Black Lives Can’t Matter Without Climate Justice
“Black people don’t care about the environment.” A lot of people say this. I even said it one time or another. It’s true. In a way.
More often than not, Black folks won’t self-identify as environmentalists. Why would we?
Black folks are busy fighting off the cops, making rent, keeping food on the table, and looking for jobs where there aren’t any. Why would we worry about polar bears in the arctic when we’re struggling to survive the streets?
Mark and Megan want us to worry about cows and killer whales.
We’re worried about our kids.
White folks are worried about “the environment.” Black folks are worried about justice. That includes climate justice.
The only people in America who are more about climate change than Black people are the Latinos who took our place on the plantations.
Black people care about climate justice because of all the challenges we already face. We know how bad things are because we face the causes of climate change just as much as the consequences.
Black communities are surrounded by toxic waste sites. Black communities are breathing the asthma-inducing emissions of industry. Black communities are sliced through by highways.
And when heat waves, droughts, floods, extreme storms, and the other effects of climate change descend on cities, Black communities bear the brunt of it.
Yet, when it comes time to take climate action, our voices are left out because we don’t speak the language of the white folks who’ve commandeered leadership of the climate movement. They’re too busy talking about decades when we need clean water, clean air, and healthy food today.
A lot of Black folks don’t have time to worry about the next decade when they’re trying to get through the day. As the planet gets hotter, it gets harder to get through the day.
We see this summer after summer in America when there’s a fresh string of record-breaking heatwaves nationwide, flood-inducing hurricanes on the East coast, and smoke-filled skies in the West.
Nowhere is Safe from Climate Consequences
No one can escape it. No matter where you go.
2021 shattered the perception that even Seattle, where I live, might be safe.
In the waning moment of winter, a sudden snowstorm blew through the city. Then, in June ’21, we got hit hard by a heatwave that killed hundreds. I’d never experienced anything like it. At least not in Seattle.
What I have experienced is a slow but noticeable shift in seasonal weather from year to year. I’m sure you’ve noticed it too, even if you haven’t consciously noted it. You’ve no doubt had the subconscious sensations that something is stretching out the summers, that something is swinging the weather wildly within a single season.
The era of stable seasons is over. It has been for some time. Global temperatures have been increasing for over three decades. I turn 27 in two months. I’ve never seen a world without even a minor amount of climate change.
Even still, I can remember a time when things weren’t so bad, when summer just meant that school was out, when the words “fire season” only left my lips if I was in the woods.
But times have changed. They’ve changed fast. They’re changing even faster still. They won’t stop changing unless we act fast. We need to act however we can if we want to avoid ever worse manifestations of the horrors we’ve already witnessed.
When I was a kid, I saw summer skies tinted by the faintest hint of haze hanging on the horizon from some faraway fire. Now, I see fire season skies darkened by the midday dusk of dust and ash, a suffocating smog that hangs in the air for weeks on end.
The Health Impacts of Climate Change on Black Communities
Things are looking bad, and they are only going to get worse, and as the weather worsens, so will every aspect of the oppression that Black people endure daily.
Smokier skies mean more children developing asthma, which has long been a problem for Black communities.
Hotter days means increased aggression, not to mention the deadly effects of extreme heat exposure itself.
More hot days and longer heat waves means more pregnant women having complications at birth, more babies born prematurely, and worse mental health for kids and adults along with other long-term health impacts.
Financially, this all means increased electricity bills and higher food prices as crops fail thanks to unstable seasons.
With Black communities already coping with the transgenerational effects of segregation and redlining, the impacts of the climate crisis will hit us harder and heavier than nearby neighborhoods.
Research has shown that there are a significant temperature differences between Black and White communities in the same city due to generations of disinvestment and discriminatory development practices. In the heights of summer, Black neighborhoods can be anywhere from 10 to 20 degrees hotter than whiter and wealthier ones nearby.
We saw this during the Pacific Northwest heat dome last year. While some white communities experienced uncomfortable temps between 98 to 105 degrees, Black communities were baked between 110 and 120 degrees on the same day at the same time.
This is just in Seattle: a place many perceive as comparatively safe.
It’s even worse elsewhere.
Black Lives Can’t Matter Without Climate Justice
This is why the Black community needs to make combating the climate crisis our top priority. If we don’t, I can’t imagine a future in which Black Lives Matter.
If we don’t act to address the crisis unfolding around us, then the world will get a lot hotter and the weather will get a lot worse. By the middle of the century, the disasters of today will become the new normal if we do nothing.
In such a world, I struggle to see how Black lives could ever matter when the system already sees us as surplus labor to be exploited or eliminated.
If they don’t care about us now, how can we expect them to care when the planet is collapsing?
The reality is, as the planet grows hotter, Black lives will matter even less than they do now. It’s already happening.
Who do we see fighting wildfires in California? The Black bodies held captive by the state prison system. They are leased as convict laborers to control and contain forest fires only to be ineligible for a firefighting career once freed.
Building a world in which Black Lives Matter requires combating the climate crisis, mitigating what we still can, and preparing for the disasters we can no longer prevent. We must learn to do this at the same time we are fighting to defund the police and abolish the prison-industrial complex.
The main question we need to be asking ourselves is this: how can we use climate action to build the Black community?
Creating New Communities through Climate Action
We are confronted with a crisis of a size and scale never seen before. If we don’t act, disaster will devastate every inch of this Earth while we watch it unfold, as we are right now. Our only option is action, and if we are intentional, we can use climate actions to make equity a reality.
If we act with urgency, we can combat this crisis before it becomes unstoppable and irreversible. Halting the climate crisis requires restructuring and revolutionizing everything. And it needs to happen fast.
We need to reimagine our cities and reorient our economies to reflect a regenerative relationship with the Earth over the exploitative economy we’ve operated under for centuries.
The current economy is built on the scar-bearing backs of enslaved Africans. The current economy is based on toiling in the blood-soaked soils of stolen land. Yet, the current economy is based on an even deeper and crueler exploitation of the ecosystems we occupy.
We’ve torn down forests for fuel and farmland. We’ve poisoned and polluted waterways around the world. We’ve moved mountains to mine for metals. All so products could flow across factory floors.
We’ve created cultures of constant consumption and endless extraction.
This means, to have a chance of avoiding complete catastrophe, we must create new economies, new societies, and new cultures of cooperation and community combined with hope and harmony based on a foundation of regeneration and reciprocity. This new world will take time and sustained struggle to build. But struggle is nothing new to Black folks. This is just a new stage.
By engaging in this new arena of action, we’ll advance an agenda of equity for the Black community as we combat climate change. Especially if we learn to leverage two movements – the just transition and EcoDistricts – movements which provide the basic building blocks for the new world our communities can create together.
The just transition can mean different things to different people depending on the context of the conversation. However, the one I believe we should be most concerned with is the framework described by Movement Generation.
Their framework focuses on how we shift the foundation of the economy, through concerted climate action, from one of extraction to one o regeneration while putting the power in the hands of the community. In some circles, this is also referred to as a broader “New Economy Movement.”
The ultimate goal is to create a new economy rooted in community and based in cooperation, reciprocation, regeneration, and decentralization. To accomplish this, we need to build new institutions and organizations in our communities centered on these principles. This would create new jobs, resources, and services in our neighborhoods while providing us with the means for self-determination.
You might think, “yeah, that sounds great. That’s exactly what we need. But how do we make it happen?” That’s where EcoDistricts come into play.
In the Black community, we already know that if we want something, whether justice or equity or just a paycheck, we have to fight for it. The just transition is no different.
EcoDistricts in our communities, controlled by our communities, would provide the vehicle we need to architect and enact the just transition.
The EcoDistrict Protocol provides a set of starting blocks we can use to set off down the long path towards revolutionizing our communities from the inside out. The protocol is loose enough that we can use it to our own ends, adding what we think is missing and eliminating what doesn’t serve us.
Also, if the “EcoDistrict” label doesn’t appeal to you, you can think about them as “Determination Districts.”
At the end of the day, the goal is simple: create a coalition of community organizations and community members that can contribute to the self-determination of the community.
This will allow us to create justice and equity while we address the root causes of the climate crisis.
To ensure we leave behind a safe, healthy planet for our children and grandchildren, to ensure we leave them with communities they can be proud of, we cannot allow the climate crisis to continue. We must prioritize climate justice.
We can do this.
We can combat the climate crisis while we prepare ourselves for what is already unavoidable and develop a robust community all at the same time. But only if we are deliberate in our decisions. Only if we reimagine and recreate our reality can we prevent catastrophe.
