Systemic Justice Through Epistemic Accountability

Sor Juana recognized that justice requires more than individual virtue—it requires challenging institutional structures that distort truth and maintain power inequalities. Applied to climate, epistemic accountability means holding corporations, governments, and institutions responsible when they manufacture doubt about climate science, suppress research on environmental racism, or profit from obfuscating their ecological impacts. Climate disinformation campaigns, like tobacco industry denial before them, represent a form of structural violence against truth and justice. Following Sor Juana's method, climate justice requires creating space for rigorous investigation, protecting researchers who expose inconvenient truths, and building institutions where evidence and community knowledge can guide policy. This also means creating accountability for the knowledge that colonial extraction and industrial growth are natural and inevitable—these are learned doctrines serving particular interests, not facts. Systemic climate justice therefore requires epistemic reformation: transforming how we collectively produce knowledge about our relationship with Earth, whose voices we privilege, and whose interests shape research questions and funding priorities.