When the City of Highland Park went dark: Climate Justice and the Taproot Earth Manifesto at Re:WIRED Green with Colette Pichon Battle
In 2011, DTE Energy Company removed 1,200 streetlights from the city of Highland Park, Michigan. A Black working-class suburb of Detroit that was once a boom town for the automotive industry, Highland Park was on the verge of bankruptcy. Unable to pay DTE the $4 million it was owed, the city went dark.
At RE:WIRED Green this week, Sarah Shanley Hope, vice president of narrative strategies at The Solutions Project, and actress Regina Hall spoke about the importance of stories like Highland Park’s—and why the need for more of them is so critical now.
“The people closest to the problems are also the first to the solutions,” Hope said. “In our country and the world, when you think about compounding crises—and the consequences of racialized capitalism—you’re solving multiple problems at once. In building community, a solar panel or renewable energy as a climate solution is also being seen as a good job creation strategy, as something to bring about more positive health in the community. We have the opportunity to see what happens at the fronts of the crisis.
Reframing stories about climate justice is something The Solutions Project works on. In neighborhoods where Black and Latinx residents feel the ravages of climate inequity, the organization helps to get a better view of the work grassroots change-makers are doing.
Hope said that when a problem is solved at the neighborhood level, it creates pathways to build power and change state and federal policy.
Pichon Battle, president of climate justice group Taproot Earth, spends her days on the front lines of the climate crisis. She lives on the Louisiana bayou, where rising waters are already washing away communities. She knows her home will be lost to rising seas no matter what she does. Pichon Battle is trying to save the parts of the world that can be protected. Her closing speech was a generous but unsparing entreaty to the privileged, asking them not to turn away from the necessity for sweeping systemic change.
As the Re:WIRED GREEN event on addressing climate change drew to a close yesterday, the weather underlined the urgency in the most horrific way possible.
The path of Hurricane Ian continued to wreak havoc across southwest Florida even as Climate activist and lawyer Colette Pichon Battle spoke from a stage in San Francisco. Pichon Battle said that he wanted to make sure that you are paying attention to what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico. She encouraged the audience to take notice of climate events around the world, from rain events in Baton Rouge and Houston to deadly floods ravaging Pakistan and Cape Verde.
For Pichon Battle, individual steps like voting for politicians who care about the climate are all well and good—but must be accompanied by hard work on collective action that challenges existing economic and political systems. Access to clean water and healthy food, she said, should not depend on how much money a community has.
Mediums like TikTok are good for both organizing volunteers and spreading information so people can easily ingest it. “Instead of the traditional forms of media, where it would be a scientist or a politician getting on the news and droning on about the newest scientific updates or policy papers,” Kianni said, “we now have young people who are able to get in front of a camera and say in five seconds what they think the major headline is.” That is a big differentiating factor between her and the climate activists of her generation.
Both Kianni and Earle agreed the key factor is having communication between the generations that enables everyone to know what they personally can do about climate change. Like, for example, getting young people excited about green jobs. “That,” Kianni said, “is the most productive way we can have these conversations and actually equip people to build a future we want to inhabit, and have a sense of hope and optimism.”
“I’d like to know from you,” Earle said, “how to strengthen that bridge between the knowledge that is there and communicating it in a way that people listen.”
For Kianni, that bridge is social media. In 2020 she founded the Climate Cardinals, a nonprofit dedicated to translating information about the environment into as many languages as possible. After seeing the effects of pollution on her parents home country of Iran, she decided to do something about it with her family. “The reason my nonprofit now has over 9,000 volunteers is because of TikTok,” Kianni said, “because we’ve been able to reach hundreds of thousands of people through organic, short-form video.”
John D. Sutter is a climate journalist and CNN contributor who has won many awards. He is now the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media at The George Washington University. The opinions he has in this commentary are his own. There is more opinion at CNN.
The Vanuatu Island Archipelago is in danger: Why is it important to save? The United States should not have to take climate losses seriously
It was an urgent question – with remarkable foresight. The low-lying archipelago in the Pacific Ocean is in danger as global temperature increases cause sea levels to rise.
Vanuatu was a part of an alliance of small-island states that wanted polluters to pay for pollution costs.
Other arguments against loss-and-damage payments should be seen plainly for what they are: excuses and stall tactics. The harm and cause are certain at this point. Oxfam estimates these climate losses will total $1 trillion per year by 2050.
After decades of deflection, it’s overdue for high-polluting countries like the United States to take this question seriously. It’s clear that polluters should be held accountable for these losses to territory, culture, life and property.
The fair and proactive thing for rich countries is to impose taxes on fossil fuel profits. It can be done in the UN climate negotiations.
The less carbon we put into the atmosphere, the less risk we put into the climate system — with important consequences for sea levels, storms, drought, biodiversity and so-on.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/opinions/cop27-climate-loss-and-damage-vanuatu-sutter/index.html
Global Fossil Fuel Claims: A Petitions Against a German Company for the Damages After the 2015 Hurricane Ian in South America
Arguments against action have taken many forms over the decades. The most ridiculous thing about this is that it’s a problem for the future instead of the present.
We now see clearly that the climate crisis is supercharging extreme weather worldwide. The floods in Pakistan this summer and Hurricane Ian inFlorida this September have killed many people. Disasters are getting more expensive because they’re becoming more intense as humans continue to burn fossil fuels and swamp the atmosphere with heat-trapping gasses.
That may feel like a new phenomenon, but it’s been decades in the making. Scientists linked a deadly 2003 heat wave in Europe, for example, to human-caused warming. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people.
The oil and gas industry has made a great deal of money in the last 50 years. That includes more than $31.3 trillion in profit for fossil fuel companies between the year 2000 and 2019, according to a recent report, “The Cost of Delay,” released by the Loss and Damage Collaboration and supported by two dozen organizations.
Short of international efforts to fund a loss-and-damage process, countries and individuals are turning to the courts. A farmer from South America is suing a German fossil fuel company because he believes the glacier will endanger his home and farm. The suit, filed in 2015, according to news reports, claims the German company, RWE, should be liable for its proportion of the damages, in line with the proportion of global fossil fuel pollution it has created. The lawsuit says that RWE is to be blamed for the damage.
There was a commission of small island states on climate change. The goal is to explore claims in international courts.
The New York Times reported that the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, said litigation is the only way to be taken seriously. We want to make them respond to a court of law.
Amazon Fires: A Story About Living in Walande Island, Solomon Islands, and What Happens When the World Gets Hotter than It Preindustrial Levels
Picture the world 4.4°C hotter than preindustrial levels by the end of this century. Predicting scenarios with either an emissions rise or immediate climate action was one of the report’s predictions. It is unlikely that you will be able to visualize the outcome and imagine the extent of the change if you don’t know how Climate models work.
Now picture Timothy, who lives with his grandchildren in Walande Island, a small dot of land off the east coast of South Malaita Island, part of the Solomon Islands. 1,100 people have left the island since 2002 and 888-492-0 888-492-0ed their homes. Only one house remains: Timothy’s. When his former neighbors are asked about Timothy’s motives they shrug indifferently. “He’s stubborn,” one says. One person says he won’t listen to them. Every morning his four young grandchildren take the canoe to the mainland, where they go to school, while Timothy spends the day adding rocks to the wall around his house, trying to hold off the water for a bit longer. I can no longer see things through the trees if I move to the mainland. I won’t even see the water. I want to have this spot where I can look around me. He says he is part of the place. His is a story that powerfully conveys the loneliness and loss that 1.1 degrees of anthropogenic warming is already causing.
Unlike numbers or facts, stories can trigger an emotional response, harnessing the power of motivation, imagination, and personal values, which drive the most powerful and permanent forms of social change. The flames appeared in the Notre Dame cathedral in 2019. Three minutes after the fire started, images of the incident were broadcast around the world, and a response from world leaders was instantaneous. The mainstream media only reported on that story for three weeks because of the large amount of smoke in the Amazon forest. The burning of Notre Dame warrants swift responses globally, when the Amazon fires do not. Notre Dame has a story we can relate to, which is why we attach personal significance to it. The Amazon was on fire, but people reacted to it because of that.
Storytelling allows us to make sense of the world. Research from a multitude of fields suggests that story structures match human neural maps. What do a mother breastfeeding, a hug from a friend, and a story have in common? They all release oxytocin, also known as the love drug. And it’s powerful: Participants who received synthetic oxytocin donated 57 percent more to charity than participants who received placebos, according to a study by Paul Zak. Similarly, hearing information in narrative form results in a higher likelihood of pro-social behavior.
Story can be harnessed for good. For instance, in 2005, the International Rice Research Institute used a radio soap opera called Homeland Story to persuade millions of rice farmers in Vietnam to stop spraying their crops with harmful insecticides. Farmers who listened to the series weren’t as likely to spray their crops.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/environment-climate-change-storytelling/
How a Sea Turtle Shows Us that the Environmental Crisis is Not a Problem We Shouldn’t Discuss: A Media Campaign Against Plastic Strains
After a video exposing a sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nose, the city of Seattle, Washington, Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May and Starbucks pledged to eliminate plastic straws.
Increased global connections will facilitate the spread of stories about people and animals on the frontier of the environmental crisis. Through various forms of art and media, it will be these stories that finally convince us that the climate emergency is not some intangible crisis affecting future generations, but a problem we must all, individually and collectively, act on now.