For Whom the Environment is Saved
Why climate activists must join the movement to defund the police
Nearly a year ago, over 7.6 million people around the world rallied behind Greta Thunberg to march for action on climate change. Today, a growing swath of the population is embracing radicalism in response to continued atrocities at the hands of the police in the United States. For both of these movements, organizers and community leaders have formed the vanguard in challenging institutions that infringe on people’s freedoms. Whether calling for cleaner air and water or demanding the defunding of police departments, each of these grassroots social movements depend on local support, investment, and coalition-building to succeed. Considering this, it’s disappointing that climate activism, while verbally incorporating some aspects of the Black Lives Matter framework, has not categorically embraced the movement to defund the police.
Ushering in an era of revolutionary climate action without centering racial justice as a core initiative is impossible. Solving the climate crisis requires us to prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable, and a country where a militarized police force brutalizes disenfranchised citizens is not one where fundamental needs can be met. Acknowledging climate justice as racial justice centers not only the voices but the experiences of those most impacted by climate change, regardless of whether those experiences fall neatly into a “climate change” bucket. Fighting alongside the marginalized extends far beyond the environment — we must shift focus when the moment calls for it. These movements should be seen as one and the same because without envisioning an equitable future, we’ve failed to ask ourselves what world we are fighting to save.
Much like our current energy system, which was built on infrastructure for oil and gas, American policing in the modern sense comes from an institution specifically created to uphold white supremacy. Given the magnitude of sunk costs and the strong sense of cultural and economic tradition, it’s no wonder that both of these institutions have consistently resisted reform. As climate advocates fight to remove institutions that infringe on people’s rights, represented in large part by the oil and gas industry, it’s easy to see the natural connection between the two causes. Both policing and the oil & gas industry are massive, have long assumed permanence, and have violent and racist origins. Surely, it requires the same amount of imagination to picture a world without oil and gas as it does to picture one without the police. As both institutions have shown to be incapable of reform, “clean coal” and “police reform” are analogous. In the same way that the clean energy industry requires re-imagining our grid, so too must we re-imagine the nature of criminal justice and public safety.
The institutional reality of policing doesn’t fit the assumed goal of maintaining peace in society, so reforms cannot address the root of the issue. Tracey Meares, law professor at Yale, wrote for the Boston Review in 2017 that “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”
Previous attempts to reform policing have failed. Keisha Lance Bottoms, mayor of one of the largest majority-black cities in the country with a majority-black police force, said that the abhorrent conduct of Atlanta’s police officers during the protests against police brutality indicated racial bias training implemented 2 years prior was not working. Body cameras are frequently turned off without consequence. NYPD officers, in direct violation of their own rules, have covered their badge numbers to avoid identification on numerous occasions. The knee chokehold employed by Derek Chauvin when he murdered George Floyd was, of course, illegal. Instead of punishing “criminal” behavior with legally sanctioned criminal behavior, we must prioritize the basic necessities of heavily-policed communities. For example, decriminalizing houselessness and poverty, providing affordable housing, and funding healthcare would have a far more positive impact on these communities than policing ever could. The numbers alone are compelling and reveal where our priorities, as a society, lie: punishment, not progress.
The current movement to defund the police has the eventual goal of fully abolishing the police to reverse this backward prioritization. Organizers in different cities have articulated specific demands centered around the same general goal — slash budgets and headcount in police departments to reduce its size and scope and allocate those funds to social programs. This collective action should be seen as a racial justice initiative. Its realization would be a boon to education, healthcare, the environment, and various other community support programs for the disenfranchised. After all, affluent communities are already intimately familiar with life devoid of constant police presence. One could argue that these communities are kept safe not by the police, but by an inequitable distribution of investment and attention. Aided by this imbalance in resources, affluent neighborhoods and communities take for granted that their basic needs are reliably fulfilled and that contact with the police is an anomaly.
As social safety nets for all communities strengthen, the perceived “need” for law enforcement decreases. Even today, the vast majority of calls to which the police respond are non-violent emergency situations. In a re-imagined future, first responders to these calls could include de-escalation experts, mental health specialists, or trained mediators. Naturally, defunding the police cannot proceed without re-investment in programs that elevate the disenfranchised. Organizer and activist Mariame Kaba puts it simply: “We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.”
I am calling for those who consider themselves to be proponents of environmental justice to seize the opportunity at hand and advocate for defunding their local police department. Historically, the climate movement’s failure to center black and brown voices who are disproportionately affected by climate change is well-documented. The gatekeeping of the climate movement by predominantly white and affluent industry leaders has minimized the role of racial justice, inherently preserving institutional racism and white supremacy in the process. Environmental justice efforts have begun to address these failings, but even those conversations involving racial justice often end at environmental implications. In supporting the movement to defund the police, climate advocates have the potential to build a coalition unified around radical change. To this end, climate activists must oppose and root out all forms of racial injustice with the same vigor they have applied in the context of climate change, taking all opportunities to show solidarity. Certainly, this is our opportunity.
The contemporary movement led by individuals and organizations like Mariame Kaba, Critical Resistance, and the Anti-Police Terror Project present a case for defunding and abolishing the police that is logical, compelling, and undeniably tied to the goals of climate activism and environmental justice. Abolition anywhere offers a blueprint for dismantling oppressive institutions everywhere — if we can radically reimagine society in one facet of life, surely this lends hope to campaigns of similar scales.
