ABSTRACT
The era of technocratic climate politics in the United States – iconized by white men addressing “the climate” narrowly as an environmental issue, communicated through slideshows of melting glaciers and drowning polar bears – is being usurped. In its place, climate justice (CJ) movements are reclaiming the politics of climate change through grassroots organizing led by Indigenous people, Black and Brown people, immigrants, workers, women, queer people, and people of different abilities on the frontlines of climate impacts and extractive industries. Nevertheless, most of the larger US environmental organizations were just beginning to grapple with their history of marginalizing grassroots people of color-led movements for climate justice. Ananda Lee Tan described the 2008 move to initiate what would become the Climate Justice Alliance through a multi-year process of alignment as critical to opening up spaces of affective encounter that cultivated common cause and deepened relationships.
