Is Racism the REAL Reason for Our Climate Inaction?
“[C]olonialism’s legacy is evident in every scourge, be it a viral pandemic, climactic events, police violence or exposure to environmental toxicity such as the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The task ahead of us is to heal the legacy wounds of genocide and slavery which we now see yawning open and festering before us.”
~ Rupa Marya & Edwin Lindo, Healing the Nations Broken & Scattered Hoop
For too long, black lives haven’t really mattered much in the U.S. It is no great secret that people of color bear a disproportionate share of environmental illness (a form of structural violence) in this country — with the lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan being a recent, and rather notorious example. Institutionalized racism was clearly reflected in the intentional poisoning of Flint’s water supply with lead, a neurotoxin, by predominantly white politicians who knew exactly what they were doing, and didn’t care because it was just this neglected area inhabited by poor folk. Years of complaints were ignored and deflected until the story achieved prominence during the heat of an election year.
This kind of political indifference is hardly unique to Michigan — it is just one example of environmental racism we’ve seen for lifetimes now, such as the systemic placement of pollution sources in disadvantaged communities. One result of this is much higher incidences of asthma, which has directly resulted in higher mortality rates from Covid-19 in black communities. Native American reservations are also a chronic symptom of institutional racism and structural violence, and they too are suffering more during this clarifying pandemic.
The other side of this racist equation helps explain the impatience of #BLM: our society tends to be slower in both acknowledging and responding to chronic problems borne by disadvantaged communities of color. Again in relation to Flint, we know well enough from past studies that the damage to children with elevated blood levels of lead is permanent. They are consigned to lives marked by diminished cognitive abilities, and they’re at much higher risk of behavioral problems, anger responses and traumatic syndromes. And yet even after Flint was placed under the magnifying lens of national media, it still took the Environmental Protection Agency three years just to fund the infrastructure improvements that would be necessary to clean up Flint’s drinking water supply.
The levels of official deception and political indifference visited upon the largely black (57%) and economically disadvantaged people of Flint, as well as upon oppressed Native American reservations, are typical of the endemic institutional racism carried forward from colonial slavery and genocide, all reinforced by capitalism. These kinds of social institutions profit by externalizing misery and harm, which in turn relies on objectifying and commodifying human beings in our thinking. POC especially, but all of us to some extent, become something less than human in the eyes of CEOs, politicians, and police, and something less than deserving of concern and compassion when it comes to the twin-businesses of consumerism and distraction. We are consumers first, and citizens only when it is convenient to be treated as such, such as blaming us for not voting.
This same indifferent, settler’s mindset can be seen at work in the failure by our racist executive branch to respond more urgently to the COVID-19 pandemic, with people of color disproportionately represented both on the front line (e.g., nurses in need of PPE) and in mortality rates. The COVID-19 mortality rate for blacks in the U.S. is 6.2%, and it’s 3.6% for Indigenous people, compared to 2.6% for whites.
It’s rather shocking how willing our corporate rulers are to sacrifice tens of thousands of human lives on the altar of Mammon (often dressed up as “the American Dream”). We all know that if the coronavirus was killing mostly rich white people in country clubs and boardrooms, our government would have responded much more swiftly and with far greater determination and concern.
Against a background of chronic indifference to this lethal threat focused in African-American communities already plagued by high unemployment and poor-to-nonexistent health care, a murderous police officer thought nothing of snuffing out what he clearly viewed as a less-than-human life in front of the whole world on social media. Similar to the death of a fruit merchant in an oppressive environment that precipitated the Arab Spring, Floyd’s death sparked a global conflagration of moral outrage, and is thankfully generating sustained attention from both media and politicians.
We know that George Floyd is only the latest in an endless and ongoing list of victims of racist bigotry and belligerence, and we saw similar demonstrations of public outrage and militarized police brutality six years ago in Ferguson, Missouri. But Floyd’s murder is turning out to be the racial straw that has hopefully broken the colonial camel’s back. What we are witnessing now, in real time, is how collective consciousness can suddenly shift in a way that what has always been tolerated by the body politic is no longer viewed as tolerable.
It is now painfully evident to the public at large, not just vicitimized and marginalized communities, how racial prejudice has been increasingly weaponized and militarized in the legal institutions of our unjust system of governance-by-domination. It is also clear that this implicit declaration of war on the American people is intended to enforce the greatest concentration of wealth ever witnessed. We all know who they are here to protect and serve — and it ain’t us.
Somehow, all the previous public lynchings, as well as the vicious cruelty of law enforcement at Standing Rock, weren’t quite enough to catalyze a social and moral imperative for systemic change. But in the clarifying light of a global pandemic, an emperor emerged from his bunker and strutted his naked id across the White House lawn, carrying a bible as his only fig leaf, and everyone together saw that he had no clothes.
It almost seems that the conscience of the entire human population has been pricked, and is now rising up with an increasingly unified voice, in harmony with young people in the streets, demanding an end to the senselessness of institutionalized racism. We may not be unanimous in fact — far from it, unfortunately, as evidenced by the rise of nationalism— but the long arc of justice is clearly describing a majority opinion. There is now a global mandate for justice that politicians are having a difficult time placating with their tried-but-never-true ‘reforms.’
Long overdue. And just beginning to play out.
The Institutionalized Racism & Structural Violence of the Climate Crisis
“The fact is that we live in a world that has been profoundly shaped by power. Differentials of power between and within nations are probably greater today than they have ever been. These differentials are, in turn, closely related to carbon admissions. The distribution of power in the world therefore lies at the core of the climate crisis.”
~ Amitav Gosh, from“The Great Derangement”
Perhaps now, primed by Covid and #BLM, we privileged descendants of America’s settlers and her favored immigrants are ready to consider the lethal role that overt racism is playing in our refusal to respond to the existential threat of our shared climate crisis. (Full disclosure: I am a Mayflower child).
After all, as a practical matter, is it not true that ruthless rulers like Trump, Bolsonaro and Putin have their knees on the windpipe of Mother Earth? She was already wheezing before the Covid pandemic, and the response to the Covid distraction has only been to accelerate the rate at which we are hacking away at her lungs.
Gaia can’t breathe, either.
So what, exactly, does it mean to say that our collective failure to respond to rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere is a racial issue? To be clear, this is not about co-opting the continuing imperative of #BLM. But at the same time public forums begin seriously taking up the issue of reparations for slavery and genocide, climate activists of every color would be wise to level up our own discussions of racism in solidarity with oppressed people of color everywhere. If nothing else, the coronavirus has brought it home to us that these systemic problems are global in scale.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, climate change has reached the point of collective biospheric trauma, and this new phenomenon of climate trauma, with its ever-present and accelerating threat to all life on Earth, is triggering us all, just as the collective trauma of the pandemic is triggering us, and bringing all of our historically unresolved collective traumas to the surface. This, in turn, is leaving us little choice but to focus our collective awareness on the still un-repaired, cumulative traumas we’ve inflicted on women (#MeToo), African-Americans, and Indigenous peoples, because these “lesser” traumas are inseparable from the much larger traumas we’re inflicting on Earth, herself, all other species, and the children of the world.
Without detracting from #BLM and the institutionalized racism of militarized police brutality, it is therefore of equal importance to acknowledge an even more lethal symptom of the disease of white supremacy, one with a greater death toll already than the pandemic and police brutality combined. As Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, U.S. Coordinator with Leap, has been articulating for some time now, the imperialistic, settler mentality that inhibits effective social change in the U.S. and elsewhere is also precluding the kind of radical global changes that scientists tell us are urgently called for if we are to avert apocalyptic climate cataclysm.
As with environmental racism, everyone can appreciate quite readily the fundamental injustice of the climate crisis: the economically ‘developing’ world of the Global South and Indigenous communities in the world are bearing a grossly disproportionate share of the effects of climate trauma, while contributing far less to the problem. In fact, much of the climate crisis is driven by our Imperialist control of their sub-standards of living — stripping their lands of resources, with virtually no regard for the environmental consequences they are then left to live with, all in order to fuel our comfortably numb lifestyles of excess consumerism and profligate waste.
These same disparities, by the way, are on full display with the global response (and lack thereof) to the pandemic, as David Bush points out quite clearly in his essay The Imperialist Pandemic. The same corporate, imperialist powers that prevent effective responses to the climate crisis (e.g., financial institutions) are busy capitalizing on the misery of the pandemic.
It is a rather convenient and ultimately lethal trap, however, to scapegoat imperialist actors on the world stage for inhibiting an effective response to the climate crisis without also acknowledging the part our own conditioned attitudes play in not demanding urgent action and reform in response to the climate crisis — the same way white allies are now, finally, demanding urgent reforms in response to the persistent calls of #BLM. Just as we can see the role white supremacy is playing in the structural violence of America’s police force, we also need to see clearly the role white supremacy plays in the structural violence of our assault on Mother Earth.
As climate scientist and Zen teacher Dr. Kritee Kanko bluntly stated on a FB post on June 10:
“White supremacy is the most important cause of climate crisis.”
Let that sink in. In response to our sudden awakening of collective compassion for POC, Hop Hopkins echoes Dr. Kritee’s sentiment in the national magazine of The Sierra Club, calling it a “long over-due realization” that “[w]e’ll never stop climate change without ending white supremacy.” And the Rev. Fletcher Harper, an Episcopal priest who is executive director of GreenFaith, a global religious-based climate action network posted this on his blog:
“For too long, the environmental movement has not been concerned enough about the destruction that climate change wreaks on Black and Brown communities around the world. For too long, we haven’t been concerned enough about Black and Brown people who can’t breathe because they are carrying the weight of climate change and White supremacy.”
This is a criminally neglected aspect of climate activism that deserves far more discussion than I can possibly advance here, but at least we can all agree on the parameters and critical import of the issue. Because as Hopkins notes in the same article: “The richest people need for white supremacy to remain invisible so they can continue to plunder our planet.”
Look at the role white supremacy has played at the outset of the mass migrations which climate scientists have predicted all along would result from global warming. The climate crisis has already produced unprecedented droughts in countries like Syria, sparking civil wars and strife, flooding mostly white Europe with climate refugees. This has been met with a rise in white nationalism and border restrictions. The same is of course true here in America, where Trump wants to wall off refugees from the Global South who are being driven north by the very conflicts and climate displacements that we are largely responsible for.
Would the U.S. and Europe be walling out climate refugees and migrants if they were not poor people of color? Do we care that our own accustomed, fossil-fueled lifestyle is partially, if not largely, to blame for their woes?
Would we be content to watch millions, or even billions, of people perish in the mostly dark-skinned Global South if, somehow, we could ourselves avoid the worst of climate chaos?
It kinda seems that way.
What would it look like if we were to respond to the climate crisis with the same urgency and resolve that shaped our initial response to the Covid pandemic? It’s instructive to note that this pandemic happened to hit the mostly white countries of Europe and North America first, or the exact opposite progression of impacts that we are seeing with global warming.
There is no reasonable debate anymore as to what needs to be done — halt and then reverse the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from fossil fuels — and the pace at which it needs to be accomplished.
But when it comes to the kind of action that would even slow this heat engine, the world acts like a deer in the headlights of its oncoming demise. Why is that? Certainly bad actors like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Putin bear a lot of the blame for derailing the Paris Accords. But we also know that even if every signatory was faithfully implementing the Paris Accords, it would still not be nearly enough to avoid unparalleled suffering and loss on a scale that would’ve made Hitler blush.
Given that the Paris Accords were negotiated on the assumption of 3–4 degrees celsius rise in average global temperatures, it seems quite apparent that wealthy, mostly white capitalist countries and corporations in the first world are making a calculated assumption that they can somehow survive on islands of luxury in a sea of misery. And so they keep kicking the can down the road.
The implicit injustice, amorality, and racism that undergirds this global stalemate and, thus far, the lack of urgency from the people not named Greta Thunberg, or part of Extinction Rebellion, can be appreciated by considering the alpha and omega factors of Climate Trauma: How we got here, and how we get out. Anyone can quickly appreciate the imperialist, racist overtones of the climate crisis and paralysis by considering three graphs.
First, consider the respective responsibility of imperialist, exploitive cultures versus any of the other countries in how we got into this lethal mess:
Pretty clear who has benefited from the Industrial Revolution the most, and who has been exploited by its twin insults: first, our corporations bribing their leaders and taking their resources, usually fouling large areas of already impoverished countries in the process (and often hiring mercenary armies to enforce their bottom line on unwilling populaces); and, now their countries are on the front-burners of runaway climate change, disproportionately experiencing unprecedented droughts, disappearing water sources — except for occasional floods — and massive wildfires or other unnatural disasters.
No wonder, then, there are more refugees fleeing those regions of the world hit hardest by climate change now than the world has seen since at any other time since the end of WWII. They’re climate refugees, whether we call them that or not. They’re people of color, guilty only of being born into poverty and strife. And they’re living in sub-human bondage to our precious economies and cherished consumer culture.
Now consider where your own carbon footprint falls in this graph:
75% of those global carbon footprints are accounted for by white countries. As Dr. Kritee points out in an illuminating YouTube presentation, what needs to happen quickly in order to come into compliance with the Paris Accord’s goals is for everyone in the world to reduce their carbon footprint to that of a person in India by 2030–2035. This is an emergency, after all — even more than the pandemic, though this higher urgency tends to be obscured by the significant, decades-long time-lag between our emissions and climate impacts. No amount of green energy can bring everyone up to our material standard of comfortable excess in that time frame, so it is clearly incumbent on we, the privileged, to simplify our lifestyles to accommodate all life.
To be even more specific, the average carbon footprint of Americans is about 50,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents. According to the famous 1.5 degree report released in 2018, in a just world where all countries fairly shared the burden of stabilizing our shared climate, the average American’s lifestyle would need to be reduced by a factor of ten in the next ten years — down to only 5000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents. This is equal to the average emissions of someone living in India today.
So far, we haven’t budged — except, of course, in response to the pandemic. But that was understood by most to be just a temporary inconvenience. Do we feel entitled to live a more extravagant lifestyle than a human being from a ‘country of color’? Let us try to remember that geneticists have proven that we all come from the same tribe in Africa, and skin color is merely a reflection of migration to different latitudes. For that matter, are we entitled to sacrifice whole species to support our accustomed diet?
According to Andreas Malm, at a minimum we need to take the following steps: stop building carbon-burning power plants; shut the existing ones down; halt any further expansions of air, sea and road travel, introducing a rationing system for transportation; rapidly expand our mass transit systems; switch urgently to food grown locally with regenerative agriculture (i.e., break up Big Ag); dismantle the meat industry’s factory farms and plantations in the Global South, substituting plant-based proteins; and, heavily invest in climate drawdown efforts to draw down carbon levels before they can exert their full climate impacts.
What is stopping us from marching on D.C. to demand this kind of climate triage right now?
Maybe this final graph will bring all this clearly into focus:
Gaia’s Life Matters
If America, purveyor of the American Dream and the World’s Policeman, is a microcosm of the global system right now, and if everyone is clearly seeing just how racism has been baked into our social disparities and oppressive systems, then why aren’t we seeing the same racism enshrined in our global economy that we see on the streets of Minneapolis?
Are we waiting for Gaia to say she can’t breathe before we take our knee off the necks of African countries and the rest of the Global South?
Will we even do so then?
Maybe it is time that we in the over-developed world demand that our corporate rulers treat the entire planet as an autonomous, racism-free, endless-war-free, and cop-free zone. The world as it is seen from space — a world without borders. It’s time for America, the World’s Policeman, these polarized and militarized disintegrating states, to turn in our badge and dismantle our forces. For all the same reasons, really, that we’re demanding the same of our militarized cities.
For humanity’s sake. For a future to be possible. For everyone — regardless of their ethnicity or place of birth. Because in the final analysis, from the standpoint of recovering from this accelerating biospheric trauma, which is on pace to lay waste to the living world, there is only one race of people.
And, alas, there is only one planet. We, as a species, only get one chance to get this right.
When we do get it right, when we do demand an end to imperialist power over people and countries of color, and power-over Indigenous peoples, when we do finally stop abusing the natural world and listen to ecologists and Indigenous voices for the Earth, when we finally enlist Gaia as an ally in our struggle, then and only then can anyone finally and genuinely be heard to say:
Yes, it has come to pass: All Lives Matter.
