Decarbonise, Decapitalise, Decolonise!
Working towards environmental justice through community and academic collaboration.
Prominent proposed solutions to climate change often focus on changing individual consumption habits, shifting corporate emissions around by means of market-based mechanisms, and even expanding carbon-fuelled economic growth in order to fund the transition to renewables. At the same time, even some of the most progressive ‘Green New Deal’ proposals demand the expansion of resource extraction across important Indigenous ecologies in both the Global South and North. Worst of all, racist population alarmism has been revived in the popular imagination, boosting dangerous interventions into women’s reproduction in parts of the world where carbon emissions are actually the lowest. This session thrashes over alternative paths to environmental justice which consciously overcome extraction, exploitation, and forms of sterilisation of racialised communities in the Global South. It will also provide a space to connect the global, structural and historical context associated with our colonial legacy. Overall, we will make the case that decarbonisation requires both decapitalisation and decolonisation in order to be a meaningful and viable route to environmental justice. Drawing on our community knowledge and our lived experiences, we will explore why the conversation has evolved to centre on the historical legacy of colonialism. We are currently witnessing racial polarisation within the environmental movement, so the conversation will cover ways of uniting for local and global solutions that centre those racialised communities who are disproportionately affected by both environmental harm and its proposed solutions.
Facilitators:
Serayna Keya Solanki (also known as Sen) is a campaigner, a facilitator, a Sustainability consultant, a poet and a painter with a focus on Anti-Racism and Decolonisation in relation to Environmental and Social Justice. Raised in Leicester and living in London, supporting Climate Justice in Climate Mitigation and Adaption Solutions.
and
Lisa Tilley, Lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck, University of London
Saturday 7th March 1:30pm – 5:30pm at the LCB Depot (31 Rutland Street, Leicester LE1 1RE)
Leicester People's University 