Feeling Climate (In)Justice
The text below is a transcript of my Postdoctoral Farewell Lecture at the Sydney Environment Institute on September 14, 2022. I’ve added links to works I referred to and headings to help navigate the text. You can watch/listen to the lecture too, which includes images that are referred to in the lecture but not reproduced on this page.
Acknowledgements
In order to begin, I’d like to acknowledge that we meet on the stolen and unceded Country of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I pay my respect to elders past, present, and emerging. I would also like to pay respects to any Indigenous people here with us today.
In doing so I would like to acknowledge the long running practices of survivance of Indigenous peoples, practices which include sorry business, humour, multispecies mourning, and unending care for each other and Country in the face of continuing colonisation and genocide. These are practices of feeling and resisting climate injustice, through care for community and Country.
It’s a huge privilege to speak to you here tonight. In recognising that I am on stolen Gadigal Country, where colonisation and environmental injustice are ongoing active processes, I want us to keep in mind important questions about who is afforded opportunities, resources and audiences to consider and discuss climate injustice, and who is not; and to recognise that the opportunities I have received are thanks to a lot of unearned privileges.
I also wanted to acknowledge that what I am able to present today is thanks to collaboration and support from a lot of people over a lot of time, from students, supervisors, academic peers, community activists, friends, family, and more. I don’t want to list everyone because that will take a long time and also I will no doubt forget people, so I will just say, please know that your support is appreciated, and I will give a quick shout out to the Sydney Environment Institute as a whole: Directors, researchers, students and professional staff have all helped me immensely throughout the nearly 3 years I’ve been at SEI. If it wasn’t for the role I’ve had here, I would not have had the time, networks, support, or resources to do the work I have done, which is what I’m here to talk about! So, thanks SEI!
Finally, a content warning. This talk includes reference to and images of the climate crisis, and perhaps more distressingly, of Scott Morrison and his government’s ‘response’ to climate catastrophe. I realise all of this is distressing and potentially traumatising, but its hard to talk about it without talking about it. So, you know, I’m sorry. If you’re calling in online, do what you need to; if you’re in the room and need to mentally check out or leave, that’s fine. If all of this is too much for you to handle alone, and honestly it should be, make sure to reach out to someone. All climate challenges are better addressed together.
Climate feelings and/as climate justice
Tonight I am talking about ‘feeling climate justice and injustice’ which is an effort to connect two often distinct conversations and issues.
The first is climate justice, a framework that explains how the impacts of climate change are experienced more severely by those who have contributed least to causing the problem. Climate justice emphasises how unfair this is. It thus considers climate change an inherently political problem, one which is caused by and exacerbates stark inequalities, including gender, racial, income, and other inequalities. As our multispecies justice communities have been articulating here at SEI and beyond, this also includes species inequalities. We only have to look at any climate disaster to see that it is poor people, people of colour, women, rural communities, and the forests, oceans, mountains, animals, plants and fungi who suffer the worst.
The second is the issue of climate anxiety or grief. Research tells us that increasing numbers of people are becoming incredibly emotionally distressed by climate change – often, just by thinking about it. In conversations about this, we find a big emphasis on young people, those destined to inherit constantly worsening climatic conditions. According to a recent survey of young people around the world, lead-authored by Caroline Hickman, 77% consider the future to be frightening, and almost half say that their worry about climate change adversely effects their daily functioning.
Climate anxiety is often defined as a chronic fear of environmental doom. I understand it as a sense that your world – your relationships, assumptions, dreams, security and identity – are in the process of ending. This experience might manifest as distinct emotional states, as nightmares and panic attacks, relationship breakdown, general disillusionment, an inability to make plans, and potentially lead to mental illness.
To a large extent, however, the issues of climate distress and climate justice have not been considered together.
Climate justice scholarship and activism has focused on more tangible, measurable and rational impacts of climate change, from economics, livelihoods, infrastructure and shelter. Increasingly, intangible impacts are being paid more attention, in part thanks to advocacy from front line communities around the world emphasising that climate change is much more than that: it’s a loss of connection to ancestors, of cultural continuity, of connection to Country or sense of place, of a sense of personal purpose, of community belonging, of personal agency and of personal identity. Such intangible losses speak more to people’s lives, and help us see that climate injustice is also about deeply unfair subjective experiences.
Climate justice discussions however, do not frequently focus on emotions. At the same time, conversations in climate emotions have not adequately centred a justice lens.
Firstly, far too frequently, having feelings about climate change is seen as an individual’s problem which can be measured through psychometric instruments, and then treated through mental health services. While counsellors have a lot to offer and so much of what I have learned on this topic is thanks to the amazing psychologists from groups like Psychology for a Safe Climate, pathologizing climate distress enables governments and corporations to blame individuals for not being resilient enough, and to limit their liability by simply funding therapy - while at the same time they continue to fund fossil fuels and fail to provide any kind of adequate disaster response. As Ruth Haggar, who lost her home in Quaama to the bushfires, recently wrote in the Guardian: ‘Feeling supported would dramatically improve our mental health. We’re getting mental health counselling because no one will help us – if someone helped us, we wouldn’t need as much mental health counselling.’
Of course, discussions about climate distress do seem to presume that the issue is political and unfair – largely based on the premise that young people are worse affected, and that this makes climate anxiety an issue of intergenerational injustice – but this is rarely made explicit, and it is often poorly articulated.
The failure to explicitly analyse climate distress as a political issue, as one of injustice, fails to hold perpetrators of this violence responsible, but it also fails to account for the intersectional differences and the inequalities regarding who experiences climate distress, to what extent, and in what ways.
Indeed, young people are not a homogeneous group; and uncritical concern about climate anxiety can perpetuate the racial, economic and gendered inequalities that cause climate change and climate injustice. As Sarah Ray has written, this is why climate anxiety can be perceived to be a ‘white’ issue that re-centres and privileges the feelings and worries of white people: a politics of emotion that repeats the logic of cutting people of colour, like Vanessa Nakate, out of the narratives of youth climate activism. As my colleague Jade Sasser has noted, if we don’t know, haven’t asked, and don’t know how to speak to, people of colour from around the world about how they feel about climate change, well, this is systemic racism in action.
So, if we are to adequately address the cause, not just the symptoms of climate distress, and to ensure that we don’t perversely re-centre whiteness while doing so, we need to think climate justice and climate feelings together.
Climate as affect
Before I get into feeling climate injustice, its worth pausing just to outline one key concept that I use to think this through: affect. Affect is sort of a synonym for feeling, but it goes beyond the idea of emotions. Affect encompasses what we might otherwise separate into physiological and psychological feelings. It also spans what we often divide into binaries: mind and body, conscious and unconscious, individual and collective, human and nature. Affect is the forces that, like the weather and the climate, swirl around and through us, ignite certain feelings, sensations, ideas and movements. Affects are composed through the interaction of human and non-human people, places, environments, cultures and politics. I think of climate as an inherently affective phenomenon.
For me, thinking climate as a set of affective forces is really important for getting outside the problematic idea that climate distress is a set of feelings someone has ‘about’ climate change, as though climate change is something external to our selves. Rather, when we think climate through affect, we realise that core climatic qualities like temperature, atmospheric pressure, and humidity, are all affective: the reason we have these concepts and bother measuring them is because these forces affect our bodies, and indeed, all kinds of bodies: animal, vegetal, aquatic, geologic, atmospheric. Take these Japanese macaques for example, for whom bathing in hot springs in the snow brings sensations of physiological and mental bliss, sensations so desirable that the collective establishes rich bathing cultures around them.
Indeed, the shape, location, function and capacities of our bodies are all intensely structured by climatic conditions. That’s why we can’t live underwater, on the moon or elsewhere. Take the blobfish for example: this critter is widely known as the world’s ugliest animal. When encountered by humans, however, they’re a long way from their climatic home, which is the cold deep sea. Because of the cold, high pressure environments, blobfish have evolved such that they have minimal muscles and bones – they don’t need them to hold their bodies up, because the water pressure does this for them. So in fact, they are not normally so blobby at all. Indeed, when they look blobby, this is due to the fish having experienced massive climatic displacement and thus, huge bodily trauma. What we can take from the so-called blobfish is that climate is a force which fundamentally and dramatically shapes and influences our bodies: from our DNA to our morphology, we are composed by climate. Changes in climate then, for example, moving from the deep sea to the open atmosphere, or from a stable climate on planet Earth to a hotter, more volatile one, will exert myriad affective forces on us.
So weather and climate are inherently affective. However, how we are affected by climate is not inevitable or natural. We develop cultural practices regarding our felt experiences of weather and climate. For example, thanks to Britain’s drizzle and the colonisation of what we now call Australia by the British, urban Australians often celebrate sunny days and resent the rain, even though it rarely rains in most of Australia and we usually need the rain (although not lately on the east coast).
Feeling climate INjustice
We love summer, a time replete with ideals of beaches, holidays and long celebratory evenings with friends and family. But as the climate changes, these embodied, place-based, cultural practices that are oriented around affective pleasure are being disrupted. We loved summer. As writers including SEI’s own Dany Celermajer have observed, summertime is no longer what it was. The changing climate changes our affective experiences: our emotions, our physiological health, our understandings of the future, our sense of place. As my dear friend Mandy Pritchard wrote during Australia’s Black Summer, and this is a lengthy quote:
‘The season we are now experiencing is nothing like summers past. The blue sky has been replaced by mammoth clouds of smoke and ash, blocking the sun’s rays. The ocean is scattered with the same ash and burnt, blackened leaves. Dead birds, feathers also blackened, wash up on shore. Exploring nature is mostly out of the question, as great swathes of the landscape have been annihilated or cut off, and the simple act of breathing is hazardous. The green, green aroma of cut grass has been replaced by the smell of unimaginable things burning, acrid and choking. And all the grass has died off anyway during the monotonous, relentless drought leading up to this planetary and humanitarian crisis, now right at our doorstep.
I feel crushed, depleted, dumbfounded and so incredibly, inconsolably sad at the loss and trauma inflicted on so many living beings, on this piece of Earth we call home. Perhaps even sadder because my childhood summer holidays were spent on the south coast of NSW. Perhaps because just over a week ago I was there again, watching the sun rise in angry, brilliant colours through the smoke haze, and swimming in an ash-littered ocean. Perhaps because my partner and I drove through beautiful, historic Cobargo less than 48 hours before a firestorm tore through the town and beyond, incinerating buildings, trees, animals, people. Perhaps because we stopped on a bush-fringed coastal road to let an echidna cross slowly, clumsily in front of us, and I now can’t stop thinking that death by car would have been better, kinder, faster than the horrendous fate it may have since met. Perhaps because I know people who have lost their homes, and others who anxiously await the next onslaught, unable to sleep as they anticipate a change in the wind, or a stray ember. Perhaps because this isn’t an abstract, distant prediction of a changing climate, its cataclysmic impacts, its unknowable ripple effects. This is our worst fears and most terrifying nightmares come to life. This is hell on Earth, here and now. We knew it was coming, but we didn’t stop it.’
From Mandy’s writing, which you can find on our blog FireFeels, we hear some of the complexity of the affective experience of climate catastrophe: it is pain in the lungs and itchy red eyes, it is being evacuated, it is heart wrenching compassion for critters, fear for people, nostalgia for childhood memories, and anger at fossil capitalism.
We often term this complex amalgamation of painful feelings and experiences ‘climate anxiety’, or solastalgia, a word coined by Glenn Albrecht to refer to the melancholy and desolation we feel about environmental destruction. But, this messy mix of feelings is not just loss, grief, and worry, but also anger, outrage, frustration, cynicism and disgust about the injustice of climate change. Unlike the metaphors offered in the films Melancholia and Don’t Look Up, where scientists have told us that a meteor is hurtling towards Earth and we are all doomed because we are unable to change it, climate distress is more complex and feels different to apolitical grief and worry because climate catastrophe could be prevented, not everyone is doomed equally, and some people are actively and intentionally making it happen. As the always savvy David Schlosberg commented during the bushfire crisis, these disasters are not tragedies, they are injustices, and as my dear friend Jarrod Troutbeck says, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Feeling climate INjustice, then, is replete with sensations of rage, abandonment, isolation and betrayal. In Australia, our Former Prime Minister literally flying from one settler colony to another, to holiday in paradise while this nation burned is an abhorrently apt representation of the distinct and unfair experiences different people have of the climate crisis, and why we’re all so fucking angry. Climate injustice feels like disillusionment in democracy, being disrespected, losing all sense of karma and faith in humanity, helplessness and being overwhelmed at our inability to have any meaningful personal impact, and internalised disgust at being unavoidably complicit. This mix of being complicit, vulnerable, ineffective and disregarded is why what we call ‘climate anxiety’ is such an existential crisis, so disorienting, and so psychologically, culturally, socially and politically harmful.
This is why its critical that we bring a careful political lens to the issue of climate feelings: because they are political, and politicised.
Consider this recent Tweet which suggests that climate scientists’ social media communications are the cause of young people’s extreme climate distress. Such sentiments are problematic for many reasons. Firstly, it is not the communication of the problem but the problem itself that causes distress. Secondly, this logic is divisive and pitches two groups against each other, two groups that have in fact worked together and catalysed huge social change through their collaborations. It also ignores climate scientists’ own needs to express themselves. Climate scientists are the original climate anxious group: they know what it feels like to be sifting through data that confirms your worst fears, searching for another explanation; to have to go through the peer review process hoping someone will tell you you’re wrong; to have the media, public and government ignore, deride or even harass you; and to avoid discussing your work with your family as its too hard to process, or to talk about.
Of course, having a conversation about how we can communicate online to very diverse audiences about the severity of the issue and the need for urgent action, without pushing some people who are already concerned over the edge, is important.
However, this logic that blames the messenger for young people’s climate distress illuminates the ways in which climate emotions and our responses to them are politicised and manipulated by climate deniers. As a climate advocate who works with young people, my work is often criticised as ‘brainwashing’ or even ‘child abuse’ by climate deniers. I’ve also heard this rhetoric from university management who suggest that I am the reason my students are upset about climate change.
Let us not forget: the cause of climate anxiety is climate change, and climate change is caused by the combustion of fossil fuels and other forms of environmental destruction. Capitalism and colonialism are the root causes of this.
A justice lens helps keep the focus on the unequal power relations that produce climate change and distress about it. In doing so, it can help us identify the ways in which the fossil economy seeks to sustain itself by dividing and conquering. One of the ways in which it does this is through what I term ‘greenhouse gaslighting.’
Greenhouse gaslighting
Greenhouse gaslighting, apart from being a fun play on words, is a patriarchal practice that attempts to absolve climate criminals of responsibility through emotional manipulation and violence.
Greenhouse gaslighting is perpetrated by both individuals and institutions, and we can see its logics and practices seep out into the broader social sphere, for example, in this tweet, and similar practices which seek to prevent people from engaging with, expressing and responding to the very legitimate terror climate change elicits.
I am an Australian, and, like many of you listening tonight, have lived through the last couple of year’s worth of climate catastrophes here in Australia: the Black Summer bushfires, and more recently, the terrifying floods. These disasters occurred during the Prime Ministership of Scott Morrison. As the leader of a climate-denying political party, and the leader of the nation during those crises, Scott Morrison’s actions, words, and his government’s policies (or lack of them) are the best representation of greenhouse gaslighting that I know of. Of course they are not the only ones, but they are for me, personal, and that’s part of it.
Greenhouse gaslighting utilises the misogynistic practices of gaslighting: denying reality, dismissing someone’s feelings and denigrating their subjective experience so as to gain control over understandings, narratives, processes and outcomes, and thus, to gain power. Greenhouse gaslighting is the kind of climate denial that might accept that climate change is real, and caused by fossil fuel combustion, but refuses to accept that it might be bad, or that the people who say they are adversely affected are right, or that they matter.
This is evident in Scott Morrison telling young people that their climate anxiety is ‘needless,’ and in him claiming that Australia is a great place to raise kids the day after images of Finn Burns, aged 11, in a gas mask in a tinny, piloting his family to safety from the ensuing inferno in Mallacoota, went viral around the world.
It is evident in his dismissal of the hostile reception he received from residents of Cobargo, one of the towns worst affected by bushfires, who he stated were ‘just feeling raw.’
As Zena Armstrong and Peter Logue, other Cobargo locals, wrote in the Guardian at the time:
‘having been through the nightmare of the past week this is why we are angry and why we think others may be. This disaster has been unfolding for several years…The request from 24 former fire chiefs to meet the prime minister in April could have been a turning point if that meeting had gone ahead and if the fire chiefs’ fears had been taken seriously and acted upon…To dismiss these displays of anger as people feeling “raw” is to dismiss the depth of insight and understanding among those of us living through this crisis. Yes, we are feeling raw and yes, we are grieving the losses. There was so much that could have been done ahead of time to help mitigate the extent of the destruction.’
Refusing to acknowledge that people may indeed be genuinely harmed by climate catastrophe amplifies the hurt, by downplaying the significance of their knowledge of their own lives and through indicating that those people’s suffering does not matter. By undermining the trustworthiness of people’s anger, greenhouse gaslighting seeks to build consent for continued fossil fuel extraction through positioning such people as hysterics.
Greenhouse gaslighting is a politics of disrespect and abandonment, of abrogation of responsibility. It blames people for their suffering, suffering that was largely, though perhaps not perfectly, preventable by governments, while making the situation worse and walking away from offering any tangible help. Or perhaps, it pays lip service to suffering while avoiding any responsibility.
We see this also in Scott Morrison’s repeated reference to supporting ‘our Pacific Family’ while doing everything possible to water down emissions reductions agreements around the world. In this image, Morrison poses for a photo opportunity with children in Tuvalu who are sitting in water to represent the impending fate of their island homes and communities. While there for the Pacific Island’s Forum, Morrison pushed for the agreement to remove reference to coal and the term climate crisis. Such climate violence is nevertheless couched in paternalistic rhetorics of ‘protecting our vulnerable Pacific family’, a kind of emotional manipulation reminiscent of perpetrators of domestic violence who excuse their actions under a pretence of care, love and protection for those they harm.
So, again, my apologies for such a lengthy discussion of Scott Morrison, but as you can see, he really is such an apt representative for this unfortunately widespread practice of emotional political manipulation.
Affective climate justice
To return to my original aim of thinking climate justice and climate feelings together, I suppose my argument is that affective climate justice can bring attention to this range of issues, and hopefully inspire healthier, more democratic, anti-colonial, practices of healing ourselves and each other together.
Firstly, affective climate justice foregrounds issues of race, economics, gender, ability, and other categories of hierarchy within otherwise whitewashed discussions of climate anxiety. Not everyone feels the pain of climate crisis equally. Climate distress is not universal, and it is not equally distributed around the world. Just as other climate justice research and advocacy has demonstrated, the impacts of climate change are unequal, and tend to be experienced more severely by those who have contributed least to causing the problems.
However, we do not have the research to really know what these injustices feel like for communities who are most marginalised and affected – of course they know, but I cannot reliably or comprehensively share this with you. For this reason, affective climate justice is a research and advocacy agenda: we, and this we includes me, need to do better at foregrounding the emotional and felt experiences of diverse people around the world, and to do this in ways that contribute to their empowerment and agency, rather than positioning them as victims.
Secondly, affective climate justice gets the burgeoning discussion on climate anxiety and disaster trauma outside of an individualised pathologized approach to explicitly situate them as systematic state violence.
As part of this, it calls out greenhouse gaslighting for what it is: an attempt to manipulate society to continue consenting to the complete destruction of our only possible home through disrespecting and denying the lived realities of those who are forced to suffer at the expense of fossil fuel profits.
Calling out greenhouse gaslighting out also functions as a mode of witnessing people’s experiences, of standing in solidarity, of validating their truths, and thus, it is a practice of justice. Through asking about, listening to, and taking seriously people’s experiences of rage, cynicism, disillusionment and abandonment, we can hone in on the element of climate distress that is about feeling climate injustice specifically.
Fortunately, communities all around the world are already doing this, and through their many ways of listening to each other, and sharing their experiences, they connect and create solidarity through these mutual experiences of climate violence. Because although these experiences are always differentiated and unique for each person according to their individual circumstances and place in society, they are nevertheless experiences which have considerable similarities. Affective climate violence harms people, and seeks to divide us, but through the shared experiences of this oppression, collectives form in response.
Outrage and anger are very effective at mobilising people; critical to this happening though, is making that outrage and anger public, so that others know that such feelings are shared.
We see this in collective responses to Morrison’s greenhouse gaslighting which recently culminated in an incredible election loss for him. While elections are rarely attributable to one factor, and simple analyses of causality will mean we lose sight of what we need to pay attention to, community dissatisfaction with Morrison and his government’s climate policy and disaster responses was electrically palpable and visible throughout so many parts of the country during the last election campaign. I’m not going to stand here and say that our new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his government are not also flat out practicing greenhouse gaslighting. Of course they are, its just of a different flavour, one where the rhetoric is nice and the policies a bit better but this progress is used as justification for telling everyone to shut up and to stop asking for anything more.
The point is that, over the last decade, and culminating in the election campaign, community activists all across Australia have made careful, committed, continuing efforts to organise climate campaigning around listening to people, and through rejecting and resisting the multiple forms of affective climate violence perpetuated by the extractivist settler state. These efforts include political satire, such as this street art here by Scott Marsh that calls out Morrison’s efforts to use the deadly Lismore floods as a photo opportunity. Such efforts mobilise community sentiment against PR stunts like this and politicians’ failure to take responsibility for anything.
This is the power of feeling climate injustice: fairness is a deeply held value in many, if not all, societies. The scale of the climate protests held in the last few years, which have been organised around climate justice is testament to this.
We know from lots of research that, often, being part of climate-concerned collectives that take action together, creates empowering and healing affective experiences. Feeling climate justice feels like having a voice, being heard, being taken seriously, being cared about, having influence, making change and celebrating wins. It feels like being part of something bigger than yourself, of having integrity, and of acting in line with your values. Taking action together feels good; although of course it is also a complex process, and one that can also lead to burnout.
So, to wrap up, through situating climate distress as a political phenomenon we can better analyse the emotional manipulation power holders enact to try to prevent climate action.
We do this by insisting that different people’s different experiences of climate distress matter, and by ensuring that our theories of causality go to the root causes of the crisis, namely, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal extractivism. Holding these root causes in mind means that while individual counselling for climate distress certainly has a place, we recognise that this can only ever be a partial cure, rather than prevention.
The real solution, then, is climate justice activism, in diverse forms, in diverse places, with diverse people, in their diverse ways. Any holistic response to climate distress, therefore, needs to be one that builds community and solidarity across and through diversity, one that recognises the deep and differentiated pain of climate catastrophe, and which organises its activism in restorative, healing, regenerative ways that counteract, rather than amplify, the burnout and other psychic harm the climate crisis can inflict. I know that so much of this work is already happening, and that people engaged in this work are here tonight, so I will wrap up there so we can have time for discussion.