Environmental Justice Lecture 2: Environmental Justice in Contemporary Movements and Policy

Defining Environmental Justice

  • Environmental Justice (EJ) is defined as environmental problems that cannot be solved without addressing social injustice.
  • Vulnerable communities are at the frontline of environmental risk.
  • Abjection and ‘othering’ of marginalised communities is a direct result of historical and ongoing colonial violence.
  • Defining injustice involves distribution, recognition, participation, and capabilities.
  • There are extractivist roots of environmental injustice.
  • It is important to challenge traditional understandings of environment as separate from ‘us’.

From Environmental Justice to Climate Justice

  • Climate Justice emphasises that the impacts of climate change fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations.
  • Climate change is “another environmental condition that demonstrates the broader social injustice of poor and minority communities” (Scholsberg and Collins, 2014, p. 362).
  • “The environment and climate system are not simply systems of existing injustice, but instead the necessary conditions for the achievement of social justice. The connection between environmental damage and the continued vulnerability of communities brought more energy and significance to the issue of climate change” (Scholsberg and Collins, 2014, p. 363).

Global Climate Justice Movements

  • Includes Indigenous Climate Action, Fridays for Future, Climate Alliance, and Extinction Rebellion.

Australian Climate Justice Movements

  • Examples include #STOPADANI, School Strike 4 Climate (SS4C), Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), and Seed Indigenous Youth for Climate Justice.

History of the Climate Justice Movement: Hurricane Katrina

  • Occurred in 2005 in New Orleans, United States.
  • Amplified preexisting injustices: segregation, poverty, education, and housing.
  • Caused ecological damage to ecosystems, threatening human and nonhuman communities.
  • “While Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is generally understood as influential in the development of the intersection of environmental and climate justice, it is important to note that there was a relationship emerging before that particular storm” (Scholsberg and Collins, 2014, p. 362).

Case Study: Climate Refugees

  • 376 million people forcibly displaced by floods, windstorms, earthquakes, or droughts since 2008.
  • Climate refugees are not covered by the 1951 refugee convention.
  • Growing concern and discussion surrounding climate refugees.
  • 1. 2 billion people could be displaced by climate-related events by 2050.

Case Study: 2019-2020 Australian Bushfires

  • Climate change erupted in our backyards.
  • Caused global horror and outpourings of grief, record-breaking donations.
  • Critical analysis is needed because climate change has scaled the walls of a wealthy economy.

Climate Justice: Climate Coloniality

  • Historical responsibilities: inequitable impact of climate change on previously colonised.
  • Colonialism undermines everyday life and ability to respond.
  • Includes colonisation, racism, land dispossession, and debt.
  • Decolonising climate means addressing impact of colonisation alongside climate change.
  • “Pollution is not a manifestation or side effect of colonialism, but is rather an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to land. That is, pollution is best understood as the violence of colonial land relations, rather than environmental damage, which is a symptom of violence. These colonial relations are reproduced through even well-intentioned environmental science and activism” (Liboiron, 2021, p. 6).

Differing Approaches to Climate Justice

  • Academic Theories
  • NGOs
  • Grassroots Movements

Climate Justice 1: Academic Theories

  • Ideal theoretical approaches from ethics and political theory.
  • Historical responsibility: polluters pay.
  • Per-capita equity: equal share of emissions pie.
  • Rights-based:
    • Developmental: the right to develop out of poverty.
    • Human rights: Climate change infringement of rights to life, health, and subsistence.
    • Environmental rights: basic right to an environment that can support life, including a stable climate system.

Climate Justice 2: NGOs

  • Elite-focused NGOs.
  • A conduit and reflection of the interests of grassroots movements.
  • Key difference apparent at level of political focus: not seeking major structural change but working within existing frameworks.

Climate Justice 3: Grassroots Movements

  • Critical of NGO economic approach.
  • Climate change understood as a manifestation of EJ.
  • Long focus on fossil fuel industry.
  • Focus on removing causes of climate change and addressing inequitable impacts on the functioning of both individuals and communities.
  • Analysis: “Looking both ways”
    • “What we’re trying to do is to build a power base that is invested in climate action. Because if you’re only talking about carbon, then anybody who has a more daily emergency – whether it’s police violence, gender violence or housing precarity – is going to think: “That’s a rich person problem. I’m focused on the daily emergency of staying alive.” But if you can connect the issues and show how climate action can create better jobs and redress gaping inequalities, and lower stress levels, then you start getting people’s attention and you build a broader constituency that is invested in getting climate policies passed.”

Klimaforum09: Copenhagen Climate Forum

  • Broad principles narrowed to:
    • Abandon fossil fuels
    • Pay for historical responsibility
    • Food and land sovereignty
    • Critique of market approaches

People’s Agreement of Cochabamba

  • 2010: The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth was held.
  • Meeting resulted in a draft of a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.
  • Non-human parts of nature should be given legal rights, just like people.

Case Study: Magpie River

  • The Magpie River, also known as the Muteshekau-shipu, has been recognised as a living entity by the Canadian government.
  • Magpie River's personhood status is a bid to protect it from future threats, such as hydro development.

Indigenous and Multispecies Justice

  • Critique growth models and social/economic organization that relies on extractivist logics.
  • Climate Justice as human and ecological: both systems must be functioning.
  • Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (personhood).
  • Protection of Indigenous people, respect and integrity, rights, historical responsibilities, restorative justice, and participatory governance.
  • Multispecies Justice: Moving beyond individual humans to entangled natures.

Just Energy Transitions

  • Applying environmental and climate justice to energy transition.
  • Public engagement in design of a new economy.
  • Social license of technologies.
  • Equitable benefit sharing.
  • Green new deal.
  • Real Deal in Australia: Gladstone and Geelong.

Just Adaptations

  • Centre potential impacts to vulnerable communities and inequities caused by climate change.
  • Importance of local in developing adaptation strategies and policies.
  • Just adaptation requires multiple notions of justice.
  • Sydney adaptation policy process.
  • Future Earth/Academy of Science Just Adaptation Strategy.

Wrapping Up: People’s Agreement of Cochabamba

  • The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress and limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself. Under capitalism, Mother Earth is converted into a source of raw materials, and human beings into consumers and a means of production, into people that are seen as valuable only for what they own, and not for what they are.

Wrapping Up: Climate, Colonialism, and ‘Apocalypse’

  • Entanglement of colonialism, environmental damage, and climate change.
  • Shifting understandings of our relationship to the environment.
  • Emphasis on critical engagement of structural underpinnings of climate change, environmental degradation.
  • Apocalypse as ‘already happened’.
  • “This isn’t some distant, dystopian future. This isn’t “somewhere else” (and even if it were, that’s no excuse not to care). This is here and now. This crisis didn’t appear out of thin air. Someone did this to us: the fossil fuel industry and the governments that aided and abetted it. And it didn’t start there. The fossil fuel industry was born of the industrial revolution, which was born of slavery, which was born of colonialism. It’s no accident that the map of climate change’s worst wrath to date looks like a colonizer’s playground. Because that’s what it is. And it’s also no accident that when it does play out in more “affluent” countries, it finds its way to communities of color with all the precision of a heat-seeking missile — that’s a feature, not a bug.” - MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR
  • “Pollution, scientific ways to know pollution, and actions to mitigate pollution allow colonialism to produce and reproduce its effects […] Colonialism is not just about taking Land […] ongoing Land theft requires maintenance and infrastructure that are not as discrete, given that colonization is a continuing process, not simply a historical event. Colonialism is a set of specific, structured, interlocking, and overlapping relations that allow these events to occur, make sense, and even seem right (to some)” (Liboiron, 2021, p. 15-16).

Discussion

  • How could legal personhood for natural entities be imagined in the context of Australia and/or your home country?
  • What would be some of the implications of a declaration of personhood?

Contextualising Environmental Justice in SUST1001

  • What power structures are being ‘sustained’ in ‘sustainable development’ (Wk 1)
  • Fallacy of the nature/culture divide (Wk 2)
  • Indigenous knowledges and approaches to place and self (Wk 3)
  • Anthropocene: Anthropogenic change and environmental risk a universal but unequal problem (Wk 4)
  • Resource extraction, tragedy of the commons. Environmental justice for all planetary beings. (Wk 5)

Conclusions

  • A long history of environmental justice.
  • Multiple definitions of ‘environment’ and ‘justice’.
  • Multiple approaches to climate justice.
  • Climate policy implications: climate coloniality; just transition; just adaptation.
  • These will be central to environmental and climate justice organisation.