Image: Pacific Coast (somewhere between Santa Cruz and San Francisco), 2016

My areas of specialty are climate change/environmental politics and governance, political and social philosophy, environmental philosophy, ethics (normative and applied) with a focus on climate justice and immigration. While grounded in political philosophical reasoning, my research is interdisciplinary in scope. I engage with policy and legal theorizing, as well as arguments in international relations, environmental studies, geography, and gender studies. In my work I centralize the impacts and challenges for marginalized groups disproportionately affected by climate change by examining interlocking systems of structural inequalities.

research overview:

My research provides normative frameworks for thinking about the moral, political, and legal challenges that emerge for the international territorial state system under conditions of climate change. Climate change introduces a shift in the background empirical conditions within which our current practices take place. We can no longer assume territorial stability or habitability, for example. This requires us to re-evaluate common conceptions that have been central to the practice of the territorial state system (such as territorial sovereignty) and to identify and examine underlying values for climate governance. My work takes a “ground-up” approach and develops normative foundations for reevaluating these conceptions in light of climate change and justice-based considerations in order to address pressing challenges such as climate-induced displacement/ migration/immobility, adaptation and overshoot, as well as the intersection of biodiversity policy and climate change governance.

values for climate governance:

Instances of displacement already occurring, along with predictions about the scale and scope of future climate change-induced migration and immobility raise significant moral questions in addition to a range of political and legal challenges facing the international community. Should international law protect people who are forced to leave their country of birth and citizenship due to the effects of climate change? Who has a responsibility to aid people whose mobility is negatively impacted by slow and rapid-onset climate events? What are these obligations and what is the moral foundation from which they arise? To meet the challenges of climate displacement, migration, and immobility, our current social, legal, and political practices require restructuring.

My current work provides principle-based requirements of justice - what I call the Livability Framework - which is sensitive to context and addresses the heterogeneity of climate mobilities. I establish these arguments across several published peer-reviewed journal articles, and I am currently developing a monograph in which I expand this livability framework to serve as a normative and evaluative framework with which to order and develop climate-related mobilities policy. I argue that the justification for institutional or policy changes regarding climate mobilities can emerge from the territorial state system understood as a social practice. Such justification arises from the practice’s own internal regulative principles as it is currently understood. This framework is advantageous in that it starts with facts about our current practices and conditions and takes them to shape moral reasoning about the state system and the principles which underlie its international protection regime and (im)migration norms. This body of research also includes a specific focus on gender in the context of climate-related mobilities.

I am expanding the scope and application of this normative framework, and the theory of livable locality which it develops, to better understand and address other structural injustices and environmental politics under conditions of climate change. My current research focus on normativity and values for climate governance encompases a wider scope of challenges beyond climate migration and mobilities. Some of my focal points include urban and peri-urban adaptation justice, housing insecurity in climate vulnerable geographies, regenerative farming practices and soil health, as well as issues related to emergent technologies such as geoengineering, carbon dioxide removal, and ice restoration. Additionally, I am currently examining how state system-based obligations of livability may be useful in addressing the novel conservation practices of managed relocation/assisted migration of climate-tracking species and the implications for biodiversity policy. I address relations between the nativist bias in invasion ecology and conservation policy with arguments in mobility studies . I draw from my normative conception of livable localities to advance arguments about the nature of our obligations to re-frame and revise certain conservation norms practices under conditions of worsening habitat loss and anthropogenic environmental impacts.

academic publications:

2020. "Territorial Instability and the Right to a Livable Locality," Environmental Ethics 42(2): 189–207. (PDF)

Territory loss and uninhabitability characterize the current environmental background conditions of the international state system. Such conditions present pressing moral questions about our obligations to protect those who are displaced by anthropogenic climate change. By virtue of our participation in the territorial state system, understood as a social practice, we have principled grounds to address some of the consequences of the uninhabitability conditions brought on by climate change. By assuming territorial instability and employing a practice-based method of justification we can identify a fundamental, basic right protected under the state system – the right to a livable locality – which grounds a moral obligation to protect against climate change-induced displacement. Assuming territorial instability and uninhabitability compels us to recognize that the causes generating climate-displacement are not merely natural but rather deeply political and that displacement is a foreseeable failure that results because of the state system’s organizational structure.

DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics2020111816

2021. “Livability and a Framework for Climate Mobilities Justice” Philosophy and Public Issues: Migration and Justice for People on the Move, 11(1). (PDF)

Due to anthropogenic climate change, the “human climate niche” is shrinking and shifting. There is a significant possibility that nearly twenty percent of the planet’s available land surface will be uninhabitable by 2070 and the significant expansion of such spaces could impact close to thirty percent of the projected human population. Political, social, and economic decisions about infrastructure, including the social and built environment, rights, public services, health care, housing, governance schemes, and a range of other institutions and elements will play a significant role in determining whether climate impacts will exacerbate current inequalities and increase negative impacts on human well-being. In this way, a shifting human climate niche, its relationship to human mobility, and how we respond to its impacts are laden with significant normative questions about whether and to what extent justice-based interventions are required. In short, the shifting human climate niche’s relationship to mobility outcomes raises the question of climate mobilities justice. This paper develops a key element of a larger “practice-based approach” to climate mobilities justice. The framework is inclusive of the full mobility spectrum and shifts the normative focus to outcomes rather than focusing solely on questions of distributive justice of resources. I argue that livability, understood as a “functioning” (on a capabilities approach) captures the relevantly normative relationship between people and place in a territorial state system. This conceptualization of livability illuminates that the social practice of the territorial state system establishes an obligation to facilitate people’s adaptation to different spaces as well as facilitate changes to spaces to adapt to the interests of those who exist in a co-constitutive relationship with such spaces. The paper establishes a foundation for why a multi-faceted approach to addressing climate mobilities justice is needed, and why a diverse range of solutions may be necessary to discharge our obligation to those at risk.

2023. “Climate Change and Human Mobilities” in The Springer Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, edited by Marcello di Paolo. (PDF)

Human migration has long been a type of adaptive response to climatic conditions and environmental pressures.   However,  anthropogenic   climate   change   threatens   to   exacerbate   vulnerabilities and impact adaptive capacity. Climate change impacts human mobility by way of long-term climate processes as well as sudden events whose intensity and frequency are exacerbated. The heterogeneity of climate-related mobility outcomes and the difficulty in determining the scale and scope of the impact on human well-being raises a number of practical and normative challenges. The  chapter  examines and compares  a range of normative frameworks that undergird policy and legal frameworks that aim to address the moral problem of climate  change’s impacts on human mobility.  These  approaches  articulate  the  nature  of  the  moral  problem, identify the rights that are violated and the associated harms of displacement, and identify correlative obligations  to  those  who  are  vulnerable  to  climate-related  impacts.  The  chapter  concludes  by suggesting   further   directions   normative   theorizing   about   climate-related   mobilities   can  take considering the complex challenges the phenomena poses for international governance.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-16960-2_124-1

additional academic publications:

(These include special issue publications, responses & engagement with other authors, etc)

“Emphasizing Embodiment in Immigration Justice,” APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, 21(2), April 2022 (PDF)

“Spatial Agency in Climate Adaptation,” Studies on Feminism and Philosophy , 22(1), November 2022 (PDF)

“Livability,” The Philosopher: The New Basics: Planet Issue, 110(1), 2022. (PDF)

public writing:

(Public writings can be accessed by clicking the title of each work)

“How to Talk To Your Children About Climate Change” co-authored w/ Kian Mintz-Woo, Irish Examiner, November 2021

“Community Building in an Online Conference” co-authored w/ Eugene Chislenko, Climate Matters American Philosophical Association, August 2021

works in progress:

(Co-authored with Hélène Benveniste) “Governing Climate Migration: A Right to a Livable Space in the Paris Agreement”

Climate-driven migration figures prominently in scholarly discussions debating how climate change might threaten the international order. Arguments range from hindered state capacity, to risks posed by uncoordinated climate policies, to fundamental challenges to the very notion of a nation-state. In this context, climate-related migration has been invoked as a potential contributor to increased conflict, generating destabilization on regional and global scales. In this paper we bring to light another, distinct way in which climate-related migration challenges the international order. We argue that for the international order to maintain claims to legitimacy, a key condition has emerged in the context of climate instability: one to protect the right to a livable space. Prevalent normative approaches to climate mobility, which include the refugee paradigm and the humanitarian model, remain limited in their capacity to address the full range of climate mobility outcomes. We show that the right to a livable space offers three moral and pragmatic advantages to such approaches: (i) it addresses instances of both migration and immobility; (ii) it offers grounds for ex-ante and ex-post claims to protection; and (iii) it avoids strenuous issues of responsibility attribution. Furthermore, we argue that the livability framework allows for the principled evaluation and further development of global governance schemes for protecting those at risk of detrimental climate change impacts on their mobility. Specifically, we identify the climate regime under the Paris Agreement (PA) as best suited for protecting the right to a livable space. We show, however, that a revision of the PA’s treatment of climate mobility is required to implement this right. We suggest two pathways to that end, which highlight contrasted understandings of how the PA’s two pillars of Loss & Damage and Adaptation ought to be articulated. Overall, the right to livability provides a normative foundation for a change in institutional setup of climate mobility, a defining issue for the future of the international order.

(Co-authored with Alexander Lee & Yasha Rohwer)“Livability and Non-Human Organisms: Re-evaluating Conservation Practices Under Drastic Environmental Change”

In a human changed world, many non-human organisms face a host of (im)mobility issues. Such novel horizons force us to ask if there is a moral obligation to intervene to move individual organisms, alter environments, or even not- intervene when individuals move by themselves? To answer this question, we argue for a right to a livable locality for non-human organisms by further developing and applying arguments for a right to livability in the context of human climate migration. We point out that non-human organisms can be understood as a type of by-catch within the territorial net the social practice of the international state system casts. Incorporating a right to a livable locality of non-human organisms into conservation practice is advantageous because it frees conservation from a dominant historical evaluative scheme – in situ conservation. In a changing and warmer world, a focus on in situ conservation makes conservation success difficult to achieve. A shift to livability considerations in conservation can guide normative evaluation in emergent conservation paradoxes and problems that arise due to environmental and climatic change.

(Co-authored with Hélène Benveniste & Sara Constantino & Filiz Garip)“Asymmetry of Climate-Induced Migration Decisions: Departure & Return”

Climate change has increased the frequency and severity of weather extremes, resulting in a range of responses, including adaptation in situ as well as migration out of affected communities. However, the documented effects of weather extremes on migration decisions are mixed, with some studies finding a strong positive relationship, while others find no relationship or a negative relationship. Recent research has shown that these mixed effects are, in part, explained by heterogeneous responses to weather extremes among different populations. Here, we examine another potential source of heterogeneity: departure migration decisions following extreme weather at origin may differ from return responses to weather extremes at destination. And this asymmetry may depend on the occupational and destination choices of individuals, as well as individual circumstances. On the one hand, migrants may choose, once at their destination, to work in occupations that are less exposed to weather shocks, they may be less dependent on the robustness of their social network for their return decision than for their initial move, and they may cross the border more easily on their return journey than on departure. On the other hand, they may have less flexibility to return as they are often an important source of income for household members who stay behind, they may be discouraged from returning due to stringent state or Federal immigration policies that restrict cross-border migration, or they may be forced to return if their documentation status comes into question. Using the context of cross-border migration between Mexico and the United States, the largest sustained international migration flow in the world, we expand on existing research by considering the impact of weather extremes not only on departure decisions but also on return decisions and destination location, and examining how different mechanisms, including the policy context, impact different stages of the migration journey.