Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Abolitionist Climate Justice, or ICE Will Melt

2021; American studies; Volume: 60; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ams.2021.0040

2153-6856

Julie Sze,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

Abolitionist Climate Justice, or ICE Will Melt Julie Sze (bio) Introduction As climate scientists and environmental justice activists have long predicted, the impacts of climate change in the shape of hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires have become relentless, hitting the Global North with urgency and impacts that hit the most vulnerable (and least responsible) in particularly devastating ways. Interconnected crises have long been the leitmotif of environmental justice activists, who defy static notions of home, time/history, and space/geography and who reject ideas of environment and protection/pollution as separate from race, class, gender, and indigeneity. It is precisely in this moment of interconnected crises that it becomes essential to foreground the stories and perspectives of environmental and climate justice activists. Environmental justice movements link diverse problems and defy state and corporate attempts to artificially separate out harms and issues (health from pollution, social from environmental factors). Activists have long understood the prevalence of violence for people of color and indigenous and poor people in the United States and globally and how narratives can act as a resource to reframe responses to such violence. For justice movements, it is not enough to say that problems are connected. When environmental and climate justice movements narrate connections between problems, they understand them as spatial, political, temporal, and ethical. These movements and the organizers and communities that make them fight and struggle against interconnected forces. They write and rewrite stories, make artwork, and seek to build and grow a different world than the one we currently inhabit. [End Page 43] What does environmental justice look like in the face of interconnected disasters caused by environmental and state violence in its myriad forms: climate change, gentrification, policing, and deportation regimes? Culture and media offer a partial response in the form of abolitionist climate justice narratives. These narratives bridge distinct strands of abolitionist praxis: against incarceration/prisons/policing (including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol), carbon emissions, and speciesism (hierarchy between human and nonhuman populations).1 Abolitionist climate justice narratives enact an imaginative reclamation and recognition in a brutalizing economic and political system that seeks to deny the rights of survival for vulnerable peoples and communities, animals, and ecosystems. These narratives build kinship between people of color and animals and imagine what abolition might look like. They highlight conceptions of home and a politics of mutual aid, care, and solidarity in the face of climate crises that have provoked tribalism, closed borders, violence, and individualism. My case study is a particular web series called The North Pole. Culture matters in defining and broadening the concept of abolitionist climate justice narratives and their audiences within the cultural sphere. I use a close reading of The North Pole and its characters within the broader context of its production grounded squarely from within the climate justice movement. The North Pole is a seven-episode, two-season show (each episode ranges from eight to seventeen minutes and is posted on YouTube and on the show's website).2 The executive producers are Movement Generation (affiliated with the Climate Justice Alliance)3 and actress Rosario Dawson.4 The North Pole was created with a theory of change with storytelling and a focus on radical imagination as its core. Three of the characters—Nina, Benny, and Marcus—are working class, Black, and Latinx respectively and grew up in Oakland, and another—Finn—is a White transplant from Minnesota. In season one, the main themes are gentrification/eviction, geoengineering, and drought ("Culture Shift" n.d.; Dry 2017). In season two, migration, deportation, wildfires, asthma attacks, racist microaggressions, and the negative consequences of online centered organizing are the putative subjects. Although I focus on The North Pole, it is not unique. Abolitionist climate justice narratives abound in hip-hop and spoken word.5 The show represents a climate justice perspective that centers the lived experiences and perspectives of the peoples most impacted by (and least responsible for) climate change. It centralizes the voices and perspectives and the fight of young people of color in the Bay Area. The North Pole also represents different strands of abolitionism and, thus, is an important bridge between conversations and critiques that have not well integrated...