As the COP26 gathering on Climate Change occurs in Glasgow, Scotland, amid an imminent climate catastrophe, one thing is certain: issues of reciprocity and redistribution are central and fundamental to justice for global and local communities. For us, a just transition roots our collaboration in the legacy of Environmental Justice. The concept of Environmental Justice has a specific history. It has its roots in the work of leading scholars, starting with W. E. B. Du Bois and the publication of The Philadelphia Negro (1898). Thirty years ago, the inaugural National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was held in Washington, D.C. on October 24-27, 1991. More than 300 grassroots activists of color and Indigenous leaders worked together to draft and adopt 17 principles of Environmental Justice. Such is the genesis. Together, these principles laid the groundwork to anchor the following commitments:
To embolden people of color that bear the brunt of harms done to the environment (land, water, and air), as well as to all the animals and plants that are bound up with the environment, as we humans are, and make crystal clear the simultaneity of pursuits of a more committed human life through the collective practices of care in how we live and work and interdependence with the natural world as a center-lane in the struggle for Environmental Justice;
That harnesses the self-activity of working-class masses at the grassroots to engage in contestation on multiple fronts: exploitation at workplaces, deprivation, lethal policing, homelessness, hyper-segregation in urban schools and residential arrangement, vulnerability to health hazards for people of color and Indigenous communities, peoples, and nations the world over, and, of course, all those in power that promote and defend the interlocking systems of extractive economies, criminalization, militarism, occupation, and dispossession locally, globally, and transnationally, namely the fossil fuel industry, multinational corporations, the mass media, bipartisanship, think tanks and technocrats, members of G20 and WTO, the IMF and World Bank, and the network of private military contractors;
To incite and engage in what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once called "a radical revolution of values” so that we can begin building communities of struggles at the grassroots that allow us to shift away from relationships founded on fossil fuel extraction, labor exploitation, and state violence and toward alternatives that come out of the radical redistribution of wealth, resources, and political power, as well as the revitalization of ways of knowing, being, and living that repudiate the very idea and project of human progress that have acquired legitimacy through the history of imperialism and colonialism.
To learn more about the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice, click here