After Carbon Neutrality, Climate Justice

So great is the sadness of our times. The recent shootings in Colorado Springs and San Bernadino brought to light a disturbing fact; in the United States this year there have been more days with mass shootings than not in the United States. From Beirut to Kenya to Lebanon to Paris to Syria, the global community is no less spared from violent attacks grounded in racial, cultural and religious discrimination, the need for resources and the desire for power.

Our own campus environment mirrors the turbulence of the world, confirming once and for all that we do not in fact live in a bubble. Just think — if we are so separated from the rest of the world, why does our campus possess the same forms of ingrained racism and widespread mental health concerns that permeate the “outside?” Whether we want to believe it or not, we are firmly grounded in this world and if we are to garner any hope for addressing these challenges, it’s high time we open our eyes and acknowledge the structures of injustice upon which they’re based.
This is essentially the mission of Middlebury’s divestment campaign. Put another way, we at DivestMidd seek nothing if not to raise awareness of the rampant yet often ignored human rights violation of unprecedented proportion: climate injustice.

You may ask – what is climate justice? In short, over the last 300 years, developed nations industrialized via fossil fuel extractive economies. By some disturbing fate of geography, the result of this industrialization – floods, drought, rising seas – have disproportionately affected poorer nations in the global south.

The same goes for the home-front. The consequences of the fossil fuel industry’s actions here in the U.S. – in terms of pollution and economic vulnerability spurred by the all-consuming boom-and-bust nature of extraction – are disproportionately placed on poorer Americans and people of color.

And while rising sea levels, drought and warming temperatures – not to mention the imperialistic practices of the fossil fuel industry itself – have moved into developing countries and stripped the world’s least resourced and most marginalized communities of their lands, livelihoods and cultures. The wealthier countries who caused these devastating effects have done next to nothing. The future of our planet and global peace are threatened as a result.

And nowhere is this more poignant than in Syria. Beginning in 2007, Syria entered a period of severe drought. This period of draught caused the price of food to double and forced millions of small farmers to abandon the countryside for Syrian cities already overcrowded with more than a million similarly desperate Iraqi refugees.

Syria’s representative to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization feared the situation was contributing to a “perfect storm” that could destabilize the country,and desperately pleaded for foreign aid. Yet, the United States and the rest of the global community remained largely unmoved by the Syrian’s appeal. And while the atrocities of Bashar al-Assad’s regime likely trump the destabilizing effects of the drought in terms of causing the war in Syria, it’s probably “not a coincidence,” as Secretary of State John Kerry recently noted, that the war was preceded by four years of failed rains, which scientists cite as a result of human-induced climate change.

Upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Wangari Maathai, the first African woman and the first environmentalist to receive the prize, proclaimed that: “there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground.” At no time has that shift been more necessary than now. Our actions to promote global peace and environmental stewardship must match the gravity of the injustices at hand.

Thus, as we move closer to accomplishing the goal of carbon neutrality, let us celebrate this truly incredible accomplishment, which I may say was a project originally conceived of and designed by a group of student environmental activists. And then let us go forward with the awareness that the severity of our time demands that we move beyond a singular focus on our own “carbon footprint.” In this way we are called to a greater level of responsibility to the global community – the cause of climate justice.

Much of this work begins with awareness about what exactly constitutes climate injustice. In this pursuit, DivestMidd is working closely with President Patton and other members of the administration to bring a series of speakers to campus to educate the community on how we can better align our investments with our environmentally and globally minded values and take new actions to address structures of social and economic oppression that have paved the way for climate injustice.

Our hope is that these forums will spur a broad campus conversation on how we can better work to address the climate crisis by shifting the paradigm of our conception of environmentalism to ensure a just transition towards a sustainable future.

The movement we imagine calls for planetary awareness – the realization that we are all inextricably linked. We seek to address the root structural causes of climate injustice – rampant inequality, the pervasive notion that some lives matter more than others and the idea that the wealthiest can continue to deplete our world’s finite resources at a tragic pace and treat the atmosphere like a garbage dump. It is no coincidence that six of our world’s top 10 wealthiest corporations are involved in fossil fuel extraction.

Some may question whether this movement will be successful. Can we sustain a global climate justice movement, essentially a global movement for justice at its core? A part of me fears the task is too large for us to hold. Even feminist leader Gloria Steinem conceded that women’s liberation would necessarily have to wait until black power was won, though we still seem to be waiting for both to arrive today. From the Chartists and Owenites in Industrial England to the Communist revolution to Occupy just a few years back, movements that have sought such large scale structural changes often fail to achieve their goals.

But a larger part of me fears even more that we don’t have a choice not to try and build this movement, no matter how much we may fail in the process. The seas will rise, disease – spurred by warmer temperatures – will spread rapidly into already vulnerable regions, the rich will continue to profit from the extraction of the poor’s land and labor and the global south will find the consequences of climate change exacerbated and even more difficult to overcome through adaptation. The global north is also now feeling the effects of climate change to an increased degree. This is everyone’s fight. This is not charity. Undoubtedly, we must try to build a successful climate justice movement.

The gravity of our call becomes even more urgent upon the realization that the leaders charged with protecting human society and the planet are doing – this seems to be a trend – next to nothing. The UN climate conference in Paris will likely conclude – for the 21st time since 1992 – without a binding, and therefore effective, commitment from the world’s most powerful countries, who also happen to be the largest emitters. This is because world leaders know a binding treaty is impossible considering Senate Republicans in the U.S. – largely financed by the fossil fuel industry – have vowed to block a binding treaty and any monetary commitment to aid the most affected and least resourced countries in efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.

As an institution of higher education and a self-proclaimed environmental leader, we are called to inhabit the fullest conception of these identities. Let us see the climate crisis for the human rights violation that it is, and match the urgency of this crisis through grassroots mobilization around education, political change, economic redistribution, restorative justice, socially responsible investment and yet unborn ideas that will enable us to transition towards a more just and sustainable world.