The Lion and the Unicorn

Climate change is the defining issue of our time. We have approximately ten years to implement "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society" (IPCC Special Report) if we are to contain global warming at 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—the threshold that the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified as the international climate target that must be met if we are to prevent irreversible damage to natural ecosystems and the catastrophic exacerbation of existing global inequities. The thing is, climate change is not a future threat that we are seeking to avert. Rather, it is a present-day crisis that is already drastically transforming and degrading environments and communities. Superstorms, firestorms, heat waves, droughts, flooding, warming and acidifying waters, disappearing shorelines, and melting ice caps have decimated natural habitats, disrupted food chains, altered animals' migratory patterns and reproductive behaviors, and imperiled the health, livelihoods, lands, and traditions of peoples around the world, particularly those who are marginalized.

There is no question that climate change is a global emergency. Yet it is a crisis that does not impact everyone equally; nor is it a crisis that everyone bears equal responsibility for. Nations in the Global North produce most of the world's emissions, yet it is communities in the Global South that experience the most brutal impacts of climate change. In the United States—as illustrated by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Sandy, and Maria—disabled persons, Indigenous peoples, and Black, Brown, working-class, and poor communities are not only severely impacted by climate disasters but also further harmed by inept, ableist, racist, and classist institutional responses to these catastrophes. Climate-driven drought has fueled the ongoing civil wars in South Sudan and Syria, leading to refugee crises in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Likewise, drought, poverty, and famine in the [End Page v] Dry Corridor of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have forced many farming families to leave their lands. The Central American climate refugees who headed north were demonized and criminalized by the Trump administration—the same administration that withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement and vigorously worked to loosen environmental safeguards. While industries—including the one hundred companies responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Griffin 8)—are rarely held accountable for the ecocide they enact on a planetary scale, individuals are urged to exercise personal responsibility by becoming eco-conscious consumers. This displacement of blame through the manufacturing of climate guilt is central to the operations of ecocidal neoliberalism.

The struggle to keep our planet habitable is necessarily intertwined with movements for racial, economic, and social justice. To confront the climate crisis is to recognize it as culminating from a long history of capitalist, colonialist expansionism—a system that equates progress to extraction of natural resources; exploitation of peoples, flora, and fauna; invention and reinforcement of hierarchies among and within species; and conquest and erasure of cultures and ecosystems. As Kyle P. Whyte reminds us, while climate change is often spoken of in terms of future ecological and social breakdown, imperialist engines that destroy natural environments and displace peoples both physically and psychologically have made environmental apocalypse the lived reality of Indigenous peoples around the world in the past and present (227). And the Covid-19 pandemic has given us a preview of how climate change will likely worsen already-entrenched forms of ecoapartheid: wealthy families will use economic and political capital to adapt to the crisis, fleeing to more hospitable areas and deploying technologies that will allow them to continue to work, acquire goods, and access entertainments. Meanwhile, the less affluent and minoritized groups will face mass unemployment, eviction, hunger, and inadequate health care services. Those without the means to move elsewhere will eke out diminished lives in what Dorceta E. Taylor calls "toxic communities": sites decimated by pollution, disasters, and racial and social injustice.

Mitigating the climate crisis necessarily requires institutional changes and responses. It also requires us to reckon with cultural narratives that normalize consumption and accumulation. A critical mass of individuals must fight for and commit to just transitions...