Lizzy: Hi, I'm Lizzy Ghedi-Ehrlich.
Lisa: And I'm Lisa Hernandez.
Lizzy: And we are your hosts for Scholars Strategy Network’s No Jargon. Every other week, we will discuss an American policy problem with one of the nation’s top researchers—without jargon.
Lisa: So Lizzy, I am very much seated for this episode because it includes one of my top three favorite topics to discuss, which are the U.S. Census, as you know, Real Housewives.
Lizzy: Knew that one.
Lisa: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And colonialism.
Lizzy: What a top three, what a, I mean, I see the intersections and I see the variety at the same time. But yes, for those who don't have colonialism and decolonization in their top three, as you do, I'm excited for this conversation because, you know, we know this is a term that gets used in these high-level conversations and it feels like a space where people bring their own assumptions to what that means and don't necessarily understand what we're talking about. And especially in the context of a global problem like climate change is. This is something that we simply cannot address completely within one country because the climate doesn't care where your borders are.
But history does and the history of colonialism, one where, you know, there were certain countries because they had the ability to, were traveling into other people's spaces and saying, I get what's yours. You know, that is a specific era in history that I think if you learn about it, you can understand. But then it's too easy to say, well, that era of history is over, so now we're not doing that anymore; what does it matter for today's problems and today's problem solving? And, the way I see it, as a non-expert, and we'll get some help with this, it's still this just kind of idea that I do see animating a lot of our policies, whether domestic or international, where the idea is that everyone wants more. That that's natural. And if I can take what you have, the fact that I was able to, and that you couldn't resist me, justifies the fact that I did. I still see us operating that way a lot today, that that's sort of the natural order of things and therefore policy should kind of follow from it.
And this idea of decolonizing, whether it's policy or our retelling of history, or just the current processes that we operate by, it's sort of getting out of that idea that. That everyone wants more, that it's natural for us to take, and that the results of that sort of taking and lack of resistance, or if you do successfully resist that, like those are the way the world should work. I see how there's actually a different world possible where we don't take that as the framework that we operate in.
Lisa: Absolutely. And I think there's hopefully a world in which we honor native people's connections to their land. Emulate that throughout the world. But let's see if that is possible, and let's see what are the specific ways of doing so?
Lizzy: Yeah. I can see that it's gonna be tough because that sounds like it might be giving up some of our assumptions or even some of the things that we have collected for ourselves, whether it's a sense of self or actual resources. But we will see what our expert has to say today. For this episode, I spoke to Dr. Farhana Sultana. She is a professor of geography at Syracuse University and an internationally recognized expert on climate justice. She's the editor of Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice and Water Politics: Governance, Justice, and the Right to Water. Her work focuses on the connections among climate change, inequality, and global politics, and here's our conversation.
Lizzy: Professor Sultana, thank you so much for coming on No Jargon.
Farhana: Thank you for having me.
Lizzy: On our podcast, we typically focus on domestic issues here in the U.S. but climate change is probably maybe the ER issue that makes the entire concept of national borders and boundaries less important in a way that we would use to kind of define those spaces. The climate is everywhere. Air does not stop at a checkpoint on your border. So today we really wanted to step back and yes, talk about what is happening here in the us but be mindful of how that's fitting into a bigger global picture and how we cannot treat this issue the same way that we sometimes treat other policy issues or maybe other policy issues need to be treated more like we treat a global issue like climate change. So to start us off, I actually wanted to ask you about your background and how you came to focus on climate justice and use this global perspective in your work.
Farhana: So I grew up in Bangladesh where environmental and climate change issues were part of everyday life, whether it's flooding during monsoon season or water shortages during the dry season, the impacts of heat stress, air pollution and so on. But what stood out to me was how unequally these issues all connected to climate change affected different communities, particularly poor communities who are the hardest hit, but also had the least amount of resources to recover. And that early exposure shaped my sense of injustice and made me curious about how global and local systems interact to shape vulnerability, how they shape policies we make, whether domestic or global. And having grown up with that kind of climate and water crisis continues to drive my research and public policy work and advocacy in climate justice.
So I started off by training in the natural sciences, actually in the earth sciences, but then shifting into social sciences to understand, okay, the earth is great, but I like people on the earth more and how do I understand these complex processes? And then I ended up working for the United Nations for a few years, which helped me gain that policy perspective before I returned to academia.
So that background, in terms of understanding those complexities across disciplines, both interdisciplinarily but also internationally, helped me understand how to think about the issues I study now, you know, in terms of politics of climate change, water governance, sustainable development, environmental justice. So I try to bring that kind of critical theory, policy expertise and lived experience, and ethnographic field work into understanding and explaining what are the different ways that climate change harms different communities that are affected by environmental change. Who gets to decide the solutions, whose voice counts and what alternatives are possible? That's how I ended up, being really driven by early experience, but ongoing research in South Asia and the U.S. to help bridge what happens in frontline communities with decisions that are made in, let's say policymaking or climate negotiations or decisions around, climate financing. And these often feel distant or detached from reality, but they affect all of us.
Lizzy: Right. It sounds like another kind of downstream upstream journey that I actually hear about from a lot of the researchers I work with. You started in the space of actually looking at the substance, the climate, the earth, the weather that, you know, you can study things kind of from that perspective. And then for a lot of people who do, you sort of immediately realize, well this isn't just understanding the natural world. I am being sort of buffeted about by all of these different decisions being made above me and, oh wait, there's a whole other level above that, you know, it keeps going. And at every sort of layer there's all these different intersections.
But here you are bridging those spaces and also writing about them in ways that you want to be applied and explain these things. So I wanna talk about the book that you recently edited, Confronting Climate Coloniality. With this book, you are arguing or the folks that you have brought together in an edited volume are arguing, that we need to understand climate change through a lens of colonialism and global inequality in order to truly be talking about what we need to be talking about and maybe figure out what we need to do. Can you explain that concept of climate coloniality for our No Jargon listeners, what does that mean?
Farhana: Yeah, absolutely. So, let me preface it by saying exactly what you are highlighting, that climate change is that risk and threat multiplier. It creates increasingly uneven and unjust impacts through more intense, frequent and unpredictable events that are climate related, whether it's floods or droughts, you know, sea surges, sea level rise, storms, wildfires, and so on. So climate coloniality is a concept that I coined. So it's a framework that helps us understand the contemporary climate crisis in terms of how this is a hangover from past histories of colonialism, resource extraction, geopolitical domination, but that both not only shapes the causes of clear climate crisis, but it continues to shape the responses. How we talk about climate justice, what solutions we come up with. So in no jargon, I would say, what are the persistent structural inequalities that are rooted in colonial histories over the last 500 years and how those said and unsaid ideologies and practices continue to shape who suffers the most from climate change and what can be done about it.
So it both helps us understand and identify power in terms of who benefits from the ongoing climate crisis, who decides who bears the cost and that helps us understand global environmental practices and policies. So if we think about, for instance, European colonialism over several centuries that left many formerly colonized countries and marginalized communities in a much more disproportionately impacted way. And this involves a range of issues that have roots hundreds of years ago. And these are countries that are often communities of color in Africa, Asia, Latin America, but they're also marginalizing communities of color and indigenous communities in, for instance, the U.S.
When we think about those connections, like why are some communities facing these disasters more disproportionately? Why do they suffer more? How is it that they have been so marginalized in having a voice or, why do they have less resources to recover and be resilient? What are the ways that this history and this spatial, geography impacts the options that they have? So this framework, climate coloniality, helps us look at how the climate crisis both impacts certain groups, harder and limits their responses. But in the process also limits how we, all of us, talk about climate change, you know, in global climate politics, in domestic climate change policymaking, in state and county level thinking about climate crisis in the U.S. or overseas. So when we look at the different aspects of climate coloniality, we get a different clarity or more sharper clarity on how did we get here? You know, what are the actual problems? What am I seeing and not seeing? And how do we actually pursue meaningful change? Change that's actually just, change that is long lasting.
So we know that the climate crisis increases various hierarchies. It, you know, it helps some people, it harms others. What it does is it also helps crack open imagination, helps us rethink the interventions and the path we're pursuing. So it helps us think, okay, is this process of hyper consumption the way to continue for another a hundred years? No. Is this dependency and fossil fuel the way to proceed? No. How did we get here? Well, you have to look at the last few centuries. Why are there threats in certain communities in certain countries, what are considered frontline communities? It's not just that they're physically, geographically located there. They were made to be more vulnerable through both global and local processes that are very interlinked, right? So this is what Climate Coloniality does and why I call the book Confronting it because it asks us to both recognize it and then address these, you know, embedded problems in global policymaking in our economic systems, in environmental policies, also in education. What we teach, what do we value, how do we explain to our students and which courses, like, for instance, get more attention, you know, so it's both material, but also about knowledge systems.
Lizzy: I cannot help but think immediately, drawing from your answer, how difficult the proposition you make then is. You very well explained how as power builds on itself, that makes those powers more reluctant to say, okay, we need to give something up in order to do the right thing. These systems that continue having certain groups of people think of themselves as naturally maybe entitled to a current system as it plays out versus other people who are not entitled to that system or to the benefits of that system or to not bearing the costs that they've shouldered from that system.
You see why these things are hard to change. They're hard to change because it's hard for anyone, regardless of their status, to take on a hardship or maybe what they perceive as a hardship or an unjust hardship. And it's hard because the whole process by which we got to the point where we had those inequalities reinforces both that sense and the structures that they've built on top of all these different kind of extractive, you know, whether it's natural gas or the export of one country's trash, you know, to another. All of these things are difficult to persuade people to want to dismantle, and they're difficult to dismantle even if you had consensus. So I'm really interested in hearing some examples from you both that maybe flesh out those current concepts, but also like how you are thinking we can reshape responses from our governments and our communities to get this difficult work done.
Farhana: Oh, that's an excellent way to phrase it in terms of the fact that people who have power are reluctant to give up power. So this is something I touch upon in the book And it has many examples, both from global spaces down to like very local rooted ones. So for instance, I'll give one example. So many of the green transitions that we know, and there's been more media coverage of this in recent years, and that in itself is a shift. The fact that we went from just glorification of electric vehicles to actually asking questions, it's because more and more researchers and communities are, you know, detailing what happens with this kinds of very problematic extractivism. So to fuel electric cars or solar panels, mining for lithium and cobalt is expanding rapidly, but it's not expanding in everyone's backyard. It's expanding in various parts of the so-called Global South or countries that were formerly colonized, and it ends up displacing indigenous communities and destroying ecologies. And that produces that coloniality, those colonial patterns. So it is extracting wealth from one part of the world to sustaining consumption in another, rather than rethinking the question of transportation, or rethinking the question of renewable energy. So that's, you know, one example.
So there are…
Lizzy: But with an added fun twist for modern times where it's not simply that we think we're extracting and getting the best because we deserve the best, and who wouldn't wanna get more from themselves, but we actually think we're doing the right thing. We're electrifying, we're moving away from fossil fuels!
Farhana: Well, it's better than just fossil fuel dependency. Absolutely, but I think we need to start asking those hard questions. So what these kinds of research does, and a book like this or other work that I've done and other work that other scholars have done, is to help us ask those questions as citizens, helps communities also find a vocabulary with which to then say, Hey, what we are experiencing is similar to what others are experiencing. So for instance, many proposed solutions, not just the, you know, the green transitions, but like carbon offsetting, green land grabs or geoengineering. They extend both that sense of hope and oh, we've created a solution—often they're false solutions—but they extend that same colonial logic because they shift the burden to communities that have been disenfranchised over time. These projects tend to commodify nature. They avoid real structural change, right? So climate justice means, really rethinking these issues and instead, supporting ways that we can think about more ethical, more redistributive, and more community led transformations.
So for instance, if we think about carbon offsetting is another example. So wealthy corporations and countries are buying out entire forests or rich agricultural land in places like Africa and places like Asia to what they call cancel-out emissions. Then they package it and call it green development for poorer countries. What this does, it often leads to more land grabs and displaces people from their ancestral homes, from forests that their livelihoods dependent on, you know, for millennia. And it also leads to resource depletion and loss of biodiversity because you went from a various robust ecosystem to perhaps often monocultures of the same trees. And local populations not only get displaced, they can suffer from food insecurity. So we are not really addressing the root problem, which is the over consumption and fossil fuel dependence.
Right? We are just making ourselves feel happy with carbon offsetting. But what's good is that people are asking these questions. More and more public conversations like this are happening. Op-eds are being written; journalists are covering these issues. So what I try to do is pull these together in this framework of climate coloniality to show that these solutions must be both reparative and redistributive and not just carbon neutral. Because we're talking about people, right? We're not just talking about particulates in the atmosphere.
We need to talk about both, and we also need to talk about other things like climate finance, which currently are often loans, but they really should be grants. And we need to talk about cumulative historical responsibility for climate harms. And think about what are the different kinds of, community led transitions, not just these technocratic fixes that are designed in boardrooms. But you know, things that are actually, designed in, in the streets and in farms and in collective gatherings and town halls and in village councils. So we try to explore these in depth with examples from around the world in, in the book, but also in ongoing work in terms of.policy-based work, empirical on the ground. Because it is really, really hard, you're right, to change governance systems and policy systems that have become very entrenched from colonial, imperial times. And people who have power don't want to give up power, but we are seeing that how not giving up power is coming to bite them in the backside right now, right?
Lizzy: Right. Well, especially because, to open this podcast, we talked about how, you know, we can't sort of isolate climate change and any of these policy changes that we're looking at within nations because that simply is not how the earth works. This is a shared problem whether we like it or not, and whether we have all these different systems of power and laws and policies and attitudes. It kind of doesn't matter in the end, because the problem has become so great, because of the forward march of capitalism and consumption and industrialization and sort of all the things that you've, you've covered in this broad, fast trot through history. The powerful forces that benefit the most from the unequal systems are no longer able to shield their citizens from these climate change effects.
You know, you talked about your upbringing in Bangladesh and how, you know, it was a regular part of life for people there to deal with impactful weather. But how you also saw that no, it wasn't just naturally that way. There were also forces kind of acting on that, and those forces created inequality. Now we have here in the U.S. like there's no longer spaces where people live that they're not having some of those similar experiences and seeing those inequalities for themselves. We started this year with devastating wildfires in L.A. We just saw catastrophic flooding in Texas and across parts of the South. You know, from your perspective, how do these kinds of disasters, fit into these global patterns of climate change? Do you see this stage that we've entered as one that is maybe making these kinds of big changes more possible?
Farhana: Yeah, so. What we've seen is that delay in climate action, whether it's mitigation, funding, you know, adaptation, different strategies, collaborations, have been, not very a priority in the United States, at least, in dominant discussions for a long time. They were in a lot of other countries. But with these floods, especially in places like Texas where people don't expect it, but it's often reported as like surprising or isolated, but they're not. They’re connected to that broader global pattern of intensifying climate disruptions. So that broader global pattern that was for decades and for a much longer time affecting those marginalized, colonized communities, primarily in the subtropics and tropics, but also elsewhere because of that heightened inequality, now we're seeing they're affecting wealthier communities, right. It's become so bad that whether it's wildfires in California, hurricanes in Puerto Rico, heat waves in Phoenix, we are seeing that the U.S. is beginning to mirror what other communities and countries had faced, and those countries and communities had been raising the alarm bells for a long time.
And as a result, we actually have ways to think about it. So this is where some of my comparative analysis is useful. So when I look at, for instance, floods and water crises unfold across South Asia, right? Sure, they've been handling it for a long time, but there are different kinds of floods. There can be flash floods from heavy rainfall in a short amount of time. It can be from hurricanes or tropical cyclones, bringing the sea onto the land. It can also be overwhelmed rivers and infrastructure collapsing, right?
What I call climate change is effectively water change. It's too much water, too little water, wrong time, wrong place. And because we're seeing both floods and droughts and so on. And those historical emissions from industrial nations like the U.S., you know, those impacts were not immediately felt, but they're being felt now. So the Texas floods highlight several of these global trends: both overwhelmed infrastructure, delayed policy response, disproportionate impacts on low income and racialized communities. And we know that in the United States, flood risk is also compounded by zoning decisions, you know, underinvestment in public services. but then also there's economic inequality, and racial injustice.
So when you think about these interlinkages, we can see that what I talk about globally and in countries across the global south, we're seeing those being reproduced here. Their manifestations may look slightly different, but we're seeing similar processes, right? More exacerbated climate disruptions, delayed policymaking, infrastructure that cannot handle it, or infrastructure that's actually not very good because one infrastructure in one place exacerbated the flood vulnerability in another.
And then finally, the resources to adapt to these are also vastly different across communities within Texas. Also whether it's the federal response, whether it was the state level response, whether it's a local response. and we saw this during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans almost 20 years ago, right? And who got away? Who couldn't, who drowned, whose home went underwater, who could not be rehabilitated and who didn't return? So those kinds of issues do exist in the U.S. So if we learn faster, we can actually get more ready for these are going to become a bigger juggernaut, so it'll help communities prepare and countries prepare better.
Lizzy: You've spent a lot of time in places that have been deeply affected by climate disasters. You've been seeing how people are actually responding to these things. Can you give us some stories or moments from your research that stuck with you? Something that might resonate for people in the U.S. who are starting to face these kinds of disasters in the way that we just laid out, that might help them take that important next step that clearly needs to start with maybe a grassroots level in order to affect our government.
Farhana: Absolutely. So a lot of my work has been in South Asia, which is where a lot of the frontline communities are, but I also work with communities around the world, including in the United States. So when we think about, for instance, if we go back to the flooding example, because that's such a big one that will come our way, and we depend on precipitation to grow our food, to give us drinking water, to you know, to deal with our own sewage pipes, right? We cannot live without water. So when we think about both water excess and water scarcity, it happens simultaneously. So one of the things that I learned, you know, through my decades of work in South Asia, is that the same community can face a flood and a drinking water shortage from contaminated water at the same time.
So, you know, how do we approach things that may seem disparate and being handled by different government agencies. So we need those collaborations and coordination, right from communities, from governments that are local, but also national. So again, if we think about disasters from hurricanes, what did we learn from hurricane in New York City in Manhattan versus the hurricane in Houston, right? So like who benefits, who loses? So these are transferable learnings. What are the models that didn't work, but we pursued for the last 200 years, like big embankments, big centralized dams, big geoengineering, or you know, big engineering fixes. Sure, they might work, but we have to recognize it in a much more holistic way. So it's both the regional, the global, and the local particularities.
So when I think about stories, from my research around the world, I remember speaking with a woman in the southwest part of Bangladesh many, many years ago who'd lost her home to repeated hurricanes and flooding, right? She'd lost her home for the second time. And also from riverbank erosion because when you have massive tropical cyclones and rivers that are continually flooding, you lose land. So she lived along the river that was along the banks that was fairly stable for a long time and then it started to happen much more rapidly given her family's history there. And she said, “We are always rebuilding what is taken. We are an expert at losing, but also rebuilding.” And that phrase stayed with me because it captured the exhaustion and the resilience and the injustice of living with repeated climate losses and damages while having done the least to cause it.
But, also figuring out locally adaptive solutions and working with other people, like whether it's the local policymaker, young architects who are trying to think about like floating homes, to agri-economists who are working on floating gardens, to issues of like early warning systems, you know, how do you evacuate on time?
And she was not a climate expert or policy maker, but she understood what many of the reports miss, which is that, you know, climate change is not just about temperature graphs. It is about loss of home, of belonging, of futures, you know, of the futures imagined for her children. And yet people still resist. People still stay in their homelands. They rebuild, they organize, they demand better, they collectivize. And that's what keeps me compelled to do the kind of work I do, because these people are not giving up and neither should we.
Lizzy: I also see it as something of a barrier to maybe the speed that we'd like some things to happen here in this country, in that I think there's a lot of people in the U.S. who are not experts at losing, or that expertise is very inequitably endowed in this country. And I see that as a real form of resistance sometimes to really reading the writing on the wall and doing the right thing.
But zooming back out for a moment to the global stage, COP30 is happening this November in Brazil. That's the meeting that brings together world leaders who attempt to negotiate coordinated next steps on climate action. Under this, the Trump administration, the U.S. is stepping back from leading on a lot of these matters. We're recording today on August 1. Just earlier this week, the EPA is making headlines under this administration for announcing its intent to revoke the 2009 declaration on greenhouse gases that has really underpinned the basis for a lot of climate regulation in the U.S. for over a decade. This is, when we officially and legally agreed that climate change was driven by humans and that it was deleterious to public health and therefore that made it something that we had a stake and being able to regulate and it justified a lot of those things. So kind of pulling that rug out from underneath that history of law that we've built on top of it, will remain to be seen what that does to our next steps. What do you see as a path forward globally with this kind of political environment that we're in?
Farhana: Yeah, it's a big concern for many, many people. COP30 will take place in Brazil, which is, you know, a country home to the Amazon, but also deep social inequalities. So the stakes are high. People will be focusing on the fact that you are in a place that has what is often called the lungs of the world. But while at the same time we're seeing rising floods and fires and heat waves and displacement that are global now, not just regional. If and when, or as the U.S. is retreating from global cooperation or continues to obstruct, you know, strong commitments, the space for meaningful global action starts to narrow even further, right?
We already have a fragile global consensus, which could erode further. But I think what we can focus on is that leadership has to go beyond pledges. So it is not just, you know, whether the U.S. is staying at the table or not, it's about how the U.S. will show up. Like will it at all center justice, will it support adaptation, loss and damage funding? These were things that happened, in the last two COPS, right, in terms of at least starting the conversation about loss and damage. Will the U.S. address its own fossil fuel expansion and militarized emissions. These are real concerns because the U.S. military is one of the highest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, larger than some smaller countries combined.
Globally, people are talking about climate justice and demanding it across scales. So I think the U.S. should listen and the U.S. is not just the current administration. I'm talking about the current administration, but also bureaucrats, citizens, scholars, communities, activists, lawyers, and so on, that we can all act with humility and commit to transformation. Yes, we would like the delegation that represents the U.S. to be a climate leader, because it has that historical responsibility. But whether it supports just transitions globally or continues to support techno solutions or delay further action by withdrawing challenging different discussions, I think there are other countries that must therefore rise to the mantle. There are other countries that could be global leaders, but what the U.S. does absolutely does have a bearing and it will only harm people who live in the U.S. further down the road because you're literally kicking the ball further down the road. That's all.
Lizzy: If you were to speak to, say a state policy maker, maybe someone in Texas who's maybe beginning to understand more of the global threats that you've discussed, but is also dealing with their own on-the-ground flooding and the lack of history that they have in being able to move people in the right direction. What would you urge those leaders to do differently that you think their position makes them able to do? Even while we acknowledge that it's so much smaller than these conversations need us to be?
Farhana: Well, we always have to start locally, right? Because that's within our power usually. And I think what's really important is that local leaders or state-level leaders, or even regional ones, think about climate justice, both local and global, and seeing those connections. So how do you reduce emissions in your city? So there are cities that are adapting to climate, valuing those issues around emissions, whether it's through infrastructure or, citizen vehicular movement. Are you ending subsidies to fossil fuels or, divesting from fossil fuels? Are you supporting those conversations about seeing climate action not as charity, but as treating it as an imperative but not just a moral imperative, but as a justice that pays dividends to you and your community into the future?
So how can we think about U.S. leaders, connect themselves and recognize themselves in other communities? So frontline communities, both domestically in the U.S. but also globally, and not push harmful technologies or quick market fixes like geoengineering or just carbon offsets without thinking about them deeply. Having conversations about them, recognizing that they do deepen inequality, and it does come back, the chickens do come back home to roost. So how can they support policy that's intersectional and democratic and reparative and is not just in symbolic gestures, but in structural changes. So can they structurally address policies that is within their power to change, whether it's in their city, in their county, in their state, but recognize that they need to go beyond, politics of funding and, you know, lobbyists, but recognize these wider connections that harm people now and will harm more and more people in their own communities as we go forward.
Lizzy: So hearing that, you know, it's always hopeful to go through to name the things that actually need to be done that could be done, that leaders and communities working together could affect and to know that they are there. But still the problem of climate change feel so overwhelming, you know, all of that acknowledgement of the harm that has already happened, complicity in that harm, our histories, and then the future harm that, you know, we are maybe causing today or making more difficult today for us to address down the line. It's a wicked problem and I understand why that sometimes makes people walk away. You are here with your eyes trained on all of this across time and space, relentlessly. What keeps you going? What hope do you hold that has allowed you to do this work?
Farhana: So, hope for me is not a feeling. It is a practice. It is a political act. So it is not just passive optimism, but it is a commitment to struggle. And there are many scholars and philosophers who've written about, you know, hope is an action. And I find hope in the refusal of the communities that I've worked with to accept the injustice. I see it in the students who ask hard questions, in social movements that connect struggles across borders, but also in everyday acts of resistance and care. So we are seeing communities that are not passive victims. They're already doing the work of resilience and justice. And that gives me hope we need to think about not just scaling these responses through top-down models, but supporting them through, you know, funding and policy change and learning from them and shifting power to those on the ground while assisting with coordination and connecting.
And I think what gives me hope, really, that collective power exists. We don't always wait for permission to act. We just need to collectivizing together. And there is real power and hope in global solidarity building, whether it's indigenous land defenders in North America, or youth climate strikers in Pacific islands, these movements challenge the roots of the crisis and not just the symptoms. And they tend to remind me that another world is entirely possible, that we are not alone in imagining or fighting for it in our own communities.
So that gives me hope that there is a collective power that we are building and we can continue to build and we just need more people to join this and recognize that it is not just one answer. It's in the many acts, both global and local, that bring about change in the world. And that gives me hope despite, you know, a lifetime of facing, you know, climate-related crises and feeling viscerally about the injustices.
Lizzy: Thank you so much for that Professor Sultana. I hope very much that that's gonna give out some hope that people can use to actually kind of take some good steps forward with your guidance.
Farhana: Thank you for having me. This was an absolute delight, and I hope folks will recognize that they do have power. And, you know, feel free to check out the book Confronting Climate Coloniality that came out a few months ago. Perhaps you'll find inspiration there.
Lizzy: And thanks for listening. For more on Professor Sultana’s work, check out our show notes at scholars.org/nojargon. No Jargon is the podcast of the Scholars Strategy Network, a nationwide organization that connects journalists, policymakers, and civic leaders with America’s top researchers to improve policy and strengthen democracy. The producers of our show are Wendy Chow and Dominik Doemer. Our audio engineer is Peter Linnane. If you liked the show, please subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. You can give us feedback on X, formerly known as Twitter, @NoJargonPodcast or at our email address [email protected].