Tuesday, Oct 17th
Climate Justice and Feminist Environmental Science
Climate change is a moral and justice issue, not a science, techno-managerial or finance
issue
Climate justice fundamentally is about paying attention to how climate change impacts
people differently, unevenly, and disproportionately as well as redressing the resultant
injustices in fair and equitable ways
Consider uneven causes and impacts of climate chang over space and time
Critical Climate Justice
Investigates how and why different groups of people face different inequities in different
ways from climate change
Examples of differential gendered harms
→ gendered workloads changing with ecological change
Water collection becomes difficult as rivers and wells dry up
→ gendered experiences of climate disasters
Women's lack of physical strength and skills (sociological and biological),
responsibility for children, poverty, mobility
Critical climate justice calls for accountability to intersectional feminist analysis, so that
lived experiences and wisdom of differently situated subjects are heard and heeded, and
appropriate and inclusive policies and programs are planned
Consumption is gendered
→ ideologically (products associated with masculine or feminine)
→ materially (women responsible for household consumptions)
Questioninh Gendered Responsibilities
Attempt to lodge responsibility mainly with women as household managers and
consumers should be rejected because it continues to conceive the household as women's
burden, because it miscocieves the power of the private household to halt environmental
degradation and because it appeals to women's traditional self-abnegation, asking them to
carry the world's ills in recognition of motherly duty
