Geographies of Global Environmental Change References Revision

Gay-Antaki, 2022

• Feminist decolonial geography can trace the origin of dominant ideas around climate change and enunciate their location by challenging normative, disembodied and universal claims with the aim of identifying exclusionary structures and forming opportunities to create a more equitable knowledge base by drawing on the negotiating and navigating skills or border crosses

• Science is seen as objective and universal with an epistemic authority, it allows a Western man to represent his knowledge is the only one capable of achieving universal consciousness; this hidden location of the scientist is perhaps the greatest danger of the scientific method as it makes systems of oppression possible and reifies the dominance of the West in global imagination

• Western science is ‘to see everything from nowhere’; however, this knowledge impacts and obstructs different people in different ways; therefore, there is danger in disembodied decisions guided by capitalist economic interests that form narratives at the expense of women, people of colour and the environment

• An example is the narrative of staying below 2 degrees as a reasonable level of risk; however, many ecosystems already feel this impact and have reached their adaptation limit

• The practice of Western science systematically places people at disadvantage due to their gender, geography, race, religion, nationality, sexuality and colonial situation and removes them from contributing to climate change solutions; an embodied climate science would allow us to imagine alternatives and incorporate different perspectives to promote social and environmental justice for all

Lehman & Johnson, 2022

• Environmental geography is aware of science’s entanglements with imperial projects and racist logics, but it is difficult to imagine the discipline not tethered to technoscience; understanding this is key to promoting a relationship that is responsible for its inheritance through its transformation

• Western technoscience has been tied up with the ‘quantitative revolution’ and the division of nature and society where mastery of Nature was promoted; Geography has maintained connections to this positivist knowledge yet does acknowledge selective critiques of the legacy of imperialism, militarism and capitalism to recognise the need to be unfaithful heirs of Western technoscience 

• Worlds emerge at multi-scaled intersections, there is a need to explore other worlds that have not been normalised by Western technoscience by rearranging conditions and bringing new ways of knowing and worlds into being 

• Environmental geography has the ability to response, but must be configured and reconfigured across disciplines, species and kinds; there is a need to recognise problematic origins, confront them and transform them

Fredriksen, 2021

• In the spring of 2006, wild flamingos returned to Florida, but not to the places they had inhabited over 100 years ago in the Everglades and Florida Keys, but instead 80 miles north in Palm Beach County’s Stormwater Treatment Area 2, a human-made facility for filtering anthropogenic pollutants forming a new more-than-human encounter in the Anthropocene

• The flamingos were forced out by human harvesting for meat and feathers; however, as icons of Florida their return was framed as a story of hope amidst environmental doom, yet the violent histories and uncertain futures of wildlife in the Anthropocene should not be forgotten

• In Florida, stories of the Anthropocene are often reported through catastrophes such as super storms or flooding cities; however, there are also ambiguous stories such as the return of the flamingos that breaks down the tunnel vision of the planetary apocalypse to instead open up a space for reflection on multivariate ecological relationships and a consideration of the shifting assemblages of everyday life and death in the Anthropocene

• This story and ambiguity allows for a greater understanding of the true scope of environmental change in the Anthropocene

Whyte, 2017

• Indigenous and allied scholars are creating a field to support Indigenous peoples’ capacities to address anthropocentric climate change through work on resilience, declarations and academic papers

• Indigenous studies often reflect the memories and knowledges arising from their people’s living heritages and interactions with colonialism, capitalism and industrialisation; climate change can be seen as an ‘emergent form of life’ and an intensification of environmental change imposed on Indigenous peoples by colonialism; these perspectives will aid in decolonising approaches to addressing climate change and imagining the future

• Colonial invasion of Indigenous lands in the past led to rapid changes leaving Indigenous people vulnerable to harms to their lifestyles, cultures, health, economies and self-determination; oncoming vulnerability to climate change can be reshaped as an intensification of colonially-induced environmental changes

• Often, anthropocentric climate change affects Indigenous peoples earlier and more severely than other populations with impacts to habitats, health and ecosystems; there are also challenges for self-determination where Indigenous peoples must rely on emergency management seeing their voices silenced by the interests of states, corporations and local governments

• This can invoke an experience of deja vu for Indigenous peoples as reclamation and displacement are a part of colonially-induced environmental changes that have harmed Indigenous peoples before; perhaps the same practices that facilitated industrial expansion in the past are the same that deforest territories and create barriers to adaptation today

Smith, 2008

• For Indigenous peoples, present anthropogenic environmental change can be viewed as an intensification of past colonial interactions; being forced to reflect on this brutal past can evoke an emotional pain in memory and a fear of what is to come in this rehashing of their past 

• This forms a new unique strand of emotional politics of the environment, ones that involve grief, differential priorities and altered perceptions of universal, scientific ‘environmental change’

Hulme, 2010

• Global environmental change brings forth new kinds of knowledge about multi-scale interactions between physical and social dimensions of the environment that is hard to govern; there is a need to understand the relationships between knowledge-making and human culture to recognise ambiguities and blind spots in our theorising of the changing world

• The global can be problematised as it can refer to globally systematic change or local changes that are globally cumulative, there is a need to move towards a less ‘scientisied’ approach to environmental change by integrating social sciences and critical knowledges

• Scale is important in questioning knowledge, as universal epistemologies claim to be ‘true’ irrespective of scale and place, this globalised knowledge erases geographical and cultural differences in a manner that centralises political power and social control such as the reification of a global mean temperature that has gained iconic status in policy and public discourse; however, this is inadequate and singular as it neglects regional and local signatures of a changing climate

• Global knowledge reified through climate models, boundaries, indices etc. are all decontextualised, top-down views of planetary knowledge that is detached from meaning; there is a need to understand that there are multiple ways of knowing environments and imaging the future that are appropriate to local cultural contexts 

• New kinds of global knowledges should recognise and respect geographical and cultural differences, we should embrace the plurality of knowledge of the multiplicity of global understandings of climates and cultures

Newman, 2025

• There is a haunting extinction story of a steep decline in the number of Arctic Terns returning to the island of Papa Westray in Orkney, Scotland; their waning presence haunts the island’s places and more-than-human inhabitants with a multiplying impact across the relational complexity of local ecology

• Hauntological effects of extinctions multiple across more-than-human landscapes and communities as the waning animal presence haunts landscapes with the silence of their song to humans as well as ecosystem impacts sees Skuas also declined as they would often steal fish from the Terns due to their better adaptation, they now lose this food source 

• The Northern Gannet/Solan Goose colony on a neighbouring island also see changes as they now engage in more flexible diets and behaviours due to the decline of the Terns; however this hope is haunted by the knowledge that this has only been made possible due to the decline of another species

O’Brien, 2011

• Human geography can play a role in shifting global environmental change research as discourse shifts from understanding and explaining problems to addressing them quickly and effectively; this can be achieved through integrating insights from the social sciences and humanities into a new science of global change that recognise the subjectivity of change

• There is a need for a deeper understanding of the role of humans and their social, cultural and political relations to foster meaningful transformations to human attitudes, behaviours and systems as well as shifting mainstream discourses to recognise the important contribution of the social sciences and humanities in championing subjective realities 

• The climate has been explored in a scientific manner; however there is a need to recognise multiple perspectives and challenge the idea of global climate change as an objective, observed reality; instead there should be attention to the politics and power or framing human-environment relationships

• The narrow focus on the local and global scales can also be challenges as there is a need to acknowledge the interdependencies of scales and understand processes that can be obscured when one is privileged over another; this can contribute to changing assumptions that global problems demand global solutions, but instead focus on place-based, context driven research that is sensitive to connections and linkages among processes, responses and outcomes

• Human geography can contribute to a shift in discourse on environmental change by shirting into human dimensions and transforming the future of global change; apocalyptic scenarios must be rejected in favour of alternative and desirable futures that involve humans as agents of change

Nayak & Jeffery, 2011

• The origins of Geography as a discipline are continually entangled with understandings of environmental change in the contemporary day

• The progression of Geography was summed up by Joseph Conrad as he described three stages of the subject’s institutionalisation; the first was ‘Geography Fabulous’ as a process of creating imaginative maps and theorising the unknown, there was then a progression to ‘Geography Militant’ where claims to scientific truth began to materialise with claims of Western intellectual superiority presented as ‘universal’

• This provided a theoretical framework for the emergence of ‘Geography Triumphant’ where European military and epistemological expansion took place based on theories of environmental determinism formed through exclusive Geographical Societies dominated by white, Western men

• From this one-dimensional and violent history came the evolution of perceptions of the ‘environment’ and the ‘global’; it is this link to scientific positivism and exclusive positionality that foregrounds their flaws in claims to universality and resultant unequal impacts

Atkins, 2022

• Right-wing populist politicians and commentators link net-zero policies to the cost of living crisis, characterise decarbonisation as undemocratic and affirm the need to accelerate policies that enable fracking; such narratives demonstrate the complexities of net-zero policies especially in contemporary populism where decarbonisation is framed as a top-down policy driving up bills and altering lives

• Populism contrasts the people to the political elite in a number of issues including energy and climate policies, this is exacerbated by online platforms where discussions of energy transitions play out such as in the hashtag #costofnetzero 

• Populist politicians and political commentators in the UK present net-zero policies as unwelcome, expensive and an undemocratic burden on households who already face financial pressure and uncertainty as a result of the cost of living crisis

• These challenges are not based on a denial of climate science but instead an opposition of the manner in which policies are imposed by a top-down elite with little care for the people and the intersectional impacts of the cost of living crisis

Vaha, 2017

• As sea level rise threatens to make some states completely uninhabitable, small island states serve as examples of those at the greatest risk and those who should be consulted in international legislation reshaping surrounding climate governance 

• The situation of small island states and their endangered populations now receive increasing attention within the Anthropocene as they are described as a place of ‘radical inequality’ where climate change will have severe and irreversible consequences to the most vulnerable; this is not only to individuals but also the future of entire political communities, generations, legal orders and global policies

• Successful climate governance must be capable of addressing notable uneven distributions of the effects of climate change, there is a need to help those in need wherever they are located and recognise that those who have contributed the most to climate change should bear the greatest responsibility 

• States should be key actors in achieving climate justice and island states should be guaranteed a moral recognition that they have not themselves significantly contributed to their extinction and therefore should not be punished for negative consequences; they call for the rederawing of territorial boundaries and the concept of large oceanic states

• There is also a need to move away from the language of politics and desperation for these states and instead form a hopeful imagery; despite their size small island states have been very successful in bringing their interests to international negotiation tables and have great soft power

Sultana, 2021

• The overlapping global socio-ecological crises of climate change and COVID have simultaneously dominated discussions since 2020 with connections exposing structural inequalities and systematic marginalisation

• Climate change amplifies, compounds and creates new injustices that are interconnected with COVID in an intersectional manner; this demonstrates the importance of investigating and addressing them through a nuanced feminist lens to understand the co-production of injustices

• While the pandemic is fast-moving and immediate, climate change is a case of slow violence that hits the same communities hardest in sacrifice zones formed from global colonialism, imperialism and injustices

• Often these communities are those who are systematically disadvantaged in decision making e.g. women, people of colour etc. who cannot easily access leadership roles

• Common intersectional axes to consider involve race, gender, class, disability, age, sexuality, religion and migrant status; understanding this helps to formulate policies that do not further marginalise people and reproduce socioecological inequalities

• An intersectional lens allows for a better understanding of the complex power structures and lived experiences of those coping with an adapting to the pandemic and climate change; there are opportunities for solidarity, agency and resistance

Robin, 2018

• Environmental studies were guided by the natural sciences in the 1960s, then broadened to include policy and the social sciences in the 1970s, before becoming concerned with the idea of ethics, responsibility and justice in the 1990s opening up a transdisciplinary mode of environmental studies

• Ethics should be taken beyond humans, and consider more-than-human others to solve complex problems and understand their uneven distribution both geographically and socially 

• Environmental justice demands multi-species justice and a recognition that ecosystems are conglomerations of human and non-species interactions that shape each other; this expression of the more-than-human conceptualises an ethical world that is more than the home of only human species

• This has led to developments such as the Rights of Nature becoming part of the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia

Kothari & Arnall, 2019

• Daily changes in the physical environment intersect and connect with people’s everyday lives, routines and practices in the Maldives in ways that are often regarded as mundane and ordinary; it is this everyday perspective that is central to understanding how environmental change occurs and how people respond to it; there is also a consideration of human and non-human entanglements here

• In the Maldives, the everyday changes in the physical environment such as sand erosion, rubbish and expansion of the built environment are shifting people’s regular, routine activities leading to mundane forms of oppression where inequalities become normalised 

• The everyday is important in focusing on the present and individuals, rather than the future and the global; it can also provide a socionatural perspective where nature and society are entangled in forming everyday life

• Beach and coastal erosion is occurring in the Maldives as well as waste being deposited on beaches; tourists have moved from the ‘tourist’ beach to the North beach due to the smell of smoke burning the rubbish but this changes the cultural character of the island as locals must shift their activities due to inappropriate tourist activities such as wearing bikinis and drinking alcohol

Wang & Lo, 2021

• Growing attention to the idea of a just transition away from fossil fuel energy has led to diverse definitions of the term centering around five main themes: the transition as labour-oriented, integrated frameworks for justice, a socio-technical transition, governance strategies and public perception

• The low-carbon transition is a multifaceted phenomenon entailing considerable benefits and risks that will be inequitably distributed with renewable energy hardly benefited marginalised groups; this low-carbon future will not create a just world but instead form new injustices and vulnerabilities whilst also failing to address pre-existing structural drivers of injustice

• A holistic framework sees that those most affected are likely to be low-income households, those with house concerns and in rural areas as well as intersecting with race, class and gender; there is a question of whom the just transition is for

• The question of governance addresses injustice in political systems due to a lack of transparency and public participation in decision-making; there is a need for more attention to be paid to the power dynamics of the transition and how powerful actors are often able to prioritise certain strategies, groups and industries

• The concept of the just transition may create opportunities to unite different groups and theories to overturn the injustices associated with a low carbon energy transition

Pulido & De Lara, 2018

• Environmental justice among multi-racial groups is an extension of the Black Radical Transition’s epistemic legacy and historical commitment to racial justice, this aids in reshaping our understanding of anti-racist organising and can help map geographies, temporalities and inter-racial solidarity between different organisations

• True environmental justice argues for a model of abolitionist social movement that invites interracial convergence to imagine urban political ecologies that are free of the spaces necessary for racial capitalism to thrive; this interdisciplinary approach breaks down barriers that have kept race, ecology and space separate

• There is a need to focus on abolitionist theories which seek the destruction of racial regimes and racial capitalism to liberate Black lives and Indigenous lands, this should occur across borders and combat the crisis of modernity that has led to the joint exploration of nature and labour

• Cities have been produced through these racialised logics to allow racism to be pervasive in landscapes and therefore cannot be separated from questions of justice and the environment

• It is important now to reimagine radical futures as spaces for convergence and epistemic communities that draw on intersections of urban political ecologists, border thinkers and the abolition of racial capitalism

McNamara & Farbotko, 2017

• The impacts of climate change have been and are predicted to be concentrated in tropical areas such as the Pacific Islands with rising sea levels, droughts and more frequent intense storms occurring the region; these low-lying islands are deemed to be likely uninhabitable in the future with migration suggested as a vital adaptation response; however island leaders and civil society groups oppose this inevitable resettlement

• The Pacific Climate Warriors is a grassroots network of young people from the Pacific Islands who take action to peacefully protect islands from the impact of climate change, to resist narratives of their homelands inevitably disappearing and instead defend their rights and cultures

• Narratives of ‘doomed’ hamper the adaptive capacity of the islands and overlook successes that have drawn on Indigenous knowledges to conserve resources and respond to stressors; there is a need to challenge the dominant paternalism in science and management and instead see humanity as heterogenous, political and able to respond

• The Climate Warriors are determined to advocate for their homelands and cultures and call for justice for the dispropionate burden they face related to increasing emissions, their largest campaign sought to demand fossil fuel responsibility by blocking the world’s largest coal port in Newcastle Australia

• This sees community groups refuse to accommodate ideas of Pacific Islanders as destined to be passive victims of climate change and deny the worst case scenario of migration but instead demand action and accountability from major polluters to protect their islands, cultures and lives

Tanasescu, 2013

• In 2008 Ecuador became the first country to guarantee rights to nature by incorporating this in a rewriting of the state’s constitution

• Natalia Greene began lobbying the Constitutional Assembly on behalf of the rights of nature and was initially met with a number of dissenting voices in April 2008 but by June efforts to convince assembly members began to see success

• This sees the marginal history of Nature become incorporated into mainstream political debate; this is occurring in multidirectional and unpredictable ways around the world with places such as New Zealand and Bolivia applying them slightly differently; however, the rights of nature are advancing

Lorimer & Driessen, 2014

• There are two conceptions of an experiment, one being the modern scientific understanding and the second being the wild experiment that considers the nonhuman world as found, unpredictable and messy

• In the Anthropocene there are a number of questions on how science should be conducted, who environmentalists should trust and what to do if Nature were to end; environmentalism now seeks to conduct a series of wild experiments involving open-ended, uncertain and political negotiations between people and wildlife involving multiple expertise not all of which are human; these leave the lab to find an unpredictable and uncertain experimental landscape where public and political conjunction is promoted and agency is provided to nonhuman actors

• The OVP is an example of this; however, received much backlash as it was seen as a pure wilderness, yet was highly artificial and led to a number of animal deaths, disagreements on what is natural and demands for intervention from citizens showing how environmental decisions are always ethical and political choices

• Drawing on this, environmentalism should shift from protecting a fixed, pure Nature to experimenting with dynamic, uncertain ecosystems and involving the public in decision making in a manner that is democratic and adaptive to improve environmental governance

Moore, 2017

• Challenges the idea of the Anthropocene where planetary breakdown is attributed to human activities to instead propose the Capitalocene where it is the economic system of capitalism that has led to the economic crisis

• This is due to capitalism’s way of organising nature based on colonial expansion, global trade and industrial nature where nature became treated as external and cheap alongside labour, bodies, food, energy and raw materials

• The endless systematic growth and creative destruction of nature to form new frontiers for capitalist production by depleting nature is what has led to the ecological crisis 

• This links to the Black Radical Tradition’s perspective of climate justice as intersecting with the systematic injustices created by racial capitalism that cheapens both Nature and Black lives

Said, 1979

• The Orient was almost a European invention, it is not a fact of nature and is not merely there but it is based on a history of thought, imagery and vocabulary drawing from a style of thought based on an ontological separation between the Orient and the Occident that is recreated in works of culture ever since

• The ideas, culture and history of the Orient cannot be seriously understood without understanding the power operations behind it, the relationship between the Orient and the Occident is one of domination and hegemony that justified ruling, dominating and restructuring from the West

• The structure of the Orient is nothing more than a structure of lies mainly produced by the British and French cultural enterprise over India and the Bible lands in their own interests

• It is this recreation of of the Orient in speech, cultural artefacts and ideas that allowed it to become embedded in socially accepted discourses and become an unquestioned reality