Environmentalism, Radicalism, Activism

As we enter the midway portion of the year 2023, it is not difficult to collect data, examples, and near daily reminders to illustrate our growing climate crises. Global temperature increases and the corresponding melting of ice sheets and mountain glaciers provide evidence of global warming. Climate scientists from across international agencies (including, for example, NOAA, NASA, and the United Kingdom's Hadley Centre) collectively demonstrate that "the Earth's average surface temperature has risen by about 1.8°F (1.0°C) since 1880."¹ Holding about 8% of Earth's fresh water, Greenland's ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate and Arctic sea ice is declining in both thickness and range.² Animal migration patterns point to the implications of these changes, occurring earlier each season and shifting increasingly northward.³ We encounter this also in the early spring blossoming of flora,⁴ declining snow coverage in the northern hemisphere,⁵ and rising sea levels.⁶

Such data, and the resultant conditions faced by billions of people and millions upon millions of land, sea, and air life forms, forewarn us not merely about the increasingly dire conditions we collectively face, but also, foreground the primary role humans play in causing large-scale climate problems. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), "since systematic scientific assessments began in the 1970s, the influence of human activity on the warming of the climate system has evolved from theory to established fact."⁷ Not a new phenomenon, humanity's reliance on fossil fuels and industrial processes that produce carbon dioxide—a condition understood since the mid 1800s—negatively impacts the balance of Earth's natural greenhouse effect, ultimately leading to more extreme weather patterns and warmer surface temperatures. Since 1800, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from approximately 280 parts per million to 417 in 2022.⁸ In fact, the increase of 2.13 ppm between 2021 and 2022 represented the eleventh consecutive year where carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by more than 2 ppm.⁹ The direness of these conditions is exacerbated by various intersectional realities, including the ways in which marginalized communities, people of color, and low-income societies feel the effects more acutely.¹⁰ Flooding, extreme heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and other life-threatening weather events destroy livelihoods, worsen wealth differentials, and cause both societal stagnation and forced migration.¹¹

In response, the past two decades bear witness to a series of local and global efforts to ameliorate the worst excesses of human conduct and seek solutions to the long-term challenges of realizing a stable environment. In different but interconnected ways, the Kyoto Protocol, International Carbon Action Partnership, Global Environment Facility, and Paris Agreement all seek to address the role humans assume in both the destruction of the environment and the changes that must take place if we are to maintain Earth as a habitable planet. Such efforts extend into global religion, with the Muslim Seven Year Action Plan on Climate Change and Pope Francis's encyclical on ecology, Laudato Si', providing two large-scale shifts in the way global religions understand human culpability, position climate crises, and situate their religious values as orientations toward responsible change.¹² Laudato Si' is especially informative as the Pope clearly identifies humans as the cause of the environmental crisis, which signals a shift away from how many Christian faiths—both historically and today—argue for dominionism, or the notion that the earth and its resources were gifted by God to humans for their use.

While these efforts and shifting narratives at political, cultural, and religious levels address both the fault of humans and the need for global humanity to think differently about energy sources and consumption, we remain trapped by the continued hubris of human actors and the manifestations of capitalism. The radical nature of the collective ecological crisis warrants critically considering not only the merits of reformist approaches to the situation but also their inherent limits.

Against this backdrop, this special issue of JSR explores the role of radical environmentalism(s), both historically and contemporaneously, in relation to combating climate...