The right to exist

Take a moment to appreciate that feeling of all the things working

Oct 18, 2019

The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834, JM William Turner, 1835

There’s a fissure in the climate community around the extent to which racial and economic justice issues should be a driving force behind climate solutions.

I’ve written about this divide often, because for many years mainstream climate philanthropy and nonprofits have been heavily technocratic, focused mostly on top-down engineering and policy fixes. Meanwhile, there’s a growing climate justice movement that frames climate change as interconnected with social issues like racial and economic inequality, housing, and health care.

I’ve been wanting to write something about an argument I hear a lot in opposition to the climate justice framing, often from very smart, well-intentioned people. I got into a similar debate on a panel discussion earlier this year, and more recently over email with another writer who I have a ton of respect for.

But I’ll tee up this tweet from a person I do not know to sort of sum this argument up:

I don’t think this guy is a bad dude, but he beats this drum a lot, and it is a drum that I suspect resonates with a lot of people even though I find it to be a very, very bad drum.

To start off, there’s a pretty straightforward just transition argument that climate action is not necessarily the best mechanism for furthering justice. There is abundant evidence that low-income communities and people of color suffer disproportionately from environmental and climate impacts, despite contributing less to the problem. If we don’t actively counter that fact, we could transition to a new energy economy and still end up with deep, perhaps even worse inequality, and that can’t happen.

But you still get people who agree with this basic concept and will say something like the above: Well, climate action is inherently an act of justice, because it stops vulnerable people from suffering. Put another way, we can’t get bogged down in issues of fairness when pursuing climate action because climate change creates such severe injustice that curbing it must be prioritized above all else.

What that argument gets seriously wrong, however, is that it casts people who are most vulnerable to climate impacts merely as passive victims of the problem. In other words, climate change is what happens to poor unfortunate people, and climate solutions are things we do for them and sometimes to them.

Even people arguing in favor of climate justice often fixate on outcomes in this way, that we have to be altruistic and consider people in need, etc.

I find climate justice as a solution to be a far more powerful argument—that we can’t get to the level of political power and sweeping change necessary without the most impacted communities playing a central and leading role. This is basically an organizing argument—that among other things, you need a powerful, engaged activist base and historically that’s the people who are feeling the pain of a problem right now.

In that sense, it’s not about “attaching” justice or fairness issues to climate action. Bold climate action requires engagement with justice and fairness issues. It’s about mobilizing human beings around the ways they are currently experiencing the problem.

“That’s frankly where our strongest base of support is,” Roger Kim, head of the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund and former head of Asian Pacific Environmental Network, once told me, referring to impacted communities. “And we haven’t invested enough in that pillar of support and power, to be more active and in a leadership role in tackling this issue.”

Kim’s fund is supporting multiracial organizing in places like New Mexico oil and gas country, where indigenous communities, labor groups, and traditional (cough, white) environmental groups are aligning around energy policy and chalking up wins.

Again, there are lots of other arguments for centering justice in climate action, such as the importance of drawing upon communities’ unique knowledge to shape appropriate solutions. But communities being unfairly impacted the most by climate change are not a burden for problem-solvers to bear. They’re leaders that the world can’t solve this problem without.

I want to close this little section with part of an essay I’ve been thinking a lot about, by Eric Holthaus, one of my favorite writers on climate right now:

This is what the climate emergency looks like, not stories of solar tech and world leaders signing a lukewarm, lowest-common-denominator agreement – and definitely not a simple statement of long-established physical science.
It is the minute-by-minute revolutions that are happening in nearly every home and neighbourhood around the world where people are simply claiming the right to exist. It is not just the contemporary image of a family standing amid their island ruins; the climate emergency looks also like the 500-year history of colonialism in the Americas. This has been happening for a long time, because climate change is a crisis of our relationship with one another and with nature.
…
We need to know, viscerally, that we can no longer abandon our neighbours in their time of greatest need. We need to relearn our interdependence. There is the alternative. The way to write this story that doesn’t end in apocalypse.

What I Wrote

I mentioned a few weeks back I’ve been talking to people at community foundations about their climate change work including in Hawaii, and that article ran this week. Here is the introduction:

In the spring of 2018, Hawaii experienced two major natural disasters. Kauai was hit with 50 inches of rain in 24 hours, creating historic flooding and landslides that washed away homes and cars, and blocked a main highway. Weeks later, on the big island, a months-long volcanic eruption began that would destroy some 700 homes.
In both cases, the Hawaii Community Foundation responded by setting up relief funds within days of the events. While the immediate aid was greatly needed by the impacted communities, the events also got the staff thinking more about what the future might hold.
“We also recognized that we could be more proactive in thinking about that work, recognizing that climate change is probably going to bring us more flooding, hurricanes that are stronger,” says Amy Luersen, the foundation’s vice president of community collaboration.
The foundation went on to create permanent funds for each of the four main counties, available for a combination of resilience projects, and when necessary, disaster aid…

Read it here: In Hawaii, Where Climate Change is a Fact of Life, a Community Foundation Gets Proactive

Listening

I guess there’s a whole thing of hip hop songs about Spongebob which I appreciate. You will like this one:

Reading

I just finished Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I had read Hill House a few years back and The Lottery in school but never this one and I was saving it for October. It’s told from the perspective of this amazing character, a teenager named Merricat whose family has been ostracized from their town. Here’s a fun little passage:

I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. Constance said, "Never let them see that you care," and "If you pay any attention they'll only get worse," and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true. "It's wrong to hate them," Constance said, "it only weakens you," but I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.

Watching

Phew let’s lighten things up. There are a lot of reasons Americans love the Great British Baking Show, as I do. There’s the calming pastoral landscapes, the thrill of hearing people say words a little differently, the way the bakers are all so nice to each other. But I think there is an under-appreciated element, which is that you are watching a bunch of ordinary people cope with intense anxieties and feelings of inadequacy very openly and in real time, in a safe and reassuring environment. So much crying for a show about baking but in a good way.

I feel you Rahul.

You know I hesitate to share this next part for reasons that will become clear, but I am always trying to look out for you guys and I feel like I gained some important wisdom from a recent unpleasant experience.

If you have any little bottles in your home that are about the same size and shape as a bottle of eyedrops, but they are not actually eyedrops, go ahead and stop what you’re doing, get up, and throw those little fuckers right in the trash just to be safe. I don't really feel like elaborating on what I did to myself this week but let's just say the consequences well they were not good. Don’t worry I am fine now.

So my next piece of advice is, if you are going about your day and find yourself in reasonably good health with all of your different parts working, take a moment to appreciate that feeling of all the things working. Because you never know where some unexpected danger will come from and make something suddenly not work. Sometimes the danger even comes from your own stupid hand, harming your own precious eye.

Tate

PS: New subscribers, did you know that you can read past issues online? There are 11 now, and they are all up on Substack. Thank you for all the great feedback on the newsletter and remember if you like it, please share or forward to someone who might also enjoy it so I can expose others to my propaganda.

Crisis Palace by Tate Williams

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