No Planet B

by Lucy Diavolo

  Sabirah: Parents can continue to support their children to strike and help them get involved with more climate initiatives to show our representatives that the youth are here. Teachers and school administrators should encourage their students to strike and make sure that they are educated about the severity of the climate crisis (because we need to learn about it!). Encouraging students to strike by not punishing them, or not giving them tests on the day of [a scheduled] strike, [is also] so important.

  Two Generations of Climate Activists Dish about Making Powerful People Uncomfortable

  ALLEGRA KIRKLAND

  September 27, 2019

  Friday, September 20, 2019, saw what is estimated to be the biggest climate strike ever, with some four million people turning out in dozens of countries and all fifty U.S. states.

  The Global Youth Climate Strike was historic, but the organizers behind it say they’re just getting started. And indeed, we saw hundreds take to the streets in Brooklyn over the weekend, for a mass protest by frontline communities; on Monday, September 23, Extinction Rebellion blocked streets in Washington, D.C.; and a mass global climate strike is scheduled for Friday, September 27. This constant drumbeat of activity is intended to keep the climate crisis at the forefront of the news cycle and of peoples’ minds, activists say.

  At the head of this movement is a new cohort of teen organizers bringing a fresh sense of optimism and fire to the cause of climate justice. They’re joining forces with an older guard of climate activists who have been doing this important work for decades.

  This week, Teen Vogue hosted Fridays for Future activist Xiye Bas-tida, an Indigenous young person, Future Coalition executive director Katie Eder, and Greenpeace International executive director Jennifer Morgan at our office in lower Manhattan. The trio had a wide-ranging conversation about what generations of climate activists can learn from one other and why things feel different this time around.

  This conversation has been significantly condensed and edited for clarity.

  Katie Eder: What excites me about what happened with the 20th is that [the strikes on] March 15 [and in] May, that was kind of the youth wave—this new youth movement was over here, and this older movement that’s existed for a long time is over here. But with September 20 we kind of combined the two, and I think that collective power, that collaboration, is what’s allowing us to put down this new foundation that is the climate movement—that we can come together intergenerationally and intersectionally. And also, it’s these big institutional groups with the grassroots; it’s traditional environmental organizations with social justice groups.

  Jennifer Morgan: It’s way more transformational as well. You’ve managed to tap into this thing that connects all of us and make room for it, which is really generous and really smart. I think the [strike] before in 2014 was also exciting. I don’t think the climate movement believed we could put people in the streets on climate change then. So people were really nervous about even trying. So it was so huge that there were the [four hundred thousand people in New York] back then. And now to see it really build, and to be able to see how it’s just exploding in a way; you’re building on it but continuing it. I can just tell you that I’m smiling because I’ve been in these conversations where people say, “Well, this is just a one-off right?” Or the other one that I love is, “You can control this, right?”

  [Everyone laughs.]

  JM: I’m like, “No and no.”

  Xiye Bastida: What we bring in the youth movement is that we’re really tapping into every sector of society. We have youth in education reform, in policy work, suing the government, the consistency of striking every Friday…. As the climate crisis gets worse, we’re going to get more activists until we stop it and we change it.

  KE: From the beginning, we said, “Our goal is chaos. We want this to be as chaotic as it can be.” Because if one person or one group or one organization is at the center and knows what’s happening, it can’t grow to the largest extent. But the fact that it’s so grassroots, it’s so decentralized, it’s coming from this power of the local level—I think that’s what sets it apart from other things. There’s no hub; there’s no circle that things are revolving around.

  I think it’s so much of a trust thing. It’s trusting the businesses to self-organize, trusting the unions to self-organize, and I think putting trust in each other. There’s a real culture shift that’s starting to happen, especially around the youth movement, around the community that we’re building, of really saying we’re on the same team. No matter what organization or what sector of society you’re coming from, we’re kind of uniting around a common enemy.

  XB: It’s about collaboration and not competition. And it’s so different from what we’ve been taught—we’ve been taught to be individualistic and to strive for personal success. But to see that we’re all in this together in a collaborative way, and seeing that from the youth movement, [where] we make all our decisions through consensus, there’s no hierarchy. We all love each other and respect each other. And in terms of the businesses, I always saw businesses as like a wall, and you couldn’t get through, right? You couldn’t talk to the people inside? But to see that so many businesses were supporting the strike, were shutting down, websites were shutting down, [thousands of] Amazon workers walked out; to see that businesses have that autonomy because we’re creating that space for them and we are saying as youth we’re gonna support you more if your business does that.

  JM: I think one of the things that’s made Greenpeace what it is, and [that] your movement [can do] as well, is bring a sense of unpredictability. I think what makes especially CEOs or heads of state a bit nervous is when they don’t know what’s going to come. It makes them uncomfortable; they need to be uncomfortable right now. And if they don’t know where you are coming next, it keeps them more on notice than if they’re like, “Okay, this is the next big mobilization, and the next one”

  KE: That’s why I think it’s so amazing that—while we are working in coalition and we are working from one vision and one message—that we have different organizations that are working off different theories of change and tactics. So it does feel like from the local level, different cities and different organizations, there are constantly different types of actions happening at different times, and you never really do know. We might know ’cause we’re living it every day, but you never really do know—the general public, there’s no way for them to know…. So it feels like we’re everywhere.

  XB: You don’t know what Extinction Rebellion is going to do next, what city they’re going to shut down. We do know. [All laugh.] We don’t know what Greenpeace is going to do next, what oil-extraction center they’re going to shut down next. It’s just amazing.

  KE: The narrative around the climate movement has been “what are we fighting against,” and I think that people don’t always understand what is that vision that we’re fighting for, what is it that we’re protecting. And I think that [it’s important that we’re] painting that picture for people and really talking about climate not only as atmospheric levels of carbon but also as climate justice, and saying we have an opportunity to use the climate crisis as an opportunity to really repair a lot of the broken pieces. And to talk about equity and justice, and to center that in the solutions that we’re talking about.

  Bringing that into the conversation can often change it from a negative tone into a positive one because people are saying, “Okay, this isn’t just about the kind of white, elitist environmentalism that has always existed, but it’s about centering frontline communities, communities of color, communities that are going to be hit first and worst, and ensuring that vision of what could be for them and how they’re going to lead the way.”

  XB: Beyond that, Indigenous peoples’ voices are being highlighted so powerfully now. We opened and closed our climate strike with Indigenous voices. And they are the protectors of the land. And if we want the land to be protected, we have to protect them. We need to
have a whole cultural shift in which it’s our culture to take care of the earth—not because it’s a movement, but because it’s how we were raised…. We need to do that through storytelling and show how the climate crisis is affecting real people in real time. When you go to the personal impacts of the climate crisis, or how individual communities are suffering from air or water pollution, and to see that this is about injustice, then people shift from thinking this is about light-bulbs and plastic straws to people’s lives. And to shift that narrative, shift the culture is what we’re fighting for.

  JM: I’m super curious how each of you got involved. Have you been involved or aware since you were little?

  KE: In sixth grade I read [Al Gore’s] An Inconvenient Truth. I grew up in suburban Wisconsin, and I had never really understood issues to be bigger than a single community. So that was the first time I really understood not just the climate crisis but that there could be an issue facing humanity that was global in scale, and that there was this existential threat.

  XB: And for me, I was born and raised in Mexico, around forty minutes west of Mexico City, in a small town called San Pedro, Tultepec. And my town suffered from heavy rainfall—flooding and contamination that came into the street because factories are pouring waste on the river we have right there. That was the first time I witnessed the climate crisis. My parents raised me being environmentally aware; both of them worked in sustainability development. My dad is Otomi, which is an Indigenous group in Mexico, so their relationship with the land, their relationship with the sacred elements is very strong. And when you see those things being disrespected systematically by society, then you know something is wrong.

  And when I moved to New York City, Hurricane Sandy had kind of destroyed many of the seashores in Long Island, and that was the tipping point [for me]—of this is global. This is happening everywhere. The climate crisis follows you. And how can you not do something when this is happening globally? It’s also happening to so many communities in so many different ways. The question is, “How can you not?”

  JM: It’s so funny; when I was in college I was studying political science, and I remember somebody saying, “How come you’re so involved?” And I remember saying, “How can you not be?” The more you learn and the more you understand, the more, I agree, you have to get involved.

  XB: It’s weird when people say, “Why are you so passionate about the climate crisis?” And I’m like, “This is a ticking time bomb; how are you not trying to dismantle it?”

  KE: I’m curious to know, from getting to watch and being involved in the climate movement for so long, how you see it shifting and if there are things you’re really excited to see or things you wish you could see?

  JM: I think now what you’re starting to see is much more of the connecting and much more of the understanding that we all actually have very similar opponents. The root causes of what we’re all trying to address are the same: this kind of short-term, profit-driven economy. In the past I think that was almost too scary to name for some, and I think the movement has gone from trying to defeat coal-powered power plants, plant by plant, to trying to address the underlying root causes.

  I also think it’s gone from being a very faraway problem to a very current problem. So I think the thing that has an impact on the movement, but also on the whole debate, is what’s happening now; is what the scientists thought was going to be happening in ten, twenty, forty years. So I think that’s petrifying, but also really makes it very local.

  KE: I’ve definitely noticed that. I think for a long time, climate change felt very abstract—this kind of scientific, very futuristic thing.

  XB: Like big waves on a globe.

  KE: Yeah, but I think in the last few years, or just months in the U.S. alone, there have been wildfires, hurricanes, flooding in the Midwest. I think they add up. I think people look at their communities and they say, “Okay, all of us are going to be affected in one way or another.” So I think it is becoming more concrete in people’s minds. We just have to make the solutions more concrete in people’s minds, too.

  XB: We don’t want people to have to experience the climate crisis to realize that it is a crisis. And that’s what we’re fighting for. For less people to be affected and more people to be aware. We want consciousness, we want action, and we want just a complete breakthrough of solutions.

  Intersectionality in Climate Reporting and Activism

  SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY

  May 2020

  Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.

  —Vandana Shiva, Soil, Not Oil

  In 2014, after a series of dubious decisions by Michigan’s state leadership, the city of Flint had its water source changed from treated water flowing from Detroit to water sourced from the Flint River. The switch was made without the normal environmental checks: officials failed to ensure the water was even drinkable. It turned out that the water in the Flint River had high levels of chlorides, which destroyed lead pipes; that, in turn, contaminated water being piped into the homes of hundreds of thousands of residents in Flint—a town that also happens to be a predominantly Black and poor white working-class town.

  Thanks to local activists, the story of Flint’s water crisis made it into the national spotlight and became a seminal public conversation about the role race and class play in environmental issues. And while far more people today may be familiar with the concept of environmental racism, if you ask the average person, they still may not know that there was a town that was deprived of clean water in the United States for years, or the way politics played into how it happened.

  Environmental justice activists have long decried environmental racism or the idea that low-income communities of color are more vulnerable to poor living conditions like toxic water, shoddy development, polluted air. Looking at just a handful of other recent cases where the environment posed a serious threat to the communities that lived in them, a pattern emerges. Sometimes, these disasters are man-made, like the Dakota Access Pipeline threatening Indigenous water supplies or a coal plant demolition in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood polluting the air with clouds of dust. Sometimes, natural disasters are exacerbated by human politics, like what happened after Hurricane Katrina in Black neighborhoods in New Orleans or the way Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico was exacerbated by neglect. In each case, low-income communities of color were effectively treated as disposable in the environmental economy.

  Advocates have developed their own strategies to fight these disparate effects, tactics that recognize that justice alone isn’t enough; what is needed is an intersectional strategy to address the fully deleterious effects of climate change and environmental degradation. At the root of it is intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw that looks at the many ways power intersects with identity to create social, political, and economic conditions. It is an intersectional lens that allows us to see the spread of Zika virus as a function ofboth warming temperatures and reproductive rights, that makes sense of the fact that women are often the hardest hit during a climate disaster, too, and that fully realizes that the carnage from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was not just about a natural disaster, but also class, race, and colonization.

  Environmentalism has long been focused on protecting the earth: stopping pollution, recycling initiatives, park restoration, and keeping streets clean. Only in the last few decades has there been a shift in the public conversation to issues of intersectionality and justice. Environmental justice has shifted the gaze from a focus on beau-tification and individual action to a recognition that the climate crisis is due to greedy corporations ignoring warnings about their impacts on the earth. An intersectional lens makes it easy to see that people living in poverty—itself a racialized phenomenon—have no choice but to buy food in wasteful plastic packaging. The most rudimentary class lens reveals that climate change is a real problem, but the communities with the highest carbon footprints are rarely the ones t
hat are on the front lines of the crisis.

  The essays in this section apply an intersectional framework to dissect and interrogate the role that power plays in both climate change and environmental activism. These selections explain the basics of environmental racism, document the groundbreaking work of activists of color, report from the front lines on how climate change has impacted Indigenous communities, and look at how those same communities have proposed viable solutions. They detail the brutal realities of the crisis for climate refugees, often women, in the Global South. They explain why the Green New Deal matters and how it connects climate change policy to immigration. They even grapple with how the labor movement must contend with climate.

  I would remiss to not mention that while these pieces predated the COVID-19 pandemic, an intersectional lens could have predicted who would be most hit by the public health nightmare: poor communities, overwhelmingly Black and Latino communities, health care workers on the front lines, and essential workers. The coronavirus pandemic is also an environmental issue and a side effect of globalization, and many of the solutions to the hardships people have experienced due to the pandemic lie in an intersectional environmental justice framework.

  In the tradition of the famed ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, these essays make the case for how our neglect of the earth is rooted in our neglect of our most vulnerable. Let’s hear their voices.

  People of Color Deserve Credit for Their Work to Save the Environment

  JENN M. JACKSON