Embodied Climate Activism As a Planetary Ethics of Care
The density and diversity of a city’s population, public spaces allowing strangers to meet and assemble, or the spatial proximity of political decision makers are just a few reasons why the urban functions as a preferred site for tackling the climate crisis. Considering the lack of political will to implement life-saving counter-measures to this crisis while the remaining window of opportunity is rapidly decreasing and the consequences of inaction are becoming more and more tangible, climate protests have become an inherent part of everyday life.
Fighting the climate crisis is thus tied to a relational understanding of care and extending care for the people, the planet, and their interrelated futures by caring-with in Joan Tronto’s sense: Caring is then not only a specific activity but a bundle of practices that respond to emotional and physical needs—of oneself, other people, and/or the planet as more-than-human being—and that rest on the radical respect for interdependencies. To secure the survival of human civilisation as we know it, structural changes towards a climate-friendly everyday life are therefore crucial. We understand care as one condition for pushing these structural changes.
Activists—particularly those participating in actions of civil disobedience—are embodying climate activism by putting themselves at the frontline of the fight for climate justice. The mental and physical implications of this fight—which can be viewed as an act of (planetary) care—will be further investigated through the method of body mapping, focussing not only on the experiences made on the immediate protest sites, but also on those made in prisons and courts thereafter.