The circles are practically on top of each other
Two enormous and complex problems exist worldwide—climate justice and racial justice. But how much do their Venn diagram circles intersect? The answer is a lot more than you may think. They overlap so much, in fact, that you may see a sign at a protest saying CLIMATE JUSTICE IS RACIAL JUSTICE. What may seem as an extreme statement is in fact a fundamental truth, its effects of which hinder the health, homes, livelihoods, and pursuit of happiness for literally billions of people.
“Climate justice is a term used to frame global warming as an ethical and political issue, rather than one that is purely environmental or physical in nature" and one that highlights “that those who are least responsible for climate change suffer its gravest consequences.” In other words, due to the nasty residuals left behind from white supremacy all over the world, the majority of people that suffer climate injustice are Black, brown, and Indigenous people. In fact, “The wealthiest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for the emission of more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorer half of the world from 1990 to 2015.” This is such a massive and unjust discrepancy, it bears repeating: 1% of all people who have the most wealth (and access to private jets), release TWICE as much greenhouse gases as 3.5 BILLION mostly poor people collectively worldwide. How is this acceptable?
This highlights the central obstacle that prevents us from making more rapid and bold changes towards curbing greenhouse gas emissions—extremely affluent (Scrooge McDuck level) billionaires that certainly use their money to buy political goodwill, favors, and actual laws to “legally” do whatever they want. Take our current president. Donald trump has singlehandedly removed 100 environmental protections enacted by various different presidents from the past, and it’s no coincidence that he has major donors in the oil and gas and other heavily polluting industries that directly benefit from less regulations. We cannot easily dismantle the power structures that cause the climate crisis, because they are SO powerful, so deep-pocketed, so well-connected, and these are the same overall forces of power that want racism to keep on keeping on. As Eric Holthaus puts it: “the reason the world hasn’t been fighting climate change as hard as it should is because powerful people don’t want to stop exploiting people of color. The urgency of climate change is also an urgency for racial justice.”
Climate justice is racial justice because of similar root causes, but also because many of the tactics to fight both crises are going to focus on local-level solutions. When we, at a societal level, accept that police brutality, coronavirus, heart disease, diabetes, etc. kill Black and Indigenous people disproportionately, we are also accepting the loss of ancestral knowledge of American land. We see this in the devastating California wildfires, as climate change has exacerbated the dry and windy conditions that make forest fires almost impossible to not happen. “Fire has always been part of California's landscape. But long before the vast blazes of recent years, Native American tribes held controlled burns that cleared out underbrush, encouraged new plant growth, and helped manage wildfires. It's a tradition that disappeared with the arrival of Western settlers.” Similarly, Black Americans of the Gullah Geechee people of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina are descendants of “enslaved Africans from rice-growing regions because of their skills and knowledge needed to develop and build irrigation, dams and earthworks.” The Gullah Geechee are gate-keepers of ancestral knowledge about how to maintain and grow in these difficult lands. If elderly in these populations perish, we all lose the ability to learn the deep knowledge they possess.
While there’s not so much we can do all on our own when up against people with vast sums of money, we must recognize our advantage—PEOPLE POWER. When we acknowledge intersectionality of Climate and Systemic Racism, we have numbers on our side.
First, we must understand that people that are not wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the worst effects of climate change are almost always going to be poor and minority communities.
Second, we should, on an individual level, recognize that all humans have the right to clean air, clean water, and not to have to live constant in fear from out of control natural disasters.
Third, we should fight for those rights to be codified into law and for laws that don’t align with these basic truths to be updated or scrapped entirely.
Furthermore, corporations should be held to account for their part in maintaining racial and climate injustice.
We can do this through the levers we know to work, slow as it may seem, but all the faster the more of us act: peaceful protest, non-violent direct action, local involvement to directly make your community safer for all, working with government officials, supporting BIPOC that run for office or running for elected office yourself! After decades of very slow, incremental changes in both spheres, we are finally seeing the hope of bigger change now, so we must keep the momentum. Let us always remember: “the movement for a transition to a decarbonized economy cannot succeed until there are structural changes in society to redress centuries of systemic racism.”
