AMHERST — Climate change and issues of environmental and social justice are closely linked and should be countered by a coordinated effort, an NAACP leader told an overflow crowd Sunday at the Unitarian Meetinghouse.
Jacqueline Patterson, director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program, explained how community togetherness and leadership are essential to addressing climate change and environmental issues as ones of human and civil rights.
At the beginning of her presentation, Patterson clicked to a slide with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. It read: “A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Patterson took her audience through communities she has visited that suffer from the impacts of what she calls “environmental racism.”
She showed photos and told stories of places like the story of Dickson County, Tenn., where the erosion of an unlined landfill poisoned the water of the community and white families on one side of the railroad tracks were notified but poor, black families were left in the dark.
She continued with the story of Kayenta, Ariz., where a coal-mining Navajo Nation community that relies on a coal-fired power plant for electricity is torn between the risk of going dark and taking a serious economic blow and maintaining a clean and healthy environment.
She called this and situations like it “energy apartheid,” where minority communities have limited access to clean energy and are at risk of losing jobs and revenue as power plants shift from coal to cleaner alternatives
Patterson also touched on the intersection of education and environmental health, and how children and teens are afflicted with asthma, learning disabilities, allergies and birth defects because of environmental injustice. She told a story of Houston, where a high school football field surrounded by five oil refineries within a 10-mile radius, including one just a stone’s throw away, becomes the visual representation of a community riddled with asthma.
Patterson used each of these stories to illustrate how communities of poor racial minorities are disproportionally affected by the impacts of climate change and environmental issues like air and water pollution across the globe compared to their wealthier white counterparts.
“People feeling like they need to assert their humanity, to say that they are also a human being, that tells us we’re not where we are supposed to be as a nation,” she said.
Patterson explained that the way the water crisis in Flint, Mich., was only brought to mainstream media’s attention by the work of two white people is a “microcosm of why movements must unite.”
Throughout the presentation, she pointed to the ways race, ethnicity, gender and class intertwine with environmental issues, and stressed the importance of uniting across these identity lines to protect the environment.
“We need to be thinking about these intersections actively as we think about the next steps,” Patterson said. “We need to be uniting across geographies, uniting across nations, uniting across movements to make policy changes happen.”
Patterson offered ideas on how to integrate equity into plans for climate action, such as anti-oppression trainings and cross-movement organizing. She also suggested establishing a sanctuary city, campus or location as an important part of fighting climate change as a community.
“As we build intersectional movements, we need to be sure policies line up,” she said, encouraging people to work with their government to change environmentally harmful and unjust policies.
The event was put together by the Amherst area NAACP, Climate Action Now and Coming Together.
Morgan Hughes can be reached at mahughes@umass.edu.
