From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC

What would abolitionism mean for climate justice? Resilience is proposed by experts as a solution to climate change vulnerability. But this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanised and endangered residents and their environments in the first place. This article focuses on majority Black areas said to be vulnerable to extreme weather events and targeted for expert-driven resilience enhancements in America's capital city, Washington, DC. Drawing on key insights from Black radical, feminist, and antiracist humanist thought, we reimagine resilience through an abolitionist framework. Using archival analysis, oral histories, a neighbourhood-level survey, and interviews conducted between 2015 and 2018, we argue that abolitionist climate justice entails a centring of DC's historical environmental and housing-related racisms, the intersectional drivers of precarity and trauma experienced by residents beyond those narrowly associated with climate; and an ethics of care and healing practiced by those deemed most at risk to climate change.

Automated summary

This article explores climate justice through an abolitionist framework, emphasizing the importance of addressing historical environmental and racial issues in Washington, DC, advocating for a focus beyond climate-related drivers of instability and trauma, and the practice of ethics of care and healing by those most vulnerable to climate change.