aggressive forms of police surveillance and abuse.

It is how Gladwell works as a further intermediary of the concept that I want to dwell on here. Gladwell (1996) references the “foundational work” of Thomas Schelling’s work on white flight before describing a mix of public health and policing studies on the epidemic nature of social change before relating the Zimbardo experiment. Although Gladwell (1996) fails to reference Kelling and Wilson’s (1982) account, his borrowing is less important than the institutional and cultural investments for which this story was again staged and amplified, only this time with their ideas of inaction, care, and impeding crisis embedded within an account of crisis and social change more generally. Much as Chun (2021) has described the transformation of homophily from a description of a highly contextualized and contingent moment of social interaction into a general principle of network design, Gladwell retells the Zimbardo story to recontextualize and widen the scope of the implications narrated by Kelling and Wilson.

Kelling and Wilson emphasize the moment when community life is sliding into disorder and their program of community policing – highly invasive and visible – is designed to address it. They also explain why these situations happen. The care that informally regulates and regenerates community life is interrupted. Disorder and crime, they claim, happen more quickly in the Bronx than Palo Alto because there is already a widespread perception of “no one caring” in the former case. In either New York or California, however, the solution is the same. Policing must fill in for this missing care by visibly maintaining order until the tipping point recedes and stability is restored. These visible displays of policing substitute control for community care. It is unclear if such policing is imagined as a temporary measure in specific circumstances, as an act of force or violence to restore community norms in ways consistent with American mythology, or intended to inaugurate a new era of policing/resident collaboration.² Once dispersed into the everyday spaces and flows of an urban environment, however, officers could perceive and control all the minor but symbolically consequential actions imagined to threaten stability before the situation approached a tipping point.

Gladwell’s (1996) article separates Kelling and Wilson’s account of these dynamics from the explanation they offer. As a result, the policing strategies appear not as solutions for maintaining order in communities threatened with crisis, but as an example lending insight into the dynamics of social interaction and communication more generally. In this way, Gladwell reifies a displacement of care that is characteristic of a highly contextual and specific moment of community life, one implicated in practices of racial segregation and oppression, into a general conception of social interaction. Whereas Kelling and Wilson argued for the necessity of constant monitoring and control to head off crises precipitated by a lack of care, Gladwell simply took this generalized state of proto-crisis and surveillance as given. As a result, social interaction was flattened into an account of collective life that could be manipulated strategically by policing, public health, or political officials, or anyone with the capacity to perceive tipping points – whether to affirm or erode the social norms governing change. “Zimbardo’s point,” Gladwell summarizes, “was that disorder invites even more disorder – that a small deviation from the norm can send into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality.” This wasn’t Zimbardo’s point, but Kelling and Wilson had suggested it was. Symbolic communication in the form of signals, imagined initially as a problem of policing in specific contexts and circumstances, was inflated into an account of social change that displaced care in accounting for social interaction.

The key to getting people to change their behavior, in other words, to care about their neighbor … . Gladwell (2000)

The absurdity of conceiving social interaction as a field of symbolic communication to be monitored for tipping points suggests a category mistake by Gladwell. By generalizing from a model for the policing of communities in crisis to create a description of the general conditions of social life, Gladwell substituted strategic control of pivotal moments for care relations in the regulation of social interaction. In this way, an account describing situations that can precipitate crisis, and that had already circumscribed the place of care in responding to them, was inflated into a general account of social interaction and communication. Politics, in this respect, was less about resolving conflict than detecting and managing threats of crisis.

Gladwell (2000) would develop his 1996 New Yorker article into a best-selling book, The Tipping Point, whose popularity and significance is difficult to overstate, and this included the adoption of its approach into climate communication (Russill & Lavin, 2012). In this work, Gladwell quietly stepped away from the story of Zimbardo’s Bronx-Palo Alto experiment. Instead, he engaged directly with Kelling’s work as implemented by Bratton, the police commissioner during Rudy Giuliani’s first years as the New York City mayor. Broken windows theory is again referenced to explain the significance of the minor symbolic cues found in one’s environment, which suggest that “no one cares and no one is in charge” (p. 141). Instead of Zimbardo’s damaged vehicles, Gladwell mixes broken windows thinking with a variety of social scientific experiments including those inspired by a popular myth of bystander inaction, the murder of Kitty Genovese, who was assaulted while 38 witnesses apparently failed to intervene. It was a story frequently told to symbolize broader concerns with a perceived lack of care or concern in urban environments.

Gladwell recounts this story in the context of research into bystander interventions during emergencies. Not surprisingly, his explanation is consistent with broken windows and tipping point theory. In a group setting, where inaction or indifference appears to be the norm, an emergency might fail to be perceived as such given the implicit message of the inaction of those surrounding an individual. By referencing experiments into bystander interventions during simulated crises, Gladwell explains how group dynamics can perpetuate a failure to act. Genovese might have lived, Gladwell even suggests, if an individual rather than the wider community had observed the attack. The key to bystander intervention, or encouraging people “to care about their neighbor in distress,” is highly contextual. It is said to involve the strategic shaping of the symbolic cues in one’s immediate situation and an ability to perceive tipping points that usually lie unrecognized all around us. Care, or the actions one would expect to follow from care, is precipitated by managing the signals of one’s immediate situation and environment. In these assumptions, Gladwell echoes wider discussions on the social science of networked connection, the activation of inert masses, and social change (see Chun, 2021, for an account of these discussions).

However, as Rentschler and Dylan Mulvin have discussed, his version of the Kitty Genovese story isn’t true (Mulvin & Rentschler, 2011). Often, the failure to call police is offered as evidence that people didn’t care, which neatly draws together the assumptions about care and policing made by Kelling and Wilson, yet some people did telephone the police or come to her aid. As Rentschler notes, the public inaction story is less an historical event or case study than an “origin myth” conveying a readymade formulation of the problem of “public apathy and the difficulties of communicating collectively within large-scale, highly distributed societies” (Mulvin and Rentschler, p. 194, 193). In the research referenced by Gladwell, it is not that people are inherently apathetic, but the communicative situations through which people engage with crisis shape their willingness or ability to respond. Care and aid are thus figured as contingent effects of symbolic communication; in these stories, social interaction is no longer constituted through or held together by practices of care and concern, but somehow both inert (indifferent and careless) and highly malleable to communication (suggestible and able to be activated by those in the know). These stories of inaction during emergency have proven durable over time, become embedded in scientific, pedagogical, and popular texts, and inspired research that aggregates the responses of individuals in simulated conditions as if it is a general account of sociality in times of crisis (Mulvin & Rentschler, 2011).

Conclusion

Tipping points are now a common feature of climate communication, often bringing scientific description and social change strategies together in a shared idiom for crisis. I have suggested the prehistory of the metaphor prior to its popularity in climate change discussions is important for understanding how networked understandings of communication and social change extend older ideas about control and crisis in urban environments. The fantasies of rapid social and energy system transformation that animate the proponents of climate change tipping points led them to overlook the history of racialized programs of conceptual displacement and social control in pursuit of tools, rules, and techniques of communication that might quickly avert a looming climate crisis. We will see if recent efforts to extend the science of climate change tipping points open up or remain closed off to exploring the history of the control systems they envision.

A key consideration is how the social psychology of urban planning and policing has been generalized into accounts of social interaction that take the displacement of care as given. The reconceptualization of the symbolic logic of our lived environments as a problem of crisis and control was accepted by not only policing and urban planning professionals, but folded into the concepts and rules for designing digital networks and engagement with them (Chun, 2021; McIlwain, 2020). While this story is now coming to light, it is not uncommon to overlook the significance of non-academic intermediaries and popular media in shaping the problems researched by professional scholars, and Gladwell’s importance to the intersections of social-psychological theories of behavior, communication, and network science is worth further consideration in this context. There is little question that his immensely popular writing on tipping points took this displacement of care as given and explored its wider implications for symbolic communication and societal change.

The integration of tipping points into climate communication clearly took Gladwell’s approach as a point of departure. This is evident, for example, in an editorial published in the scientific journal, Nature (2006), which attempted to mediate growing concerns with the concept among physical scientists by offering Gladwell’s work as guidance to “the climate crisis in the social sphere” (p. 785). It also shaped the 2007 landmark publication on climate communication, Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, edited by Suzanne Moser and Lisa Dilling. Today, Gladwell’s influence is perhaps most evident in efforts to circumscribe or contain his significance through redefinition and the drawing of distinctions (see, for example, Kopp et al., 2016). While abstraction and generalization are important intellectual techniques, the incorporation of tipping point assumptions into programs of climate communication remains linked to the intersecting histories of urban planning, crisis, and network science discussed above, perhaps most obviously through the recurrent and unconvincing efforts to mobilize the abolition of slavery as an example of tipping point induced change (Otto et al., 2020).

One emerging consideration for deepening these historical engagements is Chun’s (2021) mapping of the conceptual relays between network science and urban planning. Chun demonstrated how multiple forms of interpersonal and community connection were reduced to a widely adopted formalization of homophily, a process that distorted data to fit the rigid models of networked sociality now used to design digital spaces. Like the idea of monitoring thresholds to tipping points in communities edging toward crisis, homophily was derived from a contextually specific and contingent form of social interaction, not the typical conditions of community or friendship (Kurgan et al., 2019). These descriptions, like the earlier modeling of tipping points by Thomas Schelling to describe patterns of segregation, “have been translated from a description of urban neighborhoods to the design of online worlds” (Kurgan et al., 2019).

In each case, one finds specific examples generalized into rigid models of social interaction, a translation difficult to reverse or interrupt, even as prefigurative efforts to restore care to these spaces remain. Rentschler (2022), for instance, has discussed creative engagements with digital spaces to establish assumptions of care in conditions precipitating violence and crisis. By reintegrating practices of attentiveness into spaces designed to monitor and control, impact is sought not in the virality of tipping points, but in reshaping the everyday standards of care that inform our habits.

These standards and their models of intervention reveal ways of thinking about social change at the small scale, around interactional tactics and the creation of new habits tied to care for others that are meant to be scaled up through repetition. (Rentschler, 2022, p. 282)

In addition, there are engagements with digital space that understand its preconditions as care-based, a juxtaposition Rianka Singh (2020) develops by distinguishing moments of visible amplification and quiet care. Unwilling to cede that digital spaces must necessarily displace care, Singh questions the necessity of equating visibility and care in the way Kelling and Wilson assumed in their conception of crime and crisis.

As one of the early bridges between network science and urban planning and policing, the prehistory of tipping points helps illuminate the displacement of care from our conceptions of crisis, a series of historical developments shaping climate communication to this day. The case of tipping points suggests one way of revisiting care in our field, and of reworking the conceptual legacies of care and control in times of crisis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an overview of post-apocalyptic environmentalism, see Carl Cassegård (2023); for an influential articulation of doomerism, see Lamb et al. (2020).

2 When contrasted with the discussions of control and care found in Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts’ (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, this perspective looks like an effort to make conservative positions on policing palatable to liberals by reworking the significance of “social environment” and care in explanations of crime.