Climate Justice: a journey of reconnection

I am a climate justice researcher. It is the core of my work. Of me. Climate justice is about connecting climate change with social justice more broadly, linking climate-related issues with structural root causes (e.g., colonialism, neoliberalism, capitalism) and holding decision-makers to account. It is about collaboration, building networks, sharing knowledge, centering people and place. It is about reflection and relinquishment. But most importantly, it is about reconnection: with the planet and with each other.

Bee in nature

Climate change is a scary topic. Not just existentially, but also in terms of how climate discourse is framed and makes us feel. Discussions are filled with complex language and climate modelling, carbon credits, silver bullet innovations, international negotiations and bureaucratic processes. In doing so, the climate debate is kept behind closed doors and often feels like an exclusive space beyond our reach. It makes us feel like a tiny drop in a rising ocean.

 This is dangerous because the way we talk about climate change influences what we think can be done about it. It forms the borders of our collective imagination. We give up, often before the fight begins, before we have a chance to try.

Let’s think about it a little differently. As humans, we are physiologically encoded to remember stories, so here’s just one:

[I clearly remember] that night in April 1991 when a massive tropical cyclone barreled into desh [Bangladesh], how the sound of the storm, the trees churning, and buildings shaking scared me throughout the night. I was terrified by the deafening sounds across the land and howling winds outside that battered everything, knowing instinctively a disaster was unfolding. News broke the next day of the devastation where a 20-foot tall sea surge killed thousands overnight; later we would learn it was up to 150,000 people. So many people, just stolen by the sea! A gamut of grief, worry, and guilt filled me that day and subsequent days, as we read newspapers and looked at the images on our small TV of utter devastation, flattened homes and trees, floating carcasses of humans and livestock alike. Most of this country is at sea level, so the water just surged in and took everything away…

My immediate family was fortunate as our home was in the floodplains a little further inland from the main sites of devastation along the coast. But we worried about my ancestral home nearer the coast and our extended family there, of my elderly grandparents and relatives who lived in traditional homes made of wood, bamboo, and clay, in villages deep in the delta marshes of the Bengal Delta, one of the world’s largest deltas formed by two of the world’s most powerful rivers (the Ganges and Brahmaputra). আমরা মাটির মানুষ, পলি মাটিতে শিকড়, কিন্তু আমরা প্লাবনভূমি, নদীর এবং জোয়ারভাটার দেশেরও মানুষ [We are people of the soil, rooted in the fertile delta, a people of floodplains crisscrossed by rivers in a land of tidal waves]. Tidal rhythms rule everything and flooding is an annual occurrence during the monsoon season, but devastating cyclones and sea surges were less common. No phones, electricity, or paved roads to the villages existed back then, so we didn’t know how our family was for many days. Coastal communities were historically protected by the Sundarban mangrove forest, but increasingly subjected to tropical cyclone damage and destruction with deforestation. But in coastal villages and towns to the east of the Sundarban, there is no natural protection from the wrath of nature.

I kept worrying, the cyclones are coming, killing all. বার বার মনে হল, আমাদের সরকার কি করছে, পৃথিবীর ক্ষমতাশীলরা কি করছে? [I was frustrated with thoughts of what our government was going to do, what the global powerful would do]. I felt like both the government and the global community didn’t do enough to reduce vulnerabilities and risks. Man-made global warming is already upon us…

So I constantly worry, I worry what happens to those who are drowned out from more powerful storms and surges, whose water sources are increasingly salinized from rising seas and encroaching seawater, whose land is disappearing from erosion? Where do people take this collective trauma, grief and anger? আমরা কোথায় যাব, আমাদের কি ভবিষ্যৎ? আমরাকি হত্তছারা, পরিত্যক্ত? (Where will my people go, what future do we have? Must we remain abandoned, forsaken?) The disproportionate burden of climate damage is falling on formerly colonized and brutalized racialized communities in the developing world. We are still colonized, but this time through climate change, the development industry, and globalization.

I feel an immense responsibility to do something. But no one is going to listen to someone like me, and even more importantly, more marginalized peoples, women and children, farmers and fisherfolk, writers and scholars. But we are all expected to be resilient because we have no choice. What empty words resilience and recovery feel like. Such hollowness, so much sorrow. এই শূন্যতা ভারী লাগছে [This emptiness feels heavy]. আমাদেরকি কন রেহাই নেই? [Do we have any respite?] হ্যাঁ, আমরা জয়লাভ করব, আমরা নির্ভয়, আমাদের সহনশীলতা আছে, যাইনা হোক [I think yes, we will survive, we are fearless, we will endure and fight, whatever may come]. 

Farhana Sultana in The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality (2022, p.2)

The extract above is a heart-wrenching reflection from Farhana. It illustrates the paradox of climate injustice – how those more "vulnerable" to climate-related risks have both a reduced capacity to respond to climate events and contributed less to the issue in the first place.

The ways of thinking that got us into this mess are not going to get us out of it. Climate change does not mean we can keep living the way we have been, and simply offset it. It is too late for that. We need to be brave, bold. We must listen. That is what climate justice is all about. 

If you want to do something about climate change, start with this idea of reconnection. Reciprocity. Understanding. Observe the changing of the seasons outside, the flurry of life. Question those observations. Those flowers bloomed earlier than last year – why? Look at the stars and wonder why it is so hard to see them in the city. What stories are held in the constellations? Look at the food in your supermarket and wonder where it comes from, how those who feed you are at the front line of unpredictable rainfall and extreme weather events. Eat seasonally if you can. Reflect. Sit with the discomfort. Grieve. Set aside the notion that climate change is beyond your grasp, but also the idea that it is yours alone to solve. This is not a solo fight. Be kind to yourself. Give yourself space to make mistakes, to learn. You will never know it all. You could never know it all. Advocate. Switch off. Switch on again. Look to Country, and those who care for her. Care for her. Care.

Stories are the gateway to a world gatekept by language and power. 

Don’t let the dominant narrative dictate yours.

Sources

Sultana, F. (2022). The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography, 99, e102638. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102638