Environmentalists ‘Should’ Redirect Their Climate Change Soapbox
So, I hear climate change, and I don’t think I have the same understanding.
I scroll through my Twitter feed to see calls to action, criticisms, and other reactions to the recent IPCC report about climate change. I see climate change, and I am afraid that I don’t have the same understanding of it as those around me. I have a master’s in urban environmental education and have studied environmental science. Still, I do not think I have the same understanding as many around me — as the influencers, the climate leaders, as the environmentalists and others screaming for urgent action. Largely, the very same movement that is urging action has largely failed low-income communities and communities of color, who are most impacted by climate change.
My Mama came to Seattle to visit me in early July. I had been bragging about the weather to her in the past five years living here. The weather in the Pacific Northwest is mild compared to the Chicago extremes Mama and I grew up with. But when Mama made it to the Pacific Northwest in July, Seattle was experiencing a heat wave. We had never discussed climate change, and I didn’t know what she thought about it. That week, I learned that she had thought about it and that there wasn’t a question in her mind if climate change was real. She had experienced its effects when a weather event tore the roof off her house; she suffered the consequences in a system that lacks infrastructure to help those hardest hit. This experience made me think about the flaws in how climate change education is approached — getting the lay person to understand climate change, as if we ain’t been understood or been willing to understand. I think about how Mama’s experiences with climate change wouldn’t automatically make her welcome in the climate movement — how climate change denial isn’t the biggest battle that communities of color face. Anti-Blackness, dehumanization, greening as gentrification, tokenization, colonization, and other oppression within the movement is continuing a divide and delaying solutions.
So, I hear climate change, and I don’t think I have the same understanding. I’ve come to understand that climate change ain’t urgent until white communities are affected and when its effects enters NIMBY safe havens and threatens white children’s futures. I’ve gathered by who is and isn’t at the environmental conferences and in leadership that ain’t no concern when the levees are unable to save us from drowning, when the water ain’t healthy for us to drink, and when lead fills the blood of our children. I’ve seen diversity and inclusion as a checklist and an inconvenience in the fluidity of whiteness that is stubbornly unwavering, even as the planet is dying.
Overwhelmingly, I see white leaders “shoulding” on people and condemning corporations for climate change. But, as the saying goes, when you point the finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you. I think about my experiences in the environmental movement: the racism and disregarding of communities of color, the savior mentality that persists, the mistreatment of Black leaders who were prepared to offer solutions at the table, and how even the 2020 Uprising hasn’t shifted the movement beyond efforts of representation. If the room of decision makers is full of white, upper-class people and the most impacted are not at the table influencing climate policy, how is that effective climate policy?
A portion of my newsfeed is filled with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color voicing what we all know — how colonization and white supremacy are at the root of climate change. The color-blind rhetoric in saying “human” activity caused climate change doesn’t tell the entire story. The calls to action that don’t acknowledge the failure within the climate movement continues to silence people and communities most impacted. Ain’t no effective climate movement without welcoming our Grandmas and nem or without people like Mama who have been impacted. Instead of focusing on how to get more people more educated in fighting climate change, the climate movement should be asking how to redefine such a broken movement.
