Relational value, land, and climate justice

ABSTRACT This article draws on the insight that people and communities have fundamental relationships with place. People are defined and shaped by place; and place is, in turn, defined and shaped by communities of people. Insofar as climate change changes the nature and experience of place, it can undermine the relationship between people and place, and thereby has the potential to affect the identity of either or both. A place, or the land, may change any one of its fundamental characteristics in a variety of ways, and in so doing, may fundamentally transform its identity. Whereas the paradigmatic injustice of climate change has often been described primarily in terms of spaces that cease to be habitable such as island nations lost to rising sea levels, changing climatic characteristics are also known to result in desertification, destabilized rainfall patterns, shifts in migratory patterns, extinction of species, loss of biodiversity, erosion, increased fire risk, and other large-scale changes to the land that remains. A relational understanding of climate change reveals the harms of climate change to be both much more fundamental, and much more ubiquitous.