Climate Freedoms

In Climate Freedoms, Julie Sze reframes climate justice as a freedom movement, offering a new lens on one of the defining crises of our time. Rather than treating despair as inevitable, Sze argues that denial is a prison and despair sustains the status quo, reinforcing systems built on domination and extraction. Alternatively, climate justice movements can advance a positive vision of collective freedom—one rooted in care, reciprocity, and the possibility of livable worlds.

Centering the perspectives of those most impacted and least responsible for climate disasters, Sze engages climate reparations and traces the connections between climate justice and abolitionist, decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and Black radical traditions. By analyzing movement stories sparked by climate change–induced disasters specifically affecting frontline communities in the Caribbean, Small Island States in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous communities across the United States, Sze explores how environmental harm is inseparable from colonialism and racial capitalism. These community-based movements challenge narrow, individualist notions of freedom, emphasizing shared responsibility and interconnected futures across local and global scales.

Sze develops three interrelated freedoms: the epistemic freedom to recognize injustice, the imaginative freedom to envision alternatives, and the transformative freedom to create change. These freedoms illuminate how climate justice movements cultivate resistance, survivance, and collective continuance in the face of crisis. The result is a form of grounded hope: clear-eyed about ongoing harm, yet committed to building life-affirming futures.

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