California Environmental Justice Organizers Are Writing the Future of Climate Plans
The article begins with the author saying that they “don’t believe white people are going to save us” due to past issues such as colonizers that “decimated” people from Asia and the americas. While I don’t agree with this argument (it is not logically sound) I do agree that no matter your ethnic background, things need to be done to save our environment. There are more doors open for people with european descent than people of color, but stating that white people are never going to “save us” is talking in a lot of generalities and doesn’t really add much to the argument of the article, which is supposedly on environmental justice. The author claims that “real climate solutions had to come from Black people, Indigenous people, people of color on the ground who had firsthand experience with climate impacts and could propose solutions that would meet this existential challenge.”. Already in these first two paragraphs, there seems to be a lot of racial bias. While I agree that it is important to have people who have had experience with climate impacts, not all of these people are going to be black or indigenous. I understand that this article is about environmental justice, but the way the author is stating all of this seems to be blaming white people(i get it, they started industrialization which inherently led to all of this) but there is a lot of underlying hatred(?) That seems unneeded and i just wanted to bring that up. Not all people living in bad areas and bad climate conditions are people of color. There are a lot of these so-called “white people ” living in these areas, and just because someone is a person of color also doesn’t mean that they have had experience with that. Getting back to the article, it talks mainly about how climate efforts in the past have been met with a lot of derision and skepticism and how BIPOC organizers have envisioned how the environment could be so much better. These are efforts and ideas like the Fossil Fuel Phased Out(stop using fossil fuels), clean mass transportation(hopefully electric vehicles), and the grid of the future(electric bills, pollution control laws).