I came across this interesting interview from Kyle Whyte, a Professor of Environmental Justice at the University of Michigan and member of the Potawatomi Nation, about viewing climate change through the lens of ‘kinship time’ and thought others might be interested.
The problem we’re facing right now from an environmental justice standpoint is that people are using the urgency of climate change that you can only get from linear time to propose solutions that we know are going to actually be bad for many communities, including Indigenous people. If you change your orientation toward time, and you look at the climate change crisis through kinship time, that’s a crisis that started several hundred years ago.
The urgent issue is not just that there are environmental perils coming, but rather that the climate crisis was built off of generations of inequity. If people don’t recognize that it’s a crisis of justice, as well as a crisis of the environment, then they’re going to continue to propose these problematic solutions…
https://grist.org/climate/to-solve-the-climate-crisis-we-must-first-repair-our-relationships/