Recovering Scale for Climate Action: Indigenous Peoples, Nonanthropocentric Ethics, and Caretaking Institutions

Abstract Philosophers have widely debated and defended nonanthropocentric environmental ethics. However, nonanthropocentrism rarely features in philosophical climate ethics, which has been largely anthropocentric in focus. In contrast, Indigenous peoples throughout the world have offered a diverse array of arguments for climate action—arguments intent on achieving impact at scale—but that hinge on nonanthropocentric environmental ethics, often in relation to Indigenous peoples’ own institutions for taking care of the environment, or ‘caretaking institutions’. These arguments contain claims, based on nonanthropocentric ideas, about how climate action can be scaled up through Indigenous caretaking institutions. Additionally, one of the successful measures some Indigenous peoples have taken to scale up climate action is to carve out formal spaces in national and multilateral institutions for philosophizing about nonanthropocentric ethics and climate action. Climate ethicists should consider the contribution Indigenous peoples are making in developing nonanthropocentric ethics for climate action, both for developing philosophical approaches and for the actual mitigation of climate change ‘at scale’.