Ties between inequality, climate change chronicled in adept new account

Scroll through your morning news feed, and it’s all too easy to see the impact of climate change. Be it stories about carbon tax rebates, flood forecasts, Manitoba Hydro deficits or tariff wars, reporting on the economic impacts of climate change are ubiquitous. We are adept at compartmentalizing and framing climate change as a monetary inconvenience rather than an existential crisis.

Perhaps this is our coping mechanism.

For Friederike Otto, physicist and philosopher who lectures at Imperial College London, the question about how we collectively understand the impacts of climate change presents an ethical and moral question. In Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change, Otto, who previously wrote Angry Weather (2020) and who in 2021 was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people, contemplates the following paradox: “(C)limate change is an unstoppable catastrophe that will soon destroy humanity and even the most cautious attempt to shift the status quo is an attack on personal freedom.”

What a perplexing and ever-evolving problem: we know we are destroying the very thing that supports human life, yet if we say so, we are mocked, labeled as terrorists or removed from our land. As Otto contends, “Faced with these two irreconcilable beliefs (as mentioned above), we bury our head in the sand while clinging to the current state of affairs against all reason.”

Published by Greystone Books in collaboration with the David Suzuki Institute, Climate Injustice seeks to push the economic — or, as Otto frames it, the colonial-fossil — narrative to fundamentally link climate change to the lives of humans. This, she believes, will be how we overcome the head-in-the-sand quandary.

By focusing on four central themes — heat, drought, fire and flood — Otto weaves the science linking severe weather to climate change (or “planetary fever,” as she bleakly but powerfully offers) to the people whose lives are adversely impacted by a warming planet. And, much like the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change does not impact us all in the same way. Those who are underserved and marginalized are the ones who bear the most burden.

Collecting stories from Lytton, B.C. (site of the 2021 heat dome, when the Canadian village instantly went up in smoke), Gambia, South Africa, Madagascar, Brazil, Germany and Pakistan, Otto compareas how different cultures and societies — the global north and south — attempt to mitigate and cope with climate change. As one might predict, those countries and communities that are subjected to the devastating impacts of poverty, colonialism, racism and sexism are most at risk (and least culpable) for the impacts of climate change.

As Otto argues, “what is absolutely clear is that the more people are in harm’s way and the more vulnerable they are, the greater their risk.” Focusing on unique case studies and engaging in narrative research methodologies, Otto is able to properly and justly capture the impacts of planetary fever.

Her contention is that unless we address the systemic inequities, we will never be able to address climate change: “(T)he neglect of most of the world’s population means that they suffer the most from the climate crisis. Climate change can only be understood against this backdrop, and we won’t be able to manage climate change unless we eliminate the historic dynamic of injustice, of domination and dependence, between countries of the Global North and the Global South.”

It’s a provocative thesis that should shake the oligarchs at their core, but also those like this reviewer, whose privilege is owed to the exploitation of others. How do we address this wicked ethical problem — one both global and deeply personal?

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Unless we make individual changes to our behaviour, global temperature will not decrease. “As long as North Americans… refuse to make even laughably small lifestyle changes, the speed at which heat waves intensify won’t decrease either,” Otto writes. Think big trucks, tropical vacations, steak dinners, giant houses and such.

For Otto, it begins with story, with narrative: “We need constructive, powerful narratives that help to dismantle traditional, institutionalized, structural inequality, rather than reinforcing it through the consequence of climate change.”

We have always changed societal narratives through education — public education. If we are serious about combating inequality, and therefore climate change — or planetary fever — public education is the catalyst. Schools, divisions and ministries must double down on efforts to equip learners with the knowledge, skills and ways to call out injustice, and name it and develop powerful solutions to existential catastrophes.

Climate Justice serves as a brilliant mentor text on how physics and philosophy, combined with deep love for our planet and each other, can be the basis for a new curriculum.

Matt Henderson is superintendent of the Winnipeg School Division.