Carrying On: The walls are closing in

Imagine a massive intergalactic trash compactor, Star Wars Episode IV-style. You and me, and the rest of the world’s population, are caught inside. The wealthiest of the bunch have managed to escape to the middle, furthest from the slowly but surely incoming walls. Everyone is going to perish, but at least we’ll be able to prolong our stay in the compactor.

The walls that promise to put an end to life as we know it are climate destruction on one side, and injustices of various sorts on the other. Like in Star Wars, we can’t stop the walls from inside the compactor by pushing against or jamming something between them—by “cleaning up coal,” geoengineering our atmosphere, or even securing the ever-elusive emissions commitment from national governments. No, in order to stop the whole apparatus, we have to turn off the mechanisms that are moving the walls to begin with. The change needs to happen at a fundamental systems level: economic, political, and otherwise. The hopeful part is that, unlike in A New Hope, we don’t need R2-D2 to step in on our behalf. We ourselves can dig deep to get to the roots of climate destruction and socioeconomic injustice, and replace them with more just systems of human organization.

This metaphor was given to me last weekend by Gopal Dayaneni, a life-long climate justice activist, at a convergence of more than 200 student activists campaigning for fossil fuel divestment across North America. Dayaneni used the trash compactor to illuminate a major weakness of most mainstream environmental campaigns: a failure to recognize the wave of structural injustice crashing down on the other side. But, coming to terms with this failure, movements such as ours are presented with an opportunity to broaden their vision to include the entire compactor.

The fact of the matter is, divestment from fossil fuels is but one crucial element in the transition away from an extraction and oppression-based economy to one that is sustainable and just. This “just transition” pays attention to the working class folks on the so-called ‘frontlines’ of environmental struggles, such as those working the coal mines on Navajo and Hopi lands in Black Mesa, Arizona.

One part of the approach is comprised of student efforts to cut ties with the companies directly responsible for these operations. Two days ago, students at Washington University in St. Louis escalated their five-year long campaign to encourage their institution to cut its ties with Peabody Energy—the very coal company responsible for the mines and countless environmental harms in Black Mesa. As I write this, they are staging a sit in outside of their Chancellor’s and Admissions offices to await an answer from Wash U’s leaders. This is inspiring, and I have no doubt that student persistence will produce results as it seldom fails to do.

However, student campaigns to discredit fossil fuel companies must be simultaneously accompanied by additional strategies to facilitate this “just transition” to better systems. This includes providing immediate relief to communities in need, such as when water resources were compromised in West Virginia earlier this year as the result of a chemical spill from one of Freedom Industry’s coal facilities.

A “just transition” also entails finding economically, as well as environmentally viable, alternatives for the communities that, on one hand, suffer tremendously from the health and associated harms brought about by extractive industries, but on the other, will undoubtedly bear the brunt of unemployment if these companies find a need to cut costs. In other words, we need to be reinvesting in localized solutions that directly benefit these populations. This takes more than just reinvesting in large renewable energy enterprises. For instance, one activist I met this weekend is working on a project to transition reclaimed coal lands into solar farms. These will create long-term investment in her community by hiring locals and using existing coal-driven energy infrastructure and markets.

In other words, stopping the global compactor from destroying us all necessitates aligning strategies that work clearly towards a united vision: justice. There is no one silver bullet to solving the climate crisis and none to resolve social and economic injustices. Until we realize that all of these issues are intertwined, we’re going to have a very hard time of getting out of the compactor in time.