This March we put our plans for training and action on hold due to COVID-19 and threw ourselves into mutual aid and resiliency work while also pivoting into the pandemic future. In our last big email we asked our friends who are financially stable to use their stimulus checks for reparations. In June we turned our attention and time to the fight for Black lives in the streets sparked by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, the most recent in a 400 year history of oppression and death. In response we have been helping train, organize and act at the invitation of Black leadership where most of us live. Why? Because Black lives matter.

Racial Justice is Climate Justice

The fight for Black lives and the fight for climate justice are related. It has been evident forever that the front lines of the climate crisis are run across the bodies of Black, brown and Indigenous people in this country and around the world. The communities on the fence lines of refineries, oil rigs, power plants, tar sands mines, toxic waste dumps, polluting industries, and the people on the receiving end of the worst diesel exhaust and particulate pollution are not white. With perhaps the exception of Appalachia as a sacrifice zone for coal and fracking, the impacts of the fossil fuel industry fall along racial lines. And of course it is well established that those most directly impacted directly by the ravages of climate change in the US and around the world are the Black and brown people who have historically suffered under the boot of Western economic and environmental colonization, genocide, and exploitation.

But it goes deeper…