Tag Archives: #ClimateJustice

Can Translocal Climate Justice Solidarities transcend Segregation?

The word solidarity is used over and over in the article “Translocal Climate Justice Solidarities” written by Paul Routlegdge, which was published in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. As written in the Abstract, “This article argues that a specialized understanding of both particular placed-based struggles as well as how such struggles attempt to forge solidarities beyond the local are crucial in order to construct meaningful translocal alliances.” By briefly discussing climate justice concerning climate change and food sovereignty specifically in Bangladesh, the article discusses the manner in which a potential solidarity can be formed at the translocal level. While other keywords mentioned are translocal alliances, food sovereignty, climate justice agenda, translocal climate justice solidarities stand out the most to me. While I could not agree more with Routlege that solidarities and alliances are formed from shared experiences I think it is interesting race, racism or segregation is not mentioned once in the article.

The style of Routledge article is quite clear. He uses specific occurrences happening at  global and local levels to back his argument that translocal solidarities are effective in organizing against climate change. People are more engaged and proactive when they have a shared sense of struggle or injustice. Routledge does discuss the spatiality of struggle, covering broad categories yet still not mentioning race.  “The distribution of vulnerabilities among bodies households, neighborhoods, etc. are unequally experienced by men and women rich and poor.” As accurate as this statement is, how could he not further add between white and black, and people of color?

Interestingly, Routledge notes, “An initial requirement for the construction of such solidarities has been the construction of ‘convergence spaces’…” His two examples are interesting as they do not discuss racial issues: the ‘global south’ and Bangladesh. While Bangladesh is a poor country, vulnerable to climate injustice, it is a largely ethnically homogeneous society where it would be easier to find solidarity. Conversely, the global south, while affected greatly by capitalism and the front line of climate change spans broader across diverse countries and regions that are greatly affected by racism and segregation. Although the global south pertains to regions outside of North America, this can be seen in the southeast regions of the United States, where locations such as ‘Cancer Alley’ in Louisiana predominantly affect black neighborhoods. Many third world countries considered part of the global south are also structured in this way with poorer and oftentimes black or minority populations lumped into spaces separate from the majority. The shared experiences can be night and day, even if location wise they are close.

While racism and segregation do not have to limit translocal solidarities, as can be seen currently with the Black Lives Matter movement, after the George Floyd murder, it still presents an ongoing struggle and obstacle when discussing the fight against injustice and specifically climate change injustices. This article, while clear and informative would be more persuasive if it had included discussions on racism and segregation as potential obstacles to climate justice solidarities. As George Floyd’s murder was recorded and thus seen by people of all ethnicity and nationalities, climate change injustices can go on, hidden in many spaces due to segregation by way of racial injustice. As the majority of climate injustices affect segregated spaces due to racism, are consequently hidden from view, shared alliances would be hard to form.

St. James, LA – Oct. 23, 2019 – Sharon Lavigne (L) leads community members and activists from New Orleans on a march through her hometown of St. James. “The March Against Death Alley” was coordinated by a coalition of environmental activists to raise awareness and advocate for residents who live nearby heavy industry along the Mississippi River.

#climatejustice #segregation #CancerAlley #translocalalliances

Our Best Chance: Igniting Social Justice through Climate Activism

Students march in DUMBO, Brooklyn during the September 2019 New York City Climate Justice Youth Summit. (Jesse Ward/for New York Daily News)

“We live in a strange world where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things.”—Greta Thunberg1

Death caused by the novel coronavirus is tied to climate change, as pathogens are carried to newer hosts by insects or animals, or released from the warming permafrost, to wreak havoc.  The communities hardest hit, for a number of environmental causes fueled by racism, including toxic atmosphere, inadequate healthcare, and economic inequality, are communities of color across the US and the world. 

The ground is shifting:  the national and global is connected to the local in unprecedented ways, and activism is alive and well in grassroots organizations of New York City.  Anti-racism and climate justice activism are uniting.

“I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society or the common good.”– Rebecca Solnit2

In NYC, the Environmental Justice Alliance, its tag line On the Ground and at the Table, has published NYC Climate Justice Agenda 2020:  A Critical Decade for Climate, Equity, and Health in April 2020, marking the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.  It details an essential local strategic plan to reduce greenhouse gas and local emissions; to advance a just transition from an extractive economy toward an inclusive, regenerative economy; and to cultivate healthy and resilient communities.  In clear, concrete objectives is a comprehensive action plan for policy affecting low-SES neighborhoods:  reducing waste transfer emissions, rebuilding stormwater systems, blocking big-box retail centers on the waterfront in favor of retaining the industrial infrastructure to be put in service of eco manufacturing (and the better and better-paying middle-class jobs that industrial output creates).  It is an indispensable resource for understanding issues—such as unconscionably high rates of asthma in public housing—and paving a way forward.

Amplifying one of the goals in NYC EJA, Transform, Don’t Trash is a lecture by Justin Wood from the New York Lawyers for Public Interest (NYPLI) on waste transfer and the system that NYC has had in place since the 1950s, given as part of the Climate Action Lab in the Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center.  Municipal garbage collection is duplicated by private carters for all NYC restaurants and businesses.  The resulting truck traffic burdens already-congested routes creating more damaging emissions.  Add to this the abysmal rate of recycling from private carters (and, as noted in the NYC EJA report, compounded by the virtually non-existent recycling available to NYCHA residents), and there is action to be taken to reach 0 Waste to Landfill and composting goals.  NYC EJA gives a shout-out to Green Feen consultants who use “Hip-Hop to teach sustainability as a lifestyle through green technology and compost education.” 

The weaknesses of the NYC schools system continue to be highlighted in the crisis, as resources are scarce and access not just to the internet, but to stable housing and food security are lacking.  An encouraging initiative is the one described by Saara Nafici in another Climate Action Lab Rethinking Food Justice in New York City who galvanizes youth from NYC’s 2nd largest housing project on the Value Added Red Hook Farms.  Joining forces to address environmental changes by empowering youth and community engagement—while creating a source for fresh, healthy food—is a great example of the types of transformation needed. 

The situation is dire.  Greta Thunberg asks, “What do we do when there is no political will?”  We begin on the ground, drawn together for common cause.  We reverse the effects of neoliberal privatization for what Solnit calls “the lifeless thing that is profit.”  Solnit writes that the times may lead us to consider universal healthcare and basic income. 

Instead of standing idly by, aghast, change is being enacted locally, a model on which to build.  It cannot supplant sane national policy on emissions, the fossil fuel industry, or support for renewal energy sources, but it will absolutely inform the policy debate as more people realize that climate chaos affects all aspects of our lives, unequally. It is a time when the critical fight to end racism and climate degradation are joined. We must all be at the table, together.  The resource that NYC EJA provides is a welcome local focus for change. 

1https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Lw_qHVaJk8-QIpGv42m6bGHWo7Bg4bOG/view

2https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit?

(Yes We Can) Change the Story

A pond collects soil and water residue from oil-sands mining near Fort McMurray, Alberta. The oil sands account for 60 percent of Canada’s oil output.Credit…Ian Willms for The New York Times

This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein’s 2015 documentary based on her book subtitled “Capitalism vs. The Climate,” did not—yet.  But it has had important impact.  Klein’s overarching message hits home especially now given the world-changing pandemic disruption and activism for social justice as we face endemic racism and inequality.  The documentary does feel current as though today’s moment is our “Best chance to build a better world.”

Klein’s message is revolutionary, based on the timeless truth that humans are inveterate storytellers, are compelled to tell stories to make sense of our world.  The problem is that for the last four hundred years, the dominant cultures of the West have been telling a story based on the idea that the Earth is a machine, and humans are its master.  Through the course of the documentary, Klein shows that the economy is a machine, too, capable of being manipulated to feed perpetual growth.

Klein intimately narrates the journey from a Royal Society gathering, where an energized scientist sunnily proposes we have the ability to solve climate change by essentially putting a hose to the sky and spreading tiny particles to block a bit of the sun and therefore the heat.  Switch to a clip of Stephen Colbert interviewing this surely brilliant man, “You’ve buried the lede:  it’s sulphuric acid!”  A touch of levity, but it offers enough of a glimpse of the hubris behind the exercise.  By beginning with the Royal Society, the film places Enlightenment thinkers at its outset.  Locke and property ownership–the use of the land–forefronts the displacement and removal of indigenous peoples in North America.  The film is about the abuse of the land.

Deftly directed by Avi Lewis, the cinematography is breathtaking:  boreal forest in Alberta, prairies stretching to the horizon, and verdant tropical landscapes contrast with the savage rape of the earth and the flight of its native communities.  The scenes of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, are akin to barren moon shots.  ‘No one would ever have a reason to come here if we weren’t extracting the bitumen (thick, tar-like oil)’ one company manager says, without a trace of irony.  The tar sands site produces 60% of Canada’s oil, itself the 4th largest oil producer in the world. 

The documentary explores seven areas around the world, including Canada, the US, Greece, India, and China, where fossil fuel extraction and gold mining is a blight on the land and in communities mostly powerless to fight the exploitation.  The film’s strength is in the human narratives elicited:  a grandmother and granddaughter switching naturally to their native Cree Nation language (think about the forced assimilation schooling and denial of native languages), even if it’s to call a white bureaucrat a Moniyaw for blocking their access to see their ancestral lands.  “The land owns us,’’ says the Cree activist, not the other way around.

“Sacrifice zones” are offered as a source of profit; it’ll grow back to the way it was, they say, thirty years after the extraction, while releasing toxins to the communities downstream.  There’s a gross but real scene of a brash young oil worker—making 150k for 6 months’ work—excusing himself to blow his nose on some cash, gleeful over the scads of money he’s making.

In Beijing, a small boy is asked whether he’s ever seen a star, a blue sky, or a cloud.  No, he answers to each, though allows for ‘a little blue’ in the sky, due to the horrible air pollution. 

“Sustainability is a Marxist concept” masquerading as the redistribution of wealth, shouts one capitalist.

There’s good news:  China has since closed its last coal mine and is heavily invested in producing solar panels.  The Alberta tar sands expansion proposal collapsed in 2019 under pressure from environmentalists and indigenous groups https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/business/energy-environment/frontier-oil-sands-canada.html.

We can take care of the Earth and each other, creating a path to a different future where we can improve quality of life, create meaningful work, greater equality, and an end to ‘sacrifice zones.’  There’s a beautiful transition of Cree Nation singing segueing into Greek, the ethereal nature of the intonations being universal.  It is the less powerful who are compromised by unregulated capitalism and who suffer effects not of their making.  As we protest that Black Lives Matter in our unjust society, we also know the relationship of climate change is one of exploitation.  They are tied together and an epic Best Chance to make a better world is upon us.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/alberta-canadas-tar-sands-is-growing-but-indigenous-people-fight-back/