Climate Justice Is Racial Justice: The Black Activists Fighting for Our Future

The devastation from weather events like the California wildfires earlier this year and Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey on BIPOC communities highlight the need for environmental and climate justice. 

In addition, fighting for clean air, land, and water are integral parts of the environmental justice movement because historically and to date, the communities with the greatest exposure to man-made environmental toxins and pollutants are majority Black. According to one study, “[r]ace is one of the strongest predictors of the location of hazardous waste sites, which are consistently located near Black and low-income neighborhoods.”

As Dr. Dorceta Taylor, a professor at Yale School of the Environment stated, “Environmental justice is really concerned with documenting and understanding the disproportionate and unequal environmental burdens that certain communities face.”

“In the United States and around the world, low-income, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian people tend to be living in spaces where environmental hazards, extreme natural and human-made disasters, and environmental degradation occur more rampantly,” Taylor continued, noting that there are higher incidences of environmental hazards within “the poorest, brownest and blackest” communities, and it “is by design.”

This year during Earth Month, AFROPUNK is giving these fifteen activist leaders fighting for climate justice their metaphorical flowers.

1. In 2021, President Biden appointed Jade Begay to serve on the inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Begay has spent her career working “at the intersections of Indigenous rights and climate and environmental justice, shaping national and international policy. Jade has worked with Indigenous-led organizations and Tribes from the Amazon to the Arctic to advance Indigenous-led solutions and self-determination through advocacy campaigns, research, storytelling and narrative strategies.”

2. During the Jackson water crisis Gen Z activist Maisie Brown organized the Mississippi Students Advocacy Team. What started as delivering bottled waters to disabled, elderly and low-income residents who could not travel to obtain water from their water drives. After receiving an influx of donations to purchase bottles of water, Brown and her team expanded to providing water filters for households on boil notices and without running water.

3. Majora Carter established Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 and Green For All in 2007. In addition to these two organizations the MacArthur Fellow and Peabody Award winner is “responsible for the creation of numerous economic developments, technology inclusion projects, green-infrastructure developments & policies, and job training & placement systems.” According to Carter, “Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one.”

4. Widely hailed as the father of the environmental justice movement, Dr. Robert Bullard started researching landfills and collecting data to help his wife, lawyer Linda Mckeever Bullard, with a class-action lawsuit. This data collection was the first ethnographic study in the U.S. that identified neighborhoods close to pollutants. In the following years, Bullard expanded his study to other parts of the South, where he discovered this same trend occurring in communities of color across the country.  

5. Abre’ Connor is the Director of Environmental and Climate Justice for the NAACP. An appointee to the EPA’s first ever HBCU-MSI Advisory Council, throughout her career Connor has provided direct legal services and led litigation around “health equity and the social determinants of health that impact historically excluded communities across the Silicon Valley.”

6. Founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ) Catherine Coleman Flowers is “dedicated to reducing these disparities and seeing a world where everyone has access to clean water, air and sanitation.”

7. Known as the mother of the environmental justice movement, Hazel M. Johnson worked until her death in 2011 to improve the environment. Johnson’s work started in Altged Gardens in Chicago’s South Side where she investigated the reason behind her neighborhood’s high cancer rates, which was due to being located near a landfill. Founding the People for Community Recovery, Johnson taught residents about toxic waste and provided tools to empower environmental advocacy. In addition to her direct services at the local level, she worked with the U.S. EPA and lobbied President Clinton to sign the Environmental Justice Executive Order.

8. As senior advisor for the Funder Collaborative on Oil and Gas, Dr. Bakeyah Nelson “leads the Funder Collaborative’s project on carbon capture and storage (CCS). Previously she served as principal of Community Health Collaborative Consulting, where she partnered with community, non-profit and philanthropic partners to move environmental justice, climate justice and health equity forward.”

9. Paul Presendieu is chair of the City of New Rochelle’s Ecology and Natural Resources Advisory Committee. The former United Nations Ambassador for Climate Action is working to ensure that Black and immigrant communities are represented with respect to climate policy in the Westchester, New York area.

10. Ron Reynolds represents District 27 as a State Representative in Texas. Reynolds has worked to pass legislation with equitable policies to address the environmental disparities within his district. Reynolds serves as the ranking member of the Environmental Regulation Committee and has fought for studies on climate change and mitigating its effects in the state, especially as it relates to the electric grid and diversifying resources.

11. Peggy Shepard co-founded WE ACT for Environmental Justice where she serves as executive director. The organizer has spent much of her life “organizing and engaging Northern Manhattan residents in community-based planning and campaigns to address environmental protection and environmental health policy locally and nationally.”

12. Dr. Dorceta Taylor’s landmark 2016 book was published on the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service’s founding. “The Rise of the American Conservation Movement:  Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection” included evidence around racism and eugenics have “led to the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, and the Save the Redwoods League acknowledging the problematic discourses and actions of their founders,” in addition to prompting a congressional hearing on this discourse.

13. The Los Angeles, California based, self-proclaimed eco-communicator Leah Thomas, started and launched the Intersectional Environmentalist, a non-profit which serves as a hub for resources that “promote inclusivity and accessibility within environmental education and movements.”

14. Dr. Beverly Wright is the Founder and Executive Director of Deep South for Environmental Justice, which was the nation’s first environmental justice center. Wright has spent decades researching and community organizing around the effects of polluting industries and developed a “communiversity model” to build partnerships between communities and universities to address inequities with community input.

15. Rhiana Gunn-Wright has led “research at the intersection of climate policy, public investment, racial equity and public power.” In addition, Gunn-Wright developed and promoted the Green New Deal as policy director for New Consensus.