During EnviroCon 2023, organized by the University of Western Ontario, I will present a short version of the talk on Violence, Responsibility and Climate Justice I gave earlier this year at Philopolis.
Date: March 24th 2023, 11 AM.
Location: Zoom, Room 2. (Register here)
Abstract: Imagine that a large and powerful company pollutes a lake that is the only source of drinking water for the residents. It is making huge profits from it. As the damage grows, the company refuses to cooperate with the residents. The residents have tried many courses of action to no avail: dialogue has failed, advocacy has failed, demonstrations have failed, lawsuits have failed, democratic change has failed, and so on. Worse, democracy has failed because it is the policy makers themselves who subsidize the polluting enterprise to ensure the continued operation of the toxic facilities. Scientists agree that if nothing is done quickly enough, present and future generations of residents will suffer and die. Our situation with the fossil fuel industry is similar. In the face of the threat of human extinction, the climate justice movements almost universally follow the same motto: we must always remain peaceful.
In this paper, I examine whether it is legitimate to deviate from this motto in the context of the fight for climate justice. I therefore analyze the main pacifist arguments, which consider violence to be illegitimate. I then examine the opposite position in two senses: (i) violence against people, and (ii) violence against property. In light of these considerations, I develop the idea that there is a kind of responsible uncivil resistance, that is, a form of resistance that does not reject outright the possibility of employing violence when done reasonably and in an effort to fulfill a collective responsibility towards a structural injustice. I argue such resistance can and ought to employ violence to preserve or restore the possibility of justice.
Victor Babin 