Building on the other work in the Environmental Keywords project with the University of Bristol, we are exploring a prototype of what an ‘undisciplined’ glossary might be as it reaches across divides of academic discipline, creative practice and personal experience — while recognising the specific ‘location’ of each contribution. Disciplines have great strength and value in how we build and communicate our knowledge, and every discipline arrives at its own definitions and ways of speaking. As such, ‘undisciplining’ something like a glossary isn’t intended as ‘anti-disciplines’ but as a way of holding open the borders and in-between spaces so we can explore the possibilities of the interstices. Gaps from which more understanding can emerge.
We asked participants and other contributors to the project to share something of their work relating to any of our keywords in their research, creative practice, community work or personal experience, capturing some of the ways these words are understood. Our glossary can be a space where we’re not just talking past each other when we use our own versions of these words. Here, we’ve gathered together all the contributions received so far for each of our three keywords.
And we want to expand the glossary — both in terms of the different voices and perspectives featured, and as a conversation between them, and between the three words the project has focused on. See how you can contribute to the glossary at the end of our entries.
Environmental Justice
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The right to fair, equitable, and sustainable interaction with our environment – regardless of location, background, age, or any other apparent difference.
— Dr Paul Merchant works on modern and contemporary film and visual culture from Latin America and is Co-Director of the Centre for Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol.
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Building on Paul’s statement, I find it fascinating how definitions have the power to direct policies and initiatives. The above definition is similar to what the Equality Act (2010) enshrined in law — the duty to monitor drafted policies and plans against any potential negative impacts for people with ‘protected characteristics’ (here specifically age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation). In that sense, the definitional work advanced justice for these protected qualities but omitted some others (e.g. what about class / income?). Will there ever be a list of ‘protected characteristics’ that need to be considered to achieve justice? Should there be one?
— Dr Ola Michalec is a social scientist at the University of Bristol, interested in policies and politics of digital innovation and climate change. Currently, she explores ‘the making of’ cyber security regulations across water and energy sectors.
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Justice is more than restitution of wrongs as a resolution between two parties, but needs to consider impacts at wider scales – intergenerational consequences, precedent-setting for broader cultures, etc.
Justice only functions properly as such when the processes for it are sufficiently accessible and transparent (see, for eample, the Aarhus Convention).
Justice is framed by (and only as good as) the rights that society has enshrined in its customary codes or legislation. Weaknesses in rights (e.g. Free, Prior and Informed Consent, Rights of Nature) need to be addressed before the justice that depends on them can expand and deepen.
— Dave Pritchard is an independent advisor with special interest in intersections between culture and environment, coordinating the Convention on Wetlands’ Culture Network and chairing the Arts & Environment Network
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I’m interested in how the meanings of justice are different when framed by prefixes, and informed by contexts and experiences. Environmental Justice can be defined as in a dictionary but — because of the scale and urgency of the problem — its meaning varies strongly with related actions, proposals and terminologies.
For example, if you combine it or tweak it to ‘Climate Justice’ it means reparations to Most Affected People & Areas in the global south (at least $100 billion, distributed in participatory ways). If you use the phrase ‘Just Transition’ it means foregrounding the economic needs of coal & oil workers to implement change in incremental (too slow) ways.
Environmental Justice might be tweaked to ‘Ecological Justice’ to prioritise more-than-human lives including bodies of water or trees. I think the dominant frame is actually to focus on ‘Social Justice’, with increasing acknowledgement that there are environmental challenges to this, such as air pollution and land rights.
— Bridget McKenzie is an independent researcher, creative curator and founder of Climate Museum UK as an emerging mobile kit of ‘loose parts’ that creatively stirs responses to the climate emergency.
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Environmental justice means equal sharing of the remaining resources available to us — including the global carbon budget. Environmental justice is breached where those who are already well-off — whether countries or individuals — continue to take more than their share or to inflict harms on others as a result of profligate resource use. One of the most egregious cases of environmental injustice is the richest 1% of people in the world being responsible for more than twice the total emissions of the combined bottom 50% of earners.
— Dr Stuart Capstick is an environmental social scientist based at Cardiff University, and is Deputy Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST Centre).
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Environmental Justice is limited still as a practical and useful term, perhaps because it doesn’t seem to include the nonhuman world. Whose justice is it? As a young person, justice meant to me a wide and deep fairness but after many years of growing to understand the impact of our MANmade justice system on people, the rest of nature and on places, it has become for me a very narrow and specific thing of courtrooms and bewigged barristers.
Great fighters like Client Earth and WildJustice have used this wriggly complicated system back on itself to win ‘justice’ for a planet in theory. I hope this can be translated through into all peoples and beings and places. But I wonder what is environmental justice for a sponge on a seabed or a lichen on a mountain rock? Perhaps the eradication of humans?
— Nicky Saunter is an entrepreneurial thinker, practical activist and campaigner, and creative artist who is driven by what we can do rather than what we cannot change, and founder of Learning From the Land.
Environmental Resilience
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I think of this installation at the Biennale of Sydney: Water ecosystem, 2019-2022, by Ana Barboza and Rafael Freyre. It shows how creativity and traditional ecological knowledge can be sources of resilience (in this case, through water management).
A related point — what space is there in an ‘undisciplined’ glossary for visual/non-verbal definitions of terms?
— Dr Paul Merchant works on modern and contemporary film and visual culture from Latin America and is Co-Director of the Centre for Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol.
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Ecological resilience is typically understood to reflect the ability of a system to absorb perturbations and maintain or recover its ordinary state.
It’s a reason to conserve diversity, productivity, connectivity, integrity and extent/distribution, because these things reduce the risk of an inability to recover. But some systems occasionally exhibit ‘regime-shift’ as a natural phenomenon that isn’t necessarily something to be prevented, so the definition of resilience is enmeshed with cultural assumptions about the desirability/undesirability of change. This is perhaps better addressed (though more complicated to do so) in terms of resilience in ‘socio-ecological complexes’ rather than just ecosystems.
— Dave Pritchard is an independent advisor with special interest in intersections between culture and environment, coordinating the Convention on Wetlands’ Culture Network and chairing the Arts & Environment Network
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The notion of resilience entered geography primarily via ecology, but as Kevin Grove shows in Resilience (2018, Routledge), the roots of resilience thinking in human geography can also be traced to the cybernetic behaviouralism of Herbert Simon, to neoliberal political economy, pragmatist philosophy and modernist architecture and design.
Early critiques of resilience as a way of thinking about human-environment relations focused on the concept’s compatibility with neoliberal development paradigms, the decline of the welfare state, and the individualisation of responsibility for safety and wellbeing; a critique brilliantly captured in this image on Twitter.
More recent engagements with the concept, such as Grove (above) and Chandler et al. (2020, Resilience in the Anthropocene, Routledge), have examined how it is mobilised in practice, in projects of climate change adaptation and urban planning. These have shown how the concept can indeed function to buttress neoliberal political economy, but also how it informs designerly ways of thinking about human-environment relations which can promote fruitful trans-disciplinary solutions to the problems of complex socio-ecological systems, with some emancipatory potential (Krueger 2022, Visibilising the Neglected, Euopean Journal of International Security).
— Dr Martin Mahony is a human geographer at the University of East Anglia, interested in the contemporary politics of climate change, how future atmospheres are imagined, constructed, represented and contested and historical geographies of environmental knowledge-making.
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In Climate Museum UK, we talk about developing capacities for resilience in people (which includes knowledge and practices for increasing resilience of ecosystems and Earth systems).
The outcomes of resilience would include the peaceful and co-operative survival of communities through the impacts of the Earth Crisis (in extremis, displacement and shortages of water, food and shelter). The capacities for resilience include positive deviance, compassion for others, open imagination and curiosity, and access to resources (such as green infrastructure or emergency services).
So the term Environmental Resilience prefixes Resilience with a word that points to Earth Crisis, so that instead of thinking only of the resilience of the spirit, or of human relationships, or businesses, we think about the wider enmeshment of ecosystem and their inhabitants, and the disturbances that are catastrophically affecting their habitual stability.
— Bridget McKenzie is an independent researcher, creative curator and founder of Climate Museum UK as an emerging mobile kit of ‘loose parts’ that creatively stirs responses to the climate emergency.
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My recent project on Science and Technology Studies investigated how engineers think about their large scale systems, i.e. power plants. Here, a little edited collection by Engels is a good interdisciplinary resource: Key Concepts for Critical Infrastructure Research (2018, Springer VS). Resilience is one of the key requirements in critical infrastructures, i.e. high-level goals engineers design their systems around and embed in cultural activities.
There are active debates in Requirements Engineering resembling those in Human Geography (how do we grasp complexity beyond a cybernetic approach? How do we go beyond a neoliberal discourse of self-optimisation? Is the goal to bounce back or forwards?). What I find interesting, though, is how the definition of ‘engineering resilience’ translates into day-to-day practices and what we can learn from them in the environmental context. For example, I could mention practices like: 1. Engineering in redundant parts just in case 2. Avoiding a single point of failure 3. Having multiple access points to expertise in case people leave jobs or are off sick 4. Rehearsing worst-case scenarios 5. Having an incident response plan ready.
My provocation is: what could the above practices mean in the context of sustainability? What are the limits to resilience thinking in engineering?
— Dr Ola Michalec is a social scientist at the University of Bristol, interested in policies and politics of digital innovation and climate change. Currently, she explores ‘the making of’ cyber security regulations across water and energy sectors.
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Environmental resilience is the ability to cope with and effectively respond to changes arising from unfolding climate impacts and losses to the natural world. This can be in terms of adapting livelihoods, infrastructure, food provision, or coping at a personal and emotional level.
Resilience will become increasingly important as the climate and natural world continues to change in mostly negative ways. There are hard limits to adaptation and resilience: it is not possible to continue to live in a country that has been covered by the sea or to rely on an ecosystem when that has been destroyed.
— Dr Stuart Capstick is an environmental social scientist based at Cardiff University, and is Deputy Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST Centre).
Environmental Transitions
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An environmental transition can happen at any temporal or spatial scale, from a microsecond to a billion years, and from the molecular to the planetary. To be meaningful, any work with this concept must be explicit about the timeframe and the spatial scale intended.
In one sense, the whole of ‘the environment’ is always and only a process of transition, whether incremental or stochastic, whether fleeting or geological, whether detectable (by us) or not.
The artificial/anthropocentrically-framed notion of ‘transition zones’ or ‘transition events’ in an environment can nevertheless be an instructive focus for cultivating our understandings about the truth of this flux.
— Dave Pritchard is an independent advisor with special interest in intersections between culture and environment, coordinating the Convention on Wetlands’ Culture Network and chairing the Arts & Environment Network
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Again, there’s a need to consider what happens when ‘Environmental’ becomes a prefix. Environmental Transitions as a whole phrase suggests that we must think geologically, globally and in long-time terms. But we can home in on social patterns and economic systems, framed with an ecocentric (or pluricentric) mindset, and think more politically, locally or with urgent time-frames about the systemic crossings that are essential. I think that most essential are underlying values and frames.
— Bridget McKenzie is an independent researcher, creative curator and founder of Climate Museum UK as an emerging mobile kit of ‘loose parts’ that creatively stirs responses to the climate emergency.
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I personally don’t see transition as any different from other high level environmental keywords (sustainability or climate action). They are all high level ‘boundary objects’ (see Brand and Jax, 2007 for resilience, Susan Leigh Star for earlier research) that facilitate collaboration across different groups by allowing them to stick to their own definitions and retain flexibility about the scope.
I would personally say that it’s my least favourite high level keyword, because I associate it with Transition Studies. I find this research group quite cultish and tightly organised around Multi Level Perspective (see Geels, 2002), which is an interesting theory but I’d prefer it when keywords allow for plurality of thought. But then again, maybe that’s just my experience of the academic bubble I am in?
— Dr Ola Michalec is a social scientist at the University of Bristol, interested in policies and politics of digital innovation and climate change. Currently, she explores ‘the making of’ cyber security regulations across water and energy sectors.
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An environmental transition can be understood as moving from a destructive and exploitative system, towards one that enables people’s wellbeing and the thriving of the natural world within planetary boundaries. The societal aspect of such a transition will likely require changes to the ways we live our lives (particularly in industrialised countries), new technologies and economic models, new politics, and a more fundamental rethinking of our relationship to the natural world and the rights of people around the world today and in the future.
— Dr Stuart Capstick is an environmental social scientist based at Cardiff University, and is Deputy Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST Centre).
Help to grow our Undisciplined Glossary
Thanks to each of our contributors for these insights from their particular backgrounds and sets of expertise.
Would you like to add something from your experience or expertise to the glossary? These could be (but aren’t limited to): definitions commonly used in your field; examples of the word in use; idiosyncratic uses or illustrations of the word; short anecdotes; metaphors, similes, synonyms or other ‘sideways’ approaches; or provocations. And — bearing in mind Paul Merchant’s provocation above: “What space is there in an ‘undisciplined’ glossary for visual/non-verbal definitions of terms?” — we’re interested in non-textual contributions as well.
We’re focusing on ‘Justice’, ‘Resilience’ and ‘Transitions’ in the context of our ecological and climate predicaments (you might prefer ‘wicked problems’, ‘crises’, ‘emergencies’ or other words to ‘predicaments’) but the ideas you want to share might come from other contexts. Feel free to provide links to sources or further information. You might find inspiration in some of the other discussion on our three words in the other sections of the Environmental Keywords project, where a diverse mix of artists, researchers and others have featured in reflections on the original project workshops, in our blog posts and in our creative contributions on each word.
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