Racial Justice is Climate Justice

Two Selections from: Ric Hudgens

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following passages come from Ric’s ongoing series, Quarantine Essays, now at medium.com/@rdhudgens, which includes nearly 70 pieces Ric has written and published since the start of the global Covid-19 pandemic, all in a spirit of solidarity with those most endangered by the virus, while critically discussing responses to it by the powerful around the world. The series aims to aid readers in steering away from paralyzing rage and fear, and to facilitate a continual return to questions of how to be good neighbors and to listen well to what the Earth is telling us must be done next. This is a service to be taken seriously, if we are to not just survive but also heal and return to a better way of living than the standard fare of violence and objectification in which most of us find ourselves immersed.

-SM    

I. Racial Justice is Climate Justice

​(June 24, 2020)It has never been more important to see the intersection of ecology, race, and politics.

The current uprisings across this country and around the world make evident the global reality of white supremacy. It’s not just a Trump thing or an American thing. (See Tiffanie Drayton, “Global Protests Reveal that White Supremacy is a Problem Everywhere,” Vox, June 23, 2020).

Many are also connecting the dots between racism and climate change. In The New Yorker, Bill McKibben wrote that “Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues” (The New Yorker, June 4, 2020). Sam Grant, executive director for the Minnesota branch of 350.org, said they had expanded their concerns “beyond divestment from fossil fuels and pipeline resistance.” (“Black Lives Matter protests spotlight environmental racism”, Ben Piven, Al Jazeera, June 19, 2020). The Sunrise Movement stated their support of the Movement for Black Lives (see Mattias Lehman, “The Climate Justice Movement Must Oppose White Supremacy Everywhere — By Supporting M4BL”).
Climate justice journalist Emily Atkin said, “Racial justice is climate justice.” (“Racial Justice Is Climate Justice’: Why The Climate Movement Needs To Be Anti-Racist”, Frederick Hewet, WBUR Radio [Boston public radio], June 9, 2020). Even Greta Thunberg has stated her support of Black Lives Matters. (‘Tipping point’: Greta Thunberg hails Black Lives Matter protests,” Jessica Murray, Guardian, June 20, 2020).

Thunberg observed that the global response to the pandemic has demonstrated that people in power can act when faced with an emergency. She said the same type of urgency is needed to address the climate crisis: “Suddenly people in power are saying they will do whatever it takes since you cannot put a price on human life.”

I’m convinced the pandemic is ecological. COVID-19 and climate change are the same things. “The coronavirus pandemic is like a chunk of ice falling off of a melting glacier.” writes Vijay Kolinjivadi. (“This pandemic IS ecological breakdown”, Resilience, April 9 2020).

Addressing climate change clearly demands political engagement, and, if Thunberg and others are correct, radical political engagement. “The climate and ecological crisis cannot be solved within today’s political and economic systems,” she said. “That isn’t an opinion. That’s a fact.” I suspect the same is true for seriously addressing racial justice. Racism and climate collapse are stretching our systems to the breaking point. Perhaps our best hope is to break them.

But here’s a glitch: the confluence of racial justice and climate justice concerns focuses attention toward the racism already inherent within the environmental movement.

Last year Vice News started a new series “The Tipping Point” that addresses environmental justice. Two recent articles spoke to race issues within environmentalism and environmental science.
First, Julian Brave Noise-Cat writes, “The Environmental Movement Needs to Reckon with Its Racist History” (Vice, September 13 2019) and how it holds the movement back. Noise-Cat notes that when he was a Columbia student in New York City, there were two major divestment campaigns. Though they had similar goals and tactics, their constituencies were entirely different. They were segregated. The private prison campaign was led by Black students. The fossil fuel corporation divestment was led by White students.

The Movement for Black Lives around the world appears to be breaking down some of these racial barriers. (“Black Lives Matter has become a global rallying cry against racism and police brutality,” Jen Kirby, Vox, June 12, 2020)

But Noise-Cat wants to raise an even more troubling aspect. He discusses the history of environmentalism in America, which has several disturbing colonialist and racist elements.

For example, when Teddy Roosevelt conserved 230 million acres of public land for the creation of America’s National Parks (“America’s best idea,” said Ken Burns), he did so by expelling Indigenous peoples and rural poor who lived on those lands. “These parklands were first and foremost a sanctuary for Anglo-Saxon gentlemen. In truth, then, the origins of environmentalism are closer in spirit to the safari or trophy hunt than the march or sit-in.”

When people of color and their concerns are not addressed by large environmental groups today, it continues this racist past. Noise-Cat points to the recently formed Jemez Principles as one step towards addressing this disparity.

Climate justice is not racial justice unless the climate movement is racially just. That’s always the case when we begin to address racism. Racism is never just “out there” in “them”. When we begin to address racism and colonialism, we unsettle systems of oppression. But we are also unsettling the settlers. Which brings me back to psychologist Resmaa Menakem’s observation that “white comfort” always limits Black liberation.

In a second article in this valuable series, Wanjiku Gantheru describes her difficulties in being a Black environmental studies student. (“It’s Time for Environmental Studies to Own Up to Erasing Black People,” Vice, June 11, 2020):

As a budding environmental scholar, I spent my undergraduate career searching for my face amid my textbooks and classrooms. Staple environmental texts such as A Sand County Almanac and Desert Solitaire illustrated humanless landscapes that magnified the interests of my classmates and left mine in the dust. I eagerly awaited the opportunity to learn from an instructor of color or to delve into the science of traditional ecological knowledge, but it never came. The sparse mentions of Black history that did were almost always in reference to subjugation of the land, counter to the dynamic history I know to be the cornerstone of the Black diaspora experience.

So here we are. The realities of racial injustice and white supremacy are becoming clear to see. We feel the imminence of how climate change is going to affect our planet, our health, and the way we live our lives. Something’s gotta give.

No one is safe in a racist world. No one is secure on a dying planet. It’s all waiting for us to respond. There are no pain-free options.

Somewhere I read (and I’m paraphrasing) that whoever wants to save their life (maintain their comfort) will surely lose it. But whoever is willing to lose their life (become uncomfortable for the sake of racial and climate justice) is bound to find it. It’s an unsettling truth, perhaps, but it’s starting to make sense to me.

II. FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' DAY: CLERGY STANDING WITH STANDING ROCK
(October 12th, 2020)
PREFACE

Today, I am reposting an essay I wrote four years ago after visiting the Standing Rock protests in South Dakota. Others described the experience there as a “prayer resistance camp.” It was a life-altering experience for many, me included. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes, for example, went home and ran for office. For me, it crystallized the threats we face and the need for us to oppose powers ancient, embedded, contemporary, corporate, and violent, both religious and secular. As Bruce Cockburn sings in his song “Stolen Land”:

If you’re like me, you’d like to think we’ve learned from our mistakes.
Enough to know we can’t play god with others’ lives at stake.
So now we’ve all discovered the world wasn’t only made for whites.
What step are you gonna take to try and set things right in this stolen land?

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CLERGY STANDING WITH STANDING ROCK

On October 22, 2016, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle, called upon religious leaders of all traditions to come to Sacred Stone Camp and join the young people standing in prayerful protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline.  On October 25, Rev John Floberg of the Episcopal Diocese of North Dakota reiterated this call to clergy, inviting us to come on November 2-3 for “protective witness in solidarity.” Rev Floberg expected perhaps 100 clergy, but by November 2, over 500 had arrived from all parts of the country, representing over 20 different denominations and faith traditions.

Last week, alongside my friend Dr. Timothy Eberhart of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, I traveled in a caravan with seminarians from Evanston, Illinois, to the Oceti Sakowin camp south of Bismarck. We set up tents after dark, unable to see the literally thousands of others camped beside us.

On Wednesday night, Regina Brave, an Oglala from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, took the microphone at the gymnasium where clergy had gathered. She told us, “We knew you were coming; that one day you would come here and start asking questions about your government. We are all children of God. Black, red, yellow, white, are all represented.”

It was this sense that we were coming in response to their prayers that grounded this experience for me. I do not comprehend all the reasons that it was right for us to be there. We were answering their prayer. We were responding to the call of God. We were accepting an invitation. We were standing in solidarity with them, with all of you reading this, and with God’s creation.

Katerina Friesen described the late September delegation of Mennonites, who stayed at Sacred Stone Camp.  Since their visit, tensions have increased along the river with several encounters between Water Protectors and Oil Protectors. A week before we arrived, armed soldiers and police in riot gear had removed Water Protectors from a new encampment directly in the proposed pipeline’s path. In an ironic reversal of neo-colonial practice, the Tribes claimed eminent domain over this land under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

Last Wednesday morning, Water Protectors attempted to construct a wooden footbridge across the Cannonball River and establish a prayer camp on the sacred hill near Cantapeta Creek. Law enforcement responded by using mace, pepper spray, and rubber bullets upon the Protectors. SWAT officers in a boat tore the footbridge away with a rope. It was a remarkable sight to see heavily armed police lined along the shore attacking unarmed peaceful, and praying young people standing in freezing cold water in front of them.

It is the Oil Protectors who look intimidated and afraid. The Water Protectors are prayerful, nonviolent, courageous, and determined. On social media, they are using perhaps the greatest hashtag ever invented: #SageAgainstTheMachine. For many Indigenous people, the herb Sage is sacred because of its cleansing and healing properties.

On Thursday morning before sunrise, we awoke to the Elder’s Cry over the loudspeaker: “Sun dancers, get up! Pipe carriers, get up! Christians, dust off your Bible, and get up! You are here for a reason. The black snake is getting near the river. Get up and do something!”

On Thursday morning, the clergy gathered at the Sacred Fire, which is always burning in the camp’s center. Representatives of major denominations that have formally renounced The Doctrine of Discovery confessed and apologized before representatives of the major tribes. The Doctrine of Discovery originated with the Christian church in the 15th century and declared any land uninhabited by Christians to be unclaimed. For over five centuries, the DoD has legalized the theft of land and resources from indigenous peoples.

We ceremonially burned facsimiles of the original Latin DoD documents. We processed to the bridge where a major confrontation had occurred one week before. Route 1806 into the Camp had been closed. Our 1,000 unarmed prayer warriors stood on one side of the bridge. A hundred heavily armed corporate warriors stood on the other.

Of the over 500 clergy represented, most were from mainline Protestant denominations (Episcopal, United Church of Christ, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran). There was a sizable cohort from the African Methodist Episcopal Church. There were a few Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, Buddhists, and others. At the roll call, I was the only Mennonite Church USA clergy responding.
We prayed. We sang. We preached. We testified. A few of us walked as far onto the bridge as Native security would allow and knelt to pray. Some traveled that afternoon to Bismarck, where they occupied the state capital, and police arrested several.

Upon our return home late Friday night, I wrote this poem as both a reflection and prayer:

OCETI SAKOWIN
I return
to an unreal world.
Nothing seems true here.
At Oceti Sakowin
we lived outside
in the cold air
under the warm sun
as humus beings
waking from a dream.
Why are we so afraid
of the real world?
I once heard a scholar* say
a non-indigenous civilization
is unsustainable.
An Inuit woman told him
their art takes something real
and makes it more real.
The Dakota pipeline
this conjured serpent
is a fantasy that may kill us all.
Our resistance is art.
Tell the earth you are awake now.
Listen for your God.
Let your soul speak again.
Sign your name in big letters
so we can find you.
There’s still time
to make the real more real.
- rdh

11-6-2016

​*The scholar is Derek Rasmussen speaking on “Stemming the Tide of De-Indigenization,” Portland, February 2015, at a conference on The Economics of Happiness.
Originally posted on The Mennonite, November 15, 2016

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Ric Hudgens

is now trekking through a post-stroke world with a new set of hills and valleys. He lives on the edge of Reba Place Fellowship near Chicago.