Climate Ethics as Identity Work

Sor Juana's intellectual and spiritual identity was inseparable from her ethical commitments; her philosophy wasn't abstract but deeply personal. Climate ethics similarly becomes identity work: how we relate to our planetary home, our carbon footprint, our complicity and resistance shapes who we fundamentally are. This concept moves beyond guilt or obligation to recognize that climate choices express values and identity. Someone committed to justice cannot separate that commitment from climate action—it becomes constitutive of who they are. Sor Juana's fierce defense of her intellectual identity shows how marginalized people forge selfhood through resistance and refusal. For climate justice, this means helping communities build identity around ecological stewardship, ancestral relationships with land, and resistance to extraction. It means recognizing that Indigenous identity centers land protection, that working-class identity involves labor dignity in just transitions, that intellectual identity includes speaking truth about crisis. Climate action becomes self-affirming rather than self-sacrificing when it aligns with our deepest sense of who we are and who we want to become.