Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference

Download or read book Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference written by Nancy Tuana and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference offers a powerful intervention to the field of climate justice scholarship by addressing a neglected aspect of the field of climate justice, namely systemic racisms. Building on the work of Black feminist theorists, Tuana develops an ecointersectional approach designed to reveal the depth and complexities of racial climates overlooked even in the environmental justice literature. Tuana's conception of ecological indifference underscores the disposition of seeing the environment as a resource for human consumption and enjoyment, a resource that is as usable, fungible, disposable, and without intrinsic worth or standing. The many examples in the book offer new insights demonstrating that systemic racisms emerge out of and give rise to environmental degradation, that is, they are often mutually constitutive. The ecointersectional analyses provided throughout the book reveal that ecological indifference and climate injustice are two sides of the same coin. Tuana identifies three distinctive but interrelated domains in which the intersections between systemic racisms and ecological indifference are manifest: 1. Differential distribution of harms/benefits due to systemic racisms; 2. Racist institutions and practices fueling or causing environmental destruction; 3. The basic social structures that generate environmental destruction being the same ones that generate systemic oppression of certain groups of people. One of the aims of Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference is to underscore that any effort to protect the environment must also be a fight against systemic racisms and other forms of systemic inequity"--