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.