Claudia Rot is a designer and urban ecology enthusiast from Jisp, the Netherlands. Because of her interdisciplinary education in climate and environmental sciences and urban design, she values the use of intersectional systems approaches to tackle complex problems. She uses cartography, graphic design, linguistics, and community science as learning tools for environmental justice advocacy.

Beyond Polderen: Exposing the Voids of Environmental Justice in the Netherlands

“Within the discourse of environmental justice, burnout manifests itself as the burden of externalities of environmental problems and climate change on marginalised communities. Environmental justice advocates for the equitable distribution of environmental risks and benefits. Since its theoretical conception in the United States, environmental justice has been adopted in many countries, predominantly in the Global South. Shockingly, there is no term for environmental justice in the Dutch language. The notion of sustainability in the Netherlands is limited to finding technocratic solutions, ignoring the intersectionality of environmental problems, and the societal aspect of sustainability. This notion has resulted in a paradox in which on one side there exists the international reputation of the Netherlands as an environmentally friendly country, while on the other side, the country continues to exacerbate fossil fuel capitalism.

During my Fellowship I will start to dismantle this paradox by exploring and exposing the historical, societal, and spatial contexts of this linguistic void of environmental justice. I will do this by using a radically participatory and intersectional approach to alternative epistemologies, focusing on the building and expanding of a Dutch framework for environmental justice and a network of environmental justice ‘accomplices’.”