| The International Court of Climate Justice |  |
[https://thomasviolence.tumblr.com/post/183447944801/the-international-court-of-climate-justice-will-be]
The International Court of Climate Justice will be armed with improvised weapons. They will carry rusty machetes, fashioned from twisted sections of I-beam, grips wrapped in soft plastic and electrical tape. They will hold in their hands spears made from broom handles and broken glass bottles as they pass judgments from the top of cracked, crooked multi-level parking lots.
They will cut paths across a changed landscape with outdated cartography, clutching faded printouts from Google Maps that fail to reflect where water has come, where water has gone, and where it has removed roads in the course of those processes. They will stay in the lee of the terrain when storms come and stay in the shadows as much as they can when the storms go. They will eat mostly carbohydrates, made from the tenacious superstrains of wheat that cling to life in soil devoid of nutrients and bare of moisture — hardy stalks engineered to be resilient and adaptive and to mature quickly and to propagate even faster. They will pass little other plant or animal life.
They will have lists, scribbled with notes. Rumours. Tips. Vague recollections. Landmarks. The International Court of Climate Justice will hogtie octogenarian former employees of Shell and Exxon and Chevron and BHP Billiton. Executives who commissioned reports into climate trends and ignored them, kept them secret. Marketers and lobbyists who spun and misdirected and winked and smiled and put money in the right hands. Politicians who absorbed the interests of these companies into their ideologies will kneel helpless before the Court, breathing short and shallow breaths through hessian hoods that smell like rust.
They will hunt them down. From the basements of abandoned supermarkets and in storm shelters and in caves and in old missile silos converted to complexes that are somewhere between apartments and doomsday bunkers, they will drag out once millionaires and once billionaires. CEOs and spokespeople and authors and television hosts. The memory of the International Court of Climate Justice is long for denialists and those that equivocated.
There are no juries in the International Court of Climate Justice. Those who would be jurors are dead. There are no lawyers, either, in the International Court of Climate Justice. There are judges; many of them. As many as can follow them. And they are armed.