Imagination as Climate Resistance

Sor Juana wielded poetry, theology, and philosophy as tools to imagine alternatives to oppressive systems. She modeled how creativity enables resistance when direct challenge is blocked. Climate justice requires similar imaginative power—the ability to envision economies not dependent on endless growth, societies organized around reciprocity rather than exploitation, and human-Earth relationships based on kinship rather than extraction. Dominant institutions deploy imagination to normalize climate destruction (green growth, carbon markets) while suppressing visions of genuine transformation. Climate justice demands we reclaim imagination: speculative fiction imagining thriving post-carbon futures, Indigenous futurisms rooted in ancestral wisdom, art that makes climate violence visible and transformation possible. Sor Juana's literary defiance teaches that imaginative work is not escapism but essential resistance, creating conceptual space where different worlds become thinkable, making transformation feel possible rather than impossible.