RAC member, Professor Stacy Banwell, shares insights from her latest book about multi-species justice and the intersections between climate breakdown and atrocity crimes.
In my latest book – An Intersectional Analysis of Climate Change and Atrocity Crimes: Life on Earth is in Crisis – I explore how anthropogenic climate breakdown is experienced across both the human and more‑than‑human world, and how these experiences are far more interconnected than we often assume. While writing the book, one story – the Klamath River in Northern California and Southern Oregon – stood out to me and forms the basis of this blog. It is a story about extreme weather events, nature, human and non-human animals and Indigenous sovereignty. Importantly, it is a story about what I call multi‑species climate justice – and why we urgently need it.
At its simplest, multispecies justice moves away from an anthropocentric version of justice towards a more inclusive blueprint of justice that treats all living beings as worthy of protection and respect. Rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems, multispecies justice calls for an ethics of care, empathy and relational responsibility. It affirms Indigenous ways of knowing as essential to confronting the climate crisis and fostering more just and sustainable futures.
A river under pressure
The Klamath River runs through southern Oregon and northern California. It drains a basin that covers 2,000 square miles. The Klamath basin is well-known for its lakes, streams and forests. As a result of climate breakdown, droughts are more common meaning that water has become increasingly scarce in the Klamath Basin. This has led to tensions between farmers, who need water for irrigation, and the Klamath tribes, who need the water to preserve two sacred endangered species of suckerfish and protect coho and Chinook salmon who swim along the river to reach their habitats (Marshall-Chalmers 2021). In 2021 the Federal Bureau of Reclamation cut off water to farmers to preserve and protect these fish.
Disputes over access to water in the Klamath basin are not new. Historically, the basin was home to Native Americans. These wetlands were also home to an abundance of sucker fish and salmon. When the area was colonised during the 19th century the settlers started diverting the water relied upon by Indigenous populations. In 1910 the waterways were rerouted by the U.S Bureau of Reclamation to create farmland. However, due to a diminishing water supply alongside concerns about sustainability, the government has awarded senior water rights to the Klamath tribes so they can save their sacred endangered species of fish (Van der Voo 2021).
When fire meets water
If drought showcases one face of climate disruption in the Klamath Basin, wildfire reveals another. The McKinney wildfire burnt 21,000 hectares (52,500 acres) of land, resulting in devastating consequences. Four people were killed, at least 2,000 residents had to be evacuated, and many homes and businesses were reduced to ash. It also led to the deaths of thousands of fish (Davies and Wertheimer 2022). This is because, following a flash flood, debris from the McKinney Fire washed down into the river, contaminating the water and killing the salmon.
Climate breakdown is the cause of these extreme weather events, and scientists warn that these will become more extreme, more frequent and more destructive in the coming years (Flaccus 2022). Indeed, at the time I was writing this part of the book (January 2025), climate‑induced wildfires in Los Angeles had displaced thousands of residents, destroyed over 12,000 structures and claimed at least two dozen lives.
Fire as medicine
We can contrast the destructive and fatal consequences of wildfires with the cultural use of fire among the Karuk Tribe, who are situated along the California-Oregon border. In fact, the U.S Climate Resilience Toolkit (2017) showcases cultural burning as one example of the ways we can respond to and mitigate the impacts of the climate emergency. Cultural burning (which involves low-intensity fires) is used by Indigenous tribes to both protect forest species and habitats as well as remove any fuels that could lead to severe wildfires (Anderson 2024).
The Toolkit outlines how non‑Native management and use of the region have undermined the Karuk people’s access to various cultural and ceremonial resources: acorns, huckleberries, hazel and willow. Access to these resources has been further diminished due to climate breakdown and the increase in severe weather events. This negatively impacts the health of the Karuk community. To redress this, the Karuk tribe are reviving Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) around resource management, using fire as a primary method within their wildland management system. Grounded in TEK, the tribe argues that prescribed burning is key to addressing the climate crisis in the Klamath region (U.S Climate Resilience Toolkit2017).
Historically the federal government has criminalised Indigenous burning. However, in recent years the state of California has started to recognise the Karuk tribes’ sovereign right to self-manage cultural burning through two laws aimed at promoting the environmental and cultural benefits of cultural burning. These are Assembly Bill 642 and Senate Bill 332. The first officially recognises cultural burning and distinguishes between this and prescribed fire, acknowledging that the former needs to be treated differently to the latter. The second bill provides penalty exemptions for those involved in cultural burns and does not require tribe members to gain burn plan approval from the state (Anderson 2024).
Why we need an intersectional analysis of the impacts of the climate emergency
For me, the story of the Klamath River is a fitting illustration of the multi-species impacts of climate breakdown. It reveals the profound consequences of climate‑induced weather events for not just human populations, but also the ecological destruction wrought by extreme climatic events – in the form of torched and scarred forests and contaminated waters – as well as the fatal effects on nonhuman animals. Simply put, this case underscores the intersectional impacts of the climate crisis and why we need multi‑species climate justice.
In my book I come to the conclusion that existing approaches to the climate crisis are often: gender-blinkered – climate action plans ignore the experiences of men and boys; racist – black lives affected by dangerous levels of warming do not appear to matter as much as the lives of the wealthy situated in the Global North (Klein 2014); and anthropocentric – they prioritise the fundamental rights of humans, rather than all living entities, to exist and live in a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. To redress this, I offer a blueprint for achieving multi-species climate justice.
Multi‑species climate justice insists that we take seriously the intersecting categories of inequality that structure vulnerability to both fast and slow climate violence: gender, race, ethnicity, geographical location and species membership. It asks us to look at how climate harms are distributed within and across species, and how histories of colonialism, racialised capitalism and speciesism shape those distributions.
Empathy, rights of nature, and moving forward
The story of the Klamath River ultimately serves as a cautionary tale, compelling us to confront the intersectional impacts of climate breakdown across both human and more-than-human communities. For multispecies climate justice to be meaningful, it must extend beyond human-centred concerns and work toward ecological justice – one that safeguards rivers, forests, and the interconnected lives that depend on them.
References
Anderson, K. What’s misunderstood about indigenous cultural fire is sovereignty, https://www.sightline.org/2024/04/11/whats-misunderstood-about-indigenous-cultural-fire-is-sovereignty/ (accessed 4 February 2026)
Davies, A, Wertheimer, T (2022) California wildfire: McKinney Fire spreads rapidly in north of state. BBC News 1 August 2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62373150 (accessed 4 February 2026)
Flaccus, G (2022) Tribe: California wildfire near Oregon causes fish deaths. AP News 7 August 2022, https://apnews.com/article/floods-wildfires-california-fires-fish-16b1fba9a74ac51797889f58760cf3f2 (accessed 4 February 2026)
Klein, N (2014) Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate. The Nation 12 December 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-does-blacklivesmatter-have-do-climate-change/ (accessed 4 February 2026)
Marshall-Chalmers, A (2021) ‘There are no winners here’: Drought in the Klamath basin inflames a decades-old war over water and fish. Inside Climate News 16 July 2021, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16072021/drought-klamath-basin-oregon-california-agriculture-tribes-fish/ (accessed 4 February 2026)
U.S Climate Resilience Toolkit (2017) The Karuk’s Innate Relationship with Fire: Adapting to Climate Change on the Klamath, https://toolkit.climate.gov/case-study/karuk%E2%80%99s-innate-relationship-fire-adapting-climate-change-klamath (accessed 4 February 2026)
Van der Voo, L (2021) Young farmers lose hope as drought closes in: ‘It’s like a sad country song.’ The Guardian 5 August 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/05/drought-western-us-family-farms (accessed 4 February 2026)
