Panel 4

ACTIVISTS, ARTISTS, AND ACADEMICS

BUILDING JUST CLIMATE FUTURES TOGETHER

A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE

Panel 4: Creating a Field: Climate Justice Studies

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 21st 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.

Q & A

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