“Half of all our economic activity – all the mines, all the factories, all the power stations, all the shipping, and all of the ecological impact that’s associated with these things – is done to make rich people richer.”
“The world’s superyacht fleet uses over thirty-two million gallons of oil and produces 627 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year . The world’s superyachts consume and pollute more than entire nations.”
“The grim truth is that the rich are able to live as they do only because others are poor: there is neither the physical nor ecological space for everyone to pursue private luxury.”
“The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms.”
There no undivided, undifferentiated “humanity” that caused climate change. It is the fault of the ultra-rich, of capitalism, and of an economic system that prioritises growth over all else.
A better world is possible. It doesn’t include rich people.
Saying things like “You don’t know REAL cold” and “You call THAT heat?” is OVER!!! I don’t want to ever see shit like this again!!! We are all the victims of a system that put profit before our human lives and we are experiencing a world wide climate catastrophe!!! Be fucking empathetic to one another!!!
Prof Tangang also cautions that thunderstorms will likely get
stronger and more intense. When global temperatures increase, it means
that there will be more heat and moisture in the air, which leads to
triggering more extreme weather.
Dr Renard Siew concurrs and notes that exreme weather is getting more frequent.
so I scanned both of these articles simply because I hoped the titles made them look worse than they were [the first one is an absolute shit show btw].
Sarah Jacquette Ray, the first writer, is a white woman who is conflating xenophobia, eugenics, and ecofascism with environmentalism. she consistently mentions that “POC are most affected by climate change but white people are the most vocal about climate anxiety” – which is true – but she doesn’t mention that that’s because POC tend to not have access to resources to talk about it and, when they do, they don’t get the same attention as their white counterparts.
Ray could’ve written an amazing article about how even in activist spaces, racism seeps in through the cracks and how we as white people should still be working on dismantling our biases even when we’re activists and uplifting marginalized voices. But she didn’t; she instead theorizes that climate anxiety is a coverup for xenophobia and fascism and white people by and large don’t actually care about the climate, they’re just racist.
She also consistently promotes her own books about climate anxiety, which seems shady as fuck, but that’s a personal gripe.
the second article is my Karin Louise Hermes, a Filipino-German woman, who was discussing her personal experiences with being tokenized, looked down upon, and treated as lesser than by her white counterparts. She was only apart of the conversation in order to add diversity or commercialize her trauma. At the end of the article, she even discusses how there’s a growing BIPOC Environmental & Climate Justice Collective in Berlin that she’s apart of and now she’s an activist on her own terms and with a group of people who see her as a human and respect her boundaries. She still advocates for environmentalist ideals, it’s just now on her own terms and actually addressing all the forms of bigotry and opression that go hand in hand with climate change.
There’s nothing wrong with her article, not in my opinion at least, VICE just promoted it shittily and I’m sure some random motherfucker is going to not actually read the article and twist Hermes’s words and make it seem like environmentalism is a white people thing and therefore invalid.
So TL;DR: the first one is a white woman coming off very white savior esque and conflating environmentalism with ecofascism and xenophobia without offering any real solution. the second one is a woman of color speaking about her experiences and discussing why she left the mainstream environmentalist party in germany to prioritize her own mental health. VICE should’ve promoted it better.
[also obligatory “there’s a chance I completely misinterpreted either article, or my own biases skewed my opinion. I am not claiming to be an unbiased source, and I encourage you to read the articles yourself if you want to because sometimes you need to read something yourself to form your own opinion and that’s okay”]
[[also I’m sorry for the slight rambling]]
Thank you!
Focusing on racism and whiteness in climate movements (plural) is important and that second article sounds very worth reading.
I also feel like it’s worth shining the spotlight on the media platforming these two articles. They are the ones who have decided which part of ‘the climate movement’ to consistently give media attention: the white part.
And after having ignored climate activists of color (which is most climate activists around the world tbh) and giving white activists the media spotlight for years now, they then prop up the hot take that ‘the climate movement’ is white? Like, the part of the movements that media outlets have celebrated certainly is. Maybe that says something about those media?
And like, how many movements have we seen where most of the hard work
was done by POC, while the media spotlight went to white people, only for
the same media to then publish articles about how white the movement
was? The LGBT movement comes to mind pretty much immediately.
This very much so brings to mind an article I read years ago. It was written by a woman of color talking about her life as a polyamorous person and how frustrating it can be to try to find polyamorous spaces that aren’t dominated by white people and to deal with the elevation of white poly voices over POC. This is a conversation very worth having about the intersection of race and relationship orientation, but instead the article chose to twist it to call polyamory a “privilege”, to insinuate through its presentation of an article written by a polyamorous woman of color that polyamory is a yucky white people thing for yucky privileged white people.
This was the first run in with this kind of article, but as the rest of the post shows it’s far from the last. Any time someone tries to say something is just “a white people thing” it is ALWAYS worth examining why.
Climate change is reshaping our coastlines—and, as it turns out, the forests that live there. A new study published on April 4 in the journal Ecological Applications found that over the last several decades, a sizable portion of the forested wetlands in a coastal wildlife refuge on North Carolina’s Coastal Plain became “ghost forests”—eerily large stands of dead, leafless trees.
ifesbob 