While the climate crisis is arguably the most urgent scientific problem of our times, climate issues are also deeply political, economic, cultural, and epistemological. While global news outlets routinely cover droughts, fires, and floods affecting wealthy, frequently white, regions of Europe and the USA, far less attention is paid to the entrenched inequalities that put people of colour and poor people at far greater risk of climate-related devastation. In the Global South, climate-related disasters happen even more frequently, and the effects of such events on people’s livelihoods – which are often tied directly to the land and sea – are immediate and acute. Exacerbating existing inequalities, the climate crisis is also a cause of increased movement, as floods, fires, drought, and pollution push people out of their homes, and people in affected areas flee for their lives. Despite producing a minute fraction of the world’s carbon emissions, historically marginalized communities consistently suffer the worst and often most deadly effects of planetary warming. Grounded in ethnographic work about diverse communities’ experiences of and responses to climate change while also drawing on film and literature, this course asks: How do marginalized communities across the world respond to climate inequalities? What alternative visions and modes of co-existence might diverse meteorologies and ways of constructing ‘nature’, and human beings’ responsibilities toward it, suggest? What does capitalism have to do with it? How does ‘climate denial’ emerge, and what do climate justice and resilience look like? Contexts we will consider include Botswana, Namibia, Uganda, Zanzibar, Papua New Guinea, the Amazon, Palestine, India, Bangladesh, Norway, and Puerto Rico.
- Teacher: Nathalie Arnold