This course explores the concept of environmental justice as a framework for understanding the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and burdens across social groups, communities, and nations. While climate change represents a global challenge that concerns all of humanity, environmental justice requires us to think carefully about scale: should solutions be designed at the planetary level, or grounded in the lived experience of communities and their relationship to their land and traditions?
Each perspective carries both potential strengths and risks. Emphasizing local ties to land and culture can empower communities and protect traditions, but it may also risk sliding into forms of environmental nationalism—an idea historically misused, for example, in Nazi ideology, which linked the protection of nature with racial purity. On the other hand, global approaches are essential to address climate change as a planetary crisis, yet they can easily become paternalistic, imposing ecological models that may not fit with local ways of life.
This course invites students to reflect on what we mean by the environment. Is it best understood as the global climate system we all share? Or as the lived spaces that allow for subsistence: ancestral territories, lands, roads, and resources used on a daily basis? And how are the differences in lived experiences among oppressed groups (Indigenous peoples, racialized or marginalized communities, women) relevant to the ways we think about solutions to climate disruption? Environmental justice always involves questions of power and sovereignty, which shape how communities claim and defend their environments.
- Dozent/in: Juliette Monvoisin