Why we can’t tackle the environmental emergency without tackling racism – Greenpeace UK

Confronting injustice

For decades, Indigenous Peoples, people of colour and their allies have been fighting environmental racism, and highlighting its many injustices. Today, a new report from Greenpeace and the Runnymede Trust gathers these stories and struggles together. It should be a rallying point for those already working on racial justice issues, and a call for the wider environmental movement to join them.

The report cites examples of environmental racism from all over the world, but they all connect back to the UK. Its crucial to understand our countrys central role in these injustices. The UK is the birthplace of the industrial revolution, a global financial hub, and an imperial power that has invaded or colonised practically every country on earth. This ubiquity has left our fingerprints on all the overlapping crises of our age, and gives us a special responsibility for how they play out. The centuries of exploitation and discrimination is behind the environmental inequalities that split our world apart today.

People of colour across the globe are disproportionately losing their lives and livelihoods as a result of the environmental emergency. These impacts fall heaviest on those who did the least to cause them and have the least resources to be able to cope with it. Much of the carbon from fossil fuels in the atmosphere today came from Europe, the US and other wealthy countries in the global north, yet nearly all the countries most impacted by the climate crisis are in the global South.

Beating an indigo vat by hand, Allahabad, India, 1877, by French photographer Oscar Mallitte. In the early 19th century, British colonisers exploited people, land and resources, establishing indigo plantations across India to farm and process this highly profitable crop. The demand for the blue dye in Europe gave it a status similar to commodities like tea, coffee, silk, and gold. SSPL/Getty Images

These injustices, and the exploitative relationships that underpin them, are the legacy of colonialism. The British empire, and the corporations it sponsored, raked in enormous riches from slavery, cheap labour and the plunder of raw materials worth trillions of dollars. Thanks to technological advantages and colonial oppression, rich countries have squeezed huge profits out of the fossil fuel economy while setting the globe on a path of dependence on fossil fuels and causing much of the associated emissions, leaving the global South poorer and more exposed to the environmental emergency as a result.

The treatment of entire groups of people as inferior or less deserving of a decent life is still allowing governments and industry to dump environmental impacts on to the global South. Since the heaviest impacts of the climate crisis fall onto poorer, less powerful countries, fossil fuel giants and governments in the global North feel less pressure to get to grips with the problem. Since the UKs plastic waste is shipped off to some of these same countries, the plastic industry and our government can get away with not tackling our plastic problem at the source. And since its mostly Indigenous peoples and local in the global South that suffer from the destruction of the worlds rainforests to produce palm oil, meat or timber, companies and governments can carry on chopping down this climate-critical ecosystems with near impunity.

Fridays for the future MAPA (Most Affected People and Areas) activists, calling on the UK Government and world leaders to stop failing us on the climate crisis, outside the 26th UN Climate Change Conference, (COP26), in Glasgow, UK, November 2021. Activists (from left) are Farzana Faruck (Bangladesh), Maria Reyes (Mexico) Jakapita Faith Kandanda (Namibia), Edwin Moses Namakanga (Uganda). Their placards read Pay your climate debt, Climate reparations, Denial is not a policy! and You cant cheat nature. Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Greenpeace

As it will be clear by now, these are huge and complex issues. Theres no single magic bullet that will solve them all at one stroke. But recognising these inequalities and where they come from has to be the first step towards putting them right.

These are some of the things that need to happen if we are to tackle the fundamental injustice at the heart of the nature and climate crisis:

The fight for the environment is a fight for equality and justice. And the simple truth is that environmentalism that excludes people of colour and other marginalised groups can never win. It will miss out on a wealth of knowledge modern and traditional on how people can live well with nature. But just as importantly, it will miss out on the energy of those with the biggest stake in its success. The environment connects to everything. Its time environmentalism did too.

Read the full report

Find out more about Dr Mya-Rose Craig on Birdgirl. Guest authors work with us to share their personal experiences and perspectives, but views in guest articles arent necessarily those of Greenpeace.

The rest is here:

Why we can't tackle the environmental emergency without tackling racism - Greenpeace UK