A Time for Climate Justice: A Response to David Suzuki’s interview with iPolitics
BY JONATHAN WALD
This post responds to a recent iPolitics interview with David Suzuki where he expresses that “it’s too late” for climate change. Instead of arguing for optimism, this post argues that climate justice offers an alternative framing for the climate movement that avoids the question of whether it is too late.
Image from dmncwndrlch via Pixabay 29th February 2020
In a July 2nd interview with iPolitics, famed environmental activist David Suzuki seems to admit defeat. “It’s too late,” he tells Davis Lee. “The focus on politics, economics, and law are all destined to fail because they are based around humans.” It’s a bleak interview, clearly reflecting the frustration and disappointment of the 89-year-old environmentalist. Certainly, if anyone is entitled to feel frustrated, it is Suzuki, who has dedicated his life to the fight for a better global environment. His comment that it is now “too late” follows immediately after his reflections on the 1988 Toronto conference which set climate change on the agenda as a matter of international concern. “If the world had followed the conclusions from that conference,” Suzuki laments, “we would not have the problem we face today and we would have saved trillions of dollars and millions of lives. Now it is too late.”
I don’t disagree with any of Suzuki’s experiences, nor with his assessment of the current state of global climate politics. As a younger environmental scholar, I can only imagine Suzuki’s disappointment at seeing the work of the 1988 conference, along with many other meetings by top scientists, diplomats, and activists, squandered by years of inaction or outright sabotage. However, as someone who teaches sustainability and climate politics, I want to push against a potential interpretation of Suzuki’s disappointment, one that iPolitics seems to support by titling the interview “David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost.”
Suzuki never says these words in the interview, and more significantly never describes climate change as a “fight” that can be “won” or “lost.” However, the framing of climate change as a battle that will, in principle, have a decisive victor or vanquished is persistent in many discussions of the climate crisis.
I first became suspicious of this framing when teaching a class for international development students at McGill University. I structured the class as a multidisciplinary study of framings of climate change with each week moving to a different perspective on the complex issues. One week, we read from computer scientists putting together the models. Another week, we read Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow as a speculative image of Indigenous futures. Among those perspectives, I included Jem Bendell’s intentionally and infamously alarming piece, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” Bendell strikes a similar tone to Suzuki, turning away from the question of whether or not climate change can be prevented to imagining the future of climate devastation. His intention is to unsettle: “When I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.”
My intention in assigning the piece was to open a discussion about the risks and benefits of so-called “alarmist” writing. Despite warnings to the students, and despite already having read relatively bleak warnings about climate change in drier scientific prose, I was unprepared for the distraught student response to Bendell. It did not produce a critical discussion about climate communication or energize students to address climate change. Rather, it just seemed to defeat them.
Generously, I don’t think either Suzuki or Bendell are trying to give their audiences the impression that there is nothing to be done, but somewhere in the nuances of their experiences it seems all too easy to read the rhetoric of “too late” as pathway to defeatism, “doomerism,” or nihilism. That is an incorrect interpretation of their warnings, and I have come to believe that this misinterpretation originates in the framing of climate change as something that can be “won” or “lost.”
Climate change is not a binary phenomenon. It is a matter of degrees, both in terms of degrees of temperature and in terms of degrees along a spectrum. Climate change is generally bad, but more climate change is worse. There is no climate change “switch” which can be turned on or off by human action. Instead, our collective actions will intensify or diminish the severity of climate change that we will see over the short, medium, and long term.
For the sake of simplicity, climate communications has long presented climate change as if it were a digital event. Slogans like “we have x years to stop climate change” or the structure of the Paris Climate Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5oC give the impression that if a certain benchmark is met, climate change will be averted. Of course, climate scientists have always known that this was a simplification for political effect. Nothing magically happens at 1.5oC that makes it catastrophically worse than 1.4oC or miraculously better than 1.6oC. However, political agreements need concrete numbers and target dates, and clean numbers are easier to remember and communicate.
The digital rendering of climate change gives way to the two primary responses to climate change imagined by the climate science community represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): mitigation and adaptation. In the rendering of mitigation, climate change is either an event that must be prevented or lessened, either in part or holistically, before it happens. In an adaptive view, climate change is a past event, something that must be addressed after it has happened or in preparation for that eventuality.
The problem emerges when someone reads one of these older targets after they have been missed, like Suzuki’s reference to Johan Rockström’s 2009 description of nine “planetary boundaries” that must not be crossed for life on earth to be sustainable. The original intention of sending a clear, motivating message appears to backfire once the crisis moment has been crossed. At that moment, it really does appear that we are “too late” for anything other than adaptation.
And yet, we are still here, reading these warnings, thinking about lost opportunities and future possibilities. The follow up question that must be asked after those thresholds have been crossed is “too late for what?” It is too late to prevent climate change altogether, but as demonstrated by the recent debates by the International Commission on Stratigraphy regarding the designation of an “Anthropocene” geological era, it is difficult to assess a point in the last 10,000 years where humanity has not had a dramatic impact on the planet. Again, if climate change is treated as a binary phenomenon that either happens or does not, it might appear that things are “too late.”
However, if we reframe the question about climate change from the empirical question of whether it has happened to a moral question of what we should do about it, the issue of whether it is “too late” vanishes from view. The issue of climate justice is often excluded from the framing of climate change as simply an observable phenomenon that can, at most, be adapted to or mitigated. Justice, of course, can take many forms. In the context of climate change, it might mean ensuring that resources are allocated to the communities most directly impacted by climate disasters without having contributed as much to global emissions. It might mean providing comfort to those who have lost or will lose their homes and communities. It might mean, in a more retributive sense, holding those most responsible for climate change to account. Whatever form it takes, it is never too late for climate justice as the question is whether it is the right thing to do, not whether it will effectively prevent an event that has already occurred. After all, most efforts to seek justice take place after the event in question, without ever aspiring to “undo” the harms they seek to redress.
The transition from a mitigation and adaptation framework to a justice framework may appear disappointing at times as it means forgoing the hope that someone or something will “save” us from climate change. I read Suzuki as arriving at a similar point in this interview, hence why it is incorrect for iPolitics to title the piece as they did. As he closes the interview:
“What we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together […] Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs? Who has fire extinguishers? Where is the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? Start assessing the routes of escape. You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now.”
This is not the rhetoric of giving up. Perhaps his ambitions have declined since the global climate conferences of the ‘80s, but Suzuki’s vision of care for neighbors is still a call for action. The goal is not to “stop climate change” once and for all, but rather to ensure that our collective experience of the crisis is as just as possible (while never pretending that it truly is just).
Pursuing justice instead of or alongside pursuing a definitive “solution” to climate change opens up a host of alternative pathways for action beyond the limited horizons of doomerism. It will never be too late to care for our communities and environments, no matter how bad conditions become. Justice sidesteps the repeated and tired debate of “optimism” or “pessimism” because it is not tied to a question of whether or not our efforts will succeed. Justice is worth pursuing for its own sake.
I’m intentionally not being very specific about how climate justice would look in practice beyond a few partial examples. There are many questions to be asked about Suzuki’s turn towards local communities and how to prevent a misreading of it as a version of isolationism, especially in the midst of fascism world-wide. However, this ambiguity is, in part, the point. I’m not offering a climate “solution” that would “fix” the problem, and frustration like Suzuki’s seems to emerge when all hope is placed on the existence of such solutions. My argument is that climate justice provides a more sustainable form of motivation, one that is not pegged to whether or not it “works” in some idealistic sense and is more concerned with whether we can feel good about who we are and what we do in dark times.
