Why environmentalists should be anti-racist

Adapted from Sierra Club, see original post here.

Everyone deserves a healthy planet with clean air and water and a stable climate. Everyone deserves equal protection under the law and the right to live their lives free of discrimination, violence and hatred. These issues are not separate. Unfortunately, Indigenous and Black people often do not have equal access to these basic rights.

Systematic racism empowers polluters and leads to the destruction of our most cherished places. The companies that have profited from fossil fuels and accelerated the climate crisis are the same ones who benefited from environmental injustice, colonialism and racism.

“When we pollute the hell out of a place, that’s a way of saying that the place—and the people and all the other life that calls that place home—are of no value.”

-Hop Hopkins, director of strategic partnership for the Sierra Club

When it comes to public lands: while the creation of national parks protected lands—which would otherwise have been destroyed by white people with a settler colonialism mindset of extraction—we must remember that every American acre is stolen land, much of it once worked with stolen labor.

Environmentalists should support the movement led by Indigenous peoples to take back management of native ancestral and treaty lands.

We can’t say we work to protect the environment, to fight for clean air and water, and to confront the climate crisis without also tackling racisms, colonialism, and other injustices.