by Lucy Diavolo
Association of Flight Attendants-Communication Workers of America president Sara Nelson’s own industry is grappling with both the causes and effects of climate change. In a recent interview with In These Times, she addressed the need to build support for the Green New Deal, and renewable energy in general, emphasizing the need for a holistic approach. She said:
We must recognize that labor unions were among the first to fight for the environment, because it was our workspaces that had pol-lutants, our communities that industry polluted...
We need to build a broad coalition. And to do that we can’t start from a position that assumes opposition. If we bring everyone to the table, recognize the efforts to date, draw on the expertise from each affected field, and mobilize a united effort, then we can create allies where we otherwise might have had enemies.
At this point, those who are determined to take action to address the climate crisis need all the allies they can get. Time is running out for all of us, but at a faster pace for the poor and working class. Now, as ever, any real change is going to begin at the grassroots level, but labor leaders also need to take concrete steps toward alleviating the chaos to come by investing in workers’ futures, instead of wasting time boosting spineless politicians. Right now, our future is in flames, and some of those politicians are standing on the hose.
Four Activists Explain Why Migrant Justice Is Climate Justice
MAIA WIKLER
June 11, 2019
The climate crisis, fueled by capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, is making many parts of the world inhospitable. Because of this crisis, the climate-fueled movement of people is already well underway. Climate disaster is fueling more-frequent droughts, flash floods, and food shortages; causing dwindling water supplies; and impacting land that people rely upon. Migration is happening where homelands become inhabitable, often for those with the least amount of resources to adapt to climate change.
In 2018, the fourth-hottest year on record, we saw increases in record-setting wildfires in North America, devastating hurricanes, flash floods in India, a typhoon in the Philippines, and deadly wildfires in Greece and Sweden. And the Arctic experienced its second-warmest year on record, with a five-year heat streak, warming at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the world.
A U.N. Refugee Agency report revealed that, by the end of 2016, there were 65.6 million displaced people who had fled their homelands because of violence, human rights violations, and environmental disasters that are intensified by the climate crisis. Since 2008, an average of 26.4 million people have been displaced from their homes by extreme weather disasters every year. 350.org stated in a December press release:
From African migrants choosing to cross by boat from North Africa to Europe to Pacific Islanders losing their homes due to rising sea levels and Central American migrants fleeing their home countries in search of refuge, people around the world are being driven from their homes by droughts, storms, and the political strife and conflict that follow these climate disasters.
Fighting climate change is about more than emissions and metrics—it’s about fighting for a just world for everyone. Teen Vogue spoke with five climate-justice advocates whose work focuses on the vital intersection of migrant rights and climate action.
Maya Menezes, an organizer for No One Is Illegal and podcast host of Change Everything:
We are past the point of stopping some of the largest impacts of climate change. One of the biggest battles will be over the closing of borders, the decisions of who is deserving of basic humanity and who isn’t.
Under capitalism, goods can go across borders but human beings cannot. It’s not a weird coincidence, it’s a violent political strategy to bar people and privilege some over others. We need to envision a borderless world. Imagining a borderless world is one of the ultimate acts of decolonization because colonialism told us arbitrarily there are lines here for you to cross; it is connected to capitalism, exploitation, and racism, so challenging capitalism and colonization fundamentally challenges borders. If we are trying to challenge capitalistic structures that are destroying this planet, that means challenging the structures that are continuing to dehumanize human beings and designating people as legal bodies. No one is illegal on stolen lands. If we reject colonization and put ourselves in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty, then we reject that someone can be illegal and discarded.
Getting involved in climate justice work involves everything, it’s not as simple as recycling or buying local. It’s everything from deciding not to be a border enforcer in your community, to being in solidarity with complex Indigenous movements all over the world. Capitalism individualizes our suffering. Moving away from individualizing hardship and instead collectivizing our struggles is an empowering act. Go out into your communities and join collectives, collective movements are the way we fight individualism and capitalism—that we are in this together as opposed to doing this on our own.
Nayeli Jimenez, youth organizer for Our Time 2019 and art director at Greystone Books:
I’m from Cuernavaca, Mexico, and in my country, the desire to go to another place comes from needing to have a safer place to live. It’s really heartbreaking to leave the country you grew up in, to know that my family is so far away and also happier knowing I’m safe, because where I’m from is so wrought with violence against women and the land. The main reason why people leave is so they can keep living. People are being met with resistance and walls. They don’t want to leave their homes. If it were up to us, our communities back home would be thriving and we wouldn’t be forced out because of violence or extreme weather conditions. Closed borders are a violation of human rights.
I now live in Canada, and I can advocate for Mexico because I’m at a distance, which gives me safety. Living in deep colonial oppression, you have no say on your life, and you are being forced out of your homelands. The process of immigration is so dehumanizing—having gone through it, I know firsthand. We need systems in place to make sure people coming here to seek asylum have access to opportunities to thrive, rather than being othered.
Niria Alicia, Xicana community organizer and SustainUS COP25 youth delegation leader:
I am Xicana, first-generation born and raised in southern Oregon in a migrant farmworker community. I [worked] as a young kid myself as a farmworker, [and] both of my parents were migrants. I grew up in a mixed-status community that kept me deeply in a relationship to the land and the environmental changes. As a kid, I always heard my mom talk about climate change from the observations of having to plant seeds that we brought from Mexico. Especially farming pears, you are always watching temperature drops so the blossoms don’t frost. In a migrant farmworker community, those two connections of climate change and migrant rights are so present. We are directly experiencing these changes, being exposed to industrial agriculture and chemicals and living in terror of what will happen if we get pulled over [while undocumented].
This culture of disposability and treating the earth as just a resource is the same way that capitalism treats migrant workers as disposable and not worthy of being protected from cancerous chemicals. The climate-justice [movement] needs to understand that if we aren’t in solidarity with refugees, migrants, and people displaced by climate change, war, and violence, we are doing ourselves a disservice, because we will need to deal with these issues soon, whether we like it or not.
I volunteer with No More Deaths, which is an organization in Arizona that works to end unnecessary death and suffering of human beings on the U.S.-Mexico border. I just finished a month-long program with volunteers there doing drops of water, food, blankets, socks, any necessary supplies migrants need to make it out of this journey alive. Going out in the winter, the desert is cold. During my time there it snowed; we were going out there doing drops in the snow, we were finding people’s shoes, jackets, rosaries. It absolutely broke my heart to see that, despite the weather conditions, people are still moving through these trails. How bad does it have to
get for someone to leave the comfort of their home, to migrate through rough terrain in a country where they don’t speak the language in hopes of surviving? A lot of these people are out there for days, weeks, months, being hunted by border patrol.
We haven’t figured out how to keep humanity legal. We need to reconnect ourselves; we need to learn to look at people and land and water as a spirit and entity that is invaluable, that cannot be commodified and monetized. When we do that it will shift the way we relate to the earth and ourselves.
Thanu Yakupitiyage, Sri Lankan-born, Thailand–raised, Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist and associate director of U.S. communications at 350.org:
In most places, immigration policy doesn’t account for displacement based on the climate crisis. In the U.S., for example, you can’t apply for refugee status because of climate impacts, [though] one of the factors driving migration from Central America is drought and food insecurity. There’s no international law or national refugee law that says climate impacts are a reason to allow asylum or refugee status.
We are in a severe right-wing era, from the U.S. to Brazil and India to places in Europe. If we don’t talk about climate justice as human rights, we aren’t going to be able to move forward [with] solutions, particularly for communities from the Global South. What are we going to do about the reality of hundreds of thousands of people moving? We need to be able to support folks fighting for the survival of their land and the right to move.
What does global migration reform look like so we can support people impacted by displacement? There is so much more we could be doing with the Green New Deal—are folks who are advocating for the Green New Deal also going to call for those jobs to be supportive of migrants? What do climate reparations look like? Where can the Green New Deal intersect with refugee and asylum reform to allow for climate refugees to enter the U.S.? A radical manifestation of how we think about immigrant rights in the U.S. has been the Abolish ICE movement. I personally think we absolutely need to abolish ICE and reconsider the current system of borders. If we start at a place of radical imagination and re-envisioning, then we can think about [what] truly will work [to] uplift all communities.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Said Climate Change and Immigration Are Connected—
Here’s Why She’s Right
LUCY DIAVOLO
April 11, 2019
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) had a double-trouble callout on April 9 for people on the far right. The congress-woman known as AOC has been a leader on the Green New Deal, a plan to tackle both climate change and economic inequity. But on Tuesday, she pointed out how efforts to ignore climate change and stoke fears about immigration are connected.
“The far-right loves to drum up fear and resistance to immigrants. But have you ever noticed they never talk about what’s causing people to flee their homes in the first place?” she wrote on Twitter. “Perhaps that’s [because] they’d be forced to confront one major factor fueling global migration: climate change.”
AOC is right. The environmental impacts of climate change and disaster-level events related to it are displacing people from their homes all across the planet. Many of these people are fleeing destroyed homes and livelihoods in the wake of climate change-related crises. But at the same time, it’s getting harder to seek refuge.
The necessity of migration when climate change hits home is all too real around the world. According to the Science and Development Network, people in Bangladesh have been forced to flee due to rising sea levels brought on by climate change. According to the European Council on Foreign Relations, it’s believed that a lack of protective infrastructure and a reliance on economic sectors vulnerable to climate change impacts migration in Africa. And Public Radio International reported last year that climate change–related droughts and other natural disasters are creating refugees from Central America, a region with migrants President Donald Trump is fond of attacking.
For those fleeing the devastation of climate change, the tricky business of crossing international borders complicates things in an era when leaders in the United States and several European countries are cracking down on immigration, even though U.S. companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron and European companies like Shell and BP have historically been among the highest polluters.
AOC’s tweet was issued in response to a video from a group called The Leap, an environmental justice organization that says it “makes system change irresistible.” Narrated by actress (and Teen Vogue cover star Nico Parker’s mom) Thandie Newton, the video breaks down how right-wing fear-mongering over immigration connects to right-wing denial of climate science.
“From wildfires in Alberta to hurricanes in Puerto Rico, climate change is one of the reasons many of us are forced to leave our homes in search of a safer place to live,” Newton says in the video. “We keep hearing that migration is a crisis, and it is, for the people affected. But did you ever notice that the same leaders denying climate change are the ones drumming up fear and hatred against migrants?”
“To win climate justice, we need to oppose racism,” Newton says. “We know the world’s wealthiest countries have burned most of the carbon that is driving climate change today. Asserting the rights of migrants affected by these storms, floods, and fires is a way of paying back our climate debts.”
The way the environment and race intersect isn’t just something that occurs outside our borders. In the United States, the Flint water crisis and the Dakota Access Pipeline are examples of a concept called “environmental racism,” the idea that negative environmental impacts are more likely to affect people of color. Puerto Rico is another prime example of environmental racism in a U.S. territory, as Hurricane Maria created thousands of climate refugees and the federal government reportedly provided less funding, and did it more slowly, in Puerto Rico than after similar-strength hurricanes in Texas and Florida.
Indigenous peoples all over the world are grappling with climate issues firsthand. And in places like Malawi and Bangladesh, the impacts of climate change are often gendered, impacting women and girls of color more severely than anyone else.
Just like The Leap group, young activists at climate marches around the world have expressed an interest in systemic change. System Change Not Climate Change, an anti-capitalist, eco-socialist activist network, is one example of a group that lays out how a massive overhaul of current economics and politics may be necessary to address climate change, and questions whether or not those changes are incompatible with capitalism.
Whatever the overhaul looks like, it must include making space for people fleeing from climate-related disasters brought on by the emissions produced by the planet’s worst polluting companies. Acknowledging the intersections between climate and migration is essential to tackle right-wing fear tactics and ensure that the drastic change needed can happen.
Acknowledgments
Iregularly tell everyone that the political coverage from Teen Vogue can’t be attributed to a single person but has taken at least a village if not an entire city. This book is no different.
As its editor, I’d like to thank the following people from Teen Vogue: Lindsay Peoples Wagner and Samhita Mukhopadhyay for their leadership, Allegra Kirkland for tagging into our team, Alli Maloney for getting my foot in the door, Phillip Picardi for giving me a chance, Ella Cerón for showing me the ropes, my coworkers for making the office not just bearable but also fun, and every writer who’s ever graced us with the privilege of publishing their work.
I’d also like to thank everyone at Haymarket Books who helped make this project a reality, including Anthony Arnove for going to the mat, Dana Blanchard for her eminently personable patience and persistence, and Maya Marshall for using a fine-toothed comb on our copy.
I’d of course like to thank my parents for instilling in me an environmental sensibility from my earliest days, my sister for being an inspiration, and all the friends and loved ones who have been a wind in my sails on stagnant seas or
a hand reaching out to help me back to my feet.
Finally, I’d like to thank the young people who read our work and who allow us to share their stories. You may not sign my paychecks, but my work at Teen Vogue has always been for you.
Lucy Diavolo
May 2020
Glossary
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO): the democratic, voluntary federation of fifty-five national and international labor unions that represent 12.5 million working men and women. It is the largest federation of unions in the United States.
Black lung disease: a common name for any lung disease that develops from inhaling coal dust. This name comes from the fact that those with the disease have lungs that look black instead of pink. Medically, it is a type of pneumoconiosis called coal workers’ pneumoconi-
osis (CWP).
Climate change: a term that describes changes in average weather conditions that persist over multiple decades. Climate change encompasses both increases and decreases in temperature, as well as shifts in precipitation; changing risk of certain types of severe weather events, and changes to other features of the climate system.
Climate refugees: also known as climate migrants; a subset of environmental migrants who were forced to flee due to sudden or gradual
alterations in the natural environment related to at least one of three impacts of climate change: sea level rise, extreme weather events, and drought and water scarcity.