continuously hold themselves accountable. Through the integration of this knowledge, future grassroots environmental and climate disaster relief “care networks” can build justice-oriented and power-conscious movements where communities, rather than oppressive state and non-profit institutions, become a central source of enduring support and resilience in natural disasters.
Conclusion The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has repeatedly indicated that anthropogenic climate change will lead to more severe and widespread extreme weather events, including tropical cyclones, intense precipitation, severe droughts, and heat waves, which can increase the severity of storms and storm surges alongside rising sea levels, and increase the likelihood and intensity of wildfires, respectively.71 Even more critically, we know the impacts of climate change will have a disproportionate effect on those who contribute to it the least. In addressing these injustices, we must recognize that there exists no one-size-fits-all solution to environmental justice, climate justice, or justice in natural disaster responses. Each instance of inequity and each disaster demands a unique, scale and context-specific response that prioritizes and mobilizes those most distressed by climate change and state inaction in increasingly frequent and severe climate catastrophes. While achieving these transformative demands may at times require legal reforms or interactions between grassroots groups, the state, and other nonprofits, it is essential that the mass-mobilization of marginalized, vulnerable, and allied communities operate at the forefront of our collective efforts to address these challenges, with particular attention paid to the structural inequalities that produce and exacerbate these disasters. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes: Big problems require big solutions. Nothing happens all at once; big answers are the painstaking accumulation of smaller achievements. But dividing a problem into pieces in order to solve the whole thing is altogether different from defining a problem solely in terms of the bits that seem easier to fix. In the first instance, the remedy for each piece must develop in relation to its effect on actual or possible remedies for the other pieces. The other way is to solve a small part without considering whether the outcome strengthens or weakens the big problem’s hold on the world. In other words, there’s breaking down and then there’s breaking down.72
The devastation felt by especially vulnerable and marginalized communities in recent natural disasters was, and remains, predictable. The long-standing history of state and non-profit inaction in at-risk communities during these calamitous events reflect the chronic and unceasing discriminatory practices of the state and Non-Profit Industrial Complex, whose logics determine which lives are valuable, who is worthy of rights, and therefore, who deserves rescue,
71. IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects (New York: Cambridge University Press), 1076-1077, ipcc.ch/site/assets/ uploads/2018/02/WGIIAR5-PartA_FINAL.pdf. 72. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Foreword in The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014), viii.
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Defining Environments: Critical Studies in the Natural World