Feeling climate injustice

Affective climate violence, greenhouse gaslighting and the whiteness of climate anxiety

Bibliographic Data

ID4897573
AuthorsBlanche Verlie (0000-0002-1614-9913, The University of Sydney, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume7
Issue4
Pages1601-1619
Publication date2024-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/25148486241252734
OpenAlexW4396700190
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited73

This paper explores the process of feeling climate injustice. It aims to situate climate distress as an issue of justice, in order to generate more politically accountable and empowering responses. It firstly situates climate anxiety, solastalgia and climate disaster trauma as symptoms of affective climate violence, where harm that could have been prevented was instead consciously and systematically exacerbated by fossil fuelled political regimes. It articulates witnessing as a practice of affective climate justice, an approach that would recognise climate distress as violence, and offer support, apology and redress for this violence, including through seeking to prevent future climate change. However, the second section outlines how, in perverse efforts to maintain fossil fuel interests, climate distress is often further amplified through practices of greenhouse gaslighting - denying, deriding and dismissing people's experiences of harm. Greenhouse gaslighting is outlined as a patriarchal practice of emotional abuse that is enabled by and seeks to perpetuate white-colonial-extractivism. Thirdly, the paper argues that even within progressive circles, current efforts to witness climate distress potentially fail to enact affective climate justice due to discourses that centre whiteness and privilege, rather than recognising and responding to the different and unequal forms of affective climate violence experienced by diverse peoples

Anxiety · Climate change · Climate justice · Feeling · Greenhouse gas · Injustice · Climate Change and Geoengineering · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Psychology · Social Psychology · Ecology

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