October 15, 2025 @ 16h00 – 17h30 CEST
In this second session, we welcomed Nancy Tuana (Pennsylvania State University) as our guest. We have discussed her first chapter from the book Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference (2023), in which she argues that environmental degradation and systemic racism are mutually constitutive, rooted in shared logics of disposability and exploitation.
Climate justice isn’t simply a matter of pursuing fairness in the distribution of resources, goods, and opportunity. To reduce it to a matter of balancing scales is to accept the existence of those very scales, the systems that made inequality possible. The world we inhabit is built on structures that not only produce but also normalize injustice, turning it into something to be “managed” rather than dismantled. At the heart of rejecting this logic is care, understood as a way of noticing, acting, and remaining open. Its absence sustains the conditions in which environmental injustices thrive: threats such as pollution, displacement, and extinction are treated as collateral effects to progress, while the voices of affected communities go unheard.
In the chapter “The Interlocking Domains of Racism and Ecological Indifference”, Nancy Tuana describes this kind of attentiveness as genealogical sensibility: a cultivated habit of alertness that looks for the tangled histories that have produced our unjust present, while actively resisting and challenging the narratives that sustain them. To care, in this sense, is to trace, question, and reimagine. Tuana’s call connects deeply with Val Plumwood’s critique of hyperseparation, the conceptual and concrete split that has been imposed between the human and the non-human. Once the other-than-human world is objectified, it becomes a resource to be measured, occupied, and dominated. Behind the dichotomy of man/nature lies an oppressive assumption, a narrow and exclusionary construction of the “human” itself. The result is a hierarchy that not only devalues non-human life but also classifies certain humans as closer to nature, and thus as “less human”, those marginalized within such a dominant logic of being.
That is why a truly alternative approach to climate justice must be eco-intersectional. Tuana focuses on race, but the lived experience of environmental harm is also intertwined with class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability. Eco-intersectionality makes visible the ways oppression moves across categories, being not merely additive but entangled; it shows how the same hierarchies that shape power relations among people also operate in relation to the Earth, embedding sacrifice and loss in the very logic of progress and development. Awakening to systemic injustice is already an act of disruption: it requires resisting the narrative that relegates responsibility to the private, exposing this illusion, and replacing it with interdependence. The struggle for a better world is also a struggle to remember the complex, intermeshing relations that make us part of this very world, not standing above it.
Here, the critique naturally turns toward science itself: Western science has often reinforced the very structures that are under question. Indeed, knowledge production does not emerge from a neutral stance or the purely honorable endeavor of understanding the world; it gives substance to certain worldviews over others, attributing value, dignity, and legitimacy to dominant perspectives. The challenge, then, is to rethink science in dialogue with radically different sensibilities, other ways of knowing and valuing. The struggle to adapt to a rapidly changing world thus offers the possibility to ask what kind of world we actually want to inhabit. It invites a diversity of visions, a plurality of sensibilities. Climate justice, therefore, is a practice of relation, a way of living, knowing, and caring within a more-than-human world.
Organisers: Sapna Kumar and Futura Venuto