Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When we started organizing around climate justice back in the early period of 2006 to 2009 it was mostly just an idea. Now there are local groups and national scale groups all over the world that strongly identify with the mission of climate justice…
The Glasgow Agreement is an initiative picking things up where By 2020 We Rise Up left off. It provides a framework for further strategic escalation of social movement action for climate justice.
In many ways, the results of the upcoming elections will reflect the ways youth activists and older activists are able come to a common understanding of what climate justice means and what they want the future world to look like.
Unequal exchange—basically the notion that more labour is exchanged for less labour through international trade—was discussed by the political economists David Ricardo and Karl Marx in the 19th century.
I started to re-assess my assumption about who this letter would be directed to. When I looked up the dictionary definition – “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events” – and I recalled the way the world has changed since 2018, it became clearer where the power really is.
With us, the people.
In the famous 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and associated programmes, the first step is to recognise that you are indeed addicted. That you are bound to a substance over which you do not have control, such that this substance has become your ‘higher power’, its material qualities and structures of access determining one’s activities and choices in the world.
Also, if we cannot expand our perspective to transcend White supremacy, how are we going to transcend “human supremacy,” that is, the delusional belief that we are outside of nature, that we don’t have to obey the same laws as every other species on the planet?
I believe that working on intersecting crises, on so-called wicked problems, is the order of the day, and as in most things, the very interlocking of our crises gives me hope for confronting them with courage and vision.
From the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to the oil fields of Texas, to the Ecuadorian Amazon, The Condor & the Eagle tells the story of the collective struggle of the Indigenous peoples of North and South America in their fight to preserve their communities and to protect the Earth from climate change.
The good news is that there is a “new Global Left” that enjoys a multitude of emerging movements, including climate justice groups led by young people. The rich array of activist groups and the dynamism and passion they display excite a sense of possibility.
COVID-19 and climate breakdown are interconnected crises. They are the unintended consequences of a 500-year history of territorial expansion, conquest, resource extraction and industrial growth as a by-word for progress that has seen carbon pumped into the earth’s atmosphere at a rate that carbon sinks, compromised by industrial-scale deforestation, can’t contain.
Having acknowledged these connections, what steps can we take, as scholars, activists, and humans, to cultivate those connections in ways that empower more-than-human beings and ourselves in our collective struggle for Climate X? What does it look/sound/feel like to build climate solidarity beyond the boundaries of the human species? It’s time to find out.
