(In)justice
This section explores climate justice and disability justice. These two separate pages look at factors driving the justice movements and the intersectionality of both movements, highlighting how factors such as race, gender, nationality, and disability impact one's lived experiences.
In this section...
Climate justice focuses on the rights, equity, and effects of climate change on different groups of people. Not only does climate justice advocate for the land but also for the people who reside on this earth and their wellbeing. This movement is intersectional, meaning it recognizes how diverse identities impact the experiences felt by climate change, rehabilitation, and aid.
The climate justice movement is built on the much older environmental justice movement. Environmental justice aims for all people – regardless of their identities or status – to experience the same "just treatment and meaningful involvement" in decision-making processes related to the environment, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Other activists argue that the goal of environmental justice goes even further: "The environmental justice movement isn't seeking to simply redistribute environmental harms, but to abolish them."
The disabled population is the largest minority group in the United States and globally, but is largely underrepresented in the fight for climate justice. Disability justice expands beyond the disability rights movement, highlighting other identities alongside disability and advocating for proper recognition, inclusion, and integration in all spaces.
By defining disability and the models of disability, this webpage sets context for the societal perspectives, understandings, and experiences of disability. This page is entitled "disability (in)justice," because the last section of this page looks at structural injustice, inequity, and intersectionality within the relationship between disability and climate.