Climate justice for the dead and the dying : weaving ethics of palliation and remembrance from story and practice

This dissertation investigates how past-oriented environmentalism is ill-equipped to attend to the irreversible harms of global climate change. Having long placed heavy emphasis on strategies---e.g., preservation, restoration, and conservation---that seek to ensure the environment of today and the future roughly mirror that of the past, environmentalism's practical and conceptual tools for grappling with what is owed to the dead and dying victims of environmental injustice have been woefully underdeveloped. Relying heavily upon the ethical/political contributions of Indigenous, Afrofuturist, and/or feminist science fiction fantasy, I explore the various dimensions of environmental palliation (for the dying of climate change) and remembrance (for the dead of climate change) and situate these---hypothetical and ongoing---practices in relation to the overlapping project of transformative environmental justice. Overall, the dissertation aims to aid in reorienting and expanding the scope of environmentalism in the hope that the unavoidable moral failures of climate injustice can be ameliorated as much as possible without enacting further violence upon either the living or dead.