Climate Futures

Reimagining Global Climate Justice

Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian, Debashish Munshi, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian, Debashish Munshi

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786997852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Approaching the issues of climate change and climate justice from a range of diverse perspectives including those of culture, gender, indigeneity, race, and sexuality, as well as challenging colonial histories and capitalist presents, Climate Futures boldly addresses the apparent inevitability of climate chaos. Seeking better explanations of the underlying causes and consequences of climate change, and mapping strategies toward a better future, or at a minimum, the most likely best-case world that we can get to, this book envisions planetary social movements robust enough to spark the necessary changes needed to achieve deeply sustainable and just economic, social, and political policies and practices. Bringing together insights from interdisciplinary scholars, policymakers, creatives and activists, Climate Futures argues for the need to get past us-and-them divides and acknowledge how lives of creatures far and near, human and non-human, are interconnected.

1 | THE FUTURE IS OURS TO SEEk: CHANGING THE INEVITABILITY OF CLIMATE CHAOS TO PROSPECTS OF HOPE AND JUSTICE

Debashish Munshi, Priya A. Kurian, John Foran, and Kum-Kum Bhavnani

The present is tense but it is within our hands to make sure that the future is not. As in grammar, it is the will to change that marks the shift in tenses. And to combat the forces of climate change bearing down on the planet we need to harness the power of the will to change. We are long past the time to sit back and accept that whatever will be will be. As the author and social activist Naomi Klein (2014a: 28) says, “[N]othing is inevitable. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is up to us.”

Around the time Klein’s (2014a) landmark book This Changes Everything was stirring social media platforms and receiving widespread attention in the news media, another influential author, Margaret Atwood (2014), suggested that the term “climate change” was limiting and that we should refer to the “great big change we are all in the midst of” as “everything change.” This is because, as she says, when there are climatic changes as, for example, the patterns of where it rains or where it doesn’t, just about everything in life changes—from the foods we eat to the places we live in, to our relationships with human and non-human life and to nature in general. How drastic such changes can be is on constant display and brought home to us if not through direct experience then by the news and social media. The grim reality of climate change unfolding around us, for example, is captured in the extreme weather events around the world, wreaking havoc and setting new records in their wake. George Monbiot’s (2017) words about Hurricane Harvey that hit Texas in August 2017, could just as well apply to Hurricanes Irma and Maria that devastated large swathes of the Caribbean a month later or indeed Cyclones Fehi and Gita that ravaged the South Pacific in 2018:

Hurricane Harvey offers a glimpse of a likely global future; a future whose average temperatures are as different from ours as ours are from those of the last ice age. It is a future in which emergency becomes the norm, and no state has the capacity to respond. It is a future in which, as a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters notes, disasters like Houston’s occur in some cities several times a year. It is a future that, for people in countries such as Bangladesh, has already arrived, almost unremarked on by the rich world’s media. It is the act of not talking that makes this nightmare likely to materialize. (Monbiot 2017, citing Buchanan, Oppenheimer, and Kopp 2017)

Our volume wants to create possibilities for talking so that the nightmare does not materialize. At the same time, we editors have a relentless hope—also common to Klein’s and Atwood’s visions—for a radically different future that encompasses a flourishing and just world.

It was not only Klein’s and Atwood’s musings that got us thinking. It was also the stories of the countless women and men working tirelessly at the frontlines of climate change in every part of the world—from the sinking landmasses of the Southern Pacific and the drought-stricken stretches of Africa and West Asia to the flood-ravaged cities and villages of South Asia and South and Central America. Again, what was common to these stories was a sense of hope in the midst of tragedy, a phenomenon well-documented by Rebecca Solnit in her 2009 classic, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.

It is our confidence in the active power of hope that the four of us embarked on a journey to envision Climate Futures and to join with others to re-imagine global climate justice. We had already worked on a volume, Feminist Futures (Bhavnani, Foran, Kurian, and Munshi 2016), inspired as we were by the extraordinary ways in which subaltern Third World women and men resist the oppressive conditions in which they find themselves. We decided that what was needed was to find a way to bring people from around the world for conversations and debates around issues of climate justice. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation allowed us to host a symposium at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, in July 2015. The goal was to see how climate justice could be collectively re-imagined by climate justice organizations, grassroots activists, public intellectuals, and scholars. Those intense Bellagio discussions led us to craft an open letter in December 2015, published in the Huffington Post, to Christiana Figueres, the then Executive Secretary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Laurent Fabius, the President of the 21st UN Conference of the Parties (COP 21), and the would-be negotiators of the world’s future from 195 countries at the Paris COP 21. We asked that delegates “center the idea of justice in climate negotiations” and put “gender, indigenous rights, and resource distribution on the agenda so we may all enjoy a low-carbon, sustainable, equitable, and deeply democratic future” (Bhavnani 2015; see Foran 2016c on the limitations of the outcome of COP 21’s “Paris Agreement”).

This volume has emerged from the discussions we began in Bellagio, which continued with an enlarged community of scholars and activists. We took on the challenge of mapping strategies toward a better future for our planet, or at a minimum, the best-case planet that we can get to. Our aim has been to sharpen understandings of the social, political, and cultural aspects of environmental change, as climate change and climate justice cannot be thought about—or better futures imagined—without them. We do this by drawing on the energy of climate action groups, and their multifaceted responses to questions of justice, to envision planetary social movements that could help spark the necessary changes for sustainable economic, social, political, and environmental policies and practices.

Climate justice perspectives center the fact that the brunt of climate change falls hardest on the most poor and marginal peoples—peoples often trampled by the twin ravages of colonialism and capitalism, who demonstrate resilience despite these depredations. The rampant extraction of resources by imperial powers in colonized lands—and subsequently by local predator elites—left the lands in a state of continuing impoverishment, and with depleted levels of physical and economic resources that make it daunting, if not almost impossible, to withstand the humanitarian and environmental crises caused by climate change. The extraction-driven industries built on the platform of colonialism by the so-called “richer” nations of today have been primarily responsible for climate change. Yet these nations have made little attempt to take responsibility and atone for their destructive actions. The reckless capitalist pursuit of growth, production, and profit have propelled some to protect their lavish lifestyles with no regard for the negative consequences of their actions for the poor and vulnerable. The vast disparities in access to resources underpin the structured inequalities we encounter around the world. These inequalities traverse constituencies—all of which are shaped by the other constituencies—that include, but are not limited to, pensioners and senior citizens, urban slum dwellers, Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, women, the young, and rural communities. Instances of climate refugees, or women affected by drought and food shortage that increase their burdens, or Inuit populations displaced by eroding shorelines and melting permafrost are already all too frequent. In addition, millions face the risk of being drowned or losing their freshwater resources as sea levels rise, posing the devastating prospects of loss of both homeland and livelihood for millions of people.

We know that responses to the challenge of climate change can take the form of social movements and critical writings that straddle the natural sciences and the human sciences; that move fluently between academia and many other groupings; and that, therefore, make good on the realization that progress in any one aspect of the climate crisis can prompt change in the others. It is perhaps a little too obvious to say that climate justice means social justice. We only have to pause to remember the refugees desperate for water in the refugee camps of the early 21st century, and the droughts that pervade places as disparate as Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Syria, and the US, among others. Of course, all have very differing impacts, depending on people’s access to resources for adaptation and recovery, and yet also share a common cause: the lack of climate justice and the lack of social/political/economic justice. Our volume aims to forge connections among these locations, alongside the emerging networks of social movements, NGOs, websites, think tanks, community organizations, and impromptu local struggles that attempt to tackle this “super wicked” problem (Levin, Cashore, Bernstein, and Auld 2012). It is evident that a global climate justice movement continues to grow—witness the million marchers around the globe on November 29, 2015 on the eve of the COP 21 in Paris, France, in a week when the French “State of Emergency” made illegal any political public gatherings of two or more people,¹ and the world-wide school students’ strike for the planet in March 2019.

Today’s climate crisis has deep historical roots. When the present geological era is named the “Anthropocene,” we implicate the entire trajectory of humanity’s productive metabolism as the agent of that crisis. Indeed, the very term “Anthropocene” is “a recognition that humans have created the prospect for a systems failure of the planet,” which includes climate change, species extinction, freshwater degradation, and industrialized monoculture agriculture (Kurian 2017: 104). Only movements that firmly identify themselves with historical movements for social justice and change, and that arise from this planetary system failure, will be able to mobilize society-wide transformations around the globe. These movements have often based their strategies and tactics on challenging the forces that continue to deepen this historical ecological rift. For example, the iconic Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA or Save the Narmada Movement), launched in 1985 to challenge the building of mega-dams such as the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the river Narmada in central India, and their devastating human and environmental consequences, succeeded in questioning the World Bank’s apparently unthinking support for large-scale projects, and led to fundamental changes in the recognition of the rights of those displaced by development projects in India. The Sardar Sarovar Dam was inaugurated in 2017 despite the movement against it. Yet the NBA continues to work for social justice among marginalized communities (Uniyal 2017), and its vision of a transformative model of development that links social justice, environmental sustainability, and human rights remains as urgent as ever.

The rise of global environmentalism since the mid-20th century is embodied in a range of environmental movements, including cross-national global networks and national and local movements. Many of these movements have formed strategic alliances to halt, for example, large-scale dam building, by challenging destructive resource extraction and expropriation by corporations and nation states. More recently, mobilizing around climate justice to keep fossil fuels in the ground, such as the Break Free civil disobedience action across six continents in May 2016, has also sparked a transition to alternative and just energy systems everywhere. Unifying global discourses of “sustainable development” and “planet earth”—however contested or coopted—are marked by the presence of movements grounded in local realities, cultures, and practices.

Climate justice is the articulation of these movements: the term and the social forces that carry it are gaining momentum. Fighting at the front lines, promoting intersectionality, developing coalitions, and infusing a systemic analysis of the roots of the crisis are fundamental to climate justice movements. And so are unapologetic pressures for radical change, based as they are on expressions of commitment, love, and hope. Yet each movement speaks with a distinct voice and works with specific historical missions. Our volume is an expression of all of this. In centering climate justice for all species, indeed, for the planet itself, we open up debates that could allow for strong participation of readers in creating deeply democratic futures.

The volume brings together contributions that offer innovative analyses, engage with future-oriented strategies, and envision new ways of responding to the climate crisis. Together, these may help enhance the resilience and resistance of a range of marginalized and disadvantaged communities. We argue that one way of thinking about the present moment, and the foreseeable future, is to examine democracy and economics within the context of cultural and ideological change. We do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• About the contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword: Equity: the final frontier for an effective climate change agreement
• 1 The future is ours to seek: changing the inevitability of climate chaos to prospects of hope and justice
• Part One Climate Change, Colonialism, and Capitalism
• Part Two Climate Change Through Lenses of Diversity
• Part Three Social Sciences, Humanities, and Climate Justice
• Part Four The Quest for Climate Justice Across the World
• Part Five Thinking Beyond the Here and Now: Envisioning Many Futures
• References
• Index