2020 Changed Everything About Climate Justice

During the global climate strikes in September 2019, VICE featured young and powerful leaders advocating for climate justice, all of them people of colour and under 30. They were a testament that movements for justice have always had many leaders, but they are often ignored or forgotten; at the time, many politicians, business elites, and news outlets had reduced the movement for climate justice to a singular player, Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg. 

The activists talked about how Black, brown, and Indigenous communities are often first and worst affected by climate change, whether they breathe in some of the world’s most toxic air, are forcibly relocated because of hurricanes and flooding, or still can’t access clean and safe drinking water.

Last year, when the pandemic hit and the George Floyd protests erupted, it became clear that there’s systemic racism not only in policing, but in the environment and health care too—and if people can’t breathe, they can’t fight for justice.

Here VICE World News returns to some of the activists to find out what’s happened since the global climate strikes, how the racial justice uprising and the pandemic have shaped their work, and what Joe Biden’s win means for the climate movement. 

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Juwaria Jama, the daughter of Somali immigrants, grew up in a predominantly Black community just a mile away from factories and highways she could see from her living room. “Our community has high rates of asthma because of the constant pollution,” said Jama, an organizer with Minnesota Youth for Climate Justice. 

When George Floyd was violently killed by police nearby, Jama said the ongoing fight for the right to breathe became even more fervent. “We realized that the environment movement needs to understand these intersections. These uprisings for Black Lives Matter shows that we can no longer sugarcoat issues of justice in the climate movement, whether that is police brutality or racism.”

And while many in the movement for racial and environmental justice are celebrating the U.S. election, Jama said President Joe Biden has not done or said enough yet about climate justice. “Rejoining the Paris accord is important but we need to do more. People of color are the ones that are most impacted by environmental inequities and by the climate crisis. We will not have climate justice without racial justice.”

Last year, Quannah Chasinghorse’s homelands and way of life were threatened when the Trump administration decided to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. It was also the year she turned 18 and could vote for the first time, which meant voting for Biden, who promised to protect the refuge. “My great-grandparents and my grandparents didn't have that right to vote, and I did it for them.”

When Biden won, he nominated Deb Haaland to serve as the first Native American Cabinet secretary and head of the Interior Department. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order declaring a temporary moratorium on oil and gas drilling in the refuge. “Since Trump finally being voted out of office and our victory with Deb Haaland, it felt like a really big step in not just my healing, but for Indigenous people all over. It means a lot of our lands are being protected, lands that we have been fighting for for years,” said Chasinghorse. 

“Obviously, it doesn’t mean that the work is done or that we can stop fighting so hard for our lands and our waters. My vision for the next year is really just to keep our lands safe and sacred. For me, it’s a big part of my way of life. That’s what I'm scared of, losing anything else, because we’ve lost so much already due to colonization.”

For Aneesa Khan, executive coordinator at the youth-led advocacy group SustainUS, the pandemic made it difficult for her and other youth activists to advocate for climate justice in international spaces: many of those gatherings were postponed or cancelled. “This is proof that we are living in the same systemic injustice that has been happening for thousands of years that continues to happen to the same people in any crisis,” she said. 

But the pandemic also accelerated the decline and fall of fossil fuels, which opened up other opportunities to campaign. “We are seeing so clearly that oil is a false product being sold right now because its value is so low,” said Khan, who is also an organizer with Oil Change International. In December, both Denmark and the U.K. agreed to stop funding fossil fuel projects overseas. “We are seeing wins that were hard to imagine before,” Khan said.

“With the U.S. election, people have more hope to continue doing this work. We are moving from defending environmental policies and people’s lives, to advocating for and imagining the world we really want.”

In the short-term, Khan is feeling “pumped” for the day she can organize in person, “to feel renewed. I can't wait for these politicized Gen Z-ers to get out of the house.”

Like for many other youth, the pandemic slowed down Helena Gualinga’s pace of life. After attending the 2019 global climate strikes in New York and founding Polluters Out, an international movement that targets the UN Climate Talks because they are largely sponsored by the fossil fuel industry, she returned home to the remote village of Sarayuku in the southern Amazon for the first six months of the pandemic. Almost immediately, in April, Sarayaku was flooded by unprecedented rains that washed homes and schools away. “It was really scary; I never thought I would so soon see this happen to my entire community,” she said. “It didn’t look or feel like my home, going to my neighbors and seeing they didn’t have a house anymore, or to my uncle’s—he lost everything.”

The floods also made the ability to harvest wild foods impossible. The community put themselves at risk of contracting COVID-19 by having to travel to the nearest city of Puyo—one day by canoe or 25 minutes by plane—to buy supplies and food. “You risked taking the virus back into the community. It was horrible to witness that happen,” she said.

Even weeks after the floods, Gualinga said her community was unrecognizable. “The river bed had no trees; all of the trees were gone because the flood washed them away.” Gualinga said climate change and deforestation are to blame—rainfall is more intense than ever in the region, and deforestation has stripped the land of trees and soil that protect the community from floods. 

The impacts of the climate crisis and fossil fuel industry prompted the community to act. ”My community has a proposal called Kawsak Sacha, or "Living Forest," a vision for living in harmony with the natural world based upon the ways ancestors have cared for the Amazon rainforest for millenia,” Gualinga said, adding that any land that’s covered by the plan cannot be used for resource extraction. And the proposal isn’t new. “When I was younger and growing up in the community we used to talk about this vision and way of seeing life. It was there in our everyday life,” she said.

Makaśa Looking Horse, from Mohawk Wolf Clan and Lakota, is a water activist. For years, her community Six Nations of the Grand River, fought Nestlé, the world’s biggest bottler of water, which pumped millions of liters of water out of the local aquifer per day without consent, while most of Six Nations went without clean water. “They left the area, but they still owe for all the water they have stolen,” Looking Horse said.

The community is located just 90 minutes outside of Toronto, Canada’s largest and richest city, yet only 10 percent of the population is hooked up to the water treatment plant. The other houses have no running water or rely on water to be trucked in for $180 per week. 

The pandemic has been especially hard. “With no access to running water, how are you able to wash your hands, or proceed with health guidelines on COVID if we have no running water?” Looking Horse said. 

Currently, she is collaborating on a project to test the water quality in her community after discovering their water was contaminated with arsenic and other heavy metals. “We shouldn't have to test our water and come up with the solution to a problem Canada created.”  

Three years on, Amira Odeh Quiñones is still helping communities in Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria, and prepare for the disasters she knows are still to come. One of the ongoing problems is sourcing food: “We live in a place where colonial status has made us very dependent on food imports. After the hurricanes, our ports were closed for days and there was nationwide stress on how people could find food. We lost millions of trees in the disaster, so we are reforesting fruit trees to address food security in communities so people can have their own source of food.”

While the George Floyd protests gave communities in Puerto Rico the opportunity to talk more openly and urgently about how racism manifests daily, the US election did not have as much impact, Odeh Quiñones said. “For many local activists like myself, any president is just a new colonizer in chief. We tend to not engage as actively on U.S. politics because our culture is based on that we are a different nation and basically a different 'country' that is currently trapped as a colony.”

The pandemic also brought existing inequalities to light, and in some cases, made them worse. 

“People can’t focus on environmental issues because people are dying from COVID, and don't have the resources or mental capacity to think about so many problems at once,” she said. “My hope is that society starts to feel a need to change the system. People here are already starting to embody what they want to see. There are a lot more community organizations working to feed other people; there is a rebirth of local agriculture.”

Aryaana Khan knows the ravages climate change can wreak first hand. Both her parents and grandparents survived famine caused by colonization and war in Bangladesh. She herself grew up there, and lived through extreme flooding caused by the climate crisis.

During the past year as a member of the youth advisory council for COP26, the upcoming UN climate change conference, Khan has been working to expose the relationship between colonization and climate change. “In Bangladesh, when you are too busy surviving floods and making sure your village isn’t getting wiped off the map, you aren’t thinking about what happened 200 years ago that is the root of all this,” she said. “It is important to highlight that history and have solutions to reconcile it.” 

COVID-19 aggravated ongoing climate change impacts, Khan said. “People are thinking about food insecurity and mobility even more now. We have the world's eighth largest population, yet so many Bangladeshis are leaving their country. Bangladesh had incredibly fertile land to grow food but because of systematic colonial policy and war, food was rationed and cut off in Bangladesh, which caused a couple million deaths. None of us would be fighting so much over natural resources if we could grow our own food.” 

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