Climate Justice and Radical Ethics

What is climate justice? Like every justice discourse, it means acknowledging and addressing injustice. It includes the psychoanalytic work of remembering (colonization, chattel slavery, and their lived continuance today) and working through. Working through includes the work of repentance, repair, and reparation.

Today we live in a war-ravaged world sustained in its injustice and violence by an international commitment to oil, gas, and coal. These are creating temperature rises at rates historically unknown, sea level rise, polar melting, desertification, rapid destruction of irreplaceable species, long and terrifying fire seasons, and forms of extreme weather we had never seen. Those who suffer most from the climate emergency are those who have contributed to it the least, our brothers and sisters from Latin America, Africa, and the middle East. Remembering what is happening, why it is happening, and the extreme injustice of what is happening is psychoanalytic work, whether we call it that or not. Remembering that at least half the greenhouse gases destroying our home planet have come during the past 25 years means we who are alive today have committed this creeping crime against humanity.

Yes, as with other historical crimes like settler colonialism and chattel slavery, much of the damage has become systemic, that is, so embedded in our lives that it forms a normative unconsciousness (thank you, Lynne Layton). Like the caste system Isabel Wilkerson describes in unforgettable detail, climate damage belongs to each of us and all of us. The formidable political and economic forces, known in ordinary language as greed and lust for power, seem insurmountable to the “each of us.” But as Jeremy Ornstein (this issue) calls out to “each of us” psychoanalysts, the young activists need our voices and our bodies. Even if we cannot join them on hunger strikes, we can teach our colleagues, our children and our grandchildren that climate emergency also means devastation for our h