The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
In 2005, I gave a lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the 35th anniversary of Earth Day. I noted how the imagery and discourse of the Earth had changed since the photographs from the Apollo missions conditioned Americans to see the planet as a unified space, maintained by biogeochemical systems that science could study and technology could manage for the benefit of humankind. The 1987 report of the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development, , called this moment akin to “the Copernican revolution of the 16th century, which upset the human self-image by revealing that the Earth is not the centre of the universe.”
But was this revolution complete, I wondered. Had we, as citizens of the world, “become a single imagined community, a global community, with respect to our stewardship of the Earth”? If not, I asked back then, “what are the prospects for a truly global environmentalism in the next 10, 20, 35 years?”
Instead of leading the global effort to reduce emissions, US policy is aiming to ramp up the country’s fossil fuel production in the name of increasing consumer choice for Americans.
Twenty years later, the outlook for global unity looks decidedly unpromising. The United States, one of the world’s largest carbon emitters, both per capita and absolutely, has opted out. In January 2025, the US government under President Donald Trump for the second time, joining Iran, Libya and Yemen as holdouts against a global climate accord. Not content with this display of proud independence, the Trump administration its predecessor’s major achievements in climate law and policy, ending the Green New Deal, the electric vehicle mandate, and calculation of the “social cost of carbon.” Instead of leading the global effort to reduce emissions, US policy is aiming to ramp up the country’s fossil fuel production in the name of increasing consumer choice for Americans.
On Easter Monday 2025, the cause of global environmentalism suffered another grave loss. Pope Francis, one of the most eloquent public voices urging a communal response to the climate crisis, died after months of illness. Among his papacy’s signature achievements was the 2015 encyclical, (Praise be), urging care for Earth as “our common home.” Francis called on the global north to repay its “ecological debt” to the global south. Massive imbalances of extraction, consumption and pollution, he noted, had unduly burdened the poorer regions of the world.
This message was not new, though it was unusual to hear such a detailed articulation of the case for climate justice from a northern source. A quarter century earlier, two then little known environmentalists from India, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, made an ethical argument for a differentiated approach to greenhouse gas regulation based on the nature of the activities that produced the emissions. In their 1991 report, , Agarwal and Narain attacked the false equivalence between the “luxury emissions” of the rich, with their high-consumption lifestyles, and the ”subsistence emissions” of the poor, who were merely eking out a living doing necessary things. In time, Agarwal and Narain became prominent environmental leaders, known worldwide for their work, but the northern-dominated climate policy discourse never took up the moral implications of their 1991 report.
Today, the talk of climate justice has veered toward recognizing the rights of nature.
Today, the talk of climate justice has veered toward recognizing the rights of nature. It is more exciting to discuss the novel idea that a river or glacier or forest can have standing to sue than to harp on the shopworn theme that some countries and industries are more responsible for climate change than others. COP28 in 2023 operationalized a fund for climate-related loss and damage, but participants took pains to ensure that this did not mean an admission of legal liability or willingness to compensate. And the $750 million in initial pledges fell far short of the hundreds of billions in estimated damages from climate disruptions by the end of this decade.
Since the first Earth Day, science, religion and social justice have spoken the same common truths, if in different voices. The Earth is one and finite. Humanity has put that common home at risk, to the point where the poor and vulnerable are defenseless against extreme events—floods, drought, wildfires—that are all but certain to upend their lives. These truths are self-evident, but what if power is deaf and cannot hear?
In the United States, one man grew unimaginably rich from selling luxury electric cars to the small slice of humanity that could afford to feel good about how much they consume. Handed the keys to unlimited state power, this man demolished in a few weeks the small US government agency dedicated to helping the world’s poor. In Laudato si’ Pope Francis called this the “technocratic paradigm,” whose “ironclad logic” turns technology into profit for remarkably few hands. To break free, we need to recover the logic of nature and the soul of Earth Day, where “everything is interconnected, and this invites us to develop a spirituality of … global solidarity.” We need once again to feel, to care, and to mobilize.
Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School
