(ENV5) Decolonization, Social Justice, and the Environment

This session will bring together papers that seek to better understand links between decolonization, social justice, and the environment. Scholars such as Julian Agyeman have developed concepts such as “just sustainability” to attest to the fact that environmental quality and human equality are often closely connected, emphasizing connections between social justice and environmental stewardship. Many scholars writing on environmental justice and just-sustainability have demonstrated how racism and environmental deterioration are caused by, and mutually reinforce, the same social structures, while environmental amenities and race are also intertwined, with environmental amenities being unequally distributed to privileged (often white) groups. Agyeman and others have called on environmental organizations to critically analyze their leadership and objectives, challenging the white and privileged positionality often characterizing them. Indigenous scholars such as Eve Tuck have emphasized that decolonization is not simply reducible to social justice, as social justice and Indigenous sovereignty and rights movements often come into dialogue, including dialogues led by Black scholars such as Tiffany Lethabo King and Robyn Maynard and Indigenous scholars such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. The session will start from the opening premise that movements for decolonization (or Indigenous sovereignty and rights) and social justice have close links with the environment. The papers in this session will provide overviews of these connections and seek to advance the understanding of them. Tags: Environment, Indigenous Studies

Organizers: Tyler Bateman, University of Toronto, Jessica Braimoh, York University; Chair: Tyler Bateman, University of Toronto

Presentations

Typhaine Leclerc, Université du Québec à Montréal

"It makes a difference to be by yourself": how Beauce women's flood narratives bring light to unequal effects of climate change

Disasters brought about by extreme weather events (EWE) such as heat waves, storms, floods, and droughts are often part of a broader pattern of adversity caused by poverty and social inequality, global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, or other disasters. As social conditions are a main determinant of disaster vulnerability, groups and individuals dealing with the most intense hazards impacts are those who already find themselves in unfavorable situations for reasons linked to social positionality (Chaplin et al., 2019; Hrabok et al., 2020). Research additionally shows that “disasters have historically been narrated from the perspective of men” (Rushton et al., 2020). Although research at the intersection of disaster management, consequences of climate change, and gender has multiplied in the last decades (Enarson et al., 2018), protagonists of stories told about disasters have not necessarily changed, and men’s voices continue to dominate media coverage and representations on the topic (Cox et Perry, 2011; Leikam, 2017). Narrative research makes it possible to better document and disseminate the psychosocial consequences of EWE on a diversity of affected people and, ultimately, to support their recovery in a more equitable way. The research focuses on the psychosocial impacts of river Chaudière floods on women in Beauce (QC), and the stories they tell about what they lived through. Seventeen women who have been subjected to one or more flooding events in Beauce participated in semi-structured interviews during which they were invited to share stories of their experience and recovery process. A feminist narrative framework guided analysis, allowing us to identify impacts of the floods on their wellbeing and functioning at different points in time and strategies levied for recovery. This presentation will offer an overview of participants’ experiences of floods and recovery process. Both consequences and resources to face EWEs and recover depend on the material constraints that mark women’s existence, the social expectations they face, and their self-perceptions. Various avenues through which participants have made sense of their experience at different stages of the flood and recovery period will be examined through a gendered lens. The narrative research approach we adopted makes it possible to delve into participants’ embodied experiences of flooding and its psychosocial consequences on women. In offering space for a diversity of EWE accounts, this research makes the differentiated effects of these events more tangible. Considering a greater diversity of experiences during and after disasters could promote more equitable care for those affected in the short, medium, and long term.

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Non-presenting authors: Lily Lessard, UQAR; Johanne Saint-Charles, UQAM

Mbuli Shei Clodine, University of Lethbridge

Social Reproduction and Climate Adaptation: Gender, Climate Change, and Agriculture in Cameroon and Canada

Climate change has significant social impacts on agricultural producers in the Global North and South. Dominant discourses on climate change adaptation in agriculture rarely consider how gender affects farmers’ everyday experiences of climate variability or climate hazards like drought, fire, and flooding. Rigid gender roles, power imbalance, and women’s multiple roles in most agricultural communities affect their involvement in everyday farm management and consequently their responses to climate change. Using the concept of social reproduction, this chapter discusses the gender dimensions of agriculture in the Global North and South, focusing particularly on how gender relations, including women’s social reproduction work, affects farmers’ experiences of, and adaptation to, climate change. It is based on an in-depth qualitative study of 48 family farmers in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, Canada and Santa, North West Region, Cameroon. We argue that, for sustainable climate change adaptation, women must actively participate in climate adaptation decisions. However, transformative climate adaptation requires attention to the value of women’s work, both ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’, and an equalization of divisions of labour and power.

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Non-presenting author: Amber Fletcher, University of Regina, Saskatchewan

Kailey Walker, Queen's University

Greening Extractivism: Justifying AI supply chains in Canada

Drawing on environmental media studies, theories of data colonialism, and Povinelli’s (2016) geontologies, this paper analyzes the discursive strategies deployed to legitimize AI extractivism in Canada. In the face of anthropogenic climate change, the Big Tech industry broadcasts its embrace of environmental standards with carbon-neutrality, re-forestation, and water recycling programs. Meanwhile, the industry’s supply chains are responsible for disproportionately harming Indigenous communities in the context of resource extraction, generating pollution and toxic waste to manufacture microchips and batteries, and exhausting vast reservoirs of natural resources to operate data centers. Emerging literature on this debate thus situates AI as an extractive industry, guilty of exploiting humans and non-humans alike for profit and power. To justify the socio-environmental costs of these extractive sectors, discursive strategies of social licencing are adopted by corporations to green extractivism: AI is conflated with climate solutions to not only distract from (i.e., greenwashing) but rationalize the devastating socio-environmental effects of digital supply chains. At a time when Canada is making substantial investments into both AI and ‘green’ mineral industries, discursive strategies are similarly deployed by the state to frame the harms of resource extraction and expenditure as necessary for green energy transitions. The aim of this paper is to clarify the colonial logics that underpin green extractivism in Canada. Three main theoretical resources support this research: 1) environmental media studies; 2) theories of digital and data colonialism, and 3) Povinelli’s (2016) geontopower. This interdisciplinary scholarship studies the constitutive roles that tech corporations play in the composition of Big Data Ecologies, how digital supply chains amplify historical forms of colonization through complex arrangements of practice, materiality, and discourse, and how extractivism relies on colonial ontologies which distinguish ‘humans’ from what is ‘natural’ or ‘less than’ human. Taken together, these debates emphasize how power and domination in resource governance result in uneven outcomes along the lines of historical colonialism, ongoing settler colonialism, and environmental racism. Drawing on decolonial and qualitative methodologies, this paper puts forward a critical discourse analysis of dominant narratives of ‘green AI’ and ‘tech minerals’ as advanced by 1) the state in strategies, policies, and public statements, and 2) the ten largest tech corporations in Canada through their environmental reports, press releases, etc. Narratives of ‘land as resource’, ‘untapped mineral potential’, and the necessity of AI for ‘green futures’ are identified between these sources. I argue that justifications of AI extractivism significantly depend on colonial ontologies that devalue the natural world as Nonlife, which highlights the Western epistemological frameworks that enable and sustain the harms of AI supply chains. This paper contributes to the burgeoning debate on AI and inequality by situating extractivism as part of enduring settler colonialism in Canada. In doing so, this analysis adds specificity to theories of data (or digital) colonialism by clarifying how AI extractivism depends on the ongoing suppression of Indigenous knowledge about Land and Life – while simultaneously demarcating what (and who) is expendable in the quest for green futures.

Julie Hagan, Université Laval

Equity and reconciliation - first steps and a long way to go: How Canadian cities are integrating indigenous perspectives into environmental policymaking

Cities are important institutional players in the governance of social and environmental questions such as sustainability, climate change and indigenous-settler relations. Many major Canadian cities have long been involved in environmental issues, with their commitment to sustainable development after the Rio Summit. Since 2010 cities have also been called upon to intervene on climate change both by national and international bodies (OCDE, 2010). While many cities have been engaging with indigenous matters for some time, they have often done so from the angle of proposing solutions to poverty and social difficulties. Although well founded, these interventions were not always co-constructed, and may have contributed to the reproduction of colonial dynamics. Moreover, by offering an oversimplified image of indigenous peoples, they may have furthered stereotypes and marginalization (Peters, 2012). It is only more recently that cities have truly addressed the question of decolonization and reconciliation, largely in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action (TRC, 2015). The intersection of these two areas of municipal action - environmental governance and reconciliation - raises the questions: to what extent are Canadian cities integrating indigenous perspectives in environmental policymaking? And where does Indigenous Peoples participation fit into the development and implementation of these policies? Some conceptions of environmental and climate justice go beyond the ever-relevant concerns of risk distribution, and introduces other dimensions: equity, participatory justice and justice as recognition (Schlosberg, 2004; Bulkeley, 2014).Along with many equity-seeking groups, Indigenous Peoples face inequalities in exposure to environmental risks and barriers to participation in decision-making. as their link to the land is marked by colonization and a culturally distinct relationship with nature. It is in this context that we wanted to examine the efforts made by Canadian cities to integrate indigenous viewpoints into environmental policymaking. To this end, we analyzed policy documents produced by six major Canadian cities: Calgary, Montral, Ottawa, Qubec City, Toronto and Vancouver. For each city, we compared documents published before and after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action, supplemented by interviews with decision-makers. Before 2015, the cities studied had made little effort to take indigenous worldviews into account in their environmental decision-making processes-with the exception of Calgary engaging with the Blackfoot Confederacy in the redevelopment of Nose Hill Park. Since then, many cities have adopted reconciliation strategies, but find themselves at different points in their journey toward reconciliation. Some cities, such as Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, have developed sophisticated multidimensional approaches tackling the distribution of risks, highlighting the importance of participation to decision-making and recognizing the contribution of indigenous knowledge. Montral adopted a reconciliation strategy recommending the inclusion of indigenous perspectives into its climate change strategies, but it has not (yet) been integrated into policy documents. Ottawa's reconciliation strategy does not address environmental issues, and we couldn't find any documents on reconciliation for Qubec City, although there are occasional initiatives to showcase indigenous culture. Efforts to promote equity and inclusion by Canada's leading cities, suggest that some municipal governments are beginning to address the recognition dimension of environmental justice, contrasting with the prevailing approaches to urban environmental policymaking (Bulkeley, 2013, 2014). References to experiential knowledge and traditional knowledge, in the policy documents of some cities (e.g. Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver) also question post-political conceptions of environmental governance dominated by expert knowledge and techno-managerial solutions (Swyngedouw, 2011). We have focused on analyzing the content of policy documents and identifying the social actors involved in their elaboration. Although the results are noteworthy in terms of environmental justice theory, the question of their actual impact stays open. Some evidence shows that effective consultation between municipalities and Indigenous Peoples around climate change remains imperfect and riddled with challenges (Gillis, 2023). More in-depth qualitative research by and with Indigenous Peoples is needed. Despite these limitations, our article aims to further the engagement of environmental justice theory with decolonial thought. A lack of engagement highlighted by many (lvarez and Coolsaet, 2020; Roy and Hanaček, 2023), which appears as a particularly problematic blind spot for environmental justice theory in contexts marked by a history of colonialism, such as Canada.

Tyler Bateman, University of Toronto

Reconciliation and Decolonization Initiatives at Non-Governmental Organizations in Canada

In 2023, I implemented a 4th year undergraduate seminar, where I worked with undergraduate students and two organizations--the grassroots organization Council of Canadians and Indigenous organization Grandmother's Voice--to draft a project that filled the organizations' research needs. These organizations asked my students and I to find out what non-governmental organizations across Canada have been doing in terms of reconciliation and decolonization. The organizations asked for this because there is an impulse to make progress on reconciliation and decolonization among many NGOs, especially since the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Final Report, yet many organizations are not sure of the appropriate path forward, and some see upper management as needing to be convinced of these initiatives through evidence of precedent and effectiveness. The project is grounded in the idea of Two-Eyed Seeing, shared by Elder Albert Marshall (e.g., Reid et al. 2021, "Two‐Eyed Seeing": An Indigenous Framework to Transform Fisheries Research and Management"), that emphasizes the importance of knowledge co-existence, when settlers such as myself and my students (who have all been settlers in these seminars) do this kind of work. The idea of knowledge co-existence, also expressed in other ways such as in the Two-Row Wampum Belt Covenant, indicate the importance of settlers not "incorporating" Indigenous knowledges into settler frameworks of research, but maintaining a clear understanding of the sovereignty of Indigenous knowledges and the importance of settlers not speaking as though they are holders of Indigenous cosmologies. I ran the course in Winter 2023 and Fall 2023, co-conducting, with student researchers, 6 interviews in Winter 2023 and 9 in Fall 2023. Most interviewees were from environmental organizations, but a few (