From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC

Abstract

What would abolitionism mean for climate justice? "Resilience" is proposed by experts as a solution to climate change vulnerability. But this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanised and endangered residents and their environments in the first place. This article focuses on majority Black areas said to be vulnerable to extreme weather events and targeted for expert-driven resilience enhancements in America's capital city, Washington, DC. Drawing on key insights from Black radical, feminist, and antiracist humanist thought, we reimagine resilience through an abolitionist framework. Using archival analysis, oral histories, a neighbourhood-level survey, and interviews conducted between 2015 and 2018, we argue that abolitionist climate justice entails a centring of DC's historical environmental and housing-related racisms, the intersectional drivers of precarity and trauma experienced by residents beyond those narrowly associated with "climate"; and an ethics of care and healing practiced by those deemed most at risk to climate change.

The climate change of your desires: Climate migration and imaginaries of urban and rural climate futures

“…22 Landless group members of Nijera Kori 20 See also Jalais (2007) on earlier visions of transformation of the Sundarbans through the possibilities of tourism. 21 For a corollary discussion of alternative urban climate imaginaries, see Cohen, 2016and Goh, 2017, Ranganathan and Bratman, 2019 Nijera Kori itself is an NGO, but the collectives it supports refer to themselves as bhumiheen shamity (landless association) and they refer to the assemblage of these associations either as "Nijera Kori" or bhumiheen andolon ("landless movement"). In some parts of Khulna, residents refer to the movement as describe themselves as krishok or chashi, meaning farmer, cultivator, or peasant.…”

Getting soaked? Climate crisis, adaptation finance, and racialized austerity

“…Our analysis demands a fundamentally different approach, one that would account for the intrinsic inequities reflected in how climate change is differentially experienced across scales (see Ranganathan and Bratman, 2019). For example, academics and activists must keep the notion of ''climate debt'' squarely located as a critique that recognizes how rich countries have incurred vast overdrafts on the atmosphere and must compensate for the losses and damages they produce.…”

On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place”

“…Political ecology can learn from grassroots movements and abolitionist thought to make freedom as a place. Much like the kitchen table, it is the everyday experiences of teaching each other about native plants (Carroll 2015), making shared dinners as a community (Mei‐Singh 2020), and singing freedom songs (Ranganathan and Bratman 2019) that make structural transformations possible.…”

“…Malini Ranganathan and Eve Bratman’s (2019) paper, “From urban resilience to abolitionist climate justice in Washington, DC”, asks “what would abolitionism mean for climate justice?” In asking this, they focus on majority Black neighbourhoods in Washington, DC often described as the most vulnerable to extreme weather events within the city. They argue that abolitionist climate justice necessitates focusing on environmental and housing‐related racisms and an ethics of care and healing practiced by those deemed most at risk to climate change.…”