Climate justice in more-than-human worlds

Abstract

Theories of climate justice retain a persistent tension between transcorporeal entanglement and coherent individuality. The ontology of bodily separation required for accountability for polluters and reparation for the vulnerable enacts a worldview potentially inconsistent with the more-than-human relationality of climate change. Yet theories of material agency and posthuman becoming are criticised for offering limited guidance for political practice. Engaging with the bushfire smoke that blanketed eastern Australia throughout 2019/2020, I seek to revitalise climate justice by engaging with theories of more-than-human transcorporeality. To do so, I articulate an aspirational climate justice, where aspiration is understood as a yearning arising from inhibited breath. Aspirational climate justice considers the relationally composed human and non-human bodies that breathe, as well as the relationship – respiration – itself, as subjects, and offers a politics through which we might keep breathing together towards a more liveable world.