climate justice – Climate Justice Now

Intergenerational Movement Building

Francesca Von Krauland Global Future, Racial Justice, Uncategorized December 15, 2020December 15, 2020black lives matter, climate justice, history, march for our lives, multigenerational activism

Few individuals bring as much attention to the climate movement as Greta Thunberg, whose efforts have rallied children, lawmakers, and skeptics alike to the cause of tackling climate change. Though perhaps the best known young activist, Greta is far from the only student taking the lead in a cause. In fact, historically, young people have led the way for social change, working alongside professionals and older activists to overhaul problematic norms all over the world. Today, in movements like Black Lives Matter and Fridays for Future, multigenerational movement building is an effective and necessary goal to achieve lasting improvements.

Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager, has addressed both the U.S. Congress and the United Nations about taking drastic measures to address climate change. Despite bringing attention to a movement involving several million people, the Global Climate Strikes, Greta emphasizes, “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.” Yet societal problems affect young people profoundly, and they can’t always wait until they’re older to do something about it. The lives of young black and indigenous activists are shaped daily by systemic forces far older than them, and they can’t afford to hope that their parents’ generation will make the changes that are so long overdue. As I discussed in my previous article, people of color are particularly impacted by climate change, and are therefore very active in the climate movement. Indigenous young people who protested at Standing Rock, Kanaka Maoli youth who defended land at Mauna Kea, and students in Flint, Michigan are just some of the children whose lives are at stake because of environmental threats.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that every person under the age of 18 has the right to participate in the decision-making processes that impact them. Organizations like UNICEF work to give young people a platform to participate in climate action, hosting events like the 2019 United Nations Youth Climate Summit in New York City for activists to express their views in a public forum, but many young people actually founded their own organizations to spread their messages. For example, a youth group founded the Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard to protect black children, particularly in schools, New Jersey teenager Anya Dillard founded Next Gen Come Up, an organization “dedicated to encouraging youth activism and community service through media and creativity,” and 18-year-old Sophie Ming organized large protests in Manhattan and founded the New York City Youth Collective to educate young people on issues related to the BLM movement. Some youth are even writing books to help other youth build the movement, such as Jamie Margolin’s Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other young people working for justice every day, even and especially throughout this chaotic year of the pandemic.

Throughout history, social change has always been spearheaded not by those in power, like lawmakers and judges, but by visionaries too young to be constrained by outdated ideas of how things should be. In fact, Ben & Jerry’s (another reason to love their ice cream) created a succinct outline of global student activism within recent history, from the 1960 Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins to protest segregation, to the 1968 University Uprisings against government censorship in France and capitalist consumerism in Poland, to the Vietnam War protests of the ’60s and ’70s, to the Soweto Uprising of 1976 against South African Apartheid, to the Velvet Revolution in Prague to push the Communist party out of power after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protest in Beijing, to the 2010 Arab Spring, 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, and 2018 March for Our Lives against gun violence. The list includes movements led by college and, more recently, high school-aged people working to address the corruption, prejudice, and oppression that would limit their futures. It’s astounding that people so young could be so forward-thinking, but who better to envision a safer future than those who will live it?

Young activists are more likely to be flexible, think of the big picture, and use innovative means for campaigning, like social media, but without the support of adults who can actually implement changes, progress would still be years away. This is why it’s so important for older people to be involved with movements too—not only are they more likely to have wisdom to share on how to build and sustain social movements, they might also have the funds to fuel the movement, the expertise to guide its focus, and the wisdom to mentor young leaders, and protect them from the emotional exhaustion and physical threats sometimes tied to activist work. Movements today are not just intergenerational—they are also interdisciplinary. “The number of marchers is unprecedented, from different economic, ethnic, and racial groups—an awakening unlike any that I’ve seen on this Earth in over 70 years,” Bullard, a professor for urban planning and environmental policy, and activist, explains. “Today, the different movements are converging, and I think that convergence makes for greater potential for success.”

Movements also shape higher education, which in turn shapes the students who will then begin their careers with the goals of social and climate justice at the forefront of their minds. For example, Dr. Beverly Wright, a professor of sociology, trains leaders from historically black American universities in the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. She founded the HBCU Climate Change Consortium and the HBCU-CBO Gulf Equity Consortium, where her students assisted Hurricane Katrina victims and researched climate impacts on vulnerable communities. She also took them to the COP21 in Paris to witness the negotiation of the Paris Climate Accord. Such programs might not exist if climate activism were not so widespread, and students exposed to these kinds of opportunities are more likely to continue to pursue work that centers on sustainability and climate justice. The field of environmental engineering is another example of the institutionalization of the progress of the climate movement; a relatively new field in higher education, environmental engineering focuses on the prevention, control, and remediation of hazards to the environment using engineering expertise. With the existence of such fields, a young person today could learn about climate change in school, become an activist with the support of adult mentors, study a relevant field in university, and then go on to become a scientist, lawmaker, businessperson, or other global shaper in a position to implement the changes he or she studied the need for. It’s a hopeful path, but just one of many that exists for young people today who care so deeply about the planet and the people on it.

It’s easy to see young activists as heroes—altruists and outliers to their age group. But the reality is that young people have always cared, because they’ve always had to—it’s a matter of survival. Perhaps the fact that activists are younger, high schoolers and even middle schoolers rather than young adults, is a sign that no one is protected from the stark realities of our warming planet—least of all those who will inherit it.

Featured image from Time

Racial and Climate Justice: Shared Goals

Francesca Von Krauland Global Future, Racial Justice, Uncategorized December 12, 2020December 12, 2020activism, black lives matter, climate justice, defund police, racial justice

Skimming headlines, it’s clear that a few issues dominated our collective headspace this year: the COVID-19 crisis, racial injustice in the United States, and the increasingly alarming problem of climate change. Written out, they seem like separate categories, like one could place a given newsworthy event within a single topical classification without acknowledging the existence of the others. Obviously, this is not the case. In a country (and world) in which people of color are disproportionately affected by both the changing climate and the pandemic, in addition to facing direct discrimination, the three problems are closely intertwined, so that the discussion of one necessarily links to another. The movements for racial justice and climate justice share goals, and the ways in which these aims can be achieved have considerable overlap as well. One of the most-discussed ways of addressing the racial violence in the U.S. this year can be summed up by the slogan “Defund the Police.” But what does that actually mean, and why could it be a step in the direction of both racial and climate justice?

The idea of “defunding the police” actually refers to the idea of reallocating police funding away from traditional law enforcement. Much of the violence making headlines this year—in addition to the violence that hasn’t always made headlines for many, many years before this one—is perpetrated by the police against the black community in the United States. American cities collectively spend $100 billion per year on policing, resulting in police departments with military-grade equipment, while education, housing, health care, and other essential programs suffer chronic underfunding, disproportionately effecting communities of color. By decreasing the police budget and funneling money toward these programs, communities would be strengthened and the potential for the police to abuse their power severely undercut.

The social benefit to such a policy is matched only by the environmental one. Money previously put towards enabling violence could instead support environmental initiatives. According to this report, “As the state faces a pandemic-driven budget crisis, the programs that cap-and-trade revenue funds—including climate and environmental justice programs, investing in jobs and climate mitigation in black and brown communities—could now be at risk.” Freeing up funding to support these initiatives would be essential both to continuing to combat climate change and to supporting people of color, directly and indirectly. The Black Lives Matter movement has long supported what it refers to as a policy of “Invest-Divest,” or investing in Black communities by divesting from the forces that oppress them, such as police, prisons, and fossil fuels. It’s a policy that other countries have adopted with success. Sweden’s criminal justice system emphasizes short prison sentences that actually reduce the rate of reoffending. It focuses on rehabilitation rather than punishment, unlike the American system. In the U.S., it’s well known that long prison sentences stunt disproportionately-black former inmates’ successful reintegration into society, but a lesser known impact of the jail system is the environmental damage it causes. Many prisons produce waste and emissions far above local and federal standards because of overcrowding, an issue exacerbated by the growing prison population and the length of their punishments. Clearly, a reform of the criminal justice system, to include defunding the police, addressing unfair sentencing, and reconceptualizing prisons, would have both social and environmental advantages.

People of color also disproportionately live near these polluting prisons, in addition to other facilities emitting harmful pollutants. This study finds that people in poverty are exposed to greater quantities of fine particulate matter—including automobile fumes, smog, soot, oil smoke, ash, and construction dust, which are carcinogens—than people living above the poverty line, because they are much more likely to live near polluters. This exposure causes lung conditions, heart attacks, asthma, low birth weights, high blood pressure, and premature deaths, conditions statistically linked to poorer, nonwhite populations. The EPA states that decreasing the production of these particles and regulating emissions would directly benefit these populations—another example of the overlapping aims of the climate and racial justice movements.

The idea of combining the aims of the two movements is nothing new. Just as feminists support climate activism, black activists have drawn up their own version of the Green New Deal and Build Back Equal, which places racial and climate justices’ considerable overlap at the center of their goals. In 1966, the Freedom Budget by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin planned for a ten year program that would address employment, wages, health care, and clean air, with the aim of economic justice. Even then, the condition of the environment was a priority for the nation’s future—an essential component of ensuring a good standard of living for black and white Americans alike. This is a goal that has only become more urgent as climate change—and racial violence—worsens. Perhaps 2020 can be the year that movements converged, and racial justice became the goal of climate activists, and climate justice that of racial activists, because, after all, black or white, we need to make sure our shared future is green.

Featured image from Climate X Change

Feminism and Climate Justice: Working “Collectively, Carefully, and Tenderly”

Francesca Von Krauland Global Future November 22, 2020November 24, 2020capitalism, climate justice, feminism, indigenous, intersectional

Climate change is an issue based in fact and science, but its effect on people calls for an ideological approach to problem solving. Many of the proposed solutions to the climate crisis draw on the same ways of thinking that created the problem in the first place. While it is possible to work within the system for green reform, some people advocate for more profound systemic change. The intersectional feminist movement has taken on the challenge of using their ideology of inclusivity and equality in the face of historical power in order to reform the capitalist and paternalistic world order at the root of climate change.

Last month, I attended a symposium called Feminist Pathways to Just and Sustainable Futures. Directed by Carol Cohn, and featuring notable professors in the field, the meeting was a discussion of the diversity and depth of the feminist movement’s approach to fixing the climate crisis. Cohn asserted that a feminist approach to solving the crisis makes sense because the problems being addressed in both the climate and feminist movement are dominant power structures and the mentality of denial surrounding the problem itself. Therefore, the solution for both problems is the same: a total overhaul of the system rather than top-down change that only benefits a select few. Of course, there is no one feminist approach to problem solving since the movement itself is multidimensional, but the underlying idea is that because feminism aims to dismantle inequality, it should address injustice in all of its manifestations. Ideas about gender create racial violence, racial violence creates colonial violence, and all of these violences are wrought upon the Earth in transnational, historical systems that result in climate change. Feminism has always been critical and visionary, and one of the most important ways of employing feminism as a lens through which we can develop the climate movement is by valuing the subordinated perspective. In her address, Cohn asserted, “In a world of a dominant class of men deciding what counts as knowledge, taking women seriously as knowers is revolutionary.” People of different genders, classes, and backgrounds have different kinds of knowledge, the value of which white men have until recently held the power to judge. A feminist approach to climate justice urges the need to take seriously the “anecdotal, heathen, superstitions, idealistic, storytelling, irrelevant” knowledge of people whose understanding of the human relationship with the Earth might just be a model upon which we can rebuild sustainably.

Power structures enforce dominant ways of thinking, and practices that are unjust come to be understood as the only way to do things. In a world in which, for example, sustainable, locally used lands are considered a waste that can be better taken advantage of by dominant institutions, it will seem reasonable that corporations engage in fracking, and destroying the Amazon, and biofuel production, and destroying local livelihoods. But if we understand the land from another perspective, that of an indigenous tribe, corporate practices seem barbaric and outdated. Professor Deborah McGregor at York University explains that climate change is a kind of modern genocide for indigenous groups whose land is often most directly affected by changes to the environment, further exacerbating existing health and housing crises. Multiple joint statements by indigenous groups, such as the Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women in 1995, the 2013 Lima Declaration, and the 2020 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, argue for the protection of the environment on the basis of their understanding of the land as a female, maternal figure in need of defending. The traditional idea of everyone being connected, with the whole of the human and non-human inhabitants existing with the Earth in one shared story fuels their beliefs. Some indigenous women link feminism and climate justice because they see women as experiencing men’s violence the same way that the Earth does. Many claim that the Earth’s agency must be acknowledged, rather than talking about the Earth as something we do something to in order to destroy or save.

Intersectional feminism also carves out space for workers, migrants, and people of color within the climate movement, emphasizing that solidarity between the marginalized is the only way to truly combat the crisis of inequality. Dismissing romanticized solidarity, feminists like Ruth Nyambura of the Coordinate Hands of Mother Earth Campaign urge that real work must be accomplished “collectively, carefully, and tenderly” in order for an imagined community across boundaries to form and reject the ideas of their and the Earth’s disposability. Agribusiness and fossil fuels rely on the gross treatment of animals and of workers, and bodies and labor and territories are all exploited by the capitalist system that puts value on shared resources and living people. For people like Nyambura, solidarity with the Earth, and with other social movements, is an expression of tenderness.

I’m a feminist and a climate advocate, but before listening to this symposium, I’d never linked the two before. I like the idea of change coming from a place of caring, and agree that profound change must occur in both business and social contexts. But I hesitate to agree with one of the most basic assumptions of this feminist climate theory—that the climate crisis can only be solved by overthrowing the capitalist system. It’s the kind of statement that alienates well-meaning people who would otherwise be enthusiastic about using their ample resources (acquired with the forces of capitalism) to reform the system from within to a path of sustainability. Rebuilding society in the wake of the pandemic must take sustainability into account, and it must work towards inclusion and fair treatment of women, indigenous people, POC, and other groups, but the idea that the system must be discarded rather than simply improved is a dangerous impediment to progress. It’s also untrue. In my next article, I examine how capitalism and the climate movement are both gendered, and how solutions should be feminist, sustainable, and profitable in order to create realistic and lasting change.

Featured Image from Coursera