Introduction to Nearly Carbon-Neutral (NCN) Conferences (visit panel)

Air Travel: Academia’s Biggest Dirty Little Secret

Ken Hiltner

Air travel to conferences, talks, and meetings can account for a third of the carbon footprint for a typical scholar or university. The event that you are attending is using a nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference approach developed at UCSB that can reduce conference carbon footprints by a factor of 100 or more. In this talk, Hiltner details the problem and UCSB’s NCN approach. For more information on how to coordinate NCN events, see our White Paper / Practical Guide.

Ken Hiltner is a Professor of the environmental humanities at UCSB. The Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI), Hiltner has appointments in the English and Environmental Studies Departments. He has published five books, including Milton and Ecology, What Else is Pastoral?, Renaissance Ecology, and Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, as well as a range of environmentally oriented articles. Hiltner has served as Director of UCSB’s Literature & Environment Center, its Early Modern Center, the English Department’s graduate program, and as the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute. Prior to becoming a professor, for many years he made his living as a furniture maker. A second-generation woodworker, he received commissions from five continents and had collections featured in major metropolitan galleries.

Panel 1: The Global Climate Justice Movement in the Age of Crisis, Part One (visit panel)

The Global Climate Justice Movement Must Gear Up for Taking Political Power

John Foran

After briefly introducing this part of the conference, consisting of four panels on the problems and prospects of the Global Climate Justice Movement in the Age of Crisis, I will present what may be the movement’s biggest task: crafting ways and means for it to actually take power across the world so that the desires of the vast majority of the world’s residents (including the non-human creatures among us) can be the benchmark against which we measure our chances for arriving in mid-century in a world characterized not by multiple crises – global inequality, political disenchantment, and cultures of violence – but rather in a world beyond capitalism itself, even as the climate continues to threaten the very basis of humanity’s existence.

My academic specialty is movements for radical social change, both 20th century revolutions – my 2005 book Taking Power: On the Origins of Twentieth Century Revolutions in the Third World is free – and 21st century movements for radical social change, from the Zapatistas and the global justice movement to Occupy, the Arab Spring, and now, esp. the global climate justice movement (see “Beyond Insurgency to Radical Social Change: The New Situation (2014).

I now work passionately as a scholar-activist on, for, and within the global climate justice movement, which I see as at the center of the struggle for any prospect of achieving social justice and radical social change in the 21st century. A lot of my work is published at www.resilience.org. It can also be found on the websites of the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory and the Climate Justice Project. I am an active member of System Change Not Climate Change, the Green Party of California, and Santa Barbara 350.

Get Comfortable with Paradox

Nathan Thanki

In this talk Nathan points out some flaws in the organising culture of the climate movement and suggests that the way to build better movements (because the idea of “winning” in the climate crisis is laughable) is to embrace contradictions and engage in a battle of the imagination.

Nathan is one of the co-coordinators of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice and has been involved in the international climate change negotiations and global movements for climate justice for several years. He is currently based in his hometown of Belfast, Ireland, but has lived in Sudan, Canada, Peru, and the US where he attended the College of the Atlantic and was trained as a human ecologist. He dabbles in bad poetry, good whiskey and loud electronic music.

Climate Fear, Truth, and the Public: Discussion of the New York Magazine Article, “The Uninhabitable Earth”

Ezra Silk, Margaret Klein Salamon, and Anya Grenier

Three leaders of The Climate Mobilization discuss the recent controversy around the New York Magazine piece, “The Uninhabitable Earth” and the role of fear and other emotions in the climate movement. Should we tell the whole, frightening truth? Can they handle it? We argue that, when combined with a potential solution—WWII scale climate mobilization—the truth can be intensely motivating.

Margaret Klein Salamon, PhD is the founder and director of The Climate Mobilization Salamon earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from Adelphi University and also holds a BA in Social Anthropology from Harvard. Though she loved being a therapist, Margaret felt called to apply her psychological and anthropological knowledge to solving climate change.

Ezra Silk is a co-founder and head of Strategy and Policy at the Climate Mobilization. A former newspaper reporter, Silk is the author of TCM’s Victory Plan, and he is leading TCM’s efforts in Los Angeles.

Anya Grenier is the head of The Climate Mobilization’s media operation. She is also the author of TCM’s Blueprint for an Emergency Climate Movement. She recently graduated from Yale college.

“Safe” Climate Change?

Emily Williams

In order to build ‘climate justice futures’ collectively, our society needs to square with a divisive conception of climate change — that the threshold for “safe” climate change is often decided by those who are not yet feeling climate impacts, and discounts lived experiences of climate change occuring here and now. Climate justice futures will need to address historical marginalizations to mitigate emissions and pursue energy democracy, as well as to address the losses and damages created by the interaction of climate change and social inequality both currently and in the future.

Emily is a graduate student in Geography at UCSB, a co-founder of the Climate Justice Project, and a member of 350 Santa Barbara. She did her undergraduate degree at UCSB, graduating in 2013 with a B.S in environmental studies. While at UCSB, she interned with the NASA DEVELOP Program and cofounded the Fossil Free UC campaign. After graduating, Emily worked for the California Student Sustainability Coalition as a Campaign Director for Fossil Free, and cofounded the Climate Justice Project (CJP). With CJP, she attended COPs 19, 20, and 21, where she grew an interest in how climate solutions are often pitted against climate justice on local, national, and international scales, and became active in demanding youth have a voice in the negotiations process. In 2015, she joined the Climate Hazards Group as a researcher. Her research and organizing focus is at the intersection of climate impacts, extractivism, political ecology, accountability, and policy, all within a frame of climate justice. 

Panel 2: The Global Climate Justice Movement in the Age of Crisis, Part Two (visit panel)

Climate justice in the era of Trumpism (and capitalist crisis)

Patrick Bond

View slides.

The transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa has lessons for those concerned about Donald Trump’s climate politics and progressive responses – in part because Nelson Mandela’s call for sanctions against the Pretoria regime helped to financially destabilise and morally delegitimise the white power structure. That strategy, fuelled by local protests, ultimately split away major corporations from the racist state in 1985, leading to democracy in 1994. Aware of this legacy, Naomi Klein and Joseph Stiglitz (amongst others) have called for sanctions against the United States on grounds of climate irresponsibility. There are a great many reasons to establish a sanctions movement against not only Trump (for he may be impeached in coming years) but also the politics of proto-fascist ‘Trumpism’, for this regime is genuinely a threat to humanity:

accelerated climate change caused by relaxation of environmental regulations

Pentagon’s ‘first-strike’ nuclear capability amidst worsening North Korea and Iran conflicts

extreme military aggression in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan – including rising Islamaphobia

heightened tension with China

renewed US alliances with authoritarian regimes

trade wars, corporate investment deals, tax dodging and reactionary fiscal policy

macro-economic mismanagement in an era of stagnation yet high volatility

new restrictions to immigration, refugees and development aid

fusions of reactionary socio-cultural, political tendencies in US society with a charismatic state leader backed by most mega-corporate interests

the need for solidarity with US peoples, especially along racial, ethnic, gender and class lines.

To be sure, the July 2017 G20 Hamburg meeting essentially gave Trump a pass. And most importantly, US social movements have not yet asked for sanctions solidarity (although wide-ranging Trump-related micro-boycotts are emerging). But since his rule threatens planetary survival, we are obliged to contemplate what aspects of global capitalist crisis might make Trumpism more vulnerable to global people’s sanctions, as a precursor to the rest of the world lowering our vulnerability levels to environmental, economic and geopolitical catastrophes in the period immediately ahead.

Patrick Bond is professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and honorary professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society which he directed from 2004-16. He is the author of Politics of Climate Justice (UKZN Press, 2012) and he edited several other books on climate policy. His publications mainly document neoliberalism, sub-imperialism and political ecology in South Africa, e.g. Elite Transition (2014), South Africa – The Present as History (with John Saul, 2014), Talk Left, Walk Right (2006), Against Global Apartheid (2003), Unsustainable South Africa (2002) and Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal (2000). His PhD research was conducted at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering under David Harvey’s supervision during the early 1990s. Since then he has also taught or researched at Johns Hopkins (public health), York University (politics, environment), California-Berkeley (geography), Gyeongsang University (political economy) and Africa University (development studies).

“The Confluence of Alternatives” – An Indian Initiative

Pallav Das

Contemporary India is going through a perplexingly critical time in its economic development. The neoliberal fundamentalist agenda being foisted on the Indian people by its power elite has inflicted the worst forms of inequality on the society. Today, the richest 1% of the country accounts for nearly half of the country’s total private wealth, about $1.75 trillion! The story of the underprivileged, however, is quite different. Thirty years ago before the country opened up its economy, India accounted for about one-fifth of the world’s poorest. Today, close to one third of that category, or about 400 million, live in India. These economic choices have also had a disastrous impact on India’s environment. Home to six of the ten most polluted cities in the world, its natural resources being plundered rapaciously and its weather patterns becoming increasingly erratic, unreliable and often lethal, the country seems to be hurtling ever forward towards ecological mayhem.

Despite this bleak and overwhelming picture, however, there are significant efforts being made by the civil society to construct alternative paradigms and pathways towards a world that is sustainable, equitable and just. Vikalp Sangam, or the Confluence of Alternatives, is one such initiative, which is trying to explore and understand alternative thinking and organizing on a large spectrum of economic, social and environmental issues in India. The chief aim of the endeavor is to create a platform where alternatives, which take the earth away from ecological self-destruction and the bitter calcification of economic inequality, reach a large audience and become viable for discussion, analysis and eventual replication in other places. This paper will discuss how the Vikalp Sangam vision is unfolding in India.

Pallav Das has pursued a unique twin track career in environmental conservation and creative communications. As a conservation professional and activist, Pallav has spent years exploring the Himalayan wilderness, researching and writing on the ecology of wetlands and alpine areas, building grass-roots networks to promote sustainable environmental policies, and analyzing and advocating public policies for biodiversity and habitat conservation. Pallav’s involvement with environmental campaigns goes back to the late seventies when he co-founded one of the first environmental action groups in India, called Kalpavriksh (www.kalpavriksh.org)

As a communications expert, Pallav has designed and launched innovative campaigns, produced incisive documentaries, developed communications strategies, and founded and led both private and non-profit organizations. Pallav has documented some of India’s most pressing development challenges through his film work, including films on violence against women and the threat of HIV/AIDS among street children. As a student of politics and social anthropology, Pallav is keen to help build a productive space at the confluence of ecology, politics and communications. He is currently in the process of launching a website (www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org) with Ashish Kothari, his colleague from Kalpavriksh, India. The website is an attempt at providing a platform for exchanging analysis, ideas, activist initiatives and news etc. on next systems and attempts at creating alternatives world wide, which challenge the current neo-liberal orthodoxy.

Militant Particularism and Ecosocialism

Brad Hornick

For Ecosocialists, ecological alternatives are not possible within the framework of capitalism, so the climate movement must articulate socialist demands alongside transitional concrete ecological demands and reforms. The intellectual’s role within movements is both to engage with and empower local militancy, but also maintain theoretical distance in order to direct movements strategically. I discuss recent debates within the ecosocialist community featuring Richard Smith and John Bellamy Foster, using David Harvey’s concept of “militant particularlism” to elaborate the paradoxes of ecosocialist organizing (see attached).

Brad Hornick has been a climate justice activist in Vancouver, Canada and is presently organizing with systemchangenotclimatechange.org. He is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University working on a dissertation entitled: “Climate, Capitalism, Existentialism: Observing the Movement.” His discussion piece is entitled “Harvey, Klein, Smith, Foster: Militant Particularism and Ecosocialism,” published in New Politics, Summer 2017.

Climate Justice as Climate Realism

Tom Athanasiou

This video (and sorry if it’s a bit long) presents a draft summary of a book in progress.  In it, I attempt to lay out the basics of what I see as true climate realism.  To wit, this is an argument for a justice-forward strategy aimed at stabilizing the climate system within capitalism.  The argument, to be explicit, is that we haven’t the time to “get past capitalism” before we can stabilize the climate.  This argument, of course, is based on the climate science.

My core claim is that at the highest level, we only need two things to save ourselves.  The first is indeed a thoroughgoing green technology revolution, but the second is a high-cooperation world, and it’s long past time to focus on the second.  And on the unforgiving fact that a high-cooperation world is not and will never be possible at anything like today’s obscene level of economic and social stratification.

Along the way, I try to hit a lot of bases.  One key section – though it doesn’t work that well without slides – attempts to lay out a typology of the climate justice challenges that are now before us.

Tom Athanasiou is a climate-equity specialist.  He founded and coordinated the international Climate Action Network’s Equity Working Group, which was active in the years before Paris.  Currently, he co-directs the Climate Equity Reference Project, a long-term modeling and policy initiative designed to advance equity as a driver of extremely ambitious global climate mobilization, and is also one of the organizers of the Civil Society Equity Coalition, which remains active within the climate negotiations.

Tom’s principle interest is distributional justice, in the context of an emergency global climate mobilization, which he hopes to live to see.  As a writer, he is the author of Divided Planet: the Ecology of Rich and Poor and the co-author of Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming and Greenhouse Development Rights: The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World.  He is now writing a new book, tentatively titled Fair Enough? Justice and Technology in the Greenhouse Century. 

How the Unist’ot’en are arresting Pipelines and asserting sovereignty

Leah Temper

Since 2011, The Unist’ot’en camp in North-Western British Colombia, Canada, have been maintaining a check-point controlling access through their territory to stop government and industry plans to build several gas and oil pipelines through their territory. These pipelines form part of an energy corridor that aim to unlock the vast energy reserves of the tar sands and transport fracked gas with disastrous implications for the climate. The camp was established to oppose these projects, to defend the sacred headwaters, the salmon that spawn there and to maintain their autonomy over their unceded lands.

In this presentation I will present a video I directed and filmed at the camp in 2013. It shows how against all odds, the Unist’ot’en camp is succeeding in stopping up to 7 pipelines, holding up billions in investment and keeping millions of barrels (and cubic metres) of fossil fuels under the ground. It also shows how the camp, beyond being a simple movement of resistance, is creating a new intentional community, informed by a millennia old relationship with the territory and natural law, but through a constant process of re-imagination.

The Unist’ot’en camp interrupts the flows of capital and goods, however it is also a space for enactment of a living anti-capitalist and post-petroleum alternative, informed by an ancient system of values on how to create sustainable relationships with the material world and  transformative politics of decolonisation that revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices through a transformative praxis. This includes the recent establishment of a healing center for indigenous youth and experimentation into low-carbon technologies and ways of being.

Welcome to the gateway of meaningful decolonization.

Corridors of Resistance is an EJOLT Video directed by Leah Temper, edited by Siobhan McKeon and Claudia Medina with camera by Fiona Becker and Leah Temper. It accompanies a report on Climate Justice: Refocusing resistance for climate justice. COPing in, COPing out and beyond Paris Including an article on the camp with the title: Decolonising and decarbonising: How the Unist’ot’en are arresting pipelines and asserting autonomy (Leah Temper and Sam Bliss).

Leah Temper is a trans-disciplinary scholar-activist specialized in Environmental Justice Politics, Ecological Economics and Political Ecology based at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.  She is the founder and co-director of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (www.ejatlas.org) and is currently the principal investigator of ACKnowl-EJ (Activist-academic Co-production of Knowledge for Environmental Justice), a project looking at how transformative alternatives are born from resistance. Previously, she was the Director of USC Canada’s Seeds of Survival Program International, and the scientific coordinator of the EJOLT Project, where she co-edited several reports on Climate Justice and Leaving Oil in the Soil. She has directed and shot several short documentary films about Degrowth, recycler’s movements and climate artivism and resistance.

Panel 3: Artivism (visit panel)

The SeaChange Voyage: Artivism in the Anthropocene

Kevin Buckland

In 2014 a group of artivists crafted a flotilla of fragile paper-mache canoes and embarked down the Hudson River, following the supply chain of fracked Bakken crude oil and defending the waters as a public commons. In July 2017 a mix of First Nations, local and international artists returned to the river on a solar-powered vessel, weaving together stories of resistance and resilience in the age of the climate crisis. This piece looks at the recent SeaChange Voyage as an example of engaged arts activism and cultural organizing (“artivism”) that is both working towards addressing immediate impacts to our water and climate, and working to heal some of the colonial and extractivist relationships with the land, water and eachother.

Through a multi-layered strategy of 1) supporting the deepening of personal relationships to water, 2) storytelling along supply chains: from the frontlines of Standing Rock to the Hudson River watershed 3) and supporting relationships among local activists and local artists, the SeaChange Voyage is exploring models of activism that build community as they resist common dangers, and opens an intersectional discourse around the waters and climate as a commons.

Kevin Buckland is an independent artivist (artist+activist) who has spent the past decade working across all scales of the Global Climate Justice Movement, primarily as theGlobal Artivist Coordinator with 350.org (2009-2015). From UN Climate summits to squatted hospitals, Kevin uses a myriad of forms from street-theater to performance and mass mobilizations to promote the use of creativity in the work of re-creating our world, and supports the strategic engagement of artists in re-conceiving the concept of activism. Recently, he has been looking more at how we organize than what we organize. As a writer he has self-published “Breathing Gezi”, a first-hand account of the Gezi Park occupation, and published numerous blog-posts and essays with 350.org, redpepper.org.uk, counterpunch, treehugger.com, Ejolt Report and others. You can follow him on twitter @change_of_art and instagram @coloresamor

Purpose and re-purpose

Daniel Fernandez

A critical question that I ask myself when I perform any task is “why am I doing this?” or “What is my purpose?”   As a scholar and an activist, I often wonder where my energies and talents are best spent to make the most positive impact and how my actions matter.   In this presentation, I ponder the meaning of purpose and re-purpose in a meta-sense, whether it be of materials, energies, or intentions and I consider what some of the strongest actions that I can take are as we face the political, social, economic and environmental challenges that I expect that the future will continue to bring forth at an increasing pace.

Daniel M.  Fernandez is a Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at CSUMB. He teaches classes in first-year physics, Sustainability Systems, Environmental Studies Capstone, and Infrastructure Systems. He also co-coordinates the Environmental Studies program at CSUMB. Dr. Fernandez research focuses on the collection of water from fog, studying techniques to assess the presence of fog and to maximize the collection of fog water. Dr. Fernandez is also engaged with campus-wide sustainability initiatives, and he manages the incipient Sustainable City Year Program.

Panel 4: Creating a Field: Climate Justice Studies (visit panel)

Talking about Some of the Most Important Things We Can as Scholar-Activists:  How Can We Create the New Field of Climate Justice Studies?

 John Foran

What might a sociology of climate justice look like?  This talk focuses on two main areas:  a sociology of the crisis itself, and a sociology of all the movements which are seeking to resolve the crisis.

Here are some of its characteristics:

We are in a state of multiple crises –triple crisis involving capitalist globalization, the fraying limits of formal representative democracy, and the pervasive violence that seeps throughout and into our cultures, bound together by, and in turn exacerbating, the likelihood of climate chaos. The interdependency of the several crises means that holistic, relational analysis and visionary transboundary scholarship will be essential to understand and confront climate change, and to create climate justice

Both the depth of the current crisis, and the central role played by the climate disruption that exacerbates it, suggest that our activism around climate change may open a window to moving beyond capitalism in our lifetime.  It seems evident that only a strong and vigorous climate justice movement on a global scale has the capacity to force governments to stand up to the economic and political forces of carbon capitalism.  Movements become even stronger when to a widely felt culture of opposition and resistance they add a positive vision of a better world, an alternative to strive for that could improve or replace what exists. We might call these positive, alternative visions “political cultures of creation.”

In the long run, the only real systemic “solution” to the crisis is a broad yet at the same time more radical climate justice movement willing to confront the root causes of the crisis, including capitalism, and strong enough to decisively cut emissions in a just way.  Our task is to widen and radicalize climate justice movements everywhere we can, preparing the ground in ourselves and a new generation for the longer anti-capitalist project of deep social transformation in the direction of an ecologically sustainable, socially just, and deeply democratic global future.

My academic specialty is movements for radical social change, both 20th century revolutions – my 2005 book Taking Power:  On the Origins of Twentieth Century Revolutions in the Third World is free – and 21st century movements for radical social change, from the Zapatistas and the global justice movement to Occupy, the Arab Spring, and now, esp. the global climate justice movement (see “Beyond Insurgency to Radical Social Change:  The New Situation (2014).

I now work passionately as a scholar-activist on, for, and within the global climate justice movement, which I see as at the center of the struggle for any prospect of achieving social justice and radical social change in the 21st century.  A lot of my work is published at www.resilience.org.  It can also be found on the websites of the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory and the Climate Justice Project.  I am an active member of System Change Not Climate Change, the Green Party of California, and Santa Barbara 350.

Linking Environmental Justice and Climate Justice through Academia and the Prison Industrial Complex

David Pellow

In this chapter, I link the field of Environmental Justice (EJ) studies to the emergent field of Climate Justice (CJ) Studies by examining some links between and among universities, prisons, and EJ/CJ struggles. Because CJ and EJ are tightly interwoven discourses, practices, and visions of social change, I argue that we can illuminate those linkages in practice by connecting the institutions of academia and the prison system to CJ and EJ politics particularly in relation to divestment campaigns, because these institutions are instruments of social oppression and ecological harm. Specifically, I demonstrate that prisons and universities actively contribute to environmental racism and climate change through planning decisions and investments that support fossil fuel economies and place ecosystems and human health at great risk.

David N. Pellow is the Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he teaches courses on social change movements, environmental justice, human-animal conflicts, sustainability, and social inequality. His teaching and research focus on ecological justice issues in the U.S. and globally. His books include: What is Critical Environmental Justice? (forthcoming); Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement; The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (with Lisa Sun-Hee Park); Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice; The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy (with Lisa Sun-Hee Park); and Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. He has served on the Boards of Directors for Global Response, The Global Action Research Center, the Center for Urban Transformation, the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health, Greenpeace USA, and International Rivers.

For Climate Justice Studies – Focus on the Object — Pedagogical Spectacles of Power Counter-Power —

Richard Widick

Creating the field of Climate Justice Studies will require sustained reflection on what such a discipline should take as its central objects of investigation.  In this talk I argue from theoretical grounds and empirical evidence, derived from years of participatory observation inside the UN climate talks, that one key object of Climate Justice Studies must be the public sphere spectacle of power that is the yearly convocation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conferences of the Parties.  Power understood dialectically always begets resistance, and so we arrive at the yearly rhythm of power and counter-power putting themselves on display … a pedagogy of masses tuning into the hyper-mediated public struggles that I see reproducing and potentially reshaping both globalization and the unfolding climate crisis.  From our temporal vantage point here, early in the 21^st century, I see future decades of perpetual public sphere struggle over global climate policy through the historical lens of the preceding decades of struggle over global economic policy.

Richard Widick, Sociologist & Visiting Scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara; Director & Co-founder with John Foran, International Institute of Climate Action & Theory (IICAT); CEO & Founder, Metroglobe Productions (MGP).

Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene

Kyle Powys White

Indigenous and allied scholars, knowledge keepers, scientists, learners, change-makers, and leaders are creating a field to support Indigenous peoples’ capacities to address anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Indigenous studies often reflect the memories and knowledges that arise from Indigenous peoples’ living heritages as societies with stories, lessons, and long histories of having to be well-organized to adapt to seasonal and inter-annual environmental changes. At the same time, our societies have been heavily disrupted by colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. As a Potawatomi scholar-activist working on issues Indigenous people face with the U.S. settler state, I perceive at least three key themes reflected across the field that suggest distinct approaches to inquiries into climate change — which I will discuss in the brief presentation.

Kyle Whyte holds the Timnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State University. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability, a faculty member of the Environmental Philosophy & Ethics graduate concentration, and a faculty affiliate of the American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Environmental Science & Policy programs. He is Potawatomi and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. His research, teaching, training, and activism address moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples and the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and climate science organizations. His work has recently extended to cover issues related to Indigenous food sovereignty.

Panel 5: India: The F(r)iction of Nuclear as a Climate Solution: Tales from India’s Nuclear Renaissance (visit panel)

Making the Invisible Visible: Documenting Nuclear Radiation with a Camera

Ashish Birulee

Since the nuclear era has begun, like many other countries India also started exploring uranium deposits for the purpose of making nuclear weapons and generating nuclear energy.  However, the uranium comes at a colossal human cost. In this case, those paying the price are India’s Indigenous population. Unfortunately uranium deposits are mostly found in Indigenous belts and this has become a curse for them. Displacement and health issues have become major problems. The land is turning into another Chernobyl and Hiroshima of sorts. The government refutes the allegations and refuses to acknowledge the problems. In other words the government is taking advantage of the vulnerability of native people. Thus, some serious questions arise, such as “Why is the nuclear waste is being dumped in Indigenous lands, and why can’t it be dumped in the capital city or in non-tribal areas?” Most countries are truly going green after the Fukushima tragedy but still the Indian government is not concerned.  The government’s false pride in pursuing nuclear power is actually a push more towards destruction. While many in the public have educated themselves, it is actually the government that needs to be educated on this issue.

In my presentation, I will try to bring attention to the social problems and environmental damages from the perspective of Indigenous peoples. I will focus on Indigenous peoples’ connections with the environment, discuss my activist work through photography, and describe why I see this profession as critical to revealing the invisible world of radiation.

Ashish Birulee is an Adivasi photojournalist and an activist with the Jharkhandi Organization Against Radiation who has disclosed the effects of radiation caused by uranium poisoning in Jadugoda, India.  He has been documenting impacts of radiation on local people to bring awareness. One of his photo essays is “Jadugoda: Drowning in Nuclear Greed.” Birulee is the first Indigenous photographer from his community whose photos have been exhibited in International platforms.  He is associated with an independent organization (Jharkhandi Organization Against Radiation) which was founded by his father Ghanshyam Birulee. This organization was awarded the Nuclear Free Future Award in 2004 and the Yours Green Brigade award in 1999.

The Perils of India’s Nuclear Renaissance and the Challenge of Energy Justice

ann-elise lewallen

While the world greeted Trump’s plans to withdraw from the Paris Accords in horror, in India Modi seized the opportunity to tout nuclear energy as a climate solution and announced construction plans for ten new nuclear reactors. Since Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster many post-industrial nations have opted to eliminate nuclear energy from their energy profiles, primarily Europe, North America, and Taiwan. Facing what observers have dubbed its terminal crisis, the nuclear industry has now pivoted to emerging markets, such as India. This June Japan’s Diet ratified the Indo-Japan Nuclear Agreement, facilitating India’s import of Japanese nuclear components to construct twelve new reactors with French and American partners. Even while India is in the midst of a “Nuclear Renaissance,” with ambitious plans to scale up its nuclear capacity from 6870MW to 14,500MW by 2024, and roughly double its reactor count, the Indian people are not convinced.

Across the nation, grassroots communities and pan-India peoples’ movements continue to speak out against this “nuclear insanity” and demand a shift to decentralized forms of renewable energy. Starting with the massive peoples’ movement at Koodankulam in 2011 and citing environmental concerns, economic feasibility, livelihood issues for nuclear host sites, the toxic burden of uranium mining and waste, human and indigenous rights concerns, and the problem of liability, people across India have consistently rejected nuclear energy projects. In this presentation, I will explore grassroots responses to local nuclear projects and introduce their alternative visions that incorporate energy justice and people-centered models of development.

ann-elise lewallen’s research and activism focuses on critical indigenous studies, gender studies, multiculturalism, and environmental justice in the context of contemporary Japan and in Japan’s transnational relations. In lewallen’s current project, she investigates how discourses of science and politics shape development policy and impact indigenous sovereignty in transnational relationships between India and Japan. She is the author of The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity and Gender in Settler Colonial Japan (School for Advanced Research Press and University of New Mexico Press, 2016) and co-editor of Beyond Ainu Studies: Changing Academic and Public Perspectives (Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2014).

Climate Change and Nuclear Power: Official Narrative and Citizens’ Perspectives

Kumar Sundaram

Not only does the Indian state claim to take climate change seriously, but at international forums it also adopts a mantle as a government that cares for its huge population as a developing nation. This gesture allows the government to position itself with the same climate change and emission obligations as other developing countries. Pointing toward already achieved higher levels of industrialisation and living standards in the West, the Indian government wrestles for concessions that it claims would allow a better life for its people. Holding nuclear power as essential to rapid growth of the power sector and overall economic development of the country is a key part of this posture. However, this growth-centric scheme in reality has only meant more concessions for domestic industrial lobbies. Industrial growth of the neoliberal kind in the past 25 years has not actually led to the betterment of common people’s life. On the contrary, it has been a story of large-scale disenfranchisement of the poor, particularly for Adivasi and other underprivileged classes. Nuclear Power also does not fit in a people-centric development model. Nuclear energy fails as a carbon-free technology and as a solution to climate change, and it also leads to a centralised pattern of growth and consumption while a decentralised economy would provide more opportunities to the poor and would sustain livelihoods in rural India.

Kumar Sundaram is a researcher and activist based in India. He is the Chief Editor and Webmaster of DiaNuke.org, which is an important online hub for resources and dialogues on nuclear, peace and environmental issues. He has been writing for journals, newspapers and websites on these issues for the past decade and has received several prestigious fellowships including the Asia Leadership Fellow Program by Japan Foundation last year.