If not justice, then what? Notes on climate change, relationality, and aporia

Keywords: Climate justice, land restitution, Indigenous geographies, dispossession, futurity
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 14

Abstract

Land restitution provides an important framework through which to assess the limits of climate justice and chart pathways toward decolonial futures. Although climate change derives from atmospheric chemistry and the fluid dynamics of global circulation, land lies at the root of many debates about climate injustice—from the effects of floods, fires, and forced migration to dispossession by mitigation schemes like REDD+. The material processes of land-use change tied to extractive capitalism that drives climate change cannot be divorced from the very materiality of land and its spatial fixity. Land matters to struggles for justice that center on the notion of return or restitution for sites lost to colonialism, private industry, pollution, and more. Yet returning land to victims of dispossession does little to rectify the legacies of injustice that require restitution in the first place, something not unlike the conundrum of striving for climate justice in the context of radically altered atmospheric circulation that can only every be partially rectified through more equitable policy. Liberal justice is thus an aporia, a political horizon many strive for always just out of reach but nevertheless necessary. Critical geographers cannot shy from demanding justice despite these limits and must imagine climate justice otherwise, with frontline movements through relational solidarities. This paper draws from my research on Indigenous land restitution in South America to advance a notion of climate justice based on ensuring the ability of social collectives to maintain relations with one another and to their territories, now and in the future.