More-than-human solidarity and multispecies justice in the climate crisis

The climate emergency demands that principles and practices of justice and injustice, harm, loss, suffering, and hope are revisited, to encompass both the human and the natural world and the many interconnections between them. Following work on the Unknown Other in climate justice discourse, I examine a relational space of proximity, empathy, and responsibility across human and non-human Others to advance current understandings of multispecies justice. Via four types of encounters – the visual, the embodied, the ethical, and the political – it is possible to engage in empathetic experiences with and enact responsibility toward infinite other beings and confront layers of shared vulnerabilities and histories of silencing and erasures. These encounters across space and time make tangible what a nature of human and more-than-human togetherness and solidarity may look like and what ethics and politics would be required to overcome untenable human exceptionalism in today’s crises.