Climate justice: fostering student public engagement

Prakash Kashwan

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PROJECT SUMMARY

This chapter presents a half-semester assignment, meant for the latter part of a semester-long course on environmental and climate justice. It asks students to brainstorm, develop, and deliver a public engagement project, drawing on the knowledge and understandings gained in the classroom. Students may focus on engaging with relevant communities and public institutions, on or off campus. The pedagogical goal of this assignment is to allow students to reflect critically about what effect different types of climate actions might produce in the current context of profound social, economic, and political inequalities. The challenge of articulating diverse perspectives, in a way that resonates with members of the public, should prompt students to grapple with the complexities and nuances of climate justice.

I have used this assignment in the upper-division course on Environmental and Climate Justice that I have developed and taught at the University of Connecticut (UConn). However, it could also fit smoothly in other environmental studies, environmental science, and social science courses related to environmental and climate change. The specific activities students choose to work on can take various forms, for example, hosting a discussion on campus or engaging with public institutions to inform and influence ongoing policies and programs related to climate justice. In addition, students have the freedom to decide whether they want to do the assignment as an individual project, partner with a peer, or pursue a group project. In this way, every aspect of the project is student-driven. Equally important, classroom deliberations and the design of public engagement projects draw on critical pedagogies grounded in an ethic of care. Following are some examples of public engagement projects my students at UConn developed and implemented:

  • What do UConn students know and think about climate justice?
  • Fostering conversations about climate justice and human rights at the UConn chapter of Kappa Alpha Theta (an international women’s fraternity). Waking up the “Woke”; UConn is not as Socially Aware as They Think: Conversations with (i) Ecology majors; and (ii) more politically oriented student groups.
  • Student testimony at C.T. House Education Committee hearing on proposed Bill 7352 advocating for the introduction of climate justice in C.T. school education [livestream at about the 2:28:59 mark in the following video: http://ct-n.com/ctnplayer.asp?odID=16121&jump=2:28:40]. Exploring avenues for founding a climate justice club at UConn.
  • Dirty Meadows: Socially differentiated suburban experiences of air pollution from a trash incinerator at the border between Hartford and Wethersfield towns.
  • “An Honest Conversation about Climate Change” at the Puerto Rican Latin American Culture Center.

Alternative Projects

An ethic of care is built into the flexible design of public engagement projects. If a student cannot organize a public-facing project, they may pursue custom-designed alternative projects. For example, such students may engage deeply with a well-known book of high public interest or popular media coverage of a topic relevant to the course. Students seek to juxtapose the course material with pertinent writings in the popular media or literary venues.

  • Book Review: Islands of Resistance: Vieques, Puerto Rico, and U.S. Policy by Mario Murillo and implications for environmental and climate justice. [To compare with arguments from Katherine McCaffrey’s article “Environmental Justice in Latin America: Problems, Promise, and Practice,” which is part of the course readings.]
  • An engaged reading of and reflections on the anthology, Justice on Earth: People of Faith Working at the Intersections of Race, Class, and the Environment, edited by Manish Mishra-Marzetti and Jennifer Nordstrom.
  • A critical reading of Vandana Shiva’s Soil Not Oil and juxtaposing with course material focused on the political economy of climate action (e.g., Christian Parenti’s essay, “Why the State Matters”).

This chapter is organized as follows. I first summarize the project’s core learning objectives, which are integrated fully into my course on climate justice. However, for instructors using this assignment in a class that focuses more broadly on environmental studies or environmental politics, the background readings listed in the subsequent section should be helpful. They include some articles that offer a broad overview and others that focus on specific aspects, such as climate justice policy, politics, and movements. In the section that follows, I provide the essential background information to aid instructors in engaging with some of the points of contention among scholars and activists of climate justice. They will find a comprehensive overview of the many facets of climate justice debates in the recommended general overview readings. I then present an outline of the assignment, including a suggested grading rubric. Finally, the chapter concludes with some discussion of challenges I have faced in running this assignment and how I have addressed them.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  1. Introduce the concept of climate justice and explain how it differs from radical climate action.
  2. Develop an understanding of climate justice as a contextually shaped and multi-scalar agenda.
  3. Define “public engagement” and develop an approach to planning and executing public engagement activities.
  4. Train students to contribute to an online archive of records related to public engagement projects freely accessible to the public at large (for more on student-driven knowledge production, see also Rajan and Lu, this volume).

SUGGESTED BACKGROUND READINGS AND REFERENCES

General Overview and Pedagogy

  • Kashwan, P. (2021). Climate justice in the Global North: an introduction. Case Studies in the Environment, 5(1).
  • Meyer, J. H., Land, R., & Baillie, C. (2010). Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning. Brill.
  • Newell, P., Srivastava, S., Naess, L. O., Torres Contreras, G. A., & Price, R. (2021). Toward transformative climate justice: an emerging research agenda. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 12(6), e733.

Power and Inequality

  • Bluwstein, J. (2021). Transformation is not a metaphor. Political Geography, 90, 102450.
  • Carroll, W., Graham, N., Lang, M. K., Yunker, Z., & McCartney, K. D. (2018). The corporate elite and the architecture of climate change denial: a network analysis of carbon capital’s reach into civil society. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 55(3), 425–450.
  • Kashwan, P., MacLean, L. M., & García-López, G. A. (2019). Rethinking power and institutions in the shadows of neoliberalism (An introduction to a special issue of World Development). World Development, 120, 133–146.
  • Méndez, M., Flores-Haro, G., & Zucker, L. (2020). The (in)visible victims of disaster: understanding the vulnerability of undocumented Latino/a andIndigenous immigrants. Geoforum, 116, 50–62.
  • Sultana, F. (2021). Climate change, COVID-19, and the co-production of injustices: a feminist reading of overlapping crises. Social & Cultural Geography, 22(4), 447–460.

Historical Legacies

  • Agarwal, Anil, and Sunita Narain. 1991. Global warming in an unequal world: a case of environmental colonialism. New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment.
  • Tuck, E., McKenzie, M., & McCoy, K. (2014). Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 1–23.
  • Whyte, K. (2020). Too late for Indigenous climate justice: ecological and relational tipping points. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 11(1), e603.
  • Kashwan, P., & Ribot, J. (2021). Violent silence: the erasure of history and justice in global climate policy. Current History, 120(829), 326–331.

Policy and Politics

  • Forsyth, T. (2014). Climate justice is not just ice. Geoforum, 54, 230–232.
  • Goh, K. (2020). Planning the green new deal: climate justice and the politics of sites and scales. Journal of the American Planning Association,86(2), 188–195.
  • Keenan, J. M., Hill, T., & Gumber, A. (2018). Climate gentrification:from theory to empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida. EnvironmentalResearch Letters, 13(5), 054001.
  • McKendry, C. (2016). Cities and the challenge of multiscalar climate justice: climate governance and social equity in Chicago, Birmingham, andVancouver. Local Environment, 21(11), 1354–1371.
  • Sovacool, B. K. (2013). The complexity of climate justice. Nature ClimateChange, 3(11), 959–960.

Climate Justice Activism and Human Rights

  • Caney, S. (2010). Climate change, human rights and moral thresholds. In S. Humphreys (ed.), Human Rights and Climate Change (pp. 69–90). Cambridge University Press.
  • McGregor, C., & Christie, B. (2021). Towards climate justice education: views from activists and educators in Scotland. Environmental Education Research, 27(5), 652–668.
  • Schlosberg, D., & Collins, L. B. (2014). From environmental to climate justice: climate change and the discourse of environmental justice. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 5(3), 359–374.
  • Sultana, F. (2022). Critical climate justice. The Geographical Journal, 188(1), 118–124.

Online Multimedia Materials

  • Timmons Roberts (2022, July 15). What is climate justice? [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/178419500.
  • Deutsche Welle (2021, July 17). What is climate justice? [Video]. https:// www.dw.com/en/what-is-climate-justice/av-58220463.
  • Hurricane Harvey: Zip Code & Race Determine Who Will Bear Burden of Climate Change. (2017, August 29). [Video]. YouTube. https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=d6gCHSdQWMw.
  • Video: Hands on the Land for Food Sovereignty and Climate Justice. (2019, July 15). [Video]. Transnational Institute. https://www.tni.org/en/ article/video-hands-on-the-land-for-food-sovereignty-and-climate-justice.
  • Klein, N., & Feeney, L. (2018, March 20). Puerto Ricans and Ultrarich “Puertopians” Are Locked in a Pitched Struggle Over How to Remake the Island. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2018/03/20/puerto-rico -hurricane-maria-recovery/.

ISSUE BACKGROUND: MULTIDIMENSIONALITY OF CLIMATE JUSTICE

Climate justice is best understood as a framework to understand and address the unequal effects of the climate crisis, based on the differences and inequalities of race, gender, caste, class, orientation, and abilities. Climate injustices are also rooted in longstanding and entrenched inequalities at the international, national, and subnational levels. The industrially advanced countries, especially the dominant groups within them, benefited disproportionately from exploiting the planet’s resources in the process of industrialization. The political power that European countries exercised via colonialism and imperialism was instrumental to the Industrial Revolution. Inhuman practices of slavery, indentured labor, and other forms of exploitation of socially and politically marginalized groups were instrumental to the extraction of resources for industrialization. The mismatch between the beneficiaries of the industrial development that caused the climate crisis and the victims of industrialization, who are now also burdened by the unmitigated costs of the climate crisis, is visible most starkly in the Global South. This is why many scholars and activists identify climate justice as a question of international justice. However, within the context of international climate negotiations, the legacies of colonial history are often reduced to a question of the the responsibility of Global North to rapidly reduce their emissions, pay for the loss and damage, and assist the governments in the Global South to undertake climate adaptation. While such demands are absolutely justified, they ignore the question of internal colonialism within the Global South. Such advocacy of international climate justice often neglects the question of holding governments accountable to the poor and marginalized groups who are greatly disadvantaged in the domestic political and economic systems within the Global South.

Others who frame the climate crisis as the result of humanity’s collective quest for material well-being tend to describe climate justice as an intergenerational question. In this view, the past and current generations have imposed climate change and climate injustices on future generations, limiting their ability to flourish in a stable climate. Similar arguments are made by those who point to the dominance of the human species and its destabilizing influence on the planetary systems that we share with many non-human species. An emphasis on intergenerational or interspecies injustices tends not to focus on the histories of colonialism and enslavement and the gaping inequalities within the current generation, including within and between countries in both the Global North and Global South. Since my students relate most closely to domestic debates on the ongoing climate crisis, public engagement projects in my classes focus heavily on the U.S. and the Global North at large. However, projects focusing on international, intergenerational justice, or interspecies injustices would be engaging and insightful. Either way, I find it helpful to discuss with students how adopting any of the three different frames of justice discussed above may obscure other dimensions of climate justice.

Another point of debate relates to delineating the scope of climate justice arguments and interventions. Several scholars examine how climate justice manifests in various sectors of society and economy, for example, food, energy, transportation, water, and health. The internal workings of each of these sectors mediate how the climate crisis affects the ability of individuals and social groups to secure basic human needs and enjoy their human right to a dignified life (Caney, 2010). These arguments also extend to investigations into the distribution of costs and benefits of climate action. All-pervasive efforts by powerful groups to pursue vested interests in the wake of climate action lead to the appropriation of land and other natural resources that sustain Indigenous and other rural groups. In some other cases, successful climate adaptation and resilience interventions – such as improved access to transportation, housing, and urban infrastructure – have led to climate gentrification, displacing and dispossessing racial minorities (Keenan et al., 2018). From this vantage point, the scope of climate justice efforts must extend to all major spheres of society, economy, and ecology.

On the other hand, such a broad understanding of climate justice that requires transformative changes in all major sectors of society and economy is a cause for concern for some scholars. They seek to make a distinction between the consideration of social justice within climate action and climate governance versus, say, a discussion of how climate change may exacerbate the pursuits of longstanding agendas of social and economic justice. For example, participants at a workshop on international climate justice wondered about the risks of a climate justice bandwagon effect and its implications for the efficacy of justice efforts. They argue that longstanding socioeconomic disparities are responsible for problems like poor sanitation, especially in neighborhoods with majority populations of racial minorities and low-income communities. The ongoing climate crisis has increased the frequency and seriousness of urban floods, thereby exacerbating many times the pre-existing conditions of poor access to safe water and sanitation. The main point of debate here is whether and how climate research, policy, and advocacy might account for multiple historical and contemporary causes that make some people, groups, and countries vulnerable to the climate crisis (Kashwan and Ribot, 2021; Sultana, 2022).

The contentions over climate justice are not limited to academia and policy circles. Some climate advocates also question the wisdom of what they believe is a disproportionate emphasis on climate justice. They argue that responding effectively to the climate crisis should be prioritized over social justice considerations. For example, Jonathan Logan, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion (X.R.), America argues, “If we don’t solve climate change, Black lives don’t matter. If we don’t solve climate change now, LGBTQ [people] don’t matter … I can’t say it hard enough. We don’t have time to argue about social justice.” Logan sees the inclusion of social justice as “a polarizing deviation from … embracing a ‘big tent’ approach which makes no judgments about race, class, politics or religion.” Many X.R. activists, including in the U.S., disagree with Logan and continue to support enhancing the diversity of X.R. membership to make it a more welcoming space for historically marginalized racial minorities. Most other climate youth movements frequently articulate the fundamental connection between racism and climate change. However, in many instances, these links appear mainly in the form of bold rhetorical assertions.

Yet while ambitious and inclusive climate action is necessary, it may not be sufficient to realize climate justice outcomes (Kashwan, 2021). In many cases, “radical climate action” may produce injustices of various types (for related debates over climate geoengineering, see Jinnah, this volume). The justice effects of climate action depend significantly on the socioeconomic and political contexts that shape the design and implementation of climate action. Moreover, similar climate solutions may produce different justice effects, depending on the socioeconomic and political contexts (Sovacool, 2013). A central argument that is often not adequately discussed or fully understood is that the justice effects of climate change and climate actions cannot be pre-figured at any one scale. Instead, these effects are contingent on the workings of social, economic, and political systems. Social inequalities, which contribute to remarkably unequal access to and control over political and economic systems, also dramatically shape the societal responses to climate change and the distribution of costs and benefits of climate action (Carroll et al., 2018). Yet popular narratives that valorize self-reliance and the meritocracy of markets make socioeconomic inequalities invisible in the public sphere. The pedagogical practice of devoting equal time to multiple sides of major political and policy questions may be ill-equipped to foster the critical thinking needed to reimagine the role of markets in a climate-changed world. Instead, fostering a deep understanding of climate justice warrants critical pedagogies of various sorts. One example is the pedagogy centered on the notion of “threshold concepts.”

Threshold concepts are “certain concepts, or certain learning experiences, which resemble passing through a portal, from which a new perspective opens up, allowing things formerly not perceived to come into view. This permits a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something … and results in a reformulation of the learners’ frame of meaning” (Meyer et al., 2010: ix). The threshold approach to learning encourages a deep contextualization of the subject matter. For example, a key argument from the discussion above is that instead of labeling specific types of climate action, such as the Green New Deal (GND), as inherently “just,” instructors and students would engage in a discussion to examine the contextually situated effects of the GND, drawing on the insight that justice outcomes depend on the socioeconomic and political contexts relevant to specific communities and regions (Goh, 2020). Equally important, the transformative effects of the threshold concept go beyond rational epistemologies to recognize the “equal dignity of both cognition and affect” (Meyer et al., 2010: xv).

Instructors may experiment with discipline-relevant tools to incorporate such a threshold approach. One approach that I propose here is to use the

Table 4.1 Power in institutions matrix

Table 4.1

Power Matrix shown in Table 4.1 for a systematic analysis of the complex ways in which power is intertwined with climate crisis and climate action.

Different climate narratives or solutions may help channel power and resources to different groups holding competing views of the future pathways. Powers and counter-powers of different types mapped in the Power Matrix are central to the outcomes of the ongoing battles over the meanings, means, and ends of climate action (see also Newell et al., 2021).

Overall, I find it helpful to engage students in extended discussions on four critical observations about the relationship between climate action, advocacy, and justice (Kashwan, 2021): (1) many articulations of climate justice focus heavily on the post hoc effects of climate change while ignoring the root causes of climate change that are tied intimately to injustices that climate crisis produces; (2) assuming incorrectly that all climate action contributes to climate justice, or that climate justice can be pursued by addressing a predefined set of climate risks; some types of climate responses can produce new climate risks and associated injustices (see Forsyth, 2014); (3) while scholars have studied the causes of climate injustices extensively, an understanding of pathways to achieve climate justice remains under-developed (see Mendez, 2015); and (4) while maintaining a focus on evidence-based and analytically rigorous analyses, I also emphasize that questions of justice entail discovering, understanding, and appreciating the gravity of historical trauma.

One must guard against reducing trauma to carefree academic analyses or leaping to idle romanticizations that create barriers against deep engagement. Instead, as Tony Monchinski has argued, “critical pedagogies and an ethic of care are linked through the concepts of teacher–student mutuality and positionality; democratic authority and dialogue; caring protection and the relationship of the individual and her autonomy to the wider social whole” (Monchinski, 2010: 85). A pedagogy of care, kindness, and deep empathy should be the guiding light for both instructors and students of justice.

PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS

Course Assignment: Public Engagement for Climate Justice

Mandate: Propose, develop, and execute a public engagement project focused on climate justice.
Modality: A project can be an individual or a group project, depending on the nature of the activities you plan to undertake. Students planning for group projects should develop more extensive and sophisticated projects. Plan early and devise a strategy that works best for you in either case.

Grading:

  • Project proposal (30 points)
  • Strategy document (25 points)
  • Documentation of activities undertaken (20 points)
  • Lessons learned, insights gained (25 points)

1 Project proposal (30 points)

  • Identify specific aspects of climate justice that inform your project.
  • Synthesize the different sides of arguments/debates about your topic.
  • Use the Power Matrix to examine the power dimensions relevant to your project.
  • What are your goals for this public engagement project? That is, what specific outcomes would you like to accomplish? (Please exercise self-care and be realistic.)

2 Strategy (25 points)

  • Identify your audience and explain why the audience fits your public engagement goals.
  • List the main activities you plan to undertake as part of this project.
  • Outline the logistics you plan to put in place. We recommend that you work with relevant student groups and centers on campus and local public agencies off-campus.

3 Documentation of activities undertaken (20 points)

  • Photos
  • Audio/video recordings of the event
  • Attendance records
  • Feedback from event participants
  • Online resources/blogs resulting from these activities
  • Media reports, if any

4 Lessons learned, insights gained (25 points)

  • Synthesize the key insights gained from developing and executing this public engagement project.
  • How do these insights relate to what you learned in the classroom?
  • What recommendations do you have for future students taking up this assignment?

ADDRESSING COMMON CHALLENGES

Working on public engagement projects presents valuable opportunities but also several cognitive and pedagogical challenges, including the following. First, the longstanding and acrimonious questioning of climate science by climate deniers and skeptics in the U.S. has created an extremely low bar, such that securing the acceptance of the anthropogenic origins of the climate crisis and doing something about it seems like a major accomplishment. Consequently, popular youth movements, such as the Sunrise Movement and Fridays for Future, often equate radical climate action to climate justice, which papers over the significant differences of strategies needed to pursue these two interrelated goals. In this context, it may be challenging to steer classroom conversations toward investigating climate injustices, especially when they diverge from popular modes of climate actions, such as a rapid transition to renewable energy. A second and related challenge is to look beyond “climate solutions” to talk about their socially discriminatory effects while allowing a great deal of intellectual freedom for students to design their projects. Instructors may face a trade-off between student autonomy and the pedagogical goal of addressing the cognitive barriers that prevent a full appreciation of the unique challenges of pursuing climate justice. The third significant challenge is to find meaningful forms of “public engagement” that do not consume an overwhelming amount of time and energy. Such pragmatic difficulties reinforce the effects of the first two points discussed above.

Students and instructors taking on this project may also confront several other challenges. The inherently political nature of these questions makes fostering public conversation reasonably demanding. Does one “take sides”? Might playing the devil’s advocate be helpful in some cases? Facilitating such conversations on campus may help train students to deal with similar challenges in the public domain beyond college campuses, including in their professional careers. Lastly, engaging students this way brings up the enticing question of whether instructors should help convert some of the conversations started via public engagement projects into permanent forums and campus clubs. Both instructors and students may need to weigh the pros and cons carefully.

REFERENCES

Caney, S. (2010). Climate change, human rights and moral thresholds. In S. Humphreys (ed.), Human Rights and Climate Change (pp. 69–90). Cambridge University Press.

Carroll, W., Graham, N., Lang, M. K., Yunker, Z., & McCartney, K. D. (2018). The corporate elite and the architecture of climate change denial: a network analysis of carbon capital’s reach into civil society. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 55(3), 425–450.

Forsyth, T. (2014). Climate justice is not just ice. Geoforum, 54, 230–232.

Goh, K. (2020). Planning the green new deal: climate justice and the politics of sites and scales. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(2), 188–195.

Kashwan, P. (2021). Climate justice in the Global North: an introduction. Case Studies in the Environment, 5(1).

Kashwan, P., & Ribot, J. (2021). Violent silence: the erasure of history and justice in global climate policy. Current History, 120(829), 326–331. Kashwan, P., MacLean, L. M., & García-López, G. A. (2019). Rethinking power and institutions in the shadows of neoliberalism (An introduction to a special issue of World Development). World Development, 120, 133–146.

Keenan, J. M., Hill, T., & Gumber, A. (2018). Climate gentrification: from theory to empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Environmental Research Letters, 13(5), 054001.

Mendez, M. A. (2015). Assessing local climate action plans for public health co-benefits in environmental justice communities. Local Environment, 20(6), 637–663. doi:10.1080/13549839.2015.1038227.

Meyer, J. H., Land, R., & Baillie, C. (2010). Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning. Brill.

Monchinski, T. (2010). Critical pedagogies and an ethic of care. Counterpoints, 382, 85–135.

Newell, P., Srivastava, S., Naess, L. O., Torres Contreras, G. A., & Price, R. (2021). Toward transformative climate justice: an emerging research agenda. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 12(6), e733.

Sovacool, B. K. (2013). The complexity of climate justice. Nature Climate Change, 3(11), 959–960.

Sultana, F. (2022). Critical climate justice. The Geographical Journal, 188(1), 118–124.