About a month ago, Climate Reality made a webinar about the connection between climate and social justice. It’s important to fix American society and our planet. Recent events such as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement show how we need to be looking at the connection immediately. In this post, I will be discussing the webinar I watched and why it means you should be supporting BLM as well as the fight against climate change.
To get to the point, if we want to create “climate resilient communities” as Climate Reality calls it, we must lower poverty rates in the United States. Fixing systemic racism, will contribute to accomplishing this goal. 61% of black people are poor. What does this have to do with climate? What the webinar also brought up was that the highest poverty rate was in the South, which is a hot spot for natural disasters. Because government protection is not equal across all communities (and is especially lacking in poor ones) when a disaster hits, it hits hard. When poor, black communities are hit, it is difficult for them to rebound which in turn widens the racial wealth gap.
That is where the Black Lives Matter movement comes in. On top of making our governments implement environmental protection laws, we must encourage them to implement laws that consider the futures of black lives as well. Linked here I have a resource with actions you can take to support BLM.