presumptuous to try to solve this problem once and for all in theory, or even for any one situated practice. It would also be self-defeating because it would mean carrying out a falsely universalizing move that was just the sort to be avoided.
Besides a sense of justice and care for others, close and distant, responsibility in climate activism requires epistemic humility and the desire to understand complex social reality. In this sense, it is similar to the virtue of environmental responsibility sketched in chapter 2.
fruitful way. These articulations can also be understood as knots in the web of virtues through which we understand environmental responsibility.84
Social activism should be seen as a dynamic process in time. The fruitfulness of this particular action will be proven in practice if it sets an example of how to repeat similar articulations in the future and if in the course of these repetitions, the movement grows in power and understanding of how climate change is connected to other issues. It is a possible point of convergence, an encounter that leaves neither side as they were before. Climate activists will have a better understanding of how their global concerns are tied to local concerns, and local neighborhood activists will see the big picture of global capitalism, climate change, and the threats to local communities more clearly.
The action shows that a fundamental connection can be made between the global issue of climate change and the local issues in the London Borough of Hillingdon where Heathrow is located. Both aspects of the struggle, global and local, share the concern of defending non-monetary values and forms of life against environmental destruction caused by actions motivated by profit-seeking and structurally determined by global capitalism. Evidently there are cases where it is possible to simultaneously act against climate change and defend local communities. To see how these cases connect to other cases, how Heathrow connects to the Amazon and the threatened forms of life of indigenous communities, they must be understood in the context of global capitalism, but also in connection to other forms of structural injustice.
Later in 2016, there was another protest in Heathrow, this time by the activists of Black Lives Matter Britain. Black Lives Matter began in the US as a protest against the killings of black Americans by the police and developed into a bigger loosely organized movement for equality and social justice with branches in other countries. Black Lives Matter Britain activists have paid attention to the intersection between matters of race and climate change in many different actions, but their protest in Heathrow gained the most media attention. They blocked the motorways to the airport and used the slogan, “Climate crisis is a racist crisis.
Shutdown!” The activists pointed out in written and video communiques and interviews that while rich, mostly white people have made and continue to make decisions that lead to climate change, many of the worst effects of climate change will be suffered in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, since race and class intersect in the UK, non-white neighborhoods will statistically be more at risk from flooding and extreme weather. Finally, the activists argued that besides climate change, the
84 See chapter 2 above.
airport participates in and facilitates the racist immigration policies of UK and the EU.85 The climate crisis is not just a racist crisis, and racism is about a lot more than climate change, but insofar as they are connected, it is possible to find several points of articulation where both issues can be addressed in the same breath; ways to begin transforming different but interconnected and interdependent social structures can be found. For Black Lives Matter Britain, the Heathrow expansion was such a point.
By articulating different concerns together in the Gramscian sense, climate activism shows how different issues are connected and tries to change these connections. It makes explicit the structural injustices involved and the moral subjectivity that would embody different, oppositional values. Climate activism is a dynamic learning process that may discover what responsibility, along with other normative concepts, in the time of climate change means. Moral philosophers should pay attention. In a way, climate activism has some similarities to scientific research as a practice. Finding effective ways to change a complex world while also discovering norms and values that would be adequate to the post-fossil future, whatever shape it will take, is both a most ambitious research project and a political project. Environmental responsibility as a hybrid virtue consisting of epistemic humility and courage, the capacity to understand complex systems, openness to strange forms of life, and the capacity for empathy for distant others can be required in this project, but it may not be the final word of climate ethics in either theory or practice. There is a danger of imagining climate activists as a sort of secret group of masterminds trying to plot how different people with different concerns could be manipulated into doing climate activist work. My reply to this worry is that it is only collective practice and reflection together with others that make articulations possible. What kind of moral grammar comes out of this process, we cannot know beforehand. The concept of articulation is a useful guide, because it is likely that it is in the process finding the common ground between different concerns where shared or at least shareable moral concepts and frameworks can be found.
85 http://www.huckmagazine.com/perspectives/activism-2/black-lives-matter-shutdown-heathrow- airport-morning/ (accessed 9 March 2018).