The University of British Columbia prides itself on being a global leader in the area of climate change. It has committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, frames its campus as a “living laboratory” for innovations in the area of sustainability, and has been ranked number one by the Times Higher Education for its contributions to climate action.
Most recently, in December 2019, the university declared a climate emergency, and committed to developing a “a community engagement process to inform our collective response to the climate emergency.” As the university develops this process, we believe it is important to draw attention to certain dimensions of climate change that are often overlooked. Giving due care to these concerns will be crucial for ensuring that UBC does not reproduce common colonial tendencies in climate action efforts, including: simplistic, feel-good solutions; tokenistic engagements with marginalized communities; and narrow imaginaries of social responsibility and social change. While some of these concerns are mentioned within the university’s climate emergency declaration, their importance warrants further consideration.
In particular, we draw attention to the deep ties between climate change and colonial violence. Often, these issues are treated in siloed ways, particularly in the context of higher education institutions. Yet, as Indigenous, Black, Global South, and other historically marginalized communities have long pointed out, these communities have borne the highest costs of ecological destruction, while being the least responsible for those costs. Indeed, ecological destruction has often gone in hand with the colonization of non-European lands and communities – all in the name of progress, development, and profit. Today, these same communities are on the front line of the impacts of a changing climate, as well as the front lines of struggles to resist the continued reduction of the natural world to a set of ‘resources’ for human consumption – as ongoing efforts by the Wet’suwet’en land defenders and their supporters demonstrate. Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Simpson notes, “The global roots of the climatic crisis and the exploitation of natural resources are issues Indigenous peoples have been speaking out against for hundreds of years.” Thus, the concerns as well as insights and innovations of these communities need to be centered in any effort on the part of UBC to address the climate crisis.
UBC gestures toward such a commitment in its declaration of a climate emergency, in which it is noted that “this emergency has been experienced for decades by communities around the world, in particular by Indigenous Peoples.” UBC has made commitments to the Musqueam and Okanagan Nations in particular, and Indigenous peoples in general, to mend harmful and extractive colonial relationships. These commitments should deeply inform any climate efforts that the university makes, and thus fulfil the university’s stated commitment to a community engagement process that exemplifies “dignity, justice, and equity.”
This work cannot only be forward looking. Instead, the university must take into consideration its own historical and ongoing role in reproducing a society that is premised on extractive and unsustainable ways of knowing and being. Thus, rather than frame itself as a climate change hero, UBC might instead set an example to other public institutions by implicating itself in the harmful processes that it seeks to mitigate and interrupt. Further, UBC should recognize its indispensability as well as its insufficiency in the work of addressing climate change, and commit to addressing climate change through building strong and sustainable relationships characterized by consent, trust, accountability, and reciprocity (Whyte, 2019).
Part of this relationship-building means considering the central importance of Indigenous and other community-based knowledges in addressing climate change. One of the many causes of ecological crisis is not only the spread of monocultural crop production, but also a monoculture of (Western) knowledge. The complex challenges that we face require us to interrupt this monoculture, particularly the overemphasis on Western technology as the primary ‘solution’ to climate change, and instead address climate change through what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) describes as an “ecology of knowledges.” Thus, alongside Western disciplines, responding to the climate crisis will require the gifts of Indigenous, Black, and Global South knowledge traditions and practices. In addition to ensuring that engagements with these knowledges are not characterized by the conditional inclusion of difference, it is important that in this process, non-Western knowledges are not instrumentalized in the service of preexisting institutional or research agendas, but rather are taken on their own terms.
This work will not be easy. There are many areas of tense disagreement both within and across different knowledge systems and communities. Yet, the climate crisis requires universities like UBC to foster spaces of dissensus and modes of engagement in which we can have difficult conversations without relationships falling apart, and with the recognition that we enter into these conversations unevenly positioned in terms of the systemic power that our perspectives hold. As Potawatomi environmental philosopher Kyle Whyte (2018) notes, many people are understandably concerned about the risk that the earth may cross an ecological tipping point, leading to more extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and ocean and soil acidification, among other disastrous implications. Yet, little concern is granted to the relational tipping point, which Whyte suggests we “crossed long ago thanks to systems of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization” (p. 3). Failure to even recognize this relational tipping point, let alone address it, points to a failure “to establish or maintain relational qualities connecting societal institutions [and communities] together for the sake of coordinated action” (p. 3).
In sum, even the most ambitious climate action plans will ultimately fail if they are not crafted and executed in respectful, ethical, and equitable ways across diverse communities, all of whom have a stake in addressing the climate crisis, but not all of whom are equally responsible for and affected by that crisis. We suggest that UBC must balance its strong commitment to address (and perhaps, avoid) the ecological tipping point with an equally strong commitment to repair the harmful impacts of a relational tipping point that has long been crossed. In this way, we might stand a chance of enabling a more just, peaceful, and sustainable planetary existence for current and future generations of all living beings.
Cash Ahenakew, Associate Professor in Indigenous Education, Department of Educational Studies, UBC
Sharon Stein, Assistant Professor in Higher Education, Department of Educational Studies, UBC
Dallas Hunt, Assistant Professor in Indigenous Literatures, Department of English Language and Literatures, UBC