Critique of Power and Systemic Change

Sor Juana deployed sophisticated critique against institutions that constrained women's autonomy, suppressed Indigenous knowledge, and concentrated power in ecclesiastical hands. She didn't merely accommodate herself to unjust systems; she questioned their legitimacy and imagined alternatives. Applied to climate crisis, this means refusing to accept destructive systems as inevitable and instead tracing how capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and extractivism created ecological catastrophe. Climate change is not natural disaster but consequence of specific economic systems prioritizing short-term profit over planetary wellbeing. Addiction to fossil fuels; industrial agriculture; planned obsolescence; endless consumption; commodification of nature—these are choices made by institutions defending interests, not immutable laws. Climate justice demands systemic critique and transformation, not merely individual behavior change or technological fixes. This means questioning whether solutions that preserve power imbalances—carbon markets that let polluters purchase the right to continue polluting, green capitalism that greenwashes extraction, climate finance that imposes debt on Global South—genuinely address injustice. True transformation requires reimagining energy systems, economic relationships, and human relationship to nature itself. Sor Juana modeled how the intellectual life can be radically critical, refusing to accept constraints as justified and insisting that alternatives are imaginable. Climate justice similarly requires visionary critique pointing toward just, sustainable worlds different from the extractive present.