What Is Justice in an Era of Climate Change?

Joining KPU in 2020 as a faculty member in the Criminology Department, Mark Vardy specializes in climate justice with a particular interest in the Arctic. After receiving his PhD in Sociology from Queen’s University in 2015,  Mark pursued two postdoctoral fellowships: the first, with the Climate Futures Initiatives at Princeton University, where he undertook an ethnography of the visualization of sea ice data at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre; and the second, at the Center for Research in Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, where he researched how extreme flooding events impact people’s sense of home in the state of Texas.  Mark is currently participating in an international research team studying the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

In anticipation of Mark’s upcoming presentation “Post-Enlightenment Climate Science and the Challenge of Articulating the Political” as part of the 2021/2022 Arts Speaker Series, we invited him to share some reflections on his interdisciplinary research.

Before you pursued your graduate degrees, you worked for a time in the fields of journalism and public policy.  How did these professional experiences shape your academic career, and do you have any advice to offer KPU students who may be undecided about their own career paths? 

The small amount of time that I spent in journalism was valuable; it’s such a great way to get to know interesting people. One of the most memorable interviews I did as a student was when I was working for the Interior News in Smithers, BC. This was in 2003. I interviewed an elder who was the granddaughter of a hereditary chief when the first European colonialists settled in the Bulkley Valley. Her grandparents hid her away from Indian agents when they were rounding up children to send to residential school. I spent the afternoon speaking with her about her childhood growing up on the land. She told me about some of the different ways that her grandparents had taught her to use the land. Academia forces you to spend a lot of time devoted to just one story, but journalism gives you the opportunity to range widely. The challenge, given the busy pace of the newsroom, is to find the time to work on the really interesting stories.

Working in public policy was also an eye opener. I worked for a short period of time for the BC Government in a policy research shop where we did research for government ministries and agencies who didn’t have their own in-house researchers. So I got a window into lots of different programs and policies. One of the things I learned is that government is not a monolithic entity. From the outside, and particularly as a student, it’s easy to think of government as a single entity, as if it acts with a uniform will. In reality, however, government is a site of contestation and there are lots of really good people working as policy analysists who are doing innovative and good work. It’s hard to see that from the outside, in part because of what counts as a good story for the media. So, going back and forth between journalism and public policy, I had an insider’s view of the complexity of the world as well as how that complexity can get reduced. One thing that was common to both is writing. Obviously writing is important in journalism, but it is also vital to public policy. And that I try to communicate this principle to students. Writing clearly is a skill that many employers value.

Your research on climate change has focused your attention on a range of locations.  Can you tell us about these projects and what you have learned through researching the impacts of climate change in diverse places and societies?  Will you be directing some of your attention closer to home with the recent flooding disaster in B.C.?

First the wildfires and then the floods – this has been a year of extreme weather events in the news. Starting in February 2018, I did an 18-month postdoc with an anthropologist in Houston, Texas, about how people were grappling with the impacts of  Hurricane Harvey. We were interviewing people one to one-and-a-half years after the flood, and they were still being traumatized by their circumstances. Long after the headlines move to different stories, and long after the floodwaters recede, many people were still stuck in the immediacy of having their personal sense of safety upended.

Here in BC, we saw a massive outpouring of support for people during the floods, which is great, but we as a society also have to sustain the kind of support that is needed in the long term. But much more than that, we also need to invite the kind of futures that we want to live with. We can’t just keep on patching things up and hoping that climate change will go away. We need to embrace the kinds of infrastructures and social policies needed to support a future in which climate disasters have less impact.

The Arctic has also held particular interest for you, especially the impact of the melting polar ice. Could you share with us what you’ve learned about climate change in the north? 

In the Arctic, it’s clear that what is at stake to be lost, through climate change, is on a scale that exceeds that experienced in BC, even with wildfires and flooding. It’s important for people here in southern Canada to know that sea ice in the Arctic is a foundational component of homeland for Arctic Indigenous peoples. This has been clear ever since the 2005 petition submitted by Shelia Watt Cloutier on behalf of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. So just as people in Houston, Texas, or the Fraser Valley are grappling with the loss of the place they that called home to flooding, so too are Inuit and other Arctic Indigenous peoples grappling with the long-term decline in the duration and extent of sea ice, which literally forms the ground of their homeland. From my perspective as someone who is interested in how knowledge of climate change is communicated, it’s interesting to note that the dominant effort when it comes to Indigenous knowledge of climate change in the Arctic, is to put Indigenous knowledge of sea ice alongside scientific knowledge of sea ice, which is important. But I also think that Indigenous knowledge of sea ice can offer people in non-Arctic spaces new ways of understanding the relation between climate change, place, and homeland. That is, the experience of loss of homeland due to climate change is not just a scientific issue but a political and ethical one as well.

Your research is highly interdisciplinary in its approach, especially in terms of your work on policy and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Could you reflect on the advantages and/or challenges of pursuing research through a variety of disciplinary lenses?  

I first started researching climate change, as a Sociology Master’s student, by interviewing environmental movement activists. As I was doing so, a controversy flared up about sea level rise – the Sierra Club of BC ran a campaign that used Google Earth as a base map to show Vancouver and Victoria under projections of future sea level rise. This was in 2006 and the campaign, after getting front page news in the Victoria daily paper, was slammed in subsequent editorials and letters to the editor for scaremongering and being unfaithful to the science. Most people were saying, “climate change is real, it’s a serious issue, but this kind of alarmism just gives the denialists more fodder.” I interviewed the paleoclimatologist who put together the campaign for the Sierra Club and then I traced the references from the campaign into the peer-reviewed literature to understand the connections he was making. Two things became clear. It wasn’t really the science per se that people were interested in; rather, they were interested in the public perception of science – they wanted science to be portrayed as a sober enterprise not given to what they thought was unacceptably alarmist visions of the future.

The second thing that became clear is that the issue was not necessarily a lack of scientific understanding. Rather, the issue was in how the social processes of assessing science for policymakers frame risk in particular ways. More specifically, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which released their Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) in 2007, was critiqued by several scientists for not including the risk of potential non-linear ice sheet disintegration on sea level rise past the year 2100. The reasons why potential contributions of ice sheet disintegration to future sea level rise were not considered in the IPCC’s AR4 are related to the ways that different scientific disciplines, including glaciology and the modeling of climate change, were integrated into the assessments. So, to go back to the original question, starting with my Master’s degree, I studied climate change by trying to get as close to the actual matter of climate change — the physical processes and forces that get abstracted under the term “climate change” — and then tracing how those physical processes and forces become translated through different social processes (including media and assessments for policymakers). Specifically, at that time, I was interested in glaciology and the attempts of glaciologists to figure out the enormously complex physics of ice sheet modeling and contributions to sea level rise.

“Along the way, I became critical of the way that knowledge is socially organized in the academy, with these self-defined traditions and divisions between the humanities and the social and natural sciences. This historical division of the labour – the labour of knowing the world – continues to shape what we think of as real.”

Mark Vardy, Department of Criminology

I started my PhD by contrasting the science and politics of ice sheets – and the future of rapid sea level rise that is now much more widely accepted – with the science and politics of sea ice, which at that time was receding in the Northwest Passage and got taken up in mainstream news accounts in terms of threats to sovereignty. So we had a future of long-term movement of people away from coastal areas around the world due to ice-sheet disintegration, on the one hand, and a hardening of borders and a re-articulation of modernist notions of sovereignty and the self-interest of the nation-state in relation to sea ice decline in the Northwest Passage on the other. At that time, in 2009, I wanted to tell the sociologists that they should pay more attention to what the ice sheets portended. But then, in my PhD, I started to research how policymakers, academics, and politicians were responding to Arctic change, and rather than the ice sheets themselves, it was the social and political responses to a climate-change-impacted Artic that I felt was important.

Along the way, I became critical of the way that knowledge is socially organized in the academy, with these self-defined traditions and divisions between the humanities and the social and natural sciences. This historical division of the labour – the labour of knowing the world – continues to shape what we think of as real. I saw that not only in how international relations and political science and sociology and human geography divided up the Arctic between them, but also in how the social sciences more broadly organized themselves in relation to the natural sciences. One of the challenges, however, of going for the kind of anti-disciplinarity that I did is that it became much harder to communicate; one of the advantages to remaining within a discipline is that you can be more certain of the conventions to which your audience subscribes.

What are the next steps for your projects in the coming year?  Has Covid changed how you conduct your research?

Covid had a huge impact on my research. Prior to covid, we collected ethnographic observations at the Lead Author Meetings where the people who volunteer to author the IPCC reports gather to do their work. We were also doing in-person interviews, but the kind of detail you can pick up from ethnographic observations is very rich, and it is a shame to have lost that. While some of the quality of the in-person interviews translates to Zoom, the richness and detail of ethnographic observations are lost. There is also a massive delay, both to the IPCC processes and to our own. The next steps, over the upcoming two terms, are conducting final interviews and writing the project up.

How does your research intersect with your teaching within the Department of Criminology? 

I feel really lucky to be at KPU in the Criminology Department as I wrap up this research. It began in 2016, and over the past 6 years, it’s been through lots of twists and turns. But one of the underlying issues that has remained constant is a concern with justice, and with what justice means in an era of climate change. The concepts and practices of justice that we with live in Canada today are being challenged for lots of good reasons, including #BLM and history of residential schools. Added to the reasons why we need to think about how justice has been conceptualized and practiced is climate change. To deal with climate change, we cannot keep doing the same things as in the past. We need to ask what kind of future we want to invite into the present. That is, what parts of the past do we want to collectively keep, and what parts of the past do we want to avoid replicating in the future. The challenge is to confront inequalities and injustices while also bringing into being a vision for justice. Broadly speaking, these are kinds of questions that many of my colleagues and students in the Criminology Department are asking, so I feel like I’m in good company.