Justice as Restoration and Reparation

Sor Juana's focus on justice extended to demanding recognition of harm and dignity of the harmed. Climate justice must similarly be reparative: acknowledging that wealthy nations built their prosperity through colonial extraction and fossil fuels, and that the Global South and marginalized communities bear disproportionate costs. This concept reframes climate action beyond carbon accounting to historical reckoning. Justice requires returning stolen lands to indigenous stewardship, compensating nations for resource extraction without consent, funding climate adaptation as debt repayment rather than charity, and transferring technology without intellectual property barriers. Sor Juana's insistence on naming injustice and demanding accountability in her own era suggests that contemporary climate movements must similarly demand reparation, not merely environmental restoration. This transforms climate talk from technical problem-solving into historical and moral reckoning.