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CETE-P – Climate Dialogues 2026: Ecological Solidarities
19 May 2026, 4pm – 6pm, Prague, Czech Republic
- Living in evacuation areas
I think often about people, critters, waters, and growing things in East Palestine, Ohio, a small working-class town between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, at the intersection of Erie, Osage, and Kaskaskia traditional territories. On February 3rd, 2023, there was a massive and preventable Norfolk Southern train derailment there. That train freighted various toxic materials, notably including vinyl chloride; three days after the derailment, emergency responders and contracted clean-up workers emptied five of the freight cars and set them on fire, which they described as a “controlled release” – burning up the toxic substance as a method of clean-up and to prevent them exploding in a less-controlled way. Hydrogen chloride and phosgene gas, otherwise used as chemical weapons (notably in World War One), were produced as a side effect of burning the vinyl chloride. Phosgene gas apparently has a pleasant smell, like fresh-mown hay or green corn, but you can only smell it when it’s four times the threshold limit for toxic effects. East Palestine residents and workers were exposed to the chemical dispersal of that burn, as well as the more ordinary dispersal of toxins in the water, soil, and air both from the derailment and as a side-effect of clean-up, which includes dust raised from trucking contaminated soil to disposal sites, and aerating (or “airstripping” or “airknifing”) water to release the vinyl chloride it carries.
Vinyl chloride is overwhelmingly used to produce polyvinyl chloride, or pvc. And pvc is everywhere – throughout our built environments, in toys, in medical equipment. Pvc is, Heather Davis writes, “the most toxic of plastics produced” (Davis 2022, 65), nearly impossible to recycle, and disproportionately held in the bodies of the people near its production sites. Pvc is a good example of a substance that differentially kills and sickens people, but which we are hard pressed to avoid and whose harms are differentially distributed. It’s a good example of the ways that, as Max Liboiron elaborates, pollution is colonialism – and thus we need to be specific and deliberate in what we talk about when we talk about plastics. PVC is used everywhere, from toys to medical materials to DIY adaptive technologies. It doesn’t feel possible, to me, to respond to the East Palestine train derailment and its many toxic effects by simply arguing that we shouldn’t transport vinyl chloride, or that we shouldn’t use it. And pointing out PVC’s medical uses is a bit of a dodge; it renders the whole class of plastics somehow beyond critique because in this case they are so useful.
Responding to toxic disasters by finding examples of material use that most people agree is good or by saying that we should simply not use the substance in question is an obvious – but still tempting! – turn to a purity politics that falsely imagines it is possible to avoid or shield ourselves from implication in staggering, horrific harms. Thinking about toxicity helps me find traction for thinking about climate crises and our ongoing relation with ecocide. At first glance, the production, transport, and use of vinyl chloride is not obviously tied to climate polycrises. And, indeed, I could start from any place where the plants, animals, and human and non-human people are experiencing differential vectors of vulnerability resulting from climate catastrophes; fires, floods, landslides, earthquakes, heat waves, and so on. Like East Palestine, the beings left to bear the effects are sessile, locked in place by habit, habitat, or economics. They are the fish in the creek, the trees growing on the hillside, the people with nowhere to go or a way to get there. Catastrophe is always local, and starting from toxicity illuminates the stakes and political patterns related to this fact. People are expected to be able to shield themselves from the harms arising from exposure, or failing that to evacuate. But we know that the filters in the air purifier that we run when the fire air gets bad only help those breathers who can be inside a house, and the filters need to go somewhere once they’re clogged. There is no “away” to through things that doesn’t affect someone or somewhere else. As Malcolm Harris writes, reflecting on the climate polycrisis, “no wonder so many caring people are sitting on the picnic benches of indecision at the trailhead of despair” (Harris 2025, 236). And only the mega-rich really believe that they will be able to sequester themselves in a bunker or on another planet and somehow escape the effects of the depredations they have gotten rich pursuing. The response to being in the toxified climate world we face is too often to aim for individual human inviolability – to protect our boundaries or evacuate. But as evacuation zones proliferate, anyone looking knows that there is nowhere to go and no way to be where we can escape. We must all live here, on this earth, together.
My theoretical work over the last while has been organized around the claim that we should reject purity politics and the idea that we can be innocent of implication in or completely disentangled from troubling relations, with everything from plastics to carbon emissions. I have argued that it is best – most realistic and also most strategic – to embrace the fact that we are fundamentally relational beings; starting from our inter-implication in the world is a good place to find traction for fighting the differential distributions of harm and benefit. And I have an almost spiritual commitment to the idea that we can collectively transform the world we are flung into through our collective practices; we build new worlds in the shell of the old, only and always with others.
And yet, I have become more and more convinced that we cannot take normative guidance in any simple way from collectivity and relationality. Fascism, eugenic biopolitcs, and jingoism are all collective and relational formations. In deciding what is to be done, we need politics – a content beyond our methods, ends beyond our means. I have also been struggling with the question of how to centre the differential distribution of the harms of our toxified and overheating planet. I ask how we respond politically to that distribution from a disability, anticapitalist, and anticolonial politics. I have commitments to slowness, moving at the speed of trust, and refusing the idea that everything should scale, grounded in these politics. These commitments bump up against both the real urgency of the work there is to be done
So, we have unevenly shared contexts of poisoned places, rising seas, and so on. We live in ecocidal times, and we are implicated in the harms being done. One – impossible – response is to pretend that purity and innocence is an option. Endless rumination might actually be a subspecies of this approach, one in which we loop and loop, trying for a way out, or to be free of the relations beyond our control. A second – possible, but unevenly so, and with the risk of killing our souls – is to acknowledge that we’re complicit in terrible things and either actively embrace the project of distributing harm to others and relative ease to ourselves or metaphorically put our hands over our ears and hum rather than think about it. I’ve been looking for a secret third option, which is maybe not so secret: Politics, and solidarity, our topic for today.
If we want to turn away from purity politics we benefit from (or require) practices of solidarity organized around commitments to difference and towards future worlds that don’t yet exist. Even this idea, which I call “aspirational solidarity,” needs more normative guidance. To find that, I ask, What would it be to turn towards devastation with love? Since we cannot avoid living with it, we can ask how we live with toxicity, damage, ruination, and waste. A central part of this question of the “how” concerns the “we.” How do we constitute the scope of beings living in evacuation zones, specify the differences among places and beings, and take seriously the material conditions that mean some beings have more exposure, vulnerability, or reactions to the same stimuli. How do we love a place that is now unlivable? What are the guide rails for solidarity as we meet the complexities of the climate crisis? I close with a turn to the Jewish concept of do’ikayt, Hereness, and to a science fiction novel grappling with climate futures in a way that exemplifies the form of aspirational solidarity organized around a politics of undoing fixed hierarchies.
- Solidarities, aspirational and otherwise
Solidarity commonly arises from one or more of three situations. People are often understood to have solidaristic relations with one another out of 1) their shared experience or family or neighborhood ties – what we might think of as personal or affective commitments; or 2) their shared interests, where those are primarily self-interests – for example in a workplace; or 3) relational or political solidarity. Although solidarity does indeed arise in these three circumstances, I will argue that only the final manifestation offers a truly useable solidarity norm for the purposes of pursuing ecological justice, and that it in turn requires some supplementation.
The first formulation of solidarity relies on the idea that shared experience or identity produces shared interests. Identity-based forms of solidarity call for particular commitments or actions based on, for example, shared oppression or situation. On such a view, members of oppressed groups should stand together as members of those groups; we have obligations to family members, people in our ethnic group, neighbors, and so on. This conception of solidarity has been influential in some areas of social and political philosophy. Examples of solidaristic commitments based on shared oppression or identity might include a felt sense that one has a greater commitment to donate an organ to a member of one’s family than to a stranger; simply because someone is in your family, this view would have it, you have an imperative to help them.
The second formulation expresses the sense in which solidarity relations may arise from a shared set of interests, or from more contingent identity categories. So, working at a particular factory may put you in a solidarity relation with other workers you don’t know, or with workers in other places, simply in virtue of being workers. Such solidarity might be merely a form of expanded self-interest: as a worker, you want to have job security and a safe place to work, and so if management puts one of your fellow workers in dangerous environments or undermines the possibility for fair assessment of job performance, solidarity based in shared interests would dictate that you band together based on the recognition that collective struggle has more chance of winning gains than individual work. Such a conception of solidarity might extend beyond a particular work-site, perhaps to a kind of broader class-consciousness such that the group in question is “all of us workers.”
These conceptions of solidarity – identity- and interest-based forms – express a commitment to a unity based on sameness; people are part of the same group, whether that is a “given” group like a birth family, a chosen “us” like a factory, or a bigger collective like “humans in this city subject flooding.” They both fail when we take difference seriously – difference among humans, but also the difference between humans and ecosystems, microbes, lichens, and so much more.
I would like to argue for a different notion of solidarity as a shared commitment to a world that may not yet exist but towards which people work in concert. In formulating this conception of aspirational solidarity across difference I draw on a conception of relational solidarity as it has been formulated in political philosophy. I reach beyond this idea in order to think about the forms of solidarity we might have with beings bigger or smaller than humans, with systems and ecosystems, and with deeply damaged others of all kinds. This third conception offers a useful supplement to some of the potential problems for ecological justice of any conception of solidarity built on sameness.
So let me start with the idea of “relational solidarity.” Baylis, Kenny, and Sherwin have offered a compelling feminist account of relational solidarity for shifting public health norms. They look at discussions of pandemic preparation, since these engagements with theory and policy have dominated current discussion about public health ethics (and, indeed, are also relevant to work on solidarity). They critique the focus on individual rights, interests, and risks in public health ethics discourse on potential pandemics. This focus, they say, “remains steeped in an individual rights discourse inherited from clinical ethics and research ethics, and consonant with the dominant moral and political culture” (Baylis, Kenny, and Sherwin 2008, 197). That is, ethical theories based in liberal political philosophical doctrine as a rule center the individual, and this tendency has effects on policy and people. They argue instead for a relational conception of personhood, grounded in non-individualized understandings of autonomy and centering a conception of social justice. They contend that
individuals are not really independent, purely rational, separate and self-interested. We are all social through and through. Humans develop within historical, social and political contexts and only become persons through engagement and interaction with other persons (Baylis, Kenny, and Sherwin 2008, 200–01).
A relational conception of personhood, then, holds that the basic unit of the person is a relation – that we are constituted through others. Our ontology is multiple, dispersed, and shared rather than inherent, isolatable, and singular.[1]
Relational conceptions of personhood connect with relational conceptions of solidarity. Persons are conceived of as constituted by their relationships, where those relationships are embedded within communities, institutions, and infrastructures; interconnection is fundamental. These goals are worthy – indeed, necessary – goals for any further solidarity work. But I believe they do not offer a sufficiently robust normative guide for solidarity across difference, and especially across the contexts for acting in solidarity beyond the scale of the human. In the next section I attempt to supplement the conception of relational solidarity I have discussed so far, arguing for the notion of aspiration-based relational solidarity, or aspirational solidarity for short.
Let me reiterate the problem with a conception of solidarity as action based on a given or achieved experience of relevant sameness. As Sue Campbell writes, “if we are interested in relations of political solidarity with others, we must move away from the search for shared experience and shared perspective, and instead seek out common interests” (Campbell 2009, 229–30). Sameness models do not give sufficient respect to real difference, and may impose already-privileged perspectives, desires, and needs. That is, if we base solidarity on sameness, real difference will be a counter-indicator; difference will have to be assimilated into sameness or regarded as trivial, or solidarity relations will not hold. This is a troubling result if we aim to hold difference as politically and ethically wonderful. Especially as someone in the global north, a middle-class white settler immigrant to Canada benefitting from capitalism and colonialism, I am interested in how I might work from my actual current position towards a world in which none of those social relations of oppression and benefit exist. I yearn for a world that does not yet exist, and I believe we can structure solidarity approaches starting from wherever we are and collectively aiming towards that other world. I think of this as “aspirational solidarity” – a practice of relational solidarity with explicit politics.
The political question aspirational solidarity asks is “does this open or close the material conditions for greater future flourishing?” Aspirational solidarity relies on the sense that proliferating flourishing as a mode of moving into the future will center difference rather than sameness. It suggests a normative commitment to the open-ended proliferation of flourishing across difference. Understanding that commitment as in part about a positive orientation toward a future based on social justice visions of the material conditions for flourishing involves acknowledging that we set goals based in part on an imagined future world. We can do this solidarity work based on a shared vision for how the world could be rather than because we share an identity or experience.
It is important that aspirational solidarity is not all on its own a motivator for action, in just the way that no normative ideal is all on its own a motivator for action. Norms guide action, but they do not propel us; a map and steering wheel allow us to point a car in one direction or another, but we need gas to make it go. I do not think we can see any of the forms of solidarity I have discussed in this paper as in themselves as either political or moralmotivators. Understanding that the present is horrific, unbearable, awful does not necessarily generate a moral understanding, let alone action. Indeed, perhaps it is possible to delineate between correct understanding and moral motivation altogether; most of us have some knowledge, more or less developed, that many people suffer unnecessary harms as a result of oppressive social relations. But this knowledge often does not change people’s behavior.
In the case of ecological justice, I am interested in something where humans can act without requiring direct reciprocity either from other humans or the critters, ecosystems, and multitudes of unseen beings with whom we share this good world. In this, I see a complex network of aspirations for a future world that supports equally complex flourishing. Setting solidarity norms based on this kind of aspiration acknowledges the relational constitution of selves and social worlds. Reasoning and acting from such norms would not require us to share already-existing identities or experiences – we could, rather, collaboratively set aspirational norms toward transformed, flourishing-promoting more-than-human worlds.
- Unfixing hierarchies, choosing change, and hereness
To set normative guidance for aspirational solidarity, I need a few more explicit politics. I think that analyses understanding war, capitalism, and colonialism as ecocidal practices that produce and distribute toxicity allows us to meaningfully draw material connections, built on opposing the idea that it is worth it to produce waste in order to produce profit. Profit requires waste – wasted people, landscapes, externalities. Starting here, there are obvious arguments for the urgent need to abolish war, colonialism, and capitalism. But even if we could wave a wand and get rid of all these evils, we would be left with the toxic remnants and the bodily effects, which will always need care and work.
My agenda here is to find a way to turn towards harm as a practice of aspirational solidarity, to refuse the pretense that there is any “away” to throw anything. If we build the smokestack higher, it’s true that the people living right next to it don’t get so sick, but this is only because the particulates are sent to go further away. Carbon trading doesn’t necessarily reduce emissions – it simply re-establishes a global distribution of climate harm downward, elsewhere. When people clean up East Palestine Ohio, they truck the toxified soil somewhere else. The purity impulse to do this – to move the soil elsewhere, or the people elsewhere, or to have better filtration on the masks that allow people to stay in their houses – won’t save us. We might do better to turn towards climate harms and our shared toxic contexts instead of imagining we can evade or sequester them.
My favorite provocation towards turning towards toxicity is a speculative religion/art project called Toxic Temple. My partner Kilian Jörg is one of the conveners of this collective project that takes toxic waste products, ironically but seriously, as an indication that we humans worship at the alter of plastic, petroleum, nuclear byproducts. Disrupting binaries of “natural/clean” and so on, this project brings attention to the substances we create that will outlast our lives and civilizations. Attending to everything from critters who eat Styrofoam to the feeling of vestal robes made out of trash bags, Toxic Temple offers an urgent and unfinished opening. It has helped me think about being against sequestration and occlusion – what happens if we refuse to push plastic, Styrofoam, oil spills, and other reminders of death out of sensory range, but instead face them, cradle them, hold them in our mouth? I have come to think that the logic of sequestering the toxic is, if not of a piece with, but part of a system that carceral logics also rest on: The idea that we can put the bad people away, the disabled and elder people in forced institutions where someone else will relate with them, the garbage out of sight and mind, go “no contact” with people, and move on. Logics of sequestration and escape alike partake in purity politics – the idea that individuals can evade relations with ecocide.
Toxic Temple is one site that has helped me wonder what it means to be in loving solidarity with places, people, and systems affected by climate catastrophe. “Love” here cannot mean: Revel in damage, dispense with responsibility, abandon repair. I need a kind of love takes forms like measuring dioxin levels, making meals and bringing them to a sick friend, abolishing borders, shutting down nuclear reactors, regulating water use, making sure food is good to eat and that everyone has enough of it, ending war, and so on. It also needs to be a kind of love that affirms that no one should have to be in contact with their toxic ex or abusive parents, that is grounded on Indigenous people’s collective rights to refuse entry to the land they care for, a refusal of the state as a producer of toxic worlds. And it needs to be a kind of love that affirms the beauty of working hard and well, in caring relations that are often not at all easy, without valorizing productivism or burn out, and without derogating people who don’t work.
So. My descriptive commitment is to the understanding that climate change is inevitable, and that aspirational solidarity helps us think about what kinds of change we might embrace. We are all living as manifestations of what M. Murphy calls alterlife. They write:
Alterlife names life already altered, which is also life open to alteration. It indexes collectivities of life recomposed by the molecular productions of capitalism in our own pasts and the pasts of our ancestors, as well as into the future. It is a figure of life entangled within community, ecological, colonial, racial, gendered, military, and infrastructural histories that have profoundly shaped the susceptibilities and potentials of future life. Alterlife is a figuration of chemical exposures that attempts to be as much about figuring life and responsibilities beyond the individualized body as it is about acknowledging extensive chemical relations (Murphy, 2017)
If we turn toward alterlife, towards toxicity and damage, with this orientation, we take up the Earthseed doctrine from Octavia Butler’s Parable books: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change” (Butler). The chemical intimacies and relations explicit in toxicity, as Mel Chen has argued, illuminate the ways change arises from relation – life entangled, damaged, transformed, and so on. Life at the nexus of change figures life and responsibilities beyond the individual. That is to say, how change happens, what changes we embrace, are collectively determined. We don’t and can’t change alone. But also collectivity and relationality don’t give us guidance about what particular decisions to make, at any level.
So I’m going to make a speculative attempt at articulating a normative commitment for response. Here I’m looking for something that allows us to respond and hold what Murphy lists as the “community, ecological, colonial, racial, gendered, military, and infrastructural histories” shaping the possibilities for future life. I am specifically concerned to have a normative commitment that does not rely on rejecting disability or on logics of exile, sequestration, jingoism, and national purity. And I want also something that allows those of us who like working ridiculously hard at things, vocationally or for spiritual practice or out of love for the world, to do so, but also has room for everyone who does not work in any way, and doesn’t make up for not working by being interesting or really kind or nice to hang out with. Practicing ecological solidarity as a collective endeavour needs to be something that isn’t about charisma, beauty, or metrics of value based on use, productivism, or virtue.
This approach resonates with Malcolm Harris’s approach in What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crises, especially the orienting principle he gleans from doing away with capitalism. The end of this world based on extracting value from land and labor shatters a link in what he calls the Oil-Value-Life chain. As he writes, “With the middle link shattered, the Oil-Value-Life chain can’t hold, and we’re forced to pick Life off the ground and figure out what else to do with it. We’ll have to plan a world, but according to what?” (Harris 2025, 142-43). He offers the orienting principle: From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. This idea of “from each, to each,” which he acronymizes to the celebratory “FETE” signals an attention to the question of need, rather than the market – and opens the question of how we would collectively determine what counts as needs, and what life should be like. What changes should we choose?
I think that we should opt for changes that reduce fixed hierarchies and relations of domination. The climate crisis right now indexes both; the distribution of harm rests on and produces logics of waste and wastelands – people who can be abandoned, places that are fly-overs, polluted, not worth caring for. No such places exist, no such people exist. But our current social relations of oppression and benefit distribute damage downward: Some places are designated dumping grounds, sacrifice zones, and waste lands. And some people become the repositories for climate catastrophe’s after-effects; I am thinking here of the people who live near disasters or dump sites and work to make their homes and lands livable, workers who go in to clean up after a disaster, people disabled or ill because of their work in heat or their exposures to chemicals, imprisoned people, people who take care of others in the wake of capitalism and colonialism. Care workers and everyone who is cared-for. These are fixed hierarchies of domination, secured by racial capitalism. In a context in which everyone has to pay to live, and in which the wealthy can buy better lives, people who metabolize the climate crisis will be those who are forced to. They do the work because if they don’t work they can’t live.
Unfixed hierarchies are those that undo themselves. Think of the hierarchy of being a good teacher, a good parent, a good doctor. Those taught, parented, or cared for surpass the people they once deferred to if they wanted to learn, be someone’s child, or have medical care. If we teach, parent, or heal well, we are delighted to watch someone unfurl into something bigger and more unpredictable, well beyond our control. If we can pursue hierarchies that destroy themselves, and relations without measure or domination, responding to climate catastrophe becomes both more grounded and more iteratively possible.
Here I think we also need to follow Paolo Friere’s question in Pedagogy of Hope, “what can we do now in order to be able to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today?” (Friere 1994, 125). What relations can we transform that will change us and the world such that other worlds become ever more possible, palpable, and present with us? How do we collectively build a world that can continue?
Ruthanna Emrys’s climate/first contact novel A Half-Built Garden answers this question as though from a future in which the people of East Palestine continued living in their evacuation zone, but in a way that made it a livable place to stay. In the book, capitalism still exists, nation states still exist, but after the Dandelion Revolution, the most significant political powers everywhere except Australia are Watershed Networks – communities of ecological care, densely networked using AI tools tuned to promote biases that people collectively determine they want to pursue (collectivity, ecological care, gender liberation, and direct democracy, among other things). The novel begins with aliens whose ship needs repair; the first responder to the effluent they are releasing into a local creek is a nursing parent who is part of a Jewish polyamorous family, caring for their watershed. The aliens are “Ringers,” living in symbiotic cross-alien family structures on entirely artificial massive rings. They assume that humanity will inevitably want to join them in the stars, turning the substance of the earth into a Dyson sphere, an artificial habitat orbiting the sun. Dramatizing the question of what happens when you’re offered the possibility of abandoning the toxicity of a damaged planet, A Half-Built Garden exemplifies the Jewish political conception of Hereness, do’ikyat, first formulated by the Bund, founded in 1897 in Vilna. As Molly Crabapple writes, “The diaspora was home, the Bund argued. Jews could never escape their problems by the dispossession of others. Instead, Bundists created the concept of do’ikayt, or ‘Hereness.’ Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood” (Crabapple 2026, xx). Building solidarities based on shared futures is a produce of struggle, an accomplishment rather than a given, and a practice rather than a state. We can’t be in this kind of solidarity as a fixed entity, but we can act in such a way that we bring it into being.
In a charged discussion at a seder about the Ringers’ understanding that the only rational thing for humans to do is destroy Earth, the gathered beings discuss the meaning of freedom. One of the hosts asks, “What do you need? To be free, I mean? What choices do you have to be able to make for yourselves? Is that part of being free, for you, of being home?” (Emrys, 256). One of the aliens who has joined their family comes from a species who initially evolved to live in treetops, and swing from branch to branch. He responds by trying to translate a word that means that they need “questions where the answers help people see all the branches around them. Map questions, maybe?… Those are what we need to be free together. I’m not sure what it means to be free as a single person – I don’t know if that’s a meaningful concept” (Emrys, 256). This is the seed of what becomes a way to get on together – for some humans to go to space, and for others to stay, and continue caring for the watersheds of earth. It opens a practice that the narrator describes as a form of learning and living together across species, forming family. She reflects: “It wasn’t romance, precisely, for most of the family, but was that absolute desire to make our next steps as good as they could possibly be, and discover what we were capable of together. A different, equally valuable sort of love” (Emrys, 337). Aspirational solidarity, is here, perhaps, together – making the next steps, imperfectly, as good as they can possibly be.
[1] See McWhorter, beyond the person
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