Earth Day Matters for Social Justice and Climate Justice

Race to save Earth and Race are connected

There are still many people who have not realized the huge connection between the verdict in the George Floyd case, and people clamoring at borders as climate refugees. There is also a connection between what is happening in India — a serious humanitarian crisis as the COVID-19 virus rages through — and the agricultural crisis there (and worldwide) because food production has moved to massive scale at the expense of soils, people, and habitats.

The simple truth is that there is no where on this big blue marble where we are not impacted by the confluence of toxic fuel and toxic domination ideas.

That is, the idea that runaway and rapacious capitalism is the “way things are,” or that we need some “strong” law and order authoritarian style of socialism, is still prevalent. Both systems, of course, are doomed.

Any system that leaves behind the workers, the locations, and the resources themselves in order to benefit a few at the expense of the many is unsustainable.

Earth Day is when we find alliance

Many people are speaking out. Greta knows it. David Attenborough has always known it. A few politicians have always known it, Al Gore, or Elizabeth Warren. Or look at Bernie Sanders insistence on inclusion for decent wages and a standard of healthy living.

Yet, the alliance between activists for social justice and climate justice still do not share enough overlap. This must change today. We need a Blue Union alliance.

We all exhausted ourselves in a time of COVID marching in the streets. We were told that if I carry a sign saying “I Can’t Breathe,” that’s just more justification for spraying you with chemicals and gasses, for pointing to fires and looting, and to say as a sort of insult to injury: “Try breathing this!”

Few, if any news stories spoke of that pollution, not just of justice, but of the places where such wasteful cruelty was employed. Do Portland, Oregon birds like tear gas and noise while they try to fledge their babies? I wonder.

As bad as our lawfully enacted response systems are, they are based on the lie that demanding social justice is unpatriotic, and that the millions of protestors around the world were actually just “causing trouble.”

That said, I can see where racism and sexism as most cultures see them — as newly “woke” areas of our attention — is also largely to blame.

We get so hung up in our legitimate screaming for a place at the table that we forget the table is disintegrating before our very eyes.

There is one problem

The problem all social justice and climate justice issues share is this one: Domination culture that uses people, habitats, injustice, law, health inequality, and more destroys our hope and belonging.

Racism, sexism, and homophobia are more highlighted than ever before. We have not yet done enough to highlight class and caste. Class and social privilege are still upheld and protected largely because the other more volatile offenses are so easy to spot that we can no more look away from something like the Chauvin trial, than we could look away from our own house on fire.

Still, this summer in 2021, more fires and floods will consume many of us. Famines and conflicts due to territorial disputes (usually over drought, or flood, caused food and water shortages) will come to the fore.

They will continue to come to our urgent attention, because from now on, the new normal screams at us that we should have stopped the toxic pollution long ago.

The problem was, perhaps, that simple unfairness, the inability to have a say due to toxic money influence in our elections, allowed some leaders who were more like the sound and smell of Dump to interfere with our daily needs.

The problem is, for those who can see past the carbon emissions to see the assaulted forest through the trees, we are blind to this one big problem: domination. We are One Earth, but pretend to be separate tribes.

Toxic relationships

Toxins, as we see this Earth Day, have done us no favors. We have used them to hurt ourselves, primarily by trying to push their worst effects onto others less privileged than ourselves.

Usually those “others” are ocean reefs, dying birds, whole forests, micro-plasticated everything, starving polar bears, or kangaroos burned to death in Australia. But people to are beginning more and more to taste the poison.

Therefore, by the next Earth Day, let us hope that people have realized where the toxicity actually is.

It is in ourselves, in our elections, in class divisions, in corporate and electoral corruption and due to all of this, it is now in our air, water, food, soil, homes, and bodies.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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