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The Dr. Steve Best Narratives:

Part 3: A critical reading of climate justice declarations

Speciesist biases and exclusive focus on human rights are prominent across a wide spectrum of writings on climate justice, including state and government documents, academic analyses, and climate justice declarations and manifestos. In these latter writings, circulated mainly online, one can find scattered references to species extinction, interdependence of all life, or the sacredness of Mother Earth. But even these references are vague abstractions that say nothing concrete about the inherent value, agency, and complexity of other animals. Similarly, such rhetoric rarely leads to specific proposals for respecting animal rights or even reducing their suffering in visions of a just transition to a morally advanced, truly humane, and ecological society. Behind whatever noble sentiments about sacred life one might find, lurking underneath are human supremacist views and projects.

The “People’s Demands for Climate Justice” (2018)for instance, emphasizes the need for “urgent, vital, and ambitious action… [which] must center [on] people’s lives and human rights, and be grounded in principles of equity and historical responsibility.” Similarly, the influential “Declaration on Climate Justice” from the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice strives toward “a global climate system that is safe for all of humanity.” It emphasizes “the economic and social costs of climate impacts on people, their rights, their homes, their food security and the ecosystems on which they depend.” For Robinson, climate justice “links human rights and development to achieve a human-centred approach” to climate change action.“Climate change is fundamentally about human rights and securing justice for those suffering from its impact.” Robinson emphasized that in the concept of climate justice, “climate change and human rights coalesce around to find commonalities rather than differences”. Her vision “puts people at the centre and delivers results for the climate, for human rights, and for development.” 

Robinson references the most vulnerable countries and communities, while methodically steering clear of even minimal consideration of other species, let alone taking the larger conceptual steps toward animal rights and animal justice. There is no recognition of the need for animal rights/justice, of the impact of climate change on other species, of how factory farming undermines every human need activists champion, and the vital role animals play in the ecosystems upon which humans depend. They fail to conceive that animals have rights including environmental rights, ignore the impact of climate change on animals, and frame nature in instrumental terms. Understandably, she promotes “the right to development” in poor nations such as Africa and seeks to “marry the standards of human rights with issues of sustainable development.” But just as speciesist assumptions go unquestioned, so too do destructive concepts like development, modernization, and progress, consummate capitalist values that are the driving forces of colonialism, extractivism, and the planetary crisis climate activists seek to resolve.

Just as blatant an exclusionary humanist stance informs the Berlin Declaration on Climate Justice (2018). This proud statement from self-described liberals is emphatically “Human-centred …Human well-being must always be at the heart of liberal policy-making. We must, therefore, primarily consider (and tackle) the implications of climate change on human flourishing.” This outlook leaves out the right of animals to enjoy their flourishing and is self-defeating in its piecemeal understanding and uncritical reproduction of anthropocentric and speciesist mindsets.

A parallel declaration from the “Peoples’ Summit on Climate, Rights and Human Survival” (Peoples’ Summit: Climate Rights4All, 2018) aims to “place human rights at the core of climate activism to demand immediate, bold, people-powered and human rights-consistent action of unprecedented scale to address the climate crisis.” The declaration has verve and eloquence, it is cognizant of the depth and interconnectedness of ecological and social problems, and it grasps the need for “transformative change” of our economic, social, and political systems. But it does not address the need to revolutionize agriculture and eliminate the systemic human exploitation of “farmed animals.” It demands a broad-based alliance politics, “mobilizing the most powerful, united and diverse Peoples’ movement ever assembled,” but a movement, alas, not diverse enough to include the global animal rights/liberation movement and the tremendous contributions it can bring to social justice and environmental struggles.

The Climate Justice Alliance, formed in 2013, was built by and for oppressed workers, multiracial groups, and “frontline” organizations and communities. It seeks strategies that “can point a new direction for the grassroots climate movement as a broad, multi-sector, transformative front.” They seek “a Just Transition away from extractive systems of production, consumption and political oppression” with a politics that places “race, gender and class at the center of the solutions.” Like so many others, this articulation of a diverse alliance politics makes no mention of animals and the need to include animal rights issues and activists under its broad umbrella. The group seeks “to challenge the extractive economy that is harming people and ecosystems,” without even a cursory mention of the escalating Animal Holocaust and the impact of an extractive economy on habitats and accelerating rates of species extinction. Similarly, the collective understands that “Nature and humans are interdependent” and insists that “climate crisis solutions honor human rights and the rights of nature.” Astonishingly, but by no means atypically, this fails to include other species in the sphere of rights and either ignores animals completely or reductively subsumes them to insensate “nature.”

More promisingly, an elite team of economists, scientists, and policy advocates advanced an empirically grounded vision of “Earth4All” for the 21st century. Spelled out in their widely acclaimed book, Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity (Dixson-Decleve et al., 2022), they diagnose a deep crisis in Earth systems as humanity crosses multiple planetary boundaries while plagued by deep inequalities and unsustainable food and energy systems. Earth4All lists “five extraordinary turnarounds” necessary for change, including making food systems healthy for people and ecosystems—but calls for “sustainable levels” of meat consumption, without mentioning the enslavement of animals in farming systems. Along with social regeneration, “the invisible, internal world within each of us needs regenerating too.” The call for “compassion and solidarity for ourselves and for each other” excludes the same for the billions of animals victimized by capitalist exploitation. Their definition of “we” means, simply, “all people and peoples.” They thereby preclude a wider definition of life and moral concern covering all beings who comprise and sustain the vast biocommunity on which humans depend. In short, the compassion, moral regard, and vision of Earth4all are sadly limited to “human wellbeing within planetary boundaries.” 

The Earth4all analysis focuses on “two deeply intertwined systems – people and planet.” But the call for “interconnected work and thinking” omits a crucial third factor necessary to understand current ecological and social crises—the exploitation and plight of billions of animals ensnared in systems of human oppression. Moreover, this dual outlook of the “people and planet” paradigmatically subsume animals to the physical world. Every such reference to humans and nature, or the social and natural worlds, fails to factor nonhuman communities into a dynamic three-fold system of interdependencies that involve humans, animals, and the physical world. The closest mention (but not detailed analysis) to a comprehensive holism can be found in Article 3 of the Bolivian Law of Mother Earth, drafted and passed in 2010 as one of the most radical environmental bills in history, and not coincidentally an Indigenous peoples’ document. Quite beatifically, it defines the earth as “the dynamic living system formed by the indivisible community of all life systems and living beings, who are interrelated, interdependent, and complementary, which share a common destiny” (see World Future Fund, 2010).

One of the more radical climate activist groups, Extinction Rebellion, is painfully hidebound in its exclusion of animals. The international group believes that “Ending domination over nature goes hand in hand with tackling all forms of domination and hierarchy” (Yamin, 2019) but somehow overlooks the domination of humans over animals and its profound social and ecological consequences. “The struggle for climate justice is also the struggle for racial, gender, sexual, and economic equality,” a group leader states, in the belief that species equality and animal justice are irrelevant to climate justice and the struggle to salvage a viable future for the privileged human species. Extinction Rebellion seeks to build bridges of solidarity between Northern and Southern peoples but cannot imagine compassionate transspecies solidarity with other animals who are also exploited by capitalism and suffer severe effects of climate change.

As several more broad-minded activists pressed Extinction Rebellion to integrate animals and the impact of agribusiness and meat consumption on climate change, group leaders obstinately rejected the proposal, thereby leading to a breakoff group of activists named Animal Rising (formerly Animal Rebellion). This UK-based group employs the same direct action and disruption tactics as Extinction Rebellion, but with the aim to prioritize animal rights issues and to connect them to urgent human concerns. They stress the environmental impact of animal farming and urge governments to defund meat, dairy, and fishing industries in favor of a just and sustainable plant-based future. In a leap beyond parochial humanist “people-first” boundaries, Animal Rising emphasizes that corporations and world leaders cannot meet the Paris climate targets and secure net-zero emissions without addressing that our food system is destroying the planet. Guided by a comprehensive anti-speciesist vision, they seek to help “repair our broken relationship” with other animals and the natural world.

In addition to highlighting the systemic social and ecological consequences of speciesism and human exploitation of animals, we find a second major advance in understanding the roots of the climate crisis with radical social and political theories. Anarchists, socialists, and much of the climate justice movement grasp the fundamental fact that exploitation, violence, colonialism, extractivism, unfettered growth, and ecocide and exterminism are embedded in the DNA of capitalism, and thus the path ahead lies in transcending not reforming this system. Two such visions, well-worked out in theory and philosophy but not in actual practice, are ecoanarchism and ecosocialism. Both approaches are miles ahead of mainstream reformist politics, but, as is well-known, the pathology of humanism prevails in stodgy form throughout broad sectors of the radical left. Marxists in particular have drunk deep from the modern wellspring of anthropocentrism and speciesism, but that has been changing in productive ways.

The platform of the “System Change Not Climate Change” (SCNCC) group, for instance, is premised on the ecosocialist principle that the climate crisis is the inevitable result of capitalist systems rooted in profit and growth imperatives, but it reproduces Left hypocrisies and humanist dogmas. In their statement of goals, they write: “SCNCC envisions a climate justice movement united with the labor movement, First Nations/Indigenous and other struggles for liberation to create an alternative to the upside-down world shaped by fossil fuels and corporate power.” A noble statement indeed, but it leaves out one of the most significant struggles for liberation of the last 50 years—animal liberation—and how it could be integrated into a broad alliance of groups “united against the ecological destruction spawned by capitalism.” “Movements for sustainability and against ecological degradation,” they write, “must be led, to the fullest extent possible, by those who are most directly affected and who therefore have the highest stake in the outcome of the struggles we engage in.” In other words, people, humans, Homo sapiens. Humans enter the future through the front while animal commodities are dragged in chains and cages through the back. But clearly, millions of species and billions of suffering animal individuals are also “directly affected” by capitalist exploitation, and they too have the “highest stakes” in the outcomes of climate justice struggles.

SCNCC proudly proclaims its opposition to “all [sic] forms of oppression including racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia.” This is quite the impressive list of enlightened sensibilities that decries the many prejudices that inform systems of oppression. Unfortunately, it leaves out speciesism and the catastrophic real-world impacts of human supremacy that drive the climate emergency, the animal holocaust, and the sixth mass extinction crisis. Their reference to “the ecological destruction spawned by capitalism,” like countless others, makes no mention of factory farming and meat consumption as major contributors to environmental problems and climate change. And their allegiance to “a society that is free, just, and equitable, that fosters human creativity and productivity while healing the rifts generated by capitalism among people and between human society and the earth’s ecology,” says nothing about the rifts between humans and other animals, the creativity and amazing complexity of animals, as well as their own urgent needs for freedom from human exploitation—white, male, capitalist, postcolonialist, ecosocialist, feminist, or otherwise!

Selected References

Mary Robinson Foundation (2013) “Declaration on Climate Justice” (https://www.mrfcj.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Declaration-on-Climate-Justice.pdf).

“Berlin Declaration on Climate Justice” (2018)(https://liberal-international.org/berlin-declaration-on-climate-justice/).

People’s Summit: Climate Rights4All (2018) “Peoples’ Summit on Climate, Rights and Human Survival” (https://www.climaterights4all.com/peoples-summit-on-climate-rights-and-human-survival/).

Climate Justice Alliance(https://climatejusticealliance.org).

Dixson-Decleve S. et al.  (2022). Earth for all: a survival guide for humanity. Gabriola Island, BC Canada: New Society Publishers.

World Future Fund (2010) “Laws of the rights of Mother Earth”(http://www.worldfuturefund.org/projects/indicators/motherearthbolivia.html).

Yamin, Farhana (2019) “This is the only way to tackle the climate emergency” Time(https://time.com/5607152/extinction-rebellion-farhana-yamin/)

Animal Rising (https://www.animalrising.org) 

“System Change Not Climate Change”(https://systemchangenotclimatechange.org)