Muddying the grounds of environmental justice in the Pacific mangroves: From recognition to feeling for justice at the food-climate nexus

Abstract

The Pacific Islands find themselves at the crossroads of the polycrisis of environmental injustices. From dramatic changes in their food system and livelihoods to environmental degradation and climate change, Pacific Islanders are navigating both slow and rapid socio-ecological shifts which impact people in uneven ways. Building on critiques of environmental justice and its reliance on a universalist Western framework, this paper points to the need to expand the recognition dimension of environmental justice to bring forth haptic and sensorial dimensions of justice. Critical island and indigenous scholarship on dimensions of knowing with/through the body, alongside insights from political ecology of the body, help theoretically frame what we can learn from feeling for justice. Moving beyond simplistic victimisation or hero narratives, in this paper I draw from ethnographic vignettes on emotional, haptic and embodied experiences of environmental change as experienced by women gleaning for food in mangrove forests in the Solomon Islands. Through these vignettes, I showcase multi-scalar and temporal dimensions of environmental (in)justices, particularly highlighting what a bodily orientation can illuminate about ongoing and uneven legacies of environmental change. Through re-centering recognition of the body and also the dimension of pleasure which emerges through/with the mangroves, the article foregrounds how feelings for justice can point to which environmental futures are desired. Importantly, I argue that knowing through the body is a type of knowing differently that muddies questions about not only who is recognised in environmental justice struggles, but also which values and practices should be taken into account.