Eco-anxiety

According to the American Psychological Association , eco-anxiety refers to the "chronic fear of a doomed environment ."

This fear links to changes in the material conditions of existence, which is a phenomenon that has been known to several groups for a long time. Their discourse, however, has largely been ignored by the Global North. For a long time, inhabitants of several communities of the Global South, and Indigenous communities in the Global North, have seen their living conditions deteriorate in the face of destructive colonial and capitalist behaviour.

“The frightening future imagined by eco-anxious people are the historical realities of the Haida Nation and so many other Indigenous peoples ." -Joseph Weiss

“Individuals today are struggling to stay alive in the midst of war, conflict, pandemic, drought, famine. No one cares about climate change [while there are emergencies in their immediate environment].” -Ateeqa Riaz

It is important to think about eco-anxiety in this social context:

• Currently (and historically), several activities (deforestation, mining extraction, and various other forms of exploitation) by the Global North contribute directly to the destruction of the material conditions that support the existence of the Global South and Indigenous communities in the Global North.
• This is part of the broader context of climate crisis, the responsibility for which is largely attributable to practices of the Global North.

Adrienne Maree Brown	"I tend to think of abolition as one result of transformative justice: abolition is the end of prisons; transformative justice is the methods people use to uproot injustice patterns in communities. I tend to think of abolition as a totality, and I think that can be tricky. People set out to abolish slavery and we ended up with the prison industrial complex because while there were surface and policy level shifts, the culture did not shift. That deep underlying racism and classism remains and is now roaring to the surface as we write this. So, while I identify as an abolitionist, I find speaking about the iterative tangible work of transformative justice makes more sense to me now–I don’t simply want the prisons gone, I want a radically different way of interacting with each other to grow."
Mia Mingus	"I understand abolition to be a necessary part of transformative justice because prisons, and the PIC, are major sites of individual and collective violence, abuse, and trauma. However, transformative justice is and must also be a critical part of abolition work because we will need to build alternatives to how we respond to harm, violence, and abuse. Just because we shut down prisons, does not mean that these will stop. Transformative justice has roots in abolition work and is an abolitionist framework, but goes beyond abolishing prisons (and slavery) and asks us to end–and transform the conditions that perpetuate–generational cycles of violence such as rape, sexual assault, child abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, intimate partner abuse, war, genocide, poverty, human trafficking, police brutality, murder, stalking, sexual harassment, all systems of oppression, dangerous societal norms, and trauma."
Amanda Aguilar Shank	Interpersonal harm is inevitable. Abolition imagines that "each moment where harm happens is an opportunity to transform relationships and communities, build trust and safety, and grow slowly toward the beautiful people we are meant to be, in the world we deserve."

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