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Part 1: The Dr. Steve Best Narratives:

Climate Justice, Speciesism, and Total Liberation in Age of the Anthropocene

I. From Environmental Justice to Climate Justice

The recent emergence of the global climate justice movement builds on the achievements of the last half decade of social justice struggles. As the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s evolved—including women’s liberation, black liberation, gay liberation, anti-war and peace, free speech, and radical democracy—the concepts of rights and justice expanded to ever more marginalized human groups and even to encompass animals and the natural world. As I will show below, however, rarely were human, animal, and earth interests theorized in their inseparable unity, and social justice movements generally ignored, excluded, or marginalized the plight of animals in relation to human priorities, while failing to grasp the systemic consequences of animal exploitation on the natural world and all people. This debilitating lacuna is evident in the environmental justice movements over the last half century and in the more recent global climate justice movement that emerged in the first decade of the 21st century.

In the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s, a disaffected offshoot of the white, middle-class environmental movement launched a grass-roots struggle by low-income communities and people of color under attack by corporations and environmental racism. In response to corporations building landfills, incinerators, and producing or dumping toxic chemicals and wastes in their neighborhoods, rather than in white suburbs, a new “environment justice” movement emerged in various regions of the U.S. and spread internationally. Decades ahead of formalization by the United Nations, environmental justice advocates insisted that all human beings, whatever their ethnicity or class, have a basic right to a clean environment and access to safe air, water, food, and sustainable resources.

Thus, social and environmental issues, human and environmental rights, were knitted together, as were issues of race and class. Dialogues around inclusiveness and the need for alliances led to the “Principles of Environmental Justice” declaration drafted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in October 1991. Notably, its first principle stated, “Environmental Justice affirms the sacredness of ‘Mother Earth,’ ecological unity and the interdependence of all species,” thereby referencing human interdependence with animals, not just “nature” in the abstract, as later climate justice declarations subsume animal life and agency to the physical world. Moreover, here, as in all Indigenous peoples’ writings, the earth and its sundry life forms are viewed as sacred, as creations of Mother Earth. This implies reverence and spiritual connection with the living world, in sharp contrast to Western utilitarian views of animals and nature as mere resources to exploit. It is also significant that a second declaration from the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, “Principles of Working Together,” placed great stress on the need for alliance politics and achieving unity within a diverse multicultural context that values difference, dialogue, cultural sensitivity, and mutual learning, while “working together to overcome our common barriers, and resist our common foes.”

But as the environmental justice movement evolved from “first generation” to “second generation,” it adopted broader theoretical and political frameworks such as found in Critical Environmental Studies. Whereas first generation outlooks focused mainly on two overlapping forms of oppression—race and class—second generation activists adopted more pluralistic theories and a more diverse and inclusive politics that also incorporated gender, sexuality, animals, and other groups and identities. Second generation approaches also rejected earlier reformist politics seeking legislative changes, not whole system changes, and affirmed the Marxist assumption that the state is a tool of capitalist domination. 21st century climate activists, however, seek change from the grass roots level and widely support the goal of radical social transformation.

But, with the dawn of a new century, as climate change began to seriously affect people and ecosystems throughout the world, the framing of environmental justice issues shifted from local or regional emphases to global and planetary perspectives requisite to theorize a new geological epoch brought about by the ever-greater impact of human activity on earth processes. It became obvious that the main environmental issues affecting people were not just toxic chemicals, waste, and pollutants from local industries, but rather the prodigious release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the onset of global warming, and the disruption of all earth systems.

There are indeed common main themes throughout “the” global climate justice movement, but it is not a monolithic movement. The climate justice movement is extremely diverse and inclusive. It includes indigenous peoples, peasants, and farm workers; Asian and Pacific Islanders; youth movements such as Fridays for Future and Youth for Climate; Green New Deal proponents; direct action movements such as Extinction Rebellion, Animal Rising, Just Stop Oil, and the Keep it in the Ground; fossil fuel divestment groups; ecoanarchists, ecosocialists, and degrowth proponents; and sundry grassroots groups worldwide who fight on the frontlines of climate-related disasters. Significantly, the climate justice movement also includes thousands of scientists in the world who are frustrated with government inaction on the climate emergency and their numerous “warnings to humanity.” This global movement contains mainstream, reformist, and even pro-development approaches (e.g., Mary Robinson and Earth4All), as well as radical anti-capitalists (e.g., ecosocialist and Indigenous groups); it holds liberal-humanist proponents as well as ecocentrists and anti-speciesists, and older and younger generations such as Greta Thunberg and the Youth Climate Movement.

One might say that whereas the politics of environmental justice emerged at the dusk of the Holocene, those of climate justice appeared with the dawn of the Anthropocene—the epoch in which humans have clearly emerged as the dominant force behind rapid change in earth systems. Because the causes and effects of climate change are global, the solutions must be as well, and the planetary crisis threatening all life demands alliance politics that links interconnected forms of oppression, unprecedented cooperation of world governments, new conceptual paradigms, and immediate and decisive action.

II Climate Justice and Human Rights

Rejecting limited nationalist perspectives and state-based notions of justice, climate justice addresses global colonialism and the growing inequities between “developed” nations of the North and “undeveloped” nations of the global South. The climate justice movement emphasizes the colossal global inequalities in economic wealth, political power, and carbon pollution. It highlights the intolerable injustice that those least responsible for causing the climate crisis, especially poor and disadvantaged populations in the global south, are most vulnerable to its effects—including extreme weather events, floods and rising sea tides, heat waves and wildfires, drought, crop loss, famine, food insecurity, dwindling water supplies, loss of livelihoods, property destruction, disease, and displacement.

Clearly, corporations, the global North, and the consuming classes emit more greenhouse gases than poor nations, communities, and peoples in the global South. Counter to popular prejudice, the primary force driving climate apocalypse change is not the overpopulating masses in the developing world, but rather transnational fossil fuel corporations, the Global Meat and Dairy Complex, neoliberal capitalism, the World Bank, and the privileged lifestyles of the super-rich and middle classes. Affluent Western societies—above all the US, EU, China, and India—and their consuming classes have a far greater ecological impact than “undeveloped” nations and their poor, although Global South countries like Brazil and Middle East nations are becoming major carbon polluters. Economic inequality is inseparable from carbon inequality. In the years between 1990 to 2015, for instance, when annual heat-trapping emissions grew 60% and cumulative emissions doubled, Gore notes that “[t]he wealthiest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for releasing more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorer half of the world from 1990 to 2015.” Laura Cozzi and colleagues show that the top 1% of the world emitters produce over 1,000 times more CO2 than the bottom 1%. Given the inequities of income, power, and responsibility for causing the climate crisis, abstract references to “humans,” “humanity,” or “anthropogenic climate change,” such as often used in Anthropocene discourse, need to be qualified or replaced by phrases such as “advanced industrial nations,” “affluent consuming classes,” “transnational corporations,” or “the growth-addicted nature of global capitalism.” It is crucial not to obscure the vastly unbalanced scale of those most responsible for and vulnerable to climate change and not to conflate biological/species appeals to “human nature” with social/institutional causes in ways that naturalize and exonerate predatory capitalism.

The climate justice movement emphasizes the vast disparities in global wealth and influence and the disparity between those who contribute least to climate change and those who suffer from it the most as a colossal and intolerable injustice. In turn, it emphasizes the obligations corporations and governments have towards the world’s most marginalized and vulnerable peoples; the need to address severe global inequities; and the moral and legal imperative to respect the rights of all to clean, safe, and healthy environments. And while climate change perpetuates injustice and violates human rights, this does not happen in any random way; rather, as Elizabeth Cripps notes, it “feeds on existing violence and discrimination, on a history of human rights abuses.” In more exact terms, transnational coal, oil, and natural gas companies, along with their corrupt accomplices in nation states, have willfully chosen to unleash a “slow-motion nuclear holocaust” (Tom Engelhardt) on ecosystems, biodiversity, millions, and billions of people, both present and future generations, all for the purpose of sustaining the power, privileges, and profits of world elites.

In addition to incorporating standard concepts of procedural, distributive, retributive, and intergenerational justice, the climate justice movement has pioneered new concepts of justice. Recognition justice demands inclusion of excluded and marginalized communities in decision-making processes, and epistemic justice rejects Western mechanistic views of nature as mere matter or resources to in favor of valuing nature as sacred, expressing kinship with the living world, and validating traditional and indigenous knowledges. Ultimately, climate justice requires transformative justice, which emphasizes that interconnected forms of oppression—classism, racism, patriarchy, colonial exploitation, and so on—are inherent in capitalist systems, and thus climate change demands system change. Integral to transformative justice is the notion of just transition. The end of a just society cannot be achieved without means that are just, inclusive, participatory, and democratic and decentralized. Moreover, a just transition to democratic and ecological societies must ensure that climate mitigation and adaptation measures do not reinforce existing injustices or cause further harm to peoples, such as happened with forms of green colonialism.

Inseparably linked to the fight for climate justice has been the push to define climate change as a human rights issue, the official recognition of which only came about in 2022 through pressure by activists and oppressed communities who finally budged institutions such as the UN and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Given the fact that human beings live in and depend upon natural environments and that corporate induced global heating has destabilized ecosystems on a planetary level, the concept of universal human rights, first formally enshrined by the UN in 1948, is empty if not tied to environmental rights.

Universal human rights, global climate justice, and the disproportionate impacts of climate change on undeveloped nations and marginalized peoples were fundamental to the 2015 Paris Agreement and the 2017 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization document, and enshrined only recently in a key 2022 UN statement. This latter declaration, for the first time, explicitly endorsed the human right to a “clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” as necessary for “the full enjoyment of all human rights, for present and future generations.” If people have environment rights, then, the document insisted, corporations and states have a moral and legal obligation to promote sustainable management of natural resources, to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change, and to protect peoples’ right to protest without retaliation.

Clearly, corporations and world governments have not heeded these calls; instead, they have continued their aggressive push for fossil fuel energy resources in complete disregard to the severe and irreversible impacts on present and future generations, animals, ecosystems, and biodiversity. Rather than providing access to information, corporations like ExxonMobil have blanketed the infosphere with greenwashing and disinformation. Far from facilitating democratic participation in critical decision-making processes that affect all present and future life, nations have repressed, jailed, and murdered environmental activists. Nations like Columbia, Brazil, and Mexico kill environmental activists, while states such as the U.S. and the U.K. have begun criminalizing climate activism, as they did two decades ago with the persecution of animal rights activism as “domestic terrorism,” a trope widely circulated by mainstream media.

The climate justice movement is a vital alternative to mainstream, pro-business, government-led, and NGO approaches to the climate crisis. These struggles have shaped global policies and formed grassroots alliances that supplant the fragmented identify politics which prevailed in earlier decades in favor of a broad alliance with race, gender, and class issues at the forefront. Climate activists comprise the first social movement to fight against a planetary crisis that threatens not one group but all peoples, future generations, and a vital living earth. Like the animal liberation and planetary justice views we consider below, the climate justice movement works with traditional concepts of justice and innovates new ones. These concepts, however, remain confined in most cases to the limits of human-centered values and the human community, however broadly defined. Thus, animals are typically excluded from theoretical, moral, and political consideration in climate activist theories, critiques, concepts of justice, and politics. But this biased and uninformed marginalization of animals has tragic consequences and arguably precludes the goal of creating just and sustainable societies.

Selected References

“Principles of Environmental Justice” (1991) Environmental Justice.net  (https://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html#:~:text=Delegates%20to%20the%20First%20National,grassroots%20movement%20for%20environmental%20justice).

“Principles of Working Together” (1991) Environmental Justice.net (https://www.ejnet.org/ej/workingtogether.pdf).  

David Pellow (2017). What is critical environmental justice? New York: Polity.

Tim Gore (2020) “Confronting carbon inequality,” Oxfam International (https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/confronting-carbon-inequality). 

Laura Cozzi et. al. (2023) “The world’s top 1% of emitters produce over 1000 times more CO2 than the bottom 1%,” International Energy Agency (https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitters-produce-over-1000-times-more-co2-than-the-bottom-1).

Elizabeth Cripps (2022) What climate justice means and why we should care. New York: Bloomsbury Continuum.

Tom Engelhardt (2021) “The slow-motion equivalent of a nuclear war?,” Resilience(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-10-03/the-slow-motion-equivalent-of-a-nuclear-war/).

United Nations (2015) “Paris Agreement” (https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/english_paris_agreement.pdf).

United Nations (2022) “The Human Right to a Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment” (https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3983329?v=pdf).