Ontological Climate Justice: Global Climate Politics and Indigenous Territorial Defense in Amazonia

Keywords: Territory, Amazonia, Indigenous, Ontology, Climate Justice, Politics
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Scholars and activists define climate justice as the disproportionate impacts of climate change on marginalized communities including Indigenous peoples in Amazonia. However, Indigenous peoples are not passive victims of the phenomenon, but rather active participants of global climate politics. Drawing from collaborative fieldwork with transnational—and plurinational—Amazonian Indigenous organizations, and from critical geography scholarship concerning global climate governance and territorial and ontological politics, I analyze three Amazonian Indigenous-led climate strategies, questioning how they re-shape global climate politics and the meanings of justice.

My central argument is that we must understand climate justice as territorial defense in Amazonia. To support this argument, I first demonstrate how Indigenous climate initiatives are founded on what I call integral territorial ontologies, or common conceptions of Indigenous territories as indivisible entities or lifeworlds that encompass multiple relationships among humans and more-than-human beings. These relationships are essential in keeping forests standing in Indigenous territories, and in ensuring Indigenous cultural and physical survival. I further argue that the defense of territories as lifeworlds, as well as recognizing this different way of viewing nature is also a type of justice, which I call ontological justice. Secondly, I illustrate how Indigenous climate initiatives scale-up ancestral knowledges and ontological politics beyond the local to national and global scales of political organization. As such, these initiatives challenge binaries such as local/global or traditional/modern, as well as critiques of essentialism. I conclude with a discussion of whether Amazonian organizations and their political practices make part of a global movement for climate justice.