Systemic Crises of Global Climate Change

Subtitled 'intersections of race, class and gender', this is an edited volume of 49 international, interdisciplinary contributions on climate justice and inequity. The contributions are not simply essays, but include pictures and poems as ways of conveying the issues. The distinctive intersectionality approach uses the social categories of race, gender and class of the subtitle to deepen analysis of social issues. Hence, in the foreword Jacqui Patterson recalls her experience of working with women in sub-Saharan Africa who experienced sexual assault as a result of climate-forced migration brought about by drought or resource wars. She characterises climate change as 'a manifestation of the convergence of historic global patterns of domination, extraction and oppression' emerging from the history of capitalist colonisation where natural resources were acquired and exploited, resulting in the impoverishment of the many and enormous wealth among the few. She gives coal as a specific example with huge casualties due to black lung disease and vast annual subsidies for an industry central to global warming.

The book is structured in five parts, beginning with chaos and going through the four elements as symbolic of the underlying issues. Reading the essays and poems gives the reader a powerful and different lens, especially on the assumed primacy of hegemonic masculinity represented by capitalism. The metaphors continue with the use of the term Anthropocene as an extension of the Western paradigm exemplified in colonial conquest in this arresting passage referring to metaphors of 'white, masculine, sexual domination of a dark, feminine (sometimes promiscuous, sometimes virginal) and forced to give way to the thrust of (white, male, phallic) penetration, including military invasion, occupation, and resource exploitation.' (p. 25) One can appreciate the parallels here with the masculine scientific revolution bringing about a mechanistic world picture based on separation from and mastery of nature as the feminine. Another essay explores whiteness, masculinity and the conservative media denials of climate change and sexism - just look at the White House. The female body is highlighted in relation to reproductive rights and population questions, while R.D.K. Herman draws on Hawaiian culture to contrast indigenous and more feminine worldviews with masculine dissection, analysis, mastery and conflict. (p. 90) All this points to the necessity of profound systemic change, which Chris Williams argues involves building organised resistance in every workplace, community, school and farm across the world fighting for social justice and equality for all. This is represented by the element fire involving mobilisation, heat and transformation. The book sends a powerful message of theory and praxis, scholarship and activism in its structural and intersectional analysis of global climate change.