The people who caused the climate crisis arent the ones who will solve it Angela Mahecha Adrar
Transcriber:
We don’t just have a climate crisis,
we have a climate leadership crisis.
We’ve acted as though
an environmental crisis
created by corporate and government elites
can now somehow be solved
by these same corporate
and government elites.
While the people on the front lines,
the people most impacted
by wildfires, pollution,
rising sea levels,
have no other role but to suffer.
Centering the leadership
of these communities
and leading us out of this crisis
isn’t only the just thing to do.
It is the most important thing
that we can do
to actually solve this crisis.
Because people, when they can’t
take anymore, they rise up,
and they lead us to a better future.
Desperate times lead
to creative and just solutions
by those most impacted.
I know that from experience,
because like so many other
low-income families
searching for livelihoods,
when my mother, brother and I
emigrated from Colombia,
we made our homes alongside landfills,
incinerators, oil refineries, power plants
and waste-treatment plants.
In neighborhoods that serve
as the sacrifice zones
to fuel the economy of this nation
and, oftentimes, the world.
In the ’70s, in Southwest Detroit,
we lived in the shadow
of the Marathon oil refinery.
And in the ’80s, in Queens, New York,
we played handball
in vacant contaminated lots,
unknowingly breathing in dangerously high
levels of sulfur dioxide
from power plants nearby.
In the US, if you’re poor,
and you’re Indigenous,
Black, Middle Eastern,
Pacific Islander, Asian or Latinx,
you more often than not live, play, pray
and work in a sacrifice zone.
I’m saying this because I’ve been
assaulted by pollution violence
my whole life.
And although I’ve been on the front lines
as a climate justice leader for 20 years,
I’ve been envisioning solutions
to the environmental crisis
since I was a kid …
dreaming up a better world.
For people like me,
people in sacrifice zones
that are also leading a just transition
away from the subtractive model
of development
to one that feels just for all of us,
in the name of climate justice.
So what is climate justice?
It’s simple.
If …
climate change was created
by economic and racial injustice,
then effective solutions
to the climate crisis
have to include
economic and racial justice.
Climate justice centers
the struggle and the solutions
of those on the front lines of the crisis,
communities who have been
underresourced and plagued
by everything from police violence,
racism, struggling schools
and so much more.
These same communities
have been, historically
and disproportionately,
exposed and subjected to pollution
and contamination from industry.
These are the workers who are essential,
but are treated as expendable
by big corporations
and this wildly unjust
economic system in which we live.
Frontline communities aren’t the people
whose homes on the beach
are threatened by erosion.
They’re communities and families
whose homes are already underwater.
Children who already
can’t breathe from asthma,
and neighbors who are already
drinking polluted water
and poisoned water.
In the midst of a global pandemic,
multiple uprisings
for racial justice and democracy
and record wildfires,
droughts and storms –
it’s time we finally realized we can’t fix
injustice with more injustice.
I’ll go so far as to say
that frontline communities
are the only ones
that can get us out of this crisis.
And in fact, they already are.
And there’s so many great examples,
but to give just one …
In Washington State,
a rural farming community
created a local, scalable community farm.
It produces healthy, affordable food,
it renews land ravaged by pesticides
and it respects and protects workers.
“Tierra y Libertad” was created
when four farm workers came together
to start a berry-growing cooperative,
owned and managed by themselves.
They pay workers 15 dollars an hour,
otherwise unheard of
in a historically exploitative industry.
They take regular breaks
and they eat free communal meals.
“Tierra y Libertad”
also has a capital plan for expansion
that includes energy-efficient
worker housing
and a large community space.
If you think this is a small step,
that a berry cooperative
is small potatoes,
in the US alone,
berries are a multibillion dollar market.
Now that’s a lot of change,
in every sense.
And while the “Tierra y Libertad” story
has all the signs of a scalable investment
in community asset building,
it can resolve a number of issues,
from the need to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions
and discrimination
to the right to a liveable wage.
The truth is that “Tierra y Libertad”
is barely hanging on …
like so many other environmental
frontline solutions
that are healing and transforming
communities today …
but are overlooked and underresourced
by foundations, banks
and other sources of support.
Overlooked by us and many.
Meanwhile, the fight
against climate change
is increasingly positioned
as a big business opportunity
for big business.
But corporate greed and expediency
is what got us
into the crisis to begin with …
squeezing out as much profit
from our natural resources,
whatever the cost
to people and the planet.
Incorporating Band-Aid fixes
that rely on markets and technology
to heal what wasn’t broken
until markets and technology broke them.
Take cap and trade,
which doesn’t stop pollution,
but simply gives the right to pollute
to the highest bidder.
When enacted statewide in California,
oil and gas emissions, they went up,
and frontline communities,
they continue to bear
this disproportionate health impact,
while greenhouse gases and coal pollutants
continue to rise under cap and trade.
Or take stratospheric aerosol injections
that would shoot sulfur dioxide
up into the stratosphere
to try to block out solar radiation
from reaching the earth.
Nothing about polluting the air
with sulfur dioxide
was innovative in the ’80s,
and it isn’t innovative now.
These kinds of interventions
can have planetary consequences
in different parts of the world.
Dangerous ideas that are backed
by the same fossil fuel industry …
They don’t address root causes
of the climate crisis,
and they don’t reduce emissions
at the rate that we need now either.
Let me be clear,
making money off of the climate crisis …
That isn’t innovative.
It’s not new
and it’s not going to lead
to the kind of effective solutions
we need to solve this crisis.
And I’m not talking
from a moral perspective,
I’m talking from an on-the-ground,
practical perspective.
Because this crisis, climate change,
was created by centuries …
of exploitation and greed and injustice.
And if solutions are not addressing
and meeting the needs
of those most impacted
by the climate crisis itself,
then frankly,
they’re just false solutions.
The future that we want,
the future that we need,
has to be led by frontline communities,
here in the US and all across the world.
And it has to happen now.
In the Climate Justice Alliance,
where I organize with thousands
of other frontline leaders,
we’re uniting …
for a transition.
But not just any transition –
a just transition,
away from a dig, burn, dump economy
to one that is just
and clean for everyone.
Reinvesting in local,
place-based solutions
that are led by the very communities
with the very most at stake.
Solutions that more often than not
will lead to benefits for all of us.
And not just to line
the pockets of just a few.
Because solutions like “Tierra y Libertad”
are being implemented
all across the globe.
Earth-Bound, for example –
a Black-owned regenerative
building cooperative.
They travel in brigades
to restore the depressed farmers
to sustainability.
Indigenous communities from Pine Ridge
to the Four Corners of the Navajo Nation,
they’re building
regenerative energy enterprises
to power their territories.
Now that’s a regenerative economy.
The wind power alone,
from those tribal lands,
can satisfy 32 percent
of the US demand for energy.
In Puerto Rico,
mutual support networks
that gather together,
powered by youth, by teachers, by workers,
by organizers and farmers,
were able to renew hope
and adjust recovery
with more efficiency
and with greater compassion than FEMA
after those islands' climate disasters.
And in Miami, where I live now, residents
in the historically Black Liberty City,
they came together
and started a land trust
to protect their community
from gentrification
due to rising sea levels
and flooding in other parts of the city.
In Portland, Oregon,
communities came together
and passed a corporate Clean Energy Tax.
This tax will fund
tens of millions of dollars
into green jobs and healthy homes.
I’m saying these are just a handful
of the innovative, creative solutions
that are healing and transforming
communities right now, today.
These are desperate times,
and desperate times can lead
to beautiful strategic
and innovative solutions.
Can, but not necessarily will.
It depends on whether we continue
to grasp at the same models
that got us into this situation
to begin with,
and can only make it worse.
Or if we really just wake up.
Disrupt the status quo
and pay real attention,
real, respectful attention
to these leaders,
who are on the ground,
implementing and creating solutions
that are leading us
out of the climate crisis right now,
day by day.
There’s no time to waste.
Thank you.