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.