Description
Climate change has caused loss & harm to both natural and human systems, with a disproportionate share of the burden being felt on the vulnerable population. As per the Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), indigenous people (Adivasis) have mobilized more than half of the environmental justice movements in India (57%). Adivasis are also the most affected or displaced (over 40%) by the ecological conflicts in India. Communities that are at the forefront of social, environmental, and cultural injustices in many regions, including India, protest the continuous colonial-era environmental extraction. The motivations for resistance against climate injustices are rooted in opposition to ongoing dominance of modern, colonial, capitalist, and extractive tendencies that are a result of social difference, including gender, race, caste, & class. To study the motivations of the indigenous people, particularly indigenous youth who are at the core of many climate movements in democratic India, it is important to understand the unequal power dynamics and structural & systematic injustices that exist as a result of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. In this paper, I propose the theory of intersectionality (coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw and others in the Black feminist tradition) to examine the motivations of indigenous youth activists. Intersectionality will help examine the larger positions of power and discrimination within a system in which individuals find themselves. As youth climate activism represents ‘subaltern agency’ that has arisen from an intersection of environmental and other injustices, it is intrinsic to view it within the framework of larger political movements and conceptualize it with intersecting oppressions in mind. An intersectional lens in understanding the motivations for mobilizing for climate change will contribute to decolonial environmental justice and bring the voices from the Global south.
