Young environmental activists have long made the link between racial injustice and the climate crisis…. “If you’re tackling climate change while ignoring the fact that it will disproportionately impact all the most marginalised people in our society, and they already are bearing the brunt of this crisis, then you’re doing them a grave injustice,” she [one of the young strikers] explained.
It’s true in England, and it’s even more true in America, given the horrible wildfires out west.
What do the wildfires have to do with it?
Even if you don’t believe they’re partly traceable to climate-change drought, you can’t deny they’re damn smokey. And smoke compromises the respiratory system. And COVID-19 targets the respiratory system. And immigrants and people of color are, for various reasons, more exposed to and more vulnerable to COVID-19. Add to that, many firefighters are recruited from the prison population, which is disproportionately made up of black and brown people, and….
The links between climate injustice, racial injustice, and health injustice are so many, they’re more a spiderweb than a chain.
As a July 20, 2020 article in TIME says:
This understanding has come slowly, but the increased attention to systemic racism and the urgency of climate change has made for a unique opportunity: address centuries of racism while saving the world from a global warming catastrophe. Indeed, tackling the two together may be a political necessity.
A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: Pick two random sentences or news stories and link them.
MA
