Disasters and justice
September 9, 2021
Anyone who has been paying the slightest amount of attention this year has probably swallowed the same bitter pill: We aren’t at the stage of preventing climate disaster anymore — we’re in it. If you haven’t quite swallowed this pill yet, then it is at least poised between your teeth, and you’d better muscle that sucker down quickly before you trip and choke.
There are the wildfires. There are the floods and hurricanes and heat waves. In Denver, where I have just moved, there is an unsafe concentration of pollutants hanging in the air above us. The city is hazy; the mountains I missed so dearly are barely visible; people with underlying respiratory concerns are advised not to go outside, where breathing may do them harm. We could see this haze as a dirty brown stripe lying low in the sky as we drove in — here it is through our moving truck’s dirty windshield.
If you’re reading this newsletter, then you’re probably a bit like me: privileged to live in a permanent home, working a cozy indoor job (an “emails job”), wealthy on a global scale. And if you’re like me, you have probably tended to perceive climate change as a threat, a problem for the future, rather than a current reality.
But that’s not the case for many, many people. Communities around the world have been feeling the effects of climate change for a long time already. In 2020, more people were displaced by extreme climate than by conflict. Rising sea levels, melting glaciers, raging fires, cataclysmic storms — all of these things are occurring not just in your news feed, but to people. And overwhelmingly, these people are from poorer nations that are the least responsible for climate change.
A popular tweet has been going around, which I believe originated from @Hugo_Book_Club. It says:
Dystopian fiction is when you take things that happen in real life to marginalized populations and apply them to people with privilege.
This made the rounds when the biggest news story was the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Afghanistan, and again when Texas’s near-total ban on abortion went into effect. And while it’s apt for the sort of event that prompts a certain type of person to make Handmaid’s Tale comparisons online, I think it’s also relevant to the climate crisis.
This summer, Americans have watched environmental dystopia roll in from the mysterious beyond, knock down their front door, and shit on their couch. Far too many of us are just now understanding the consequences of the mess we have made. (To be fair to people in my generation, our parents and grandparents made most of this mess.)
After that major IPCC report came out last month, I experienced a sad, lingering thought: “At least I got to enjoy my time on this planet while it was still a nice place to live.”
This is a grotesque kind of sadness that a vanishingly small portion of the world’s population gets to experience. For most, the world is already not a nice place to live. These fires, these floods, these disasters are not new. They only seem that way to us because we’ve been shielded by wealth — the very wealth which generates the emissions that directly contribute to the suffering of people who have done far less harm to this planet than we have.
For most of my life, language about climate change has been framed in terms of prevention. “We must act quickly to avoid rising sea levels / save the polar bears / preserve civilization as we know it.” And I think this is what the majority of people want to support: initiatives and actions that serve our basic need to protect ourselves, to preserve the way of life that we take for granted.
But climate action requires that we expand our sense of community beyond our families, our neighborhoods, even our nations, and take accountability for our roles within a deeply interconnected and terribly fragile global system. This is where justice comes in. Climate action cannot always be prevention, because we have already failed to prevent disaster. Sometimes you just have to send money to people whose lives the climate crisis has turned inside-out.
To that end, here are some mutual aid groups supporting vulnerable communities in the wake of Hurricane Idea. If you feel so moved, consider sending a donation.
Imagine Water Works is leading hurricane response for multiple communities in Louisiana.
Another Gulf’s mutual aid and rapid response fund is distributing goods and donations directly to indigenous, black, and brown frontline folks impacted by Hurricane Ida. (I sent $50 here.)
Inclusive Louisiana is collecting funds to buy tarps for residents with damaged roofs.
If none of these options speaks to you but you still want to send support, just Google “Hurricane Ida mutual aid” to see what sounds good! There is no wrong place to send help, unless that place is a scam or the Red Cross.
This is the second issue of NOW IS LONG. Longtime subscribers to my old newsletter will know that it usually came out on Sundays. I’m a little late this week because I spent the weekend moving all the way across the country. I may also play around with the schedule. Do you have a favorite day of the week to receive semi-educational, climate-related, encouraging-you-to-do-something newsletters? Let me know!
In future issues I’ll try to include a list of recommended reading (usually climate-related, but sometimes not because this is still my newsletter and I can do what I want here). But this week was very busy, and my house is still full of unpacked boxes, so I will send this off and see you all in a couple weeks.