The duty announced last week the creation of its brand new Environmental Pole, an initiative led by a dozen journalists from all sectors who, from now on, will feed the coverage of environmental and climate issues. These issues, it was explained, can no longer be addressed in a separate box. The challenges posed by the climate crisis are everywhere, punctuating our lives and putting pressure on communities that can no longer be ignored or even treated as a marginal issue.
It has already been said: on this occasion, my column changes vocation. It will now be devoted to issues of climate justice. Ambition is all well and good, but it still needs to be defined a little more carefully.
First, the words. “Climate justice”, the expression, used almost everywhere, is very clearly in tune with the times. However, we know that words lose their meaning and, above all, their force when they are used excessively. Here, one could say that it means approaching environmental issues not only from the data offered by the natural sciences, but also through a political, ethical and social lens.
It will therefore be a question of working from the observation that any reflection on social justice cannot ignore the climate issue and, conversely, any reflection on the ecological crisis cannot ignore the dramatically unequal distribution of the consequences of climate change. This reflection cannot omit either that the preferred solutions to mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis are never neutral; they are always likely to reproduce, even to accentuate, the lines of fracture which today cross society, at home and on the scale of the globe.
Last week, on Earth Day, the Quebec Statistical Institute (ISQ) informed us that the average Quebec household emits up to four times too much greenhouse gas (GHG) less, if we still hope to respect the emission thresholds established by the Paris Agreement and which aim to limit global warming to 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial era.
What does it mean to belong to a community whose rate of consumption is aggravating and hastening the consequences of climate change that are already being felt in the Global South? If citizens individually have very little room for manoeuvre, why do we allow our social organization, our political decisions to unload the tragedy on other shoulders, while we live on borrowed time? Who are those who today are putting everything into play so that the window towards a viable future for humanity, which the IPCC recently told us about, does not close for good?
Perhaps you will have understood that I have no intention of abandoning the bones that I have become accustomed to chewing on in these pages over the years, from one week to the next. Above all, I will seek to draw a clearer line between social inequalities and the challenges posed by climate change. I will also try, while remaining on a ground that I know well, to highlight the fact that the social movements, the citizen mobilizations, the political movements which, today, fight for a more dignified present and for a fairer future , inevitably face the challenges posed by the climate crisis.
This means that talking about climate justice presupposes continuing to address all the social issues that already concern us: the housing crisis, the disintegration of the health network and the services offered to vulnerable citizens, the cost of living, the impossible dilemma faced by workers whose income depends on the exploitation of resources that lead us straight to disaster, access to food and healthy living environments, to name but a few examples.
The intuition became clear last fall on Vancouver Island as I spoke with activists defending the ancestral forest of Fairy Creek in the cold October rain. Watching them put their bodies on the line, relentlessly and with a lot of support, to prevent the continuation of the deadly exploitation of nature, I said to myself that there was something like a truth of our time there: the asymmetry in the balance of power when the time comes to defend ecosystems, the continuous violence on which the exploitation of the territory depends, the logic of exclusion and sacrifice of bodies that it implements, and this, despite the imminence of the catastrophe…
All of this constitutes the political horizon on which all questions of social justice are now thought. However, so that the platform from which I benefit here remains coherent, it seemed essential to me to take note of it, by rectifying my angle of approach. In a way, I propose to take a side step which is not one, to think from the solidarities that are being built in the wake of the ecological crisis.