Beyond Justice?: The Radical Asymmetries of Climate Change Seminar

This talk sets out from the current impasse in global climate politics and explores some ways of working with and through some of the more troubling prospects on the horizon. Starting with the question of global climate justice and the sticking point of the North/South divide, I examine both the necessity and the limitations of working with models of justice that hinge on apportioning culpability and calculating costs and benefits. Turning to the possibility of passing over thresholds or tipping points in major environmental systems, I look at the challenge this poses to a calculating model of justice, along with the risks of both self-defeating fatalism and self-serving regional securitization that attend `catastrophic’ scenarios. In the interests of considering what else we might do with the concept and possibility of large scale nonlinear climate change, I take a turn to the deep history of hominid and human experience of extreme climatic variability, and ask how a sense of the (pre)historical and geographically-varied experience of past climatic upheavals might inform and inspire the quest for climate justice – and help push it beyond the `symmetries’ of cause/effect and cost/benefit.