From Ibram X. Kendi’s HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST

In a recent article for Patagonia, environmental forerunner Bill McKibben notes that when he published his first book, The End of Nature, thirty years ago, his main worry was about nature itself, and the way that beloved landscapes and species would be wiped out if humanity didn’t change course soon–but in the years since, he came to realize that “there were deeper and more pressing reasons to fight climate change.”

He came to realize that “Climate Change is a Human Issue” (the title of his article).

“The iron law of climate change,” he notes, “is that the less you did to cause it, the sooner you feel its effects.… Those who poured the most carbon into the air will be dead before its effects are fully felt.” This is why indigenous people and young folks are at the front lines of this movement–as well as, increasingly, individuals from urban communities of color.

McKibben notes that when Hurricane Harvey rolled up on Houston, on top of already historic levels of flooding, it was the poorest people who suffered the worst. Those of us who tuned into the Youth Summit for Earth Day Online this year saw this for ourselves as a young Black activist from Houston stepped up to say that not only did her community experience the worst during this crisis, every year they were told that they were experiencing a hundred-year-flood, a once-in-a-lifetime event.

She was smart enough to see this adult dissembling for what it was–smart enough to understand that she and her people are on the front lines of climate change.

Which is to say, this young activist and her peers, many of whom are still in high school, are smart enough to understand something many of us adults are just now catching up with, which is that climate change is racist AF.

And here I’m reminded of the quote I’ve included in the photo above, from Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. Here he writes,

Do-nothing climage policy is racist policy, since the predominately non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north, even as the Whiter global north is contributing more to its acceleration. Land is sinking and temperatures are rising from Florida to Bangladesh. Droughts and food scarcity are ravishing bodies in Eastern and Southern Africa, a region already containing 25 percent of the world’s malnourished population. Human-made environmental catastrophes disproportionately harming bodies of color are not unusual: for instance, nearly four thousand US areas–mostly poor and non-White–have higher lead poisoning rates than Flint, Michigan.

McKibben points out this is why it’s so important that we pass the Green New Deal: because if we don’t, the same bodies facing the gravest harm at the hands of climate change will be locked out of the massive economic mobilization necessary to mitigate (and perhaps even reverse) the worst of its effects.

And personally, this brings home to me just how important our sustained efforts to pass a Green New Deal really are. Because what’s called for here is nothing less than a re-envisioning of who we are as Americans, and what we value.

Einstein has been quoted as saying, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it,” and to my mind, climate change and racism are both products of the same level of consciousness, one that condones exploitation of “the other.”

But there is no other. There is just us. And the Green New Deal is more than a way to put this country to work in a way that will help to preserve a livable future for all–handled right, it could be a form of reparations for those who’ve endured the worst.