Most of the activists I know in the climate movement are environmentalists…for decades. I didn’t come to it that way, and it is still not my primary identification – just one I know as that of my allies. I came to it as a social justice activist. A born and bred city girl who has lived most of the decades of my life in big cities, I have cared most about people. I love the way they laugh, the sound of children playing, and the intense way we love each other. I love what we can do when we collaborate. I am thrilled by our ability to learn and grow. Evolution to me is about evolution of society and how we treat each other. Therefore, issues of equality and non-violence and compassion have always been central to me.
I became an activist at the tender age of 16. I had gone into a grocery store with my Dad and someone was passing out fliers about the United Farm Workers boycott on grapes and lettuce. It described the appalling and inhumane working conditions that the workers suffered and why they were calling for this boycott to put pressure on the growers to pay them fair wages and improve their conditions. I thought: “That is terrible. Someone should do something about that” and then a voice from somewhere said: “And who is someone?” I worked on the boycott for the next two years spending Saturdays outside grocery stores passing out fliers until they won.
That was followed by a brief enough dip into nuclear power to know where I stood on that and then at age 20 all the young men my age were required to register for the draft. As a lifelong pacifist I knew where I stood and proceeded to date a series of young men who were public non-registrants (speaking out about their refusal register and risking and sometimes being prosecuted and imprisoned for this choice.) I worked on anti-conscription issues for the next 3 years till the sexism of the movement got to me.
I worked for the next 10 years on teaching non-violence to prisoners and prisoner’s rights. That work was bookended by getting arrested at the White House protesting President Reagan’s initial cuts to the safety net of programs for the poor (now seeming minor compared to the Republican onslaughts that ravished afterwards). And bookended on the other end by my involvement in the Pledge of Resistance an effort to “stop the next war before it starts” by strategic nonviolent protest against US covert involvement in Central American and the toppling of democratically elected leaders there. In that insistence I was arrested blocking a Federal building entrance in a “die-in”.
By this time, I was 36, married and had given birth to a small baby and became by 38 a single parent, mostly without child support. So my decades of activism ground to a halt and for a decade I just parented. When at 47 I remarried and did not have to spend all of my time parenting and earning money I was happy to be able to turn my attention to my concerns for social justice. When I looked across the landscape and asked myself “What should I do now?” the emergence of climate change made fairly obvious the answer. It was clear that every other thing that I had worked on or had ever cared about would be wiped out, destroyed or ruined by unchecked climate chaos. It was clear to me that if I wanted my daughter to be able to live out all the days of her natural life that I would have to start now while she was 7 protecting her old age and protecting my unborn grandchildren.
So I became a climate activist. It was puzzling to me at first why my fellow activists always identified themselves as environmentalists since it was clear to me that the impacts of climate change would be felt way beyond the impacts on the environment. And it was also puzzling to me why they were sometimes offended that I did not identify that way and made clear that I did not.
However, as I have worked on this issue it has been working on me – the Earth has been calling me home, teaching me a new relationship to the earth. As I worked first on divestment (see later post) I learned how our systems not control us rather than we them. As I worked on protecting trees, at first out of the wrong mindset – out of seeing the trees as “things” that reduced carbon and thus were needed, the trees taught me that they were living sentient beings in and interdependent relationship with humans (see post of Tree Hugger). As I worked on food issues because they rank really high in Drawdown as solutions to climate disaster, I learned the disastrous results of our rape and pillage approach to the land.
I learned that the techniques we use to grow food abuse the land and thus release GHGs, use excessive fossil fuels and produce unhealthy food. I learned that when we use techniques that mimic nature or tune into its own cycles, we actually sequester carbon, restore the soil and produce healthy foods. As I have worked on trying to get a climate mitigation plan passed for my community I have come to realize the shortcomings racked up even those who care deeply if we still engage in Decartian error of dualistic non systemic thinking. In other words, is we attempt to address only what GHG we create in our county we cannot think about the problems systemically and holistically. We are, in essence, again separated from the earth and getting in sync with her.
I certainly was raised in the paradigm that saw humans as having dominion over the earth and my concerns for human justice issues were part of seeing humans as supreme. Climate work has brought me back into relationship with the earth. Now I am an Earthavist. An activist for whom the earth, and its well being is primary. I am someone who see the Earth as an entire eco-system of which humans are apart. They are still a part I cherish and I long for a more justice humane society. But I have become entirely clear that without justice we will never make the changes we will need to make to survive. But I have also thankfully been brought back into a deep gratitude for the natural world, my home, and to the fight for our shared survival.
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