• FACE-TO-FACE
Dr Kyle Whyte is George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), teaching in the SEAS environmental justice specialisation. He is founding faculty director of the Tishman Centre for Social Justice and the Environment, principal investigator of the Energy Equity Project, and affiliate professor of Native American Studies and Philosophy at the University of Michigan. Kyle is currently a US Science Envoy and serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and the National Academies' Resilient America Roundtable. He is president of the Board of Directors of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition and the Pesticide Action Network North America. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Bal Krishna Sah of The Himalayan Times caught up with Dr Whyte and discussed climate change impacts on Indigenous people in Nepal and across the globe. Excerpts:
How was your experience co-leading indigenous-led research and education in Nepal?
It was a great experience. In the United States, we have hundreds of tribal nations, different cultures and communities. And we've benefited a lot from leading our own research on environmental and climate issues. It was also wonderful to be in a country where there are many diverse indigenous peoples and diverse local communities and to learn from them and share some of our success stories. So it's been a tremendously positive week of intercultural exchange.
How vulnerable are indigenous people to climate change and how are they coping with it?
My research, which is mostly related to North America, found that if you take any climate change impact, whether it's severe weather, increasingly hot temperatures, or changes in precipitation, it's indigenous people that face the most severe risks.
For example, in the United States, the first communities that are having to permanently resettle due to climate change-related environmental disasters are indigenous people. They are losing some of their cultures as well as the environments that their languages came from because of climate change. Many non-indigenous communities in the United States, are concerned that in the future they might experience these things, but they're not yet experiencing them now. So, indigenous people in North America face extreme risks and are experiencing them right now.
I found this in my conversations with indigenous people in Nepal who are facing what I interpret as heightened risks and harms of climate change. The situation is a bit similar. In my research, we found that climate change impacts are not more severe for indigenous people because indigenous people live in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The problem is actually that our communities were put on to reservations. Our land area was shrunk.
We were isolated and we couldn't talk to other indigenous people.
We've also faced economic deprivation as well, a lack of resources to deal with climate change or environmental issues. And our rights haven't been respected as much as they should be by companies, NGOs, and the government. And that's why we're affected more severely by climate change.
In Nepal, I found some of the same ideas here. When indigenous people wanted to talk about how they've been impacted severely by climate change, they're concerned about the fact that their environment is already stressed by development projects. They've already been isolated. Oftentimes here, people talk of the isolation of some indigenous communities. But what does that mean historically? Historically, isolated communities had many bonds and relationships with each other. And so today they have less, even though there's more technology.
For example, they don't have access to information about funding opportunities. They don't have access to information about what climate change risks they might be facing in future years. So it's not always about the impact itself, but it's about how indigenous people have been affected by decades of isolation, alienation and land shrinkage.
Why is it important to uplift the indigenous-led research and education in Nepal or globally?
So first of all, it is really important that indigenous people are leaders in the authoritative scientific institutions that give governments information about climate change risk. In the United States, National Climate Assessment has a chapter that is focused on indigenous people, and that the majority of authors are indigenous, and some of them are themselves indigenous knowledge holders, not just academics. That provides a powerful voice because then we hold meetings and workshops with communities to inform them in that chapter.
This sends a message directly to the US government that's consistent with the Information Quality Act in the United States, which is an act that governs the credibility of information that goes to Congress. So I think we need to make sure that there are systems in place that indigenous knowledge holders feel is valuable for them to participate in the major scientific institutions that are informing governments, businesses, and NGOs.
Where is Nepal from acknowledging climate change and handling it?
Well, what I would say is that from what I learned this week, there are extreme threats to indigenous people in Nepal. There are climate change threats that are affecting culture, indigenous people's economies and health. I think both Nepal and the US have a really important responsibility of climate policy to the world because we do have some similarities. Indigenous people's rights in both countries are referenced in our constitutions. We are trying to create laws and policies that support indigenous people's practices and there is a strong interest in both countries in uplifting indigenous people's leadership.
Both countries are made up of extremely diverse indigenous languages and cultures. So, I think that's the opportunity that people want and I hope Nepal and the US take advantage of this. Similarly, in the international sphere, we should understand that solutions to climate change inboth countries are ones that can be hastened by respecting and allowing the space for indigenous people to implement customary practices, for indigenous people to implement solutions to climate change that they know will work in their communities.
What is Eco-Anxiety? Do you think the world or Nepali people are experiencing it?
Eco-anxiety is often something experienced by people who believe that climate change is a threat to their future. They're worried that actually climatic systems are altered in such ways that their future might be endangered or their environmental future might not be secure. I really question the relevance of the eco-anxiety concept for Indigenous people because at least in the US, a lot of these ideas have resonated with a lot of indigenous people here in Nepal.
We already went through the complete collapse and the destruction of the environment that mattered most to us. My tribe in the 19th century was relocated like 1,000 miles from a very freshwater, wetland-intensive environment to the Great Plains. We moved there over a course of months. We literally experienced the apocalypse of our entire culture and ended up in a dystopian environment where there were no resources to start farming. There was no knowledge of the local environment there. We had to figure out how to survive. So, the climate change threat is just another iteration of the environmental damage that we've already experienced. So I think that it's not, there are different indigenous people who are going to say they experience eco-anxiety.
But the vast majority of people I talk to, their perspective is, that we already experienced the apocalypse. And we're trying to rebuild our societies.
Climate change is just another threat that arises from the very same causes, the fossil fuel industry, deforestation, and other problematic land uses. Why did those causes of climate change get established so rapidly before people knew their effects on the climatic system? Because many dominant societies were able to freely dispossess indigenous people of their territories in the 19th century and early 20th century.
That's what allowed those industries to grow so quickly. That's why they grew so fast before people knew that they were increasing emissions in the atmosphere to the degree that it would destabilize the climate system.
So, I would challenge the notion of eco-anxiety and say instead that we need to be focusing on, what climate change means for people that have already seen huge collapses and changes to their ecosystems.
What do you infer by environmental justice?
The idea of environmental justice, If you look across the world, and this has been proven widely, pretty much everywhere in the world, which communities suffer the most pollution, which communities face the greatest climate change risk, it's almost always communities that historically have experienced racial, ethnic, gender, ability-based discrimination.
If you want to find out where a coal power plant is set up, you're not going to be wrong if you say that it's established by people of colour in the US or a community in Nepal that experiences economic deprivation or caste discrimination.
Those are the communities that experience the highest burdens of pollution. So, environmental justice is a movement to increase the self-determination and consent of those communities, so that they can both say no to dirty projects that are causing disproportionately bad health harms, but also to say yes and lead the solutions, whether it's the establishment of clean, renewable energy in their territories, whether it's the restoration of customary practices or other solutions to climate change. Environmental justice is both stopping the bad, and also changing who is in leadership with key environmental decisions.
What is the energy equity project that you are dealing with?
The Energy Equity Project is one of the projects that I have a leadership role in that I direct at the University of Michigan. That particular project is looking at a phenomenon that in the US, we have a system where when people, to get electricity or heat or air conditioning in their homes, buy it from somebody. The United States has this funny system where they have companies that are both private and public.
So, the Energy Equity Project is creating research and policy recommendations based on deep stakeholder engagement to actually change how the energy sector works, and to create opportunities for public utilities and community-led utilities to replace shareholder controlled private institutions, and also to hold private energy institutions accountable for this injustice. This is largely invisible to many Americans, this problem with the utilities, unless you're somebody that experienced it.
A version of this article appears in the print on October 3, 2023, of The Himalayan Times
