Jennie Stephens - Diversifying power : why we need antiracist, feminist leadership onclimate and energy

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Copyright 2020 Jennie C. Stephens

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, Suite 650, 2000 M Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939046

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Cover images courtesy of Shutterstock.com: wind power by AF studio; lightning by SmartMark; fist by Yevhen Chernukha; switch by GoperVector

Sun image by Ahkm, courtesy of freeiconspng.com

Keywords: antiracist, climate change, climate denial, climate isolationism, diversity, energy democracy, environmental justice, feminism, green jobs, Green New Deal, housing, leadership, polluter elite, precarity, prosperity, public health, reclaim, renewable energy, resist, restructure, transportation

For my grandmothers

SARAH COAN ACHESON

19202010

ITA JOYCE STEPHENS

19252011

All author proceeds from sales of this book will be donated to the NAACPs Environmental and Climate Justice Program.

We must reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us

but also those that we have of ourselves.

Shirley Chisholm

Dr. Ted Landsmark

I grew up in the 1950s as a postpolio black son of a single parent in East Harlems projects. My strong mother, a public health nurse, inspired me to have the vision, imagination, and resilience to survive the vicissitudes of growing up black in America and to build my life around my strengths, rather than on my needs.

Dr. Jonas Salks polio vaccine had been developed too late for me to have avoided the viral pandemic that crippled millions of people around the world, including President Franklin Roosevelt. By the early 1960s, the March of Dimes mobilization of community support for a shared approach to solving the polio public health crisis had begun to fade from memory. Urban life in New Yorks public housing for the poor also shielded me from the environmental concerns being expressed primarily by suburban and rural activists. As working-class urban baby boomers, we were largely oblivious to the policy links between public health, environmental resilience, institutional racism, and social justice. We were more concerned with building movements to address nuclear proliferation and civil rights.

When I encountered environmentalism as a college student, I pondered how the ecological ideas of landscape designer Ian McHargs Design with Nature (1969) or the environmental degradation admonitions of Rachel Carsons Silent Spring (1962) might resonate among the people Id grown up with. McHarg traced how parts of the New Jersey coast might disappear if struck by a devastating storm, while Carson revealed the negative health effects of chemical pesticides used in agriculture. The environmentalists concerns had made almost no impression on my Harlem community. Few of the young African Americans Id grown up with saw beyond their immediate needs for getting an education, finding a good job, and avoiding the bad effects of street life. Environmental concerns or global pandemic responses were less important as social justice issues than avoiding the impacts of urban poverty.

Community-based perceptions of what constitutes social justice have expanded since then. Hurricane Katrina (2005), Superstorm Sandy (2012), California wildfires (2017, 2018), and Puerto Rican Hurricanes Maria (2017) and Dorian (2019) have all had devastating effects on poor communities of color. The failure of largely white policy makers to prepare forand respond adequately toglobal public health and environmental threats has worsened racial disparities and social injustices. This failure has reinforced the sense that The Man doesnt care about supporting impoverished communities of color, even as those communities have provided the cheap labor and exploitable resources that have supported American capitalism. Residents of the predominantly black Ninth Ward in New Orleans asked, Why did white folks in the Historic French Quarter get recovery aid before we did, and why did this disaster hit us harder in the first place? Communities across the United States asked why governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic failed to address the disparate impacts of that global disaster on poor, largely urban, and aging people of color.

As this urgent book makes clear, a new era of diverse leadership is rising up to resist climate injustices. Young activists and progressive politicians are now connecting the climate crisis with public health and social justice. They are resisting how fossil fuel energy companies have paid lobbyists and propogandists to spread falsehoods that oil and gas investments do not damage environments or add to pollution through offshore drilling and onshore fracking. They are resisting how the lure of job creation and corporate profits have been prioritized over public health and environmental quality. They are resisting how public officials have brazenly stripped terms like climate change from official government documents and dismissed concerns about growing economic inequities.

As communities most at risk and those with the fewest resources have begun to protest the effects of these environmental disruptions, diverse leadership is now calling for more transformative change. Women are increasingly assuming leadership roles in social justice movements, from environmentalism to #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. Among youths of color, the climate crisis is now viewed as an existential threat that is directly linked to economic and racial justice.