Forging Multispecies Justice Alliances

As climate and biodiversity disintegration, extreme inequality and political polarisation gather momentum, radical reimaginings of our collective futures are needed as a matter of urgency. This is a task that contentious socio-ecological movements are particularly well placed for. Contemporary environmental mobilisations in the Global North have, thankfully, become more intersectional (Thomas 2022) in their diagnostic and prognostic framings since their earlier iterations in the 1970s (Bari 1992; Alberro 2023). Activist groups like Earth First!, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil (JSO)- though they remain predominantly white and middle class (Hayes et al 2020; Bell 2021)- increasingly avow the inextricable links between social and ecological wellbeing, partly due to the growing influence of global discourses around climate justice (Claeys et al 2017). However, in this paper I argue that many key ecological mobilisations in the global north, particularly JSO and Extinction Rebellion, remain limited in their transgressive capacity due to (1) the persistence of singular and at times apolitical diagnostic and prognostic framings, which impede the formation of productive alliances with BIPOC and working class communities at the front lines of environmental devastation, and (2) a pervasive anthropocentrism, rooted in longstanding Western dualisms (i.e. Nature/Culture, Human/animal). Through multispecies justice (Celermajer at al 2022; Chao et al 2022) and decolonial-ecological (Ferdinand 2021) lenses, I enquire: whither the other-than-human in movement visions of more sustainable futures? How ought contemporary ecological mobilisations mitigate the socio-ecological injustices associated with new waves of (neo)extractivism of rare earth minerals (Zografos 2022) for powering global Net Zero transitions? How can we better unite struggles for land sovereignty, climate justice, biodiversity, food and financial justice in an effort to build multispecies alliances for liberated futures? I suggest that a crucial starting point is for environmental mobilisations in the global north to become more thoroughly (re)politicised, intersectional and multispecies.