Eco-organizations, some of which have struggled with their own lack of racial diversity and an inadequate focus on environmental justice, have stepped up with statements in support of justice for murdered African American George Floyd and for a transformation of America’s policing and other racist policies. Journalists at Inside Climate News have highlighted statements issued by several of them. This is encouraging. As always, however, the question is how much will these words be turned into continuing action once the protests inevitably wane and the hard work begins of making the transformation happen? After all, in 2015 under President Obama, the entirety of The Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing is sitting on a government shelf.
Some eco-advocacy groups already have a history of working for environmental justice, or, like the youth-led Sunrise Movement, have made it a crucial element of their credos from the get-go. Among these are the grassroots Communities of Change and the Bronx Climate Justice North, which includes on its website: "Without a focus on correcting injustice, work on climate change addresses only symptoms, and not root causes."
Elizabeth Yeampierre, the executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn's oldest Latino community-based organization and co-chair of the national Climate Justice Alliance, told ICN’s reporters that she considers showing up to fight police brutality and racial violence an essential element of her climate crisis activism. Since "big green" eco-organizations have used the climate justice narrative without necessarily making it a priority of their agendas, Yeampierre says they should take direction from Black Lives Matter organizers in this matter.
The Rev. Fletcher Harper, an Episcopal priest who is executive director of GreenFaith, a global religious-based climate action network based in Highland Park, New Jersey posted 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."
Patrick Houston, climate and inequality campaigns organizer for New York Communities for Change, said he believes the broader climate movement is "becoming much more open to listening and understanding the struggles of the black community" by connecting "overt racism and violence" with "overlooked racism" stemming from proximity to power plants and other fossil fuel infrastructure.
Nathaniel Stinnett, founder and executive director of the Boston-based Environmental Voter Project, said "every fight we enter is also a choice about whom to protect—will we protect the privileged or the oppressed, the heard or the unheard, those who feel the brunt of environmental impacts or those who don't?"
At the widely read California Water Blog published by the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis, all discussions of water this week have been suspended in solidarity with the protests. On Monday, a blog post entitled "Black Lives Matter" included this:
Institutional racism is urgent and real, and should divert us from topics of California water at this time. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others are horrific, and the effects of a pandemic are disproportionately affecting communities of color. At the Center for Watershed Sciences, we acknowledge that while we strive for equity and inclusion in our science in line with our Principles of Community, we have a long way to go to address racism and unconscious bias.
We admire all who have flooded our social media and news this week with demonstrations of the great power of diversity in our nation and our scientific fields. We support and encourage everyone to have the hard conversations and do the hard work to learn more about how to better support all people in our communities. It is moments like this that remind us that bearing witness to racism and injustice is critical and must be a core part of our mission.
When those Minneapolis police officers decided last month that it was okay to put a knee on George Floyd’s neck and ignore his pleas that he couldn’t breathe, they didn’t do anything that other cops haven’t done for years. But doing it on camera has sparked a broader, bigger resistance to this behavior and to the unwillingness of so many of our leaders to do something to stop it.
It’s easy to say—as the hundreds of thousands of protesters of all colors stand against these atrocities and the system that encourages them to keep happening—that this time things will be different, this time we really will change this at its roots. Possibly. Hopefully. But that will require relentlessness. Allies of Black Lives Matter in this fight—whether the environment or some other matter is their usual political work—must be willing to back up their words and protests now with relentless support over the long haul. Black Americans don’t have the option of giving up the fight.