Climate Change in Historical Perspectives: Climate Justice Movements
On Wednesday November 16, 2022, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest hosted a virtual webinar featuring four scholars from around the country to reflect on climate justice movements. This discussion, moderated by Villanova Education and Counseling Professor Dr. Jerusha Conner, was the third and final Climate Change in Historical Perspective event for this semester. Dr. Conner was joined by Dr. Karen Jarratt-Snider, Chair of Applied Indigenous Studies at Northern Arizona University; Dr. Prakash Kashwan, Associate Professor, Environmental Studies at Brandeis University; Dr. David Pellow, Chair and Dehlsen Professor for the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Dr. Julie Sze, Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis. If you happened to miss or wish to revisit the conversation, check out the recording linked here.
Throughout this semester, the Lepage Center’s Annual event series has covered important topics concerning the historical contexts of climate science; climate knowledge production; and climate change denial. While these are important topics, they can be difficult to face and so the event on November 16 was a refreshing change of pace as the speakers discussed some of the specific avenues of climate activism and the importance of climate justice. Four different speakers presented their ongoing research, elucidating some of the complexities and questions that can emerge around climate justice movements
Dr. Julie Sze, began by reminding the audience of an important aspect of the academic component of climate justice and action, often left unsaid or treated separately. Referencing short quotes from Amiri Baraka and Joan Didion, (“We write to fight” and “We write to think,” respectively), Dr. Sze reminds us that studies of climate justice and action can inspire and include both academic historical study of climate justice and on-the-ground activism. She spoke to her experience as a student and how she came to engage with these ideas and how that informs her approach to teaching these topics. Beyond this, she also introduced concepts of subjectivity and importance of highlighting different actors when wrestling with complicated ideas around climate justice and activism. The next speaker, Dr. Karen Jarret-Snyder continued this thread by emphasizing the importance of indigenous and native perspectives, knowledge and history that is entangled with Climate justice action. Much like Dr. Ruth Morgan from the first Climate in Historical perspectives series, Dr. Jarrett-Snyder spoke on the importance of indigenous knowledge production. She emphasized the failure to embrace this native knowledge and confront the history of settler colonialism, when in fact native knowledge can be incredibly useful especially because the unresolved history of settler colonialism has forced native communities to be disproportionately affected by climate change.
Dr. David Pellow spoke to the ways in which students have been encouraged and encourage focusing on the front lines and affected communities in these conversations of climate justice. Throughout the talk, there was concern of what is to be done, particularly when considering the privileged and often detached space of college campuses. Dr. Sze spoke to the responsibility of the educator and characterized the university as an “incubator” that can be used to move beyond exclusively grant-funded research and encourage students to engage with community led activism. In practice, Dr. Pellow discussed some of the exciting ways that students in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Class on Climate Justice collaborated with the Central Coast Climate Justice Network to work on multiple projects engaged with local climate justice action. Dr. Prakash Kashwan finished out the presentations by discussing some of the divides between these studies as they are understood between global north and the global south. For instance, Dr. Kashwan introduced some important differences between social science arguments and tools that are often missing from environmental justice and climate justice cultures. Specifically, there are conceptions of climate science action that do not always consider the actual lived experience or realities of the action that they call for when their basis is set in climate data. That Equatorial Guinea should devote 99.6% of land mass to forest restoration stood out as indicative of a potential disconnect between issues of scale from the local to the global.
The talk concluded with a Q&A that fielded interested and exciting conversation between and from the scholars. A thread pulled from the most of the speaker’s presentation was student engagement and motivation, as well as the academic/scholar/teacher/leader roles that these speakers can play on- and off-campus. Dr. Jarratt-Snider expanded on ideas some of the other speakers enumerated; she discussed the importance of thoughtfulness in assignment creation and student engagement. It is important that students see the ways in which they can contribute and find important narratives of hope in times of crisis. The focus on hope instead of only despair was key. In the previous event series, Dr. Erik Conway spoke to the trend of disinterest and disengagement that comes with consistent and constant news concerning the threat of doom faced by humanity because of the climate crisis. While it is important to stay aware of the realities of the climate situation, there can and probably should be a balance of hopeful narratives to foster motivation and keep the fight alive.
