Environmental victims and climate change activists

There are powerful examples of victims of historical and ongoing direct harms gathering forces to fight for justice and reparations: from native peoples in Canada and Australia demanding redress for harms suffered since colonial times (Cunneen and Tauri 2016; Jung 2009) to current movements against gender-based violence or racialized police brutality such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Overcoming individual agony and organising resistance is extremely difficult in cases such as these.

Yet even more challenges appear when struggling against, allegedly, more abstract and indirect harms such as climate change.¹ Ultimately, we are all affected by environmental harms, and particularly by climate change (Hall 2014; Watts 2018). Moreover, our own humane existence is under threat (White 2019; Sanchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019). However, the impact of climate change is more diffuse, immaterial and abstract than crimes, such as murder or rape, and this peculiarity is what might make commitment to resistance even more challenging than usual.