Broaden the Climate Movement or Fail.
By Rev Lennox Yearwood Jr.
Hip Hop Caucus - President & CEO
@RevYearwood
I was asked to write about why fracking is bad…that’s easy, fracking is horrible, and kills and pollutes people, as well as livestock.
Fracking is the process of drilling down into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the gas inside. Water, sand and chemicals are injected into the rock at high pressure which allows the gas to flow out to the head of the well…this process usually contaminates and pollutes everything around where the fracking is taking place, even causes earthquakes.
I was also asked if the California measure to place a moratorium on fracking is good, (for the record it is) and which actions should we use to oppose fracking.
The last part of that last question, “which actions should we use to oppose fracking” is where it becomes a little difficult to answer…the (We) being the (Climate Movement) should do everything in our collective power to stop fracking, but the problem is what happens when the (We) is not really a (We).
The urgency of the climate crisis, especially as it relates to fracking, requires that we have a powerful diverse coalition of people that reflects the diversity of our country coming together and taking action together.
Anything less than that…and we are setting our climate movement up for failure.
Given the climate crisis moment we are in – from a scientific perspective – it may feel like we do not have time to go back to the basics of education, outreach, and messaging in order to truly build a rainbow/diverse environmental coalition, and that we need to be executing strategies that mobilize activists and target decision makers directly.
But we have no choice but to face our movement’s current reality, that we are not diverse and we must pause to deal with the disconnect that exist, and fix it.
Luckily, we really do not have to pause for long; we simply need to execute authentic cultural strategies that will create a sincere and broad interest from communities of color to be more involved in the climate movement.
As a movement, there is no reason that we cannot ‘fight the good fight’ and build a diverse climate movement at the same time. The existing activist and movement base can continue to be activated and mobilized, while new campaigns are speaking to new audiences who have not yet been reached and empowered. Ultimately as a movement, we should be constantly bringing in new voices and new leaders and be consistently moving everyone up the ladder of engagement.
The key challenge to engaging more people of color to broaden the climate movement is not convincing individuals that they should be plugged into the climate movement. The key challenge is convincing individuals that if they step out there in their communities on the issue of climate, their friends, family, neighbors, peers, co-workers, etc. will follow them. Currently, people of color believe that given the challenges faced by their communities, (gun violence, poverty, education, etc.) that their families, friends and neighbors would be hard-pressed to make climate change a priority issue.
To overcome this perception challenge that communities of color cannot prioritize climate, we need to create a cultural space from which stronger, more effective grassroots organizing can then happen, so that climate activists and organizers in communities of color have the “relevant” factor, and in some cases “cool” factor, on their side.
To illustrate this point, because of the history of the civil rights movement, when an organizer who is working in an African American community, presents a current-day voter suppression issue to their community, the organizer does not have to do the heavy lifting of convincing folks that voter suppression is an issue that is relevant to them. Instead, the organizer can start from a level of inherent understanding that as African Americans, we care about voter suppression and we mobilize to overcome voter suppression efforts. Meanwhile, generally speaking, when an organizer in a community of color presents the issue of climate change she/he has a huge lift because the issue is not understood on a widespread scale as particularly relevant, and certainly not cool, to communities of color.
In effect, as the climate movement, we need to play “catch-up” by investing in cultural strategies that overcome the “relevancy test” and the “cool test”, so the work of grassroots and online climate organizing can be effective in communities of color as it is currently in other communities.
In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
We really have no other choice…All Power to All the People.
End Fracking Now!