Climate Justice & Nonviolence: Inseparable Aims

by Randall Amster

It would be an overstatement to suggest that an environmentally sustainable society is automatically a peaceful one, or that the absence of hostilities directly yields greater ecological wisdom.

This piece originally ran in our Winter/Spring 2017 print issue. Want to receive our biannual print issues? Become a donor/subscriber.

Teaching at the intersection of peace/nonviolence and environment/climate, I’ve found it increasingly evident that meaningful progress in either sphere is impossible without paying attention to both. The arc of peace studies as an interdisciplinary, holistic school of thought has been moving in this direction for decades, and likewise environmental studies has long recognized the centrality of social and political concerns. Students today readily grasp the realization that “wicked” problems require “kind” solutions.

At the same time, it would be an overstatement to suggest that an environmentally sustainable society is automatically a peaceful one, or that the absence of hostilities directly yields greater ecological wisdom. The spheres are interconnected, but not necessarily in a linear causal manner. Rather, it might be said that the same policies and practices that enable the potential for a peaceful world — including the absence of systemic violence and the presence of social justice, the capacity to manage conflicts in a healthy way and the embrace of nonviolence as not merely a set of tactics but as a way of life — are also part and parcel of achieving justice when it comes to environmental and climate-related issues.

For instance, mitigating systemic (or structural) violence entails addressing profound inequalities at all levels, which have been found to correlate with poor environmental outcomes and climate change alike. Simply put, people and their environments fare better when greater opportunities and equities are present. Similarly, the capacity to prevent conflicts from escalating to violence applies not only in human-human interactions, but as to the human-nature interface as well; this can serve to avert not only escalating “resource wars” with other nations but also associated “scorched earth” practices. And when we apply the tenets of nonviolence at all of these points, we come to see other people as connected to ourselves — and all of us together as intimately interconnected with the habitat itself.

These are merely some of the ways that environmental and social issues intersect. The silver lining of this era of profound crisis is that it amplifies this nexus in a clear and compelling manner, bringing us to a recognition that our collective future will only be ensured through action in concert and wise policy-making at every level of governance. In the end, the stark choice before us indicates that we can have both peace and sustainability, or neither. More succinctly, we might say (as those before us have) that the ultimate choice is between nonviolence and nonexistence. This is our generational crucible.

Randall Amster, JD, PhD, is Director of the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University. He is also the editor-in-chief of Contemporary Justice Review and author of Peace Ecology (Routledge, 2015).

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