Presumably, there is a disconnect between mainstream, first world environmental values and environmental justice, which is a focus on the social and environmental needs of communities of color, the poor, especially poor women, and the colonized.

Following a highly controversial and infamous essay, “The Death of Environmentalism,” by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus,* the mainstream environmental movement felt a crisis of faith. This crisis, however, was not shared by most environmental justice advocates*. If Shellenberger and Nordhaus are correct, the inability of mainstream environmentalism to form an adequate political and cultural response to climate change is caused by its orientation towards incremental policy-making in centers of power like Washington, DC. Would thinking about climate change from an environmental justice point of view, which generally seeks action (sometimes radical action) in local communities, re-invigorate the troops and open new areas of policy-making?

As I point out in many of my classes, the industrial waste stream, worker inequity, toxic substances (as well as a host of other ‘bads’ produced for the ‘good’ of the rest of society) affect indigenous, racialized, and impoverished peoples and cultures around the world in a much greater way than they do others. Thus, by analogy and by what we know already, climate change is affecting and will continue to affect these peoples in a greater fashion.

The fact that Arctic peoples are already adapting to climate change was a key theme of a symposium that I helped to develop last May for the Dickey Center, called, “Arctic Change: Creating a Dialog Between the Academy, Northern Peoples, and Policy Makers.” Participants at the symposium were from the Nunavut Ministry of Environment, the Alaska Native Science Council, the Northwest Arctic Borough, (RAIPON) the Russian Association of Indigenous People of the North, as well as from (CRREL) the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian, the US Department of State, the Canadian Consulate, and elsewhere.

As someone who generally works on indigenous environmental issues not in the Arctic north, I wanted to engage the participants in the symposium around a set of key questions that I thought would overcome the seeming lack of efficacy of the environmental movement’s response to climate change: Would bringing these groups of people together—academics, scientists, indigenous peoples, and policy makers from various levels of government—to address the needs of indigenous peoples in the north lead to new ways of addressing the cultural and political problems of climate change? That is, would addressing the issue of climate change from a northern indigenous perspective create new opportunities, not only for understanding climate change, but also in crafting an equitable set of policy responses to it?

Explicitly, the goal of our symposium was to “examine the ways in which information about climate change can be incorporated into national and international policies for trade, cultural vitality, national security and sustainable development in the North.” Additionally, the guidance sheet we issued for the symposium stated: “We must ensure that corporate resource interests and nation-state actors respect the interests and lifestyles of those who live in the far north, thus avoiding a destructive resource rush. This requires taking both the formal and informal mechanisms currently being put into place by state and local actors, and ensuring local, indigenous influence over not just the management schemes, but the forms of knowledge that frame them as well.” Thus, we were interested in starting the discussion about the current and future effects of climate change from a space of equity and sustainability, not in the general sense that seems to make climate change an abstract issue for many, but with specific needs of specific peoples—peoples who will, as history teaches us, bear the heaviest burdens of the ‘bads’ of industrial society.

In particular, we found that three issues are of critical concern to Arctic peoples as they face climate change: what knowledge is used to make policy decisions for adaptation and mitigation of drastic climate change, who controls the resources that will be affected by these changes, and who will suffer or benefit from these changes. We were surprised at how scientific tools have the potential to help indigenous people already adapting to climate change. We heard many stories of hunters going out to hunt in traditional areas that are now facing previously unknown dangers. As a scientific and public health concern, there could be great progress made in avoiding such dangers by combining scientific techniques and indigenous knowledge. But beyond these specific everyday adaptation needs, the indigenous participants of the symposium reminded us again and again what was at stake in adapting to these changes in the very near future—not only just the lifestyles that will be lost, but also the huge economic and social problems that they will have to face in the north because of eroding coastal villages and constantly shifting marine resources.

All of this leads to a deeper understanding of the policies needed to address climate change, and may allow for just the discussion that Shellenberger and Nordhaus feel is lacking in mainstream environmentalism regarding climate change—namely, a recognition that our institutions do not work, and that we will need new ones to address the coming changes to our environment. Indigenous peoples and citizens of island nations like Tuvalu are already organizing to make this point, as can be witnessed by the human rights case that the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) brought against the United States in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights this past December. The real impact and ultimate decision of this case remain unclear, but it is clear that the policy dimensions are shifting in the debate around climate change.

This human rights case and the claims of indigenous people in the north are perhaps the most original, creative responses to climate change we have so far. A couple of years ago, as part of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment process (which culminated, in November of 2004, with the most definitive statement on climate change to date), the six permanent Arctic Indigenous peoples organizations of the Arctic Council put forward a list of recommendations for the Arctic states to consider, which included, among other recommendations, that nation-states:

1. Inject Arctic perspectives into the heart of the debate on the impacts and effects of climate change.

2. Assist Arctic Indigenous peoples to bring their views, perspectives, and recommendations to international institutions mandated to combat the impacts and effects of global climate change.

3. Encourage Arctic Indigenous peoples to adapt to and manage the impacts of climate change by equipping them with information and budgets, by acknowledging their authority to protect and promote their ways of life, and by working closely with their representatives

These recommendations represent the new cultural and policy angles on climate change that can only be brought about by groups normally thought of as engaged in struggles for environmental justice. It creates an opportunity to address issues of equity within nation-states while at the same time going beyond the cycle of incremental policy represented by the Kyoto Protocol and its advocates. As a set of principles, based on inclusion and equity, these types of policy recommendations aim to ensure a future for us all in a way that the regulation of future carbon emissions will never do. This is what an environmental justice view of climate change can offer us.

*Check out the paper and many responses to it at http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/doe-intro/