Abstract
Abstract. This exploratory study traces the emergence of climate justice claims linked to narratives of Latin American social movements for the defence of life and territory. I argue that in post-colonial settings, religious and historical injustices and socio-cultural factors act as constitutive elements of environmental and climate justice understandings which are grounded in territories immersed in neo-extractivism conflicts. Environmental and climate justice conceptualizations have overlooked the religious fact present in many Latin American socio-environmental movements. As a result, the intertwined notions of divine justice and social justice are unacknowledged. To illustrate this claim, I examine socio-environmental and climate justice claims in a cross-border region between Guatemala and Chiapas. This region has a common ethnic background but divergent historical trajectories across the border. Diverse nuances and intensities adopted by environmental and climate justice practices and narratives on both sides of the border are examined. The case study reveals the importance of religion as a force for collective action and as a channel for the promotion of place-based notions of climate justice. The text calls for the examination of the religious factor, in its multiple expressions, in the theories of climate and environmental justice.
Highlights
Socio-environmental struggles in Latin America are, in many cases, sustained by a formal religious faith or by adaptations of ancestral world views (Lorentzen and Salvador, 2006)
In local territories crisscrossed and lacerated by neoextractivism, the religious feeling emanating from liberation theology provides a sense of strength, union, and transcendence that counterbalances the power wielded by the state in coalition with mining and agro-industrial empires
This is especially true for San Marcos, Guatemala, where the state still refuses to recognize the most basic rights of the majority of its population
Summary
Socio-environmental struggles in Latin America are, in many cases, sustained by a formal religious faith or by adaptations of ancestral world views (Lorentzen and Salvador, 2006). Among the elements problematized in that literature are religious dogma, structure, organization, and conceptions of deity and human nature (Gerten and Bergmann, 2011; Veldman et al, 2013) This body of research is not connected, at present, to the environmental and climate-justice conceptualizations. Recent research into the influence of such dogmas appears to have been triggered by the debate surrounding the papal encyclical Laudato si’ (published in 2015), which calls emphatically for stronger action against climate change. It prompts for a more integrative view of climate justice: one that moves away from carbon issues
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