To solve the climate crisis, we must first repair our relationships
Environmental justice scholar Kyle Whyte on reframing the climate conversation through the lens of "kinship time."
Indigenous leaders and their water-protector allies protest Enbridge Line 3 in St. Paul, Minnesota
Jena Brooker Midwest fellow
Published
Sep 08, 2021
Climate change is often thought of in linear time, as in a series of events leading toward something. How if we don’t limit warming to under 2 degrees Celsius in the next several decades, for example, we face a cascade of natural disasters. But Kyle Whyte, an environmental justice professor at the University of Michigan, suggests that climate change should also be thought of through a concept known as “kinship time.”
Pulling from traditional Indigenous ways of thinking, kinship time is understanding time through the lens of relationships. Not just familial or human-to-human, but the everyday relationships we invest our time into, ones of mutual responsibility, like mentor and mentee, or between communities, or with plants and animals. Qualities of a kinship relationship include consent, trust, and reciprocity.
The United States and many other parts of the world lack a good understanding of how much these informal relationships matter, Whyte argues. The climate crisis we face has been caused by the breakdown of our relationships over time, and to solve the crisis we must repair those relationships first.
https://grist.org/climate/to-solve-the-climate-crisis-we-must-first-repair-our-relationships/
