Paper short abstract:

In 2021 the 'Pilgrimage for Nature' saw UK participants walking 500 miles to COP26, gathering community stories along the way. These narratives became a multi-modal performance, highlighting the creative potential of collective walking and ecological activism, while questioning insitutional power.

Paper long abstract:

In 2021, delegates from nearly 200 countries convened in Glasgow, Scotland, as part of COP26 to address the escalating global climate crisis. In preparation for these pivotal discussions, Jolie Booth of Kriya Arts initiated The Pilgrimage for Nature: Listening to the Land, a journey designed to engage participants with the environment and communities en route to the summit.

Beginning at Tower Hill in London, a group of two dozen participants undertook a 500-mile pilgrimage over the course of eight weeks, arriving at COP26 in Glasgow. Along the way, they sought to "Listen to the Land," organizing public discussions, or moots, in community centres, pubs, and churches to gather stories from diverse communities across the country. These narratives—drawn from the experiences of the pilgrims, the communities that supported them, and the individuals they encountered—were synthesized into a multi-modal performance, which was later presented in COP’s Green Zone.

Despite the significant efforts of the global delegates, including indigenous leaders, the UN Secretary-General remarked that the "collective political will" at COP26 was insufficient to overcome the existing divisions and challenges.

In this paper, I will explore key elements from Jolie Booth’s performance work and the collective pilgrimage experience. Specifically, I will critically examine the relationship between process and product of performance-activism and the sharp disparity in how the activist work was received at COP and other external supporters along the journey. I hope to provoke discussion on what knowledge emerges through pilgrimage and performance and how it is received in global institutional settings.

Paper short abstract:

This paper critically examines whether shifts towards climate ethnographies & climate justice at a planetary scale may conceal rather than reveal causes & solutions to environmental problems

Paper long abstract:

Should anthropologists replace ‘environmental ethnography’ with ‘climate ethnography’ to denote the urgency of the climate crises and advocate for climate justice at global policy levels (Crate 2011: 185)? In this paper, I critically examine whether shifts towards climate ethnographies may risk concealing – rather than revealing - causes and solutions to environmental problems. From the COPs to IPCCC reports, are activities for ‘climate justice’ becoming theatrical performances rather than measures to solve specific problems? Both the 1972 UN Conference in Stockholm to tackle Acid Rain and the 1987 Montreal Protocol phasing out the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances showed the potential of global collective action. Since the end of the Cold War, neoliberal tenants have not only weakened the role of states but also cemented ‘business as usual’ in global trade. ‘Climate crisis’ causes despair and helplessness in individual consumers, stoking collective action. How do we as anthropologists reframe the problem back to how global consumption and extractive production is killing our planet: from species extinction and disappearing ecologies to deforestation and pollution. If climate justice is limited to greenhouse gas emissions and changes in weather over time, how do we ensure environmental justice for human and more-than-human alike?

Paper short abstract:

I discuss two protests: on missing donkeys and on rabid dogs through which communities evade the charge of being ‘anti-development’. However, such protests make it difficult for communities to make claims about climate justice and displacement.

Paper long abstract:

In the paper, I discuss two protests: One for missing donkeys and the other for rabid dogs. These two events, seemingly unrelated, demonstrate the way local communities in the region of Southeast Pakistan have come to express their grievances against displacement. By discussing the issue of missing donkeys and rabid dogs, the communities are evading the label of being ‘anti-development’. But the manner of their protests, as well as the issues which they can protest about, does little to reveal the true extent of their displacement. This ethnographic paper discusses the constraints and limits of seeking climate justice in an area which is considered an ‘periphery’ and rarely reported in the national newspapers. For the local communities, social-media and local media has played an important role to register their protests, but such platforms are now increasingly being used by coal-companies to advertise their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the local region.

Paper short abstract:

Using courtroom ethnography, this talk explores the modes of expression and silencing of climate justice claims in criminal trials brought against climate activists in Switzerland.

Paper long abstract:

The recent rise of climate civil disobedience has been met with a global wave of repression, not least in Europe. In Switzerland, this repression takes the form of criminal convictions by penal order, which activists regularly resist to have their case hear in court, despite the low likelihood of a complete acquittal and the resource-intensive nature of proceedings. This presentation therefore proposes to examine the criminal trials of climate activists as sites of political and moral negotiation beyond the stakes of state repression. It asks: What are the means by which climate activists are introducing climate justice claims into their criminal trials? Which of these claims are heard and which are silenced? How do these claims bear on their criminal cases? Drawing on courtroom ethnography, this research mobilizes insights from discourse and performance studies to illustrate how the structure of the trials and the dominant positivist paradigm of criminal law silence the voices of activists, scientists, and even of some judges, often leading to the conviction of the accused in an age of climate crisis.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my field-philosophical research in Pödelwitz, I propose a transformative concept of climate justice. This concept bridges academic and activist discourses, responds to the political struggles in the post-coal transition, and contributes to locally varied understandings of climate justice.

Paper long abstract:

Climate justice is both a precise conceptual tool to analyse the injustices caused and compounded by climate change as well as a powerful rallying call for political struggles around the globe. Despite this undeniable impact, critical scholars have recently emphasized the need for a transformed understandings of climate justice (Sultana 2021; Newell et al. 2021; Ranganathan & Bratman 2021): Academic and activist discourses have often remained siloed and both have predominantly focused on climate change mitigation, neglecting injustices in adaption. In addition, conceptions of climate justice should be locally varied rather than universal or global in order to account for geographical disparities of climate change.

In this paper, I will present and develop a transformative notion of climate justice drawing on my field-philosophical research in Pödelwitz. Pödelwitz is a village in the central German coal district where local residents and climate justice activists resisted the expansion of a neighbouring lignite mine. From this successful struggle, a civil society initiative emerged which aims to transform Pödelwitz into a social-ecological model village. Even though the work of the initiative stands in continuation and solidarity with the resistance, it requires a renewed understanding of climate justice. After Germany’s exit from coal, Pödelwitz transformation is more threatened by solar parks and post-mining lakes than fossil energy. Together with the initiative, I propose a concept of climate justice that emerged from and responds to these new challenges in theory and practice along its distributive (socialization of property), procedural (democracy and anti-fascism) and recognitional (more-than-human) dimension.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines an evolving relationship of climate (in)justice and climate reparations. It locates the debates of climate (in)justice within the discursive practices of the leadership, student groups,and activist representatives of the small island developing states (SIDS).

Paper long abstract:

The leaders and the peoples of the small island developing states (SIDS) have been at the forefront of driving the global movement for climate justice. Yet, scholars such as Burkett (2016) have meticulously underlined the marked shift in the discursive practices used by the leaders of the SIDS in global platforms such as the UNFCCC. “Compromise language” is preferred to shape what comes in hand tangibly (climate finance) for their acutely climate vulnerable communities, rather than what goes into – or rather – what does not get into the text, given the continued push backs from the developed countries of the world. Interestingly, the discourse of reparations has caught the imagination of diverse social movements in recent years. These include movements for and by climate vulnerable communities and activists of the SIDS such as the Pacific Students Fight Against Climate Injustice(PSFCI) and the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network(PICAN).These groups raise questions that are not only political, legal, and economic but are also moral. Despite using diverse discourses, the common ground between the activists, students groups, and SIDS’ leadership remains that of seeking urgent climate justice. I examine this evolving relationship of the climate (in)justice and reparations among the diverse groups that represent the SIDS. I draw on informal conversations with state representatives and activists, interviews and fieldnotes from COP 29, shadowing the PICAN and the PSFCI members in the processes for the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on State’s obligation to climate change, and grey literature.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores spiritual climate activists’ highly affective struggles of coming to terms with contradictory demands between mostly secular climate movements and their respective religious traditions on the example of German Faith Bridge.

Paper long abstract:

In September 2024, the German interfaith subgroup of Extinction Rebellion, Faith Bridge, introduced a new element of mobilisation to the wider movement. Gaia, a three-and-a-half-meter tall, bright-blue puppet created by British artist Kim Chaos, symbolises the Earth and, for the Faith Bridge activists, combines manifold meanings ranging from Greek mythology to the Gaia hypothesis. While the idea was specifically born out of the desire to unite Faith Bridge members of different religious traditions, what was communicated to the wider secular movement were the figure’s more scientific aspects. The first use of Gaia at the XR Living Resistance Festival in Berlin was a great success. Gaia attracted attention and created a vibrant atmosphere, reminiscent of XR’s peak days. However, secular activists also were critical about the ‘spiritual agenda’ associated with the figure. As spirituality and religion are generally viewed with suspicion withing the secular XR movement, activists with religious backgrounds are constantly navigating conflicting demands between their own religious communities and traditions and their activist practice as part of the larger movement. Practices and views that are interpreted as religious often lead to the delegitimization of those who engage in them. While this creates uncertainty and anxiety, for members of groups such as Faith Bridge it may also reflect wider social dynamics, as climate activist groups in general face attempts of delegitimization and fear that the open inclusion of spiritual elements could harm their cause. This paper explores spiritual groups’ highly affective struggles of coming to terms with such conflictive dynamics.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on extensive fieldwork between two case studies, a campaign seeking to make a glacier the president of Iceland and Finnish activists promoting research into geoengineering, I show how these Arctic organizations innovate legally and politically in their quests for environmental justice.

Paper long abstract:

The Arctic is warming 4x faster than other parts of the world, increasing interest in the region for geopolitical and industrial purposes. Increasingly encountering these discourses from both local and international sources, worried residents have been inventive in their creation of climate justice movements, balancing pragmatism with aspirational, democratic, and utopian thinking. Drawing on extensive fieldwork between two case studies, a campaign seeking to make a glacier the president of Iceland, and a group of Finnish Extinction Rebellion activists who have formed an organization to promote research into geoengineering, I show how these organizations have innovated legally and politically in their quests for intergenerational, pluriversal, and more-than-human environmental justice in the Arctic. The former has drawn on Icelandic history and culture, popular proposals for a new constitution, and scientific data about the link between melting glaciers and ecosystem collapse to push for an amendment that would enshrine the rights of nature in Icelandic law. The latter, meanwhile, has made the argument from the perspective of intergenerational, more-than-human//multispecies, and Indigenous justice for geoengineering, a technology that is controversial because of the challenges it poses to traditional forms of governance. To conclude, I reflect on the novel opportunities and challenges I have encountered while engaging with these organizations as an anthropologist and youth environmentalist, navigating competing claims to justice, a nascent field in which the science or governance is not at all clear (geoengineering), and exclusions of local and traditional ecological knowledge.

Paper short abstract:

How to construct climate justice when 'the natives', sustainably living Andean famers, consider they are causing climate change themselves? Rather than reifying conceptions of climate change into 'ontologies', I look at how such concepts can compliment and interact contingently in 'cosmoscapes'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with critiques of the 'ontological' mode of interpreting constructions of climate change in the Andes (see Burman 2017). As villagers and Andean shamans consider themselves responsible for climate change in their immediate environments, rather than the victims of polluting actions of western others, Burman questions whether taking an 'ontological' approach to understand these perspectives as true within their own worlds might prevent action within a single world confronting universal dilemmas of capitalogenic climate change.

My response to this is that Andean perspectives on climate need not necessarily conflict with climate justice: although considering their actions deeply emeshed in a relational landscape, where weather and fertility are the barometer of social relations between humans and sacred places (Gose 2016), and inseparable from the changes they are seeing, these actors would not refuse or deny that western powers should compensate developing countries for their actions. To elide these discourses and assume that subscribing to the first would necessarily negate the second is to reify contingent constructions of reality into 'ontologies'. We can more fruitfully engage the theoretical advances of the ontological turn (OT) to create a cosmopolitics of worlding practices, and explore how actors themselves construct 'cosmoscapes', drawing on contrasting cosmological practices contingently. When viewed as an example of indigenous climate leadership, the radical respons-ability of Andeans and their landscapes can be more widely inspiring for climate activists. We do not need to re-einscribe such beliefs within a logic of 'climate justice' and conclude that they contradict it.

Paper short abstract:

Climate justice often foregoes contextual specificities in order to allow for its conceptual mobility. This paper explores the historical and spatial terrains through which climate justice draws its legal and political currency through a focus on hydropolitics in a world of global boiling.

Paper long abstract:

In an era where climate futures are shaped by “scientific knowledge,” the situational insights crucial to ethnographic research are becoming increasingly vital. This paper delves into the rich tapestry of Southern African lifeworlds, deeply interconnected with their ecologies—primarily soil and water. It reveals how long-term participant observation is not just a supportive tool but an essential force in climate litigation and justice politics. The complex issues surrounding access to and contamination of underground water raise significant methodological and ontological questions. By examining how specific geographies, histories, land ownership, and usage intersect with the invisible flows of water and its abstraction, this paper challenges the broader conceptualization of climate justice. It investigates how this concept permeates the legal sphere and its far-reaching implications for the “more than human” world.

Paper short abstract:

Climate justice is a political-moral modality that concerns not only normative claims but situated repertoires of social movement praxis. The paper discusses this by examining 'patient urgency' as a mode of response to the climate crisis within a North American climate movement organisation.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing upon ethnography of the climate movement in the Northeastern United States, this paper presents climate justice as a political-moral modality that concerns not only normative claims about distributive and procedural (in)justice but prefigurative forms of political practice, mobilisation, and organisation. In other words, the paper argues that, in order to appreciate climate movement perspectives on climate justice, it is necessary to pay attention to how the concept produces – and entails the enactment of – situated repertoires of social movement praxis. As such, critique is at the heart of social movement articulations of climate justice, in relation both to climate change as a matrix of problems and solutions and the climate movement itself. To evidence this, the paper ethnographically examines 'patient urgency’ as a mode of response to the climate crisis within climate movement organisation People for Mass Climate Action (PMCA), which, in 2018-19, decided to frame its organising and activism in terms of a campaign strategy titled Constructing a Massachusetts Green New Deal. PMCA had a membership of predominantly white and middle-class climate activists. But its work was supported by a group of professional organisers, who were foremost in arguing that working to realise a Green New Deal for Massachusetts meant taking the time to enact intersectional responses rooted in problematisations of whiteness, cross-movement coalition-building, and solidarity organising. Ultimately, this points to how moral understandings and forms of strategic reasoning are entwined in social movement attempts to realise climate justice, in the present and into the future.