Climate Justice

July 16, 2018
Robinson (Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice), a former president of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, writes of global warming and climate justice in this succinct but powerful volume. She highlights communities “suffering the worst effects of climate change” that, more often than not, are “least responsible for the emissions causing change.” Robinson describes, for example, drought-stricken farmers in Uganda, who have endured extreme weather in recent years (longer rainy seasons followed by intense periods of drought) that has damaged maize, sorghum, and millet crops; weighed produce down with moisture and pests; and crippled yields. She recalls the havoc wreaked along the Gulf Coast in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina—more than 1,800 deaths and more than one million homes and businesses destroyed—which “weighed more heavily upon racial minorities and the poor.” She bemoans the Trump administration’s “unconscionable” decision to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, an accord “negotiated by more than 190 world leaders, over decades, in the interests of all people and the planet.” She remains hopeful, however, that humans will heed “personal responsibility for our families, our communities, and our ecosystems.” This brief but cogent account reminds readers that climate change is not academic or abstract; it is real and it has consequences.