Virginia De Biasio

Climate change leads to environmental transformations and destruction, which deeply affect individuals and communities living in vulnerable areas. There is a growing literature considering the ethical and political implications of climate change on people's identity and attachment to places. Separately, there is a body of research on the mental health impact of climate change, with many studies focusing on ecological grief—the grief felt in response to ecological losses. In this article, we will connect these two strands of inquiry. We will bring together insights from accounts of attachment to place and the experience of ecological grief, which will shed new light on the negative implications of climate change on places and people's connections to them. The study of ecological grief within climate research capitalizes on existing work in psychology on grief over non-death losses. There is growing evidence that people grieve not just bereavement but also losses arising from illness, incarceration, or infertility. A recent proposal is that what unites all these experiences is a sense of losing one's life possibilities. In the case of ecological grief, the heart of the experience is the loss of possibilities that were sustained by one's place. In this article, we will connect this insight with the emerging attention given by political theorists to the significance of occupying a specific place for people's life plans, and we will investigate how climate change threatens people's ability to sustain their traditional ways of life and their stability in life projects, constituting an incommensurable loss.

This paper proposes an original account, based on the capabilities approach, that explains which kinds of attachment to natural resources are sufficiently morally weighty to give rise to special resource rights. The paper provides a critique of current attachment theories, which fail to provide a clear way to differentiate between what is a preference and what is a legitimate attachment, and thereby justify overreaching resource rights. It then examines Armstrong’s welfarist account of natural resources justice, and argues that the capabilities approach can be used to specify the relevant dimensions of well-being, as elements of human flourishing. A capabilities-based account is appealing because it is more limited in scope than existing attachment theories, and able to make finer distinctions regarding the scope and content of individuals’ rights claims. Attachment claims are legitimate when the valuable basic capabilities held by individuals depend on their relationship to specific natural resources. By using capabilities as a mediating concept, we can detect more precisely when attachment claims are normatively significant and can ground special resource rights.