In this interview, Julian van Vugt discusses the research and findings of his recent article in Environmental Politics, co-authored with Adrienne de Ruiter and Christoph Henning: Where to aim with multispecies climate justice? A critical realist account.
Congratulations on your recent article! What is the key message that you hope people take from this publication?
Thank you! My co-authors and I see the emergence of new non-anthropocentric paradigms of climate justice, such as multispecies justice (MSJ), as a crucial addition to the formerly so human-focused climate justice debate. However, the ontological picture of nature and society that most MSJ scholarship adheres to can be counterproductive for some of the aims of the approach. In the paper, we therefore discuss the possible problems of viewing nature and society as an indistinguishable ‘hybrid’ for building a theory of climate justice. We argue that what we need is an ontological approach that takes the interconnectedness and entanglement between nature and society seriously, while retaining an analytical separation between the two. To us, this approach should be critical realism.
How does critical realism help build on calls for multispecies justice?
We take the existing calls for MSJ as our starting point, stressing the importance of taking relationality between human and non-human entities as a foundation for building a more inclusive theory of climate justice. To us, this focus on relationality beyond humans alone is a key way in which the MSJ approach can be an addition to existing climate justice literature. What we note, however, is that the way in which this idea of relationality is conceptualised in existing MSJ scholarship leads to difficulties for building a theory of climate justice. As mentioned, our point here is on the hybridity of nature and society. This refers to the idea that these two categories are so deeply entangled as to be indistinguishable. Following this idea, discussing ‘nature’ and ‘society’ as separable domains is problematic.
This idea of hybridity or ‘hybridism’ is generally accepted in MSJ literature, yet we hold that it is at the root of ambiguities in the approach that might stand in the way of its development. For one, collapsing nature and society into one ontological domain makes it difficult to consistently discuss the great harms that societal structures cause to natural entities through climate change. Moreover, this appears to mean that only certain relationships should be the key focus of multispecies climate justice. Hence, we think that the idea of relationality, while promising, remains overly broad in existing MSJ literature as a consequence of not making the analytical nature/society-distinction. Lastly, we see possible issues in getting the hybridist picture to align with institutions that could potentially put MSJ into practice.
Given these potential problems, we argue for an ontological basis for MSJ that takes relationality beyond humans alone as a key starting point, while retaining an analytical distinction between nature and society. This is where critical realism comes in. This ontological position views society as an emergent part of nature, which does however have distinct properties not found in nature as such. Society is thus intricately related with nature, but the two remain analytically separable. Within society, people are born into societal structures, but within these they retain agency to determine their own course. Critical realism is a perspective focused on emancipation, too: societal structures can be transformed, for instance so that they create less pervasive and harmful intrusions into nature. We see this as a promising direction for MSJ: we should be examining structural transformations that can limit and redirect societal impacts on natural entities.
You use the example of mining for renewables to explore this issue, what did this case study highlight for you?
The case study highlights the ambiguities that taking a hybridist position towards climate justice can lead to. Renewables are crucial for mitigating climate change, yet mining for the materials used in most of them – think of cobalt or lithium, for instance – can spell local ecological disaster. A broad picture of relationality that fails to distinguish nature and society might here lead to a confused picture of justice. For one, not every relation potentially relevant to the case is one of potential injustice: in our view, the inclusion of a societal entity would be needed for that to become possible.
More importantly, focusing on relationality as such does not yet tell us much about which relations to privilege when different ways of doing justice are in conflict with one another, as is the case here. The critical realist perspective we propose can here give MSJ a clear focus area: try to tackle these societal institutions causing unjust spillovers into the natural domain. In other words: promote strong limitations of energy consumption and potential for recycling in the renewable energy domain. This means privileging certain relations over others, in a way we think is missing from hybridist pictures of MSJ.
How does your work fit with other notions of justice such as ecological justice or planetary justice?
In our paper, my co-authors and I build on some well-known formulations of ecological justice by David Schlosberg in arguing why a non-anthropocentric take on climate justice is necessary. The relational focus of MSJ, which Schlosberg currently also writes on, would be an important addition to these views on ecological justice. Where exactly MSJ falls within the planetary justice framework would, in my view, merit more research. What I can say is that the developments in planetary justice literature to more clearly include non-human species in the picture, for example in the recent special issue on this in Environmental Politics, seem to be an area where the two approaches could overlap. The discussions of pluriversality, for instance, are also reminiscent of work done in the multispecies justice field.
Finally, what’s next? Are you publishing more on this topic?
This paper is the first to come out of my current PhD project on multispecies climate justice, so the goal certainly is for more publications on the topic to follow! I am currently working on developing the idea of principles of multispecies justice that my co-authors and I introduce towards the end of this paper. Alongside that, I am working on an exploration of the linkages between multispecies climate justice and degrowth scholarship.
Bio: Julian van Vugt works as a PhD candidate and lecturer in the department of Humanism and Philosophy at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, the Netherlands. His educational background is in Biology, Philosophy and Environment and Society Studies. His research interests include environmental and climate justice, environmental political theory, and non-anthropocentric climate ethics. In his PhD project, he focuses on the concept of multispecies climate justice, studying its ontological presuppositions, its normative-ethical implications, and its linkages to various approaches in environmental philosophy.
