"I think the difficulty is this fragmentation ... all thought is broken up into bits. Like this nation, this country, this industry, this profession, and so on. ... That comes about because thought has developed traditionally in a way such that it claims not to be affecting anything but just telling you the way things are. Therefore, people cannot see that they are creating a problem and then apparently trying to solve it. ... Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. It's a way. If we can have a coherent approach to reality, then reality will respond coherently to us."--David Bohm
In essence, the human race was fragmented into Blacks and whites during the 1600s to prevent united protest of oppression by wealthy landowners. Whites were able to work off indentured servitude, while Blacks became slaves in perpetuity. People began to see this as just the way things were.
Another fragmentation: Racism and climate change, which are actually interdependent.
Slavery was followed by Jim Crow policies such as redlining, which forced people of color into front-line communities all over the U.S., such as Port Arthur, Texas, and Cancer Alley in Louisiana, where the residents suffer asthma in disproportionate numbers and die prematurely from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. The burning of fossil fuels also has polluted our atmosphere with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, causing climate change.
Shalanda Baker, the new deputy director of Energy Justice at the U.S. Department of Energy, writes in "Revolutionary Power": "People of color and the poor have provided an indirect subsidy to the rest of the beneficiaries of the energy system, primarily by shouldering health burdens and other stressors."
People of color (POC) suffer the worst impacts of climate change and are also the most vulnerable to toxic emissions from industry. While the wealthier may not immediately make these sacrifices of health, all of us will, eventually, suffer the impacts of climate change.
Racial injustice is a cause of climate change in many ways.
- It allows industry to pollute without adequate regulation. Low-income people, primarily POC, need the jobs and don't have the political power to compete with industry with which state governments are often aligned. POC also have always been met with harsher reprisals.
- Various tactics of voter suppression aimed at POC allow conservative takeover of state governments, which tend to support fossil fuels and toxic industries. Here in Arkansas, a law was just passed denying cities the right to ban Styrofoam containers. In many areas, such trash goes to incinerators placed in marginalized communities. Besides releasing dioxins, lead and mercury, incinerators also pump vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
- Through the separation of the "races," and through an appeal to religious values, those in power promote an identification of the poor white with the wealthy white, rather than with low-income POC, their socioeconomic and environmental natural allies.
- We are living with the accumulation of greenhouse gases from the Industrial Revolution, which developed the financial mechanisms of today's capitalism on the backs of slaves, and with the cotton they produced, which fed the industry that began the accumulation of emissions beginning climate change.
- In order to fight for changes imperative for our planetary survival, we need mass mobilization. To fight racism, we need leadership by POC, but peaceful protests organized by the Black Lives Matter movement are considered dangerous, and many are arrested, while there is more official tolerance of protests by white supremacists.
- The disparities of wealth created by past and present discrimination makes it difficult for communities of color to make the transition to renewable energies or regenerate damaged environments.
- EcoWatch determined that 1 billion people may become climate refugees by 2050. Most of these are denied refugee status by the countries that are most responsible for climate change driving them from their homes.
What can be done? We can put a price on carbon with a dividend coming back to the people, which would reduce emissions and allow low-income populations to adjust to the higher fuel prices.
There also has to be restitution for front-line communities who have served as the indirect subsidy for fossil energy for centuries. Development of renewable-energy projects in low-income communities is possible and being done around the country and world, but not to the extent necessary. There must be retraining of workers who have labored in the fossil-fuel industries, and funds dedicated to regeneration of lands denuded by mining and climate change.
In order to fight climate change, which impacts all of us, we have to redress the burdens borne disproportionately by some of us. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "We must learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] or perish together as fools."
Shelley Buonaiuto of Fayetteville is an artist and a member of Citizens' Climate Lobby.