Intergenerational Democracy, Environmental Justice and the Case of Nuclear Waste
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Energy justice is often approached through the four tenets of procedural, distributive, restorative and recognition justice. Though these tenets are important placeholders for addressing what type of justice issues are involved, they require further normative substantiations. These are achieved by using principles of justice to specify why-normatively speaking-something is just or unjust within each category or tenet of justice. In addressing the principles of justice, it is important to acknowledge normative uncertainties, or the fact that different (incom-patible) conceptions of justice might be morally defensible, leading to different normative conclusions or policy recommendations. This paper reviews the definitions of tenets in energy justice scholarship, the occurrence of normative claims, and how these claims are justified. The review shows that the scholarship ignores to a large extent normative uncertainties. In response, we propose a revisited energy justice framework, focusing on four aspects that help us to articulate the normative uncertainties in both the principles and the tenets of energy justice. These aspects are (i) the scale of justice (i.e. whether justice is considered at a local, national, regional, multinational or global scale), (ii) the subject of justice, (iii) the body of knowledge that is assumed and (iv) the time frame in which justice issues are being considered. We hope to provide a conceptual framework that make explicit the different types of normative assumptions underlying claims of justice, which will ultimately improve the quality and legitimacy of normative conclusions such as policy recommendations that follow.
For the past 50 years, the UK nuclear industry has characterised disposal of radioactive waste as a social problem not a technology problem. Yet nearly 50 years after the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution’s report, the UK is still several decades away from building facilities that will provide a safe, permanent home for all but the lowest-level categories of waste. Attempts to site new facilities have repeatedly failed. In 2007, the approach changed from one driven by identifying an ideal site then implementing it, to one that placed consent from the hosting community at the forefront. The new policy appears risky, with little confidence that it will identify a site for the more dangerous waste that is both technically and politically acceptable. If a suitable site cannot be identified, policymakers will have to face the unpalatable option of long-term surface storage of highly radioactive waste.
The scientific literature on the co-impacts of low-carbon energy systems—positive and negative side effects—has focused intently on climate mitigation, or climate adaptation. It has not systematically examined the prospective co-impacts of carbon removal (or negative emissions) and solar geoengineering. Based on a large sample of diverse expert interviews (N = 125), and using a sociotechnical approach, in this study we identify 107 perceived co-impacts related to the deployment of carbon removal and solar geoengineering technologies. Slightly less than half (52) were identified as positive co-impacts (38 for carbon removal, 14 for solar geoengineering), whereas slightly more than half (55) were identified as negative co-impacts (31 for carbon removal, 24 for solar geoengineering). We then discuss 20 of these co-impacts in more depth, including positive co-impacts for nature-based protection, the expansion of industry, and reduction of poverty or heat stress as well as negative co-impacts for water insecurity, moral hazard, limited social acceptance and path dependence. After presenting this body of evidence, the paper then discusses and theorizes these co-impacts more deeply in terms of four areas: relationality and risk-risk trade-offs, co-deployment and coupling, intentional or unintentional implications, and expert consensus and dissensus. It concludes with more general insights for energy and climate research, and policy.
In 1987, the Brundtland Commission urged nations to improve present conditions without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Against the background of this appeal for sustainable development, there is a call for intergenerational justice, under a sufficientarian framework. Despite their strong relation, we claim that, to some degree, intergenerational sufficientarianism disregards relevant sustainability notions. This neglect undermines intergenerational sufficientarianism in the context of sustainability, here operationalized as sustainable development. In response, we propose the concept of irreplaceable goods as a necessary bridge between the two frameworks. Simultaneously, we stress the need for scholars to consider sufficientarianism as a valid alternative to egalitarianism for achieving resource justice. To harmonize intergenerational sufficientarianism and sustainability, we firstly delineate sustainability theoretical notions that influence fair distributive futures. Secondly, we incorporate those sustainability constraints into the conceptual background of intergenerational sufficientarianism. We also establish the concept of irreplaceable goods as a pivot and anchor for further theoretical development on the sufficient well-being of future generations. Finally, we discuss the implications of this concept in terms of expenditure and investment by contemporary people. With the proposed adjustments, we advocate that intergenerational sufficientarianism is a robust framework to deliver just futures.
Canada's siting process for spent nuclear fuel, led by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), is frequently held within nuclear industry spheres as an exemplary siting process, designed to be inclusive, participatory, and “community-driven.” Drawing from ethnographic observations of the process as it unfolded in Southern Ontario, Canada, this paper focuses on the epistemic issues of how diverse knowledges are treated in the process, whose knowledge is valued, how such knowledges are understood, and whose knowledges are excluded. In particular, I make sense of how epistemic tensions in the process are produced by being situated within a nuclear landscape, informed by local nuclear-dominant socio-technical relations and epistemic regimes, which exceptionalize pro-nuclear Western scientific knowledges. This socio-technical constellation, I suggest, leads to careful but sometimes paradoxical negotiations of the expert/lay divide that subsequently reveals cracks in the policy foundation for inclusion of diverse forms of knowledge. While the NWMO policy framework discursively values diverse knowledges, critical lay community knowledges are often delegitimized and dismissed. Similarly, there are scalar issues in the ways Indigenous knowledges are homogenized and devalued through discursive separation. These epistemic tensions, between how knowledges should be treated in policy, and how knowledges are actually treated in practice, demonstrate clear issues of recognition justice, participatory fairness, and inclusion of diverse knowledges. The implications of this work shed light on understanding the complexities of landscape-based knowledge politics and how they might inform siting practices and technological decision-making more broadly.
This chapter examines corporate-state collaboration and policing technologies along the UK’s High Speed 2 (HS2) railway project. After situating Europe’s largest infrastructure scheme as a fundamentally extractivist green capitalist megaproject, we examine policing partnerships and mechanisms including the outsourcing of policing work to private contractors, formal arrangements, and on-the-ground collaboration. The policing of HS2, we argue, relies on (a) the silencing of dissent and control of the political narrative through non-disclosure agreements and pressure on landowners; (b) (a priori) criminalisation and deterrence grounded in open-source intelligence gathering; and (c) physical coercion of resistance and violence against protesters. Policing and marketing enable the positioning of the project as environmentally and economically beneficial for Britain, especially less wealthy Northern communities, making claims that are strongly contested by protesters and observers. This chapter thus contributes to our understanding of large infrastructure projects, their extractivist nature, and their links to state power and legitimacy, and it shows how state and non-state policing combine to enforce growth at any cost.
SignificanceSmall modular reactors (SMRs), proposed as the future of nuclear energy, have purported cost and safety advantages over existing gigawatt-scale light water reactors (LWRs). However, few studies have assessed the implications of SMRs for the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle. The low-, intermediate-, and high-level waste stream characterization presented here reveals that SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically reactive waste than LWRs, which will impact options for the management and disposal of this waste. Although the analysis focuses on only three of dozens of proposed SMR designs, the intrinsically higher neutron leakage associated with SMRs suggests that most designs are inferior to LWRs with respect to the generation, management, and final disposal of key radionuclides in nuclear waste.
Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth 242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
Introductory chapter of Kaijser, Lehtonen, Meyer & Rubio-Varas. 2021. "Engaging the Atom The History of Nuclear Energy and Society in Europe from the 1950s to the Present". West Virginia University Press.
What radical tactics might those seeking transformational action on climate or environmental sustainability undertake? What options are capable of stopping actors and institutions who already realize their actions and behavior may harm millions, degrade the biosphere, and contaminate the climate, but continue to do so, despite the scientific or moral reasons not to? This paper explores efforts that can vigorously confront apathy and inaction and potentially subvert power relations currently perpetuating climate catastrophe and environmental destruction. We examine the tactics employed over time from civil disobedience and (strict) nonviolence, antiauthoritarian strategies and self-defense as well as guerrilla warfare perspectives, and distill from them options for potential climate action. In doing so, we offer a comprehensive inventory of 20 distinct direct action tactics that, while unsavory in some contexts, offer a chance of creating social change. In doing so, we also draw from the wealth of knowledge regarding protests, social movements, self-organization, and an array of different struggles and strategies.
At a time when such discussions are muted in academic enquiry, media coverage and wider energy policy, Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) have provided crucial analysis of the role that militaries play in influencing the direction and speed of low carbon transitions. 1 Indeed it is remarkable given the central role that war and the military have played in past energy transitions and how large global military spending continues to be, 2 that there seem only such marginal levels of academic curiosity regarding how contemporary energy system dynamics might be shaped by military imperatives. There is tendency in contemporary analysis of 'sustainability transitions' for example, to treat energy and other 'systems' as discrete and bounded, governed by their own internal properties and seemingly disconnected from wider dynamics. This leaves questions of how military ambitions shape the direction of energy policy trajectories almost entirely unaddressed. A key example of these tendencies can be seen in conventional energy policy analysis of UK commitments to new nuclear power, the UK being one of the few OECD countries still enthusiastically pursuing the technology. As we discuss below, given the now clear disadvantages of new nuclear compared to renewables, this commitment does not make sense when considered simply within the confines of energy policy rationales. What we have outlined through research spanning several years, is that a key driver of the UK's intense enthusiasm for new nuclear reactors stems from elite imperatives to sustain the capabilities, skills, and supply chain activities necessary for Britain to build, maintain, and operate the nuclear propelled submarines that underpin its nuclear weapons system. In other words, civil nuclear channels a subsidy towards military nuclear activities. At a time when the UK Government seeks to 'build back better' following the COVID-19 pandemic and sees nuclear as playing a role in this, our analysis holds potentially significant implications for the UK's climate action, for discussions concerning the health of British democracy-and for the building of a more peaceful and less militarised world. The oddity of UK nuclear commitments We are currently living through momentous and global shifts in energy systems. Over the past decade, renewables have surpassed official expectations with rapid construction and plummeting costs. Renewables now increasingly offer the cheapest energy sources worldwide. 3 As highlighted by recent Lazard data, cost advantages of renewables over new nuclear now typically dwarf costs of managing intermittency. 4 Costs of batteries and other storage and grid management options are also declining rapidly. 5 Between 2010-2019 wind costs fell globally by 70% and solar costs by 89%. 4 Nuclear costs on the other hand, have risen by 26% over the past decade. 4 Indeed, global nuclear new build continues to stagnate. 6 is plagued by delays and cost overruns. 6 with leading nuclear companies face bankruptcy or potential insolvency. 7 Some are withdrawing entirely from nuclear investment, because it is no longer After speaking at SGR's 'Transition Now' conference, Phil Johnstone teams up with Andy Stirling, both of the University of Sussex, to reveal even more evidence of the unwelcome institutional links of nuclear energy. > >
Intergenerational sustainability (IS) has emerged as the most serious social problem reflecting climate change and accumulation of public debt in modern democratic societies, undermining the potential interests and concerns of future generations. However, little is known about whether or not deliberative forms of democracy with majority voting helps support at maintaining IS by representing future generations' potential interests and concerns. We institute IS dilemma game with three forms of decision-making models with majority voting and examine how they maintain IS in laboratory experiments. In the IS dilemma game, a sequence of six generations is prepared where each generation consisting of three subjects is asked to choose either maintaining IS (sustainable option) or maximizing their own generation's payoff by irreversibly costing the subsequent generations (unsustainable option) with anonymous voting systems: (1) majority voting (MV), (2) deliberative majority voting (DMV) and (3) majority voting with deliberative accountability (MVDA). In MV and DMV, generations vote for their choices without and with deliberation, respectively. In MVDA, generations are asked to be possibly accountable for their choices to the subsequent generations during deliberation, and then vote. Our analysis shows that decision-making models with only majority voting generally does not address IS, while DMV and MVDA treatments induce more and much more generations to choose a sustainable option than MV, respectively. Overall, the results demonstrate that deliberation and accountability along with majority voting shall be necessary in models of decision-making at resolving IS problems and representing future generations' potential interests and concerns.
Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve. However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today's carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 46 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Climate change worry, eco-anxiety, and ecological grief are concepts that have emerged in the media, public discourse, and research in recent years. However, there is not much literature examining and summarizing the ways in which these emotions are expressed, to what processes they are related, and how they are distributed. This narrative review aims to ( a) summarize research about the relationships between, on the one hand, negative emotions in relation to climate change and other environmental problems and, on the other hand, mental well-being among people in different parts of the world and ( b) examine studies that have explored the potentially constructive role of worry—for example, in the form of providing motivation to act. It is clear from this review that negative emotions regarding environmental problems are normal, and often constructive, responses. Yet, given the nature, range, and extent of these emotions, it is important to identify diverse place-based and culturally relevant strategies to help people cope.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 46 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Climate justice is conceived as the intertemporal climate equity and equality exchange amongst generations. Sustainability—intended as the interplay amongst the economy, the society, the environment, and the governance—is essential to forge the climate justice theoretical framework. On this base, the study attempts to model the intertemporal choice of the status quo amongst generations in these four domains, making use of an overlapping generations (OLG) model making use of an intertemporal choice framework. The proxies detected are GDP growth (economy), environmental quality (environment), and labor growth, and environmental investment (society) as assumptions. The governance dimension is captured by the difference in wealth between young and old generations. The work aims at replying to the following research question: Which are the conditions for sustainable development such that climate justice holds? The intra-intergenerational exchange is defined in two periods, while the individual provides their preferred economic and environmental choice mix as consumption-saving. This study shows that keeping the business-as-usual scenario, young generations will have to bear the brunt of sustainable development. Additionally, reduced emissions are only achievable with increased efforts by the youth by reducing their leisure and consumption. These facts call for enhanced intergenerational sustainability and climate justice policies.
This paper quantifies drain from the global South through unequal exchange since 1960. According to our primary method, which relies on exchange-rate differentials, we find that in the most recent year of data the global North (‘advanced economies’) appropriated from the South commodities worth 62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars), or $152 trillion when accounting for lost growth. Appropriation through unequal exchange represents up to 7% of Northern GDP and 9% of Southern GDP. We also test several alternative methods, for comparison: we quantify unequal exchange in terms of wage differentials instead of exchange-rate differentials, and report drain in global average prices as well as Northern prices. Regardless of the method, we find that the intensity of exploitation and the scale of unequal exchange increased significantly during the structural adjustment period of the 1980s and 1990s. This study affirms that drain from the South remains a significant feature of the world economy in the post-colonial era; rich countries continue to rely on imperial forms of appropriation to sustain their high levels of income and consumption.
Trust and confidence have been identified as crucial for efforts at solving the conundrum of high‐level radioactive waste management (RWM). However, mistrust has its virtues, especially in the form of “civic vigilance”—healthy suspicion towards the powers that be. This article examines civic vigilance in the form of “watchdog journalism,” as practiced by the leading Finnish and French newspapers—Helsingin Sanomat (HS) and Le Monde (LM)—in their RWM reporting. Although both countries are forerunners in RWM, Finland constitutes a Nordic “high‐trust society” while France has been characterized as a “society of mistrust.” Employing the methods of frame analysis, key RWM‐related news frames were identified, consisting of varying combinations of confidence, skepticism, trust, and mistrust. LM's mistrust‐skepticism‐oriented framings reflect the classical watchdog role, in sharp contrast with the confidence oriented framings of HS, which tends to reproduce government and industry framings. Explanations for the observed differences can be sought in historically constituted political and media cultures, as well as national nuclear “regimes”. For further research, we suggest two alternative hypotheses concerning the implications that these distinct models of civic vigilance have for democracy.
This article examines the struggle against the new Électricité de France (EDF) wind park, Gunaa Sicarú, in Unión Hidalgo (UH), Mexico. Foregrounding Indigenous land defense, the article refers to wind energy as ‘wind factories’ to discuss agrarian change in the region. Revealing the counterinsurgency colonial model as a foundational approach to extractive development, the article argues that the distribution of money, Sicarios (hitmen) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are instrumental to engineering ‘social acceptance’. Moreover, the liberalism underlining NGOs, if not careful, advances processes of infrastructural colonization and, consequently, wider trajectories of (neo)colonialism.
The intergenerational sustainability dilemma (ISD) is a situation of whether or not a person sacrifices herself for future sustainability. To examine the individual behaviors, one-person ISD game (ISDG) is instituted with strategy method where a queue of individuals is organized as a generational sequence. In ISDG, each individual chooses unsustainable (or sustainable) option with her payoff of X (X − D) and an irreversible cost of D (zero cost) to future generations in 36 situations. Future ahead and back (FAB) mechanism is suggested as resolution for ISD by taking the perspective of future generation whereby each individual is first asked to take the next generation's standpoint and request what she wants the current generation to choose, and, second, to make the actual decision from the original position. Results show that individuals choose unsustainable option as previous generations do so or X/D is low (i.e., sustainability is endangered). However, FAB prevents individuals from choosing unsustainable option in such endangered situations. Overall, the results suggest that some new institutions, such as FAB mechanisms, which induce people to take the perspective of future generations, may be necessary to avoid intergenerational unsustainability, especially when intergenerational sustainability is highly endangered.
This collection of essays examines, in context, eastern Native American speeches, which are translated and reprinted in their entirety. Anthologies of Native American orators typically focus on the rhetoric of western speakers but overlook the contributions of Eastern speakers. The roles women played, both as speakers themselves and as creators of the speeches delivered by the men, are also commonly overlooked. Finally, most anthologies mine only English-language sources, ignoring the fraught records of the earliest Spanish conquistadors and French adventurers. This study fills all these gaps and also challenges the conventional assumption that Native thought had little or no impact on liberal perspectives and critiques of Europe. Essays are arranged so that the speeches progress chronologically to reveal the evolving assessments and responses to the European presence in North America, from the mid-sixteenth century to the twentieth century.
Providing a discussion of the history, culture, and oratory of eastern Native Americans, this work will appeal to scholars of Native American history and of communications and rhetoric. Speeches represent the full range of the woodland east and are taken from primary sources.
Future generations” play a key role in current political debates. In the context of the climate crisis especially, political controversies are often framed as moral problems of “intergenerational justice.” This article aims to historicize the use of the concept of “future generations” in modern political discourse and to uncover its long—and often ambivalent—history. Its main argument is that talking about “future generations” was part of an attempt to integrate (distant) futures into the political discourse of the time. The first part of the article outlines a theoretical perspective on the relationship between generations and temporalities. The second part focuses on how anticipating “future generations” became an important part of the history of utopian thinking and political planning in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the realm of demographic and economic discussions. The third part analyzes the emergence of “future ethics” and “intergenerational justice” as important political discourses in the 1970s. This part refers both to the academic debates about “future generations” and to the way political decision‐makers used the concept to legitimize their policies. The article argues that the concept of “future generations” should not be taken as an ethical principle that transcended the political debates of the present. Rather, it was itself the result of intense political controversies.
What does the rise of the far right mean for the battle against climate change?
In the first study of the far right’s role in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, revealing its deep historical roots.
Report and commentary on the "promise-construction" at the Reuters “SMR & Advanced Reactor 2022” conference held in Atlanta, 24-25 May, 2022.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/12/building-promises-of-small-modular-reactors-one-conference-at-a-time/#post-heading
This Handbook analyzes the macroeconomics of global warming, especially the economics of possible preventative measures, various policy changes, and potential effects of climate change on developing and developed nations.
Who owns the internet? It depends where you look. The physical assets at the core of the internet, the warehouses that store the cloud’s data and interlink global networks, are owned not by technology firms like Google and Facebook but by commercial real estate barons who compete with malls and property storage empires. Granted an empire by the US at the moment of the internet’s commercialization, these internet landlords shaped how the network of networks that we call the internet physically connects, and how personal and business data is stored and transmitted. Under their governance, internet exchanges, colocation facilities, and data centers take on a double life as financialized real estate assets that circle the globe even as their servers and cables are firmly rooted in place. The history of internet landlords forces a fundamental reconsideration of the business model at the base of the internet. This history makes clear that the internet was never an exogenous shock to capitalist social relations, but rather a touchstone example of an economic system increasingly ruled by asset owners like landlords.
i>Systemic Action Research explains how systemic thinking works and how it can be embedded into organisational structures and processes to catalyse sustainable change and critical local interventions.
Christopher Columbus’s voyage changed the world forever because the era of racial slavery and colonialism that it started built the world in the first place. The irreversible environmental damage of history’s first planet-sized political and economic system is responsible for our present climate crisis. Reparations call for us to make the world over again: this time, justly. The project of reparations and racial justice in the twenty-first century must take climate justice head on. The book develops arguments about the role of racial capitalism in global politics, addresses other views of reparations, and summarizes perspectives on environmental racism.
This book provides an accessible introduction to environmental politics through a powerful, discourse-centred approach which analyzes how environmental affairs are constructed and interpreted through language. It recounts developments beginning with the arrival of environmental crisis in the late 1960s, which yielded dire warnings about global shortages and ecological collapse. It moves through subsequent decades to the Paris Agreement on climate change, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and the anti-environmental backlash of denial and “Gray Radicalism”. The book develops an innovative approach to understanding contemporary environmental discourses, covering ecological limits and planetary boundaries, pragmatic problem-solving, sustainability, ecological modernization, and green radicalism, as well as radical anti-environmentalism. It analyzes key developments in environmental affairs alongside many examples that illustrate how discourses shape past and current debates on the environment. It concludes by examining the radical implications of the Anthropocene concept.
Media actors, broadly conceived, act as powerful agents shaping not only what we think about, but also how we think about it. Whilst research at the site of news content (e.g. newspaper articles) has proliferated, there is little understanding about the site of news production (i.e. the role that powerful actors play in shaping news content). Here, both news content (via newspaper articles) and news production (via image collections) are examined together to seek to understand how climate protest has been visually represented.
This study focuses on the period between 2019 and 2020, a time of significant growth for climate protest through the expansion of movements including Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future. Historically, protest is often represented in the media through the ‘protest paradigm’, with protestors depicted as socially deviant. This study sought to examine if this paradigm held true for these most recent protests.
Climate protest imagery was collected from a globally-dominant image collection, Getty Images; and from the digital archives of five major UK newspapers. Secondary analysis was also undertaken of a longitudinal visual media datasource featuring three of the same UK newspapers from 2001 to 2009. The study shows that in 2001–2009, climate protest was typically visualised in a way which obscured the human face of protest and was consistent with the protest paradigm. In contrast, in 2019–20, protesters – and particularly school strikers – were depicted in an individualised, powerful, and hopeful way. The dominant face of climate protest in 2019–20 is visually represented in the media as young and female. We conclude that the visual discourse of climate protest has shifted away from the protest paradigm to instead depict climate change as an issue of intergenerational equity.
The Covid pandemic and the shocking racial disparities in its impact. The surge in inflammatory illnesses such as gastrointestinal disorders and asthma. Mass uprisings around the world in response to systemic racism and violence. Rising numbers of climate refugees. Our bodies, societies, and planet are inflamed.
Boldly original, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through the human body—our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, this groundbreaking work illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. Inflammation is connected to the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the diversity of the microbes living inside us, which regulate everything from our brain’s development to our immune system’s functioning. It’s connected to the number of traumatic events we experienced as children and to the traumas endured by our ancestors. It’s connected not only to access to health care but to the very models of health that physicians practice.
Raj Patel, the renowned political economist and New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with the physician Rupa Marya to offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. Decolonizing heals what has been divided, reestablishing our relationships with the Earth and one another. Combining the latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization with the stories of Marya’s work with patients in marginalized communities, activist passion, and the wisdom of Indigenous groups, Inflamed points the way toward a deep medicine that has the potential to heal not only our bodies, but the world.
Climate change is increasingly understood as a social justice issue by academics, policymakers, and the public, however, the nature of these perceptions, and their implications for cooperation and decision making, have only recently begun to receive empirical attention. We review emerging empirical work that suggests that morality and justice perceptions can serve as both a bridge and a barrier to cooperation around climate change, and highlight two critical areas for future development, identifying psychological processes that promote and impede climate vulnerability and enhance equity in the design and implementation of climate solutions. We argue that conceptualizing climate justice as a multidimensional process addressing both social and structural barriers can stimulate new psychological research and help align disparate approaches within the social sciences.
Between 1957 and 1962, the UK and USA conducted 33 atmospheric nuclear weapons test detonations at or close to Malden and Kiritimati (Christmas) Islands (total yield 31 megatons), formerly British colonial territories in the central Pacific region, now part of the Republic of Kiribati. Some 40,000 British, Fijian, New Zealand and US civilian and military personnel participated in the test program and 500 i‐Kiribati civilians lived on Kiritimati at the time. This article reviews humanitarian and environmental consequences of the UK and US nuclear weapons testing programs in Kiribati, as well as the policy measures that have addressed them. The authors contend that policy interventions to date have not adequately addressed the needs and rights of test survivors, nor ongoing environmental concerns. They argue that the victim assistance and environmental remediation obligations in the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons offer an important new opportunity for addressing the consequences of nuclear detonations in Kiribati, by focusing policy attention and constituting a new field of development assistance.