This is the recording of the keynote lecture by Professor Linda Hogan, delivered as part of the Women, Solidarity, and Ecology Conference held on 2 June 2021.

About

How to inhabit our common home is an ethical question of great urgency. It impacts individuals and communities differently around the world, exposing the inequalities and vulnerabilities that become more stark with every passing decade. Laudato Si’ has injected a new sense of purpose and direction into the global response to the environmental crisis and has positioned the ethical question as a matter of social justice and of intergenerational solidarity. Any solution, it argues, must be committed to combatting poverty and inequality, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature. Within this context human rights can help provide a framework for response in which the interconnectedness of the economic, political, environmental and cultural dimensions of the crisis are foregrounded, and in which the perspective of vulnerable individuals and communities is central.

This lecture discusses how women’s existing vulnerabilities are amplified and re-inscribed as the effects of environmental degradation become ever-more severe and considers the value of human rights perspectives as a means to address these challenges.