Global Climate Crisis Seeking Environmental Justice and Climate Equality
Chapter 6
Reflections on the possibility of a global climate justice movement from the US-Mexico border: Justicia ambiental al límite
Kyle Haines
This chapter the author shares the experience of working with communities on the border between San Diego and Tijuana. He outlines four challenges that prevent the formation of a global environmental justice movement.
The first challenge is information. Access to information is key but is difficult in San Diego and Tijuana where the official languages and institutional histories are rooted in different understandings. Information is relatively available on the San Diego side but limited in Tijuana because of language differences obscuring data from monolingual researchers and aspects such as internet access, libraries and the ability to travel.
The second challenge is identification. The lack of free and accessible information on shared-ecological issues creates an identification problem. Environmental justice advocates in Tijuana and other developing countries may not identify themselves as advocates despite their work addressing the consequences of climate change. This makes it harder for advocate groups in the US to make connections with them. In the US environmentalism is treated as a special lobby, while in Tijuana it's more characterized and connected to labor, cultural autonomy and lively in connection to Mexican social movements..
The third challenge is aggregation of collective agency. San Diego and Tijuana lack an institutionalized form of democratic agency and attempts to govern binationally are prevented due to clashing interests from each side of the wall. The lack of historical and institutional commonalities is accentuated by indifference such as lack of a common language, developmental context and culture. Both communities view themselves as separate.
The last challenge is mental and material displacement. The shift to “post-material” values in rich consumer societies is based on the contamination and waste of the places where the goods are exported from. The author's work in Tijuana proved evidence of this. The dumping of waste from “post-material” San Diego enabled a mental distance between their providing of waste and the impact of the waste on the location their goods were created.
About the Author
Nina is the Research Intern for The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace. She is a junior at The University of Maryland on the Pre-Law track pursuing a dual major in Psychology and Theatre.
