 | Protests at the makeshift memorial in honor of George Floyd in Minneapolis
(Chandan Khanna/AFP) |
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| “Climate Folk if you think you can sit this out, you’re very wrong.”
So tweeted the Hot Take climate podcast and newsletter run by Amy Westervelt and Mary Annaïse Heglar, on Monday. “This” referred to the nationwide—now global—protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But it also referred to another viral outrage of the past week: a white woman’s 911 call claiming her life was in danger in New York’s Central Park because a black birder had asked her to leash her dog in accordance with local law.
Over the past decade, more and more Americans have come to accept the reality of climate change and support action to reduce it. According to Yale and George Mason University’s Climate Change in the American Mind survey, in April, 73 percent of us now acknowledge that global warming is happening; 62 percent “understand that global warming is mostly human-caused”; and 66 percent say they are at least “somewhat worried” about it. But that same survey found something striking about how Americans “conceptualized” the problem: 82 percent saw global warming as an “environmental issue,” while only 50 percent saw it as a moral issue, 32 percent as a poverty issue, and 29 percent as a social justice issue.
Those latter numbers suggest a widespread ignorance about how the climate crisis is likely to play out. So here is a roundup of persuasive and provocative writing from around the web—from TNR and elsewhere, opinion and reporting—about how privilege intersects with global warming, environmentalism, and nature rights in ways relevant to both the racial-equality space and the climate space. There’s much, much more out there, but this should serve as a useful primer.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, Deputy Editor |
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Climate Change Isn’t the First Existential Threat
“I’ll grant that we’ve never seen an existential threat to all of humankind before.… But history is littered with targeted—but no less deadly—existential threats for specific populations. For 400 years and counting, the United States itself has been an existential threat to Black people.… You don’t fight something like that because you think you will win. You fight it because you have to.”
By Mary Annaïse Heglar | Medium/Zora |
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Bill McKibben Interview With Vanessa Hauc
“The climate emergency is affecting everyone on the planet, but not equally.… Latino children are forty per cent more likely to die from asthma than non-Latino white children.”
The New Yorker |
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In the Shadows of America’s Smokestacks, Virus Is One More Deadly Risk
“Nationwide, low-income communities of color like hers … are exposed to significantly higher levels of pollution, studies have found, and also see higher levels of lung disease and other ailments. Now, scientists are racing to understand if long-term exposure to air pollution plays a role in the coronavirus crisis, particularly since minorities are disproportionately dying.”
By Hiroko Tabuchi | The New York Times |
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People of Color Experience Climate Grief More Deeply Than White People
“Anyone can experience climate grief, regardless of their identity. But for us, our grief—and our anger—is rooted in centuries of painful history, and the current ecological violence hurled at our communities.”
By Nylah Burton | VICE |
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The World Order Is Broken. The Coronavirus
Proves It.
“Debt relief and adequate funding for climate adaptation, mitigation, and recovery have been key demands of climate campaigners from the global south in U.N. climate talks—and among the points wealthy global north nations, including the United States, have reliably pushed back most strongly against.”
By Kate Aronoff | The New Republic |
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How Medicare for All Could Help Fight Pandemics
“Not all of global warming’s health impacts are so obvious, but virtually all of them will be exacerbated by deep inequalities that make some people more vulnerable to disaster and disease than others.… While NYCHA buildings made up just 5 percent of the city’s buildings when Sandy hit, in 2012, they suffered 15 percent of its damages.… A study of 108 urban areas found that historically redlined neighborhoods were on average almost 5 degrees hotter in recent summers than those that weren’t.… And in majority-Black Lowndes County, Alabama, poor sewage infrastructure contributed to 34 percent of residents surveyed in a 2017 study testing positive for hookworm.”
By Kate Aronoff | The New Republic |
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“We Belong Here”: Racist Central Park Video Shows Why We Need Diversity Outdoors
“If we’re going to make the outdoors friendlier for communities of color, advocates and organizers need to come from diverse backgrounds. Right now, white people hold power in these spaces. They sit on the boards of top environmental organizations and run the show. Cooper may sit on the board of the New York City Audubon Society, but he’s the exception, not the rule. This dynamic needs to change both in offices and on the trail.”
By Yessenia Funes | Earther |
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The Climate Movement’s Silence
“Climate Chads are self-identified environmentalists who say they care about pervasive racial inequality and police brutality, but don’t believe these issues are related to the climate fight. Or if they do, they believe focusing on racial equality ‘undercuts’ the fight, and limits the climate movement’s ability to achieve broad support.… That these climate activists think mere talk of racism is more divisive than actual racism exposes their anti-Blackness—not to mention their stupidity. Imagine thinking you have a better chance convincing racists to support the climate movement than engaging minorities across the world.”
By Emily Atkin | HEATED |
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As Rare as Hen’s Teeth
“Racial minorities consistently report higher concern for the environment and the climate than white people. And yet, they are severely underrepresented in mainstream environmental groups, are less likely to identify as ‘environmentalists,’ and less likely to participate in outdoor recreation.”
By Emily Atkin | HEATED |
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There Is No Climate Justice Without
Defunding the Police
“The climate crisis is exacerbating existing inequalities, and a militarized police force will only make those inequalities worse. There’s a better way forward, though, one that prioritizes resilience—taking funding away from the force that is over-policing and racial profiling black communities, and putting that funding into preparing them for a 21st century of dangerous weather driven by the climate crisis.… At the end of the day, adapting to the risks of climate change means giving people the chance to be safe in the face and aftermath of a storm, fire, or other unnatural disasters. Cops with rocket launchers ain’t it, especially for black and brown communities.”
By Brian Kahn | Earther |
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Birding While Black
“There’s talk and posturing about diversifying the hobby, but the money is not where the mouths are. People buy binoculars that would fund the economy of a small Caribbean island—where, coincidentally, lots of neotropical migratory birds winter, and where local people of color might contribute to their conservation if more birders cared about more than counting birds.”
By J. Drew Lanham | Orion Magazine |
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Crisis, COVID-19, and Democracy
“Although the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis are both provoked by natural phenomena, the dangers they present are political.… In both Bengal and Ireland, people starved to death despite an abundance of food. The legal structure acted to protect the food supply from the people dying of hunger, rather than to protect hungry people from starvation.”
By Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò | APA Online |
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The Connection Between Pipelines
and Sexual Violence
“Pipelines, a growing body of research suggests, can actually fuel violence against Native women. Man camps, also described as ‘work-camp modular housing,’ are temporary housing communities set up for the well-paid, typically male laborers who are tasked with constructing pipelines snaking their way above, across, and below our nation’s waterways and lands. More often than not, these routes, and as a result the man camps, find themselves cutting through or just outside of rural tribal nation lands and other marginalized communities.”
By Nick Martin | The New Republic |
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The Climate Crisis Is Racist. The Answer
Is Anti-Racism
“No, rainstorms don’t care about skin colour, but worsening weather worldwide aggravates the divisions in society that already exist because it hits people of colour living in poverty the hardest. Simply put: 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 colour.”
By Eric Holthaus | The Correspondent |
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America’s Climate Refugees Are Pleading for Help. The Government Has No Answer.
“The Federal Emergency Management Agency has recovery programs in place, but villages like Kivalina often don’t qualify because they’re not declared federal disaster areas. Instead, Alaska Native villages are often forced to relocate only individual projects, one house or building at a time.… In 2008, the village filed a lawsuit in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corp. The suit was an attempt by Kivalina to recoup monetary damages for the energy industry’s contribution to the destruction of its island. But in 2009, the court dismissed the claim, ruling that greenhouse gas emissions were not a legal issue but a political one and should be addressed by Congress or the executive branch.”
By Nick Martin | The New Republic |
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The Racist Gatekeepers of American Land
“You can see the same overwhelming whiteness in the original makeup of the mainstream environmental movement and conservationists, who propagated the idea that only a certain subset of Americans know who and what is best for the land.”
By Nick Martin | The New Republic |
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Climate Change Is Going to Hit Palestine
Particularly Hard
“Research by Michael Mason, the Director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics, shows that Israeli and Palestinian reports on climate change have almost entirely ignored climate change’s role as a threat multiplier in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and the conflict’s role as a threat multiplier in the climate crisis. But there’s ample research showing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will make the impacts of the climate crisis more severe. Specifically, the Israeli military occupation is already exacerbating climate-related resource shortages for Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights.”
By Eric Margolis | The New Republic |
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Reducing Fire, and Cutting Carbon Emissions,
the Aboriginal Way
“Over the past decade, fire-prevention programs, mainly on Aboriginal lands in northern Australia, have cut destructive wildfires in half. While the efforts draw on ancient ways, they also have a thoroughly modern benefit: Organizations that practice defensive burning have earned $80 million under the country’s cap-and-trade system as they have reduced greenhouse-gas emissions from wildfires in the north by 40 percent.”
By Thomas Fuller | The New York Times |
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Thunberg Isn’t the Only Young Voice We
Should Be Listening To
“Thunberg has tried to do her part by visiting Standing Rock, bringing activists of color up on stages with her at climate marches, and noting in speeches that she is ‘one of the lucky ones,’ Jamie Margolin, a 17-year-old Colombian American activist told me. But the message Thunberg brings—to follow the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report or deprive future generations—is still the message of an activist from a relatively privileged country.”
By Mythili Sampathkumar | The New Republic |
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Your Climate Anxiety Is Another
Person’s Existential Crisis
“I suspect that many of us are homesick less for the loss of a physical place than for an idea. We’re nostalgic for a world that for most people never existed—one where there was a guarantee that basic needs would be met and where our children would have a better life than we did.”
By Abigail Higgins | The New Republic |
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Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem
“The sheer purchasing power of a U.S. government committed to making its transportation system run on renewables could set a global standard for labor, indigenous and environmental rights in minerals extraction, ensuring the benefits of a green transition flow up and down the supply chain.”
By Kate Aronoff | The New Republic |
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I'm a Black Climate Expert. Racism Derails Our Efforts to Save the Planet.
“Here’s the rub: If we want to successfully address climate change, we need people of color. Not just because pursuing diversity is a good thing to do, and not even because diversity leads to better decision-making and more effective strategies, but because, black people are significantly more concerned about climate change than white people (57 percent vs. 49 percent), and Latinx people are even more concerned (70 percent). To put that in perspective, it means that more than 23 million black Americans already care deeply about the environment and could make a huge contribution to the massive amount of climate work that needs doing.”
By Ayana Elizabeth Johnson | The Washington Post |
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