ABSTRACT
This chapter frames the climate crisis as a problem of history and memory, making heritage work central to environmental and climate justice. The chapter considers climate denial as a form of historical denial, largely driven by the US, rooted in this country's deep culture of refusing to acknowledge and assume accountability for its global leadership in structural racism. It explores the potential of participatory public memory, drawing lessons from the environmental justice movement as well as heritage and public history, to confront that denial. In particular, it builds on the vision of the environmental justice movement that building an equitable future out of the world we have just destroyed requires redressing the historical inequities that brought us here, through reparations. The chapter shares stories from communities around the country that came together to create Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice, a project through which students collaborated with frontline environmental justice organizers and community members to create public histories of environmental justice in their localities, and how these histories shaped climate change, in support of local and global campaigns for a Just Transition. The coalition applied environmental justice principles to heritage work, including EJ communities “speaking for ourselves”; building generative, not extractive, ways of sharing memories and knowledge; focusing on EJ communities themselves as the primary audience, as opposed to raising awareness among people more insulated from environmental harms; and building translocal solidarity by connecting local communities into a national coalition. Together their projects suggest possibilities for how participatory public memory can be activated in service of reparations and a Just Transition.
