Kommende Veranstaltungen

Just Climate Transitions / Work-in-Progress Seminar Spring 2026

6.2.26 Levi Tenen (Virginia Wesleyan University): Who should own America’s public lands

The federal government owns more than a quarter of the land in the United States.  Whether itshould is much debated.  Some writers, often on the political right, think that many federal lands should be turned over to individual states or sold on the open market.  Meanwhile, on the political left, writers argue that federal lands ought to be returned to Indigenous tribes.  Political theorists, legal scholars, and philosophers have explored issues on each side of the debate, but very little has been done to consider all of them together, even though views about one may have implications for the others.  So, I seek to provide a more complete, philosophical assessment of the prominent anti-federal land arguments.  While privatizer and state sovereignty arguments raise foundational issues and prove more formidable than some critics think, a fair assessment shows them to be unconvincing and reveal good reasons to uphold federal lands.  Indigenous calls for restitution, by contrast, are stronger and imply that Indigenous groups deserve a say over their ancestral homelands.  The earlier arguments in favor of federal lands do not disappear, however, so I conclude that the federal and tribal governments ought to have co-sovereignty over today’s federal lands.

 

6.3.26 Elena Libera (Oxford University): Place attachment and environmental instability in highly industrialized democracies

The question I want to ask is what kinds of claims citizens of liberal democracies should have, when the place they are attached to is negatively affected by climate change. Investigating the relative importance of the physical dimension of place attachment in relation to its social dimension is fundamental for my project, since the harms of climate change primarily affect the physical-cultural setting of place. The general point I want to make is that place attachment is neither a niche concern nor an apolitical value. On the contrary, place attachment is an important value for citizens, since as physically located individuals, their understanding of institutional responsibilities is mediated by affective relations they have established in the place they happen to live. As a result, loss of place does not merely imply “personal” harms, but it also causes “political” harms by decreasing citizens’ trust in institutions that disregard their affective interests. The institutional dimension of loss of place has been largely ignored by political theorists, who have fundamentally conceived victims in apolitical terms. I intend to fill this gap.

 

3.4.26 Easter break

 

8.5.26 David Paaske (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway): Interspecies Justice and Assisted Migration 

This paper explores the implications of assisted migration when we take the rights of animals seriously. Drawing on an interest-based conception of rights, it argues that assisted migration poses two distinct normative challenges. First, forcibly relocating individual animals to new habitats exposes them to foreseeable harms—including capture stress, predation and starvation—that may amount to rights transgressions, raising the question of whether such interventions wrong the very animals they intend to benefit. Second, the paper examines what follows for rectificatory climate justice if animals are included as rights-bearing subjects. The paper goes on to argue that, even where assisted migration is permissible, it rarely constitutes full rectification: it mitigates some future harms while generating new risks for present individuals, leaving significant losses unaddressed. Assisted migration is therefore best understood as a form of partial rectification: that is, a morally tainted, forward-looking response adopted under conditions of severe constraint.

 

 

5.6.26 Christian Baatz, Lukas Tank, Lieske Voget-Kleschin (Kiel University): Carbon Dioxide Removal and the Value of Naturalness

Climate engineering (CE) depicts a broad set of methods aiming to deliberately alter the climate system in order to alleviate impacts of climate change. It encompasses measures that aim to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and store it somewhere else (Carbon Dioxide Removal, CDR) and options that aim to manage the energy flow of incoming sunlight to cool the Earth (Solar Radiation Management, SRM). One of several concerns raised about CE pertains to how humanity would undermine whatever degree of naturalness still remains in the natural world. Most of this debate has focused on SRM. Unlike SRM, CDR is firmly entrenched in current climate pledges and regulatory frameworks. After reconstructing the ‘Naturalness Argument’ for the case of CDR, we develop two objections. We first dispute the argument’s claim that CDR turns nature into an artifact. Rather, anthropogenic climate change should be interpreted as having already turned nature into an artifact. The second objection does not deny that there still is valuable naturalness in our world that could be undermined by CDR, but it denies that CDR does in fact undermine it. To this end we develop an account of ‘remedial’ interventions in nature that act as a (partial) remedy to previous interventions and may constitute a benefit from the viewpoint of naturalness itself. We then argue that CDR qualifies as such remedial intervention. The paper concluded by delineating what this rebuttal means for the overall line of criticism.