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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Commun.
Sec. Science and Environmental Communication
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2024.1484643
This article is part of the Research Topic Media, Racism, Speciesism: Issues and Solutions for Creaturely Racism in the Anthropocene View all 6 articles

Climate Justice, Speciesism, and Total Liberation in Age of the

Provisionally accepted
  • The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This talk provides a critical overview of climate justice discourse, while examining a key deficit that stems from humanist/speciesist biases and a failure to incorporate nonhuman animals (hereafter "animals") into social analyses, ethics, politics, and visions of a just transition to an ecological society. This deficit, I argue, has serious consequence for understanding the roots and driving forces of social hierarchies, mass extinction, and the climate crisis. Climate mitigation strategies, I claim, will fail without engaging animal rights and vegan perspectives. I argue that earth, animal, and human liberation movements are inseparably interlinked in a comprehensive project of "total liberation." A guiding thread throughout is the focus on increasingly expansive concepts of rights and justice that break through the parochial boundaries of humanist views, to include "animal justice" (or "multispecies" justice") and "planetary justice." These emerging moral paradigms and cognitive mappings are vital to overcome the planetary social and ecological crises that define the Anthropocene Epoch.

    Keywords: Climate justice, Just Transition, anthropocentrism, speciesism, hierarchy, Holocene, anthropocene, Animal justice

    Received: 22 Aug 2024; Accepted: 31 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Best. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Steve Best, The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.