Dear friends,
I held my breath on Tuesday night as I listened to the verdict. My heart took a while to settle back into my chest. Before I got to bed that night, I saw a post about the police killing of a Black teenager who had called the cops because she was being attacked.
Thursdays are throwback days, and today we’re throwing back a long way.
In 1722, two white fur traders killed an Indigenous hunter in Pennsylvania. Historian Nicole Eustace, author of Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, said this about the murder in a recent interview:
[W]hat you see through this case is a real debate—a back-and-forth between two very different world views about what to do when there is a rupture, created by violence, in the fabric of social relationships. Everyone could agree that these two murderers were people who had committed a grave offense. However, under the Indigenous justice system, they did not lose their value as human beings after committing this horrific crime. According to Native protocols, they had to make amends through a series of ritual actions designed to create emotional and economic redress. If they did so to everyone’s satisfaction, they could then count on being welcomed back into society to continue playing roles as fur traders, as interpreters, and as go-betweens within their own community and across communities. However, according to the Anglo-American legal system, they deserved to be treated simply as criminals in need of punishment.
Eustace notes that to the colonists, any effort to apologize or make amends was regarded as a ploy to avoid punishment and subvert justice. But most of us understand intuitively that apologies are important. They are not enough, but they are essential for healing. Reparations are also necessary.
Can any of us picture what it would be like if Derek Chauvin admitted wrongdoing? If he and the officers who stood by as he killed George Floyd participated in a process that required them to listen and respond to all of the people who were harmed by Floyd’s murder? Reparative justice could break down the blue wall of silence. What if we stopped suing cities and prosecuting police (mostly unsuccessfully) for repeated violations of human rights and instead committed to a justice system that would change our relationships? It could humanize us all. Ultimately, it could offer us a path out of policing, which fails us again and again.
Wrap your mind around today’s abolition movement.
Last June, just two weeks after the Floyd’s murder, Hop Hopkin explained the connection between white supremacy and climate destruction in a piece called “Racism is Killing the Planet”:
You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can't have disposable people without racism.
We’re in this global environmental mess because we have declared parts of our planet to be disposable. The watersheds where we frack the earth to extract gas are considered disposable. The neighborhoods near where I live in Los Angeles, surrounded by urban oilfields, are considered disposable. The very atmosphere is considered disposable. When we pollute the hell out of a place, that’s a way of saying that the place—and the people and all the other life that calls that place home—are of no value.
In order to treat places and resources as disposable, the people who live there have to get treated like rubbish too. Sacrifice zones imply sacrificed people.
Hopkins noted that most of the towns in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley are majority Black, as is Chicago’s South Side, where he used to live. He described his community as a “dumping ground of petroleum coke (a fossil fuel byproduct)” and noted the prevalence of pollution-related disease among the South Side’s residents.
I’ve lived in a lot of places, and just about every place I’ve ever lived has been targeted by big polluters as a dumping ground.
Emily Atkin just posted a great piece about the “hot, useless garbage” that fills a climate writer’s inbox in the run-up to Earth Day. She noted that only three of the 100 pitches she received were designed to get her to “highlight environmental injustice and climate activism focused on Black and brown lives.” One of the three was from the Solstice Initiative.
Read about the work of the Solstice Initiative and support them to “bring affordable and accessible community solar to low-income and BIPOC families on the frontlines of climate change.” Charity Navigator says we can “give with confidence.”
Finally, I’m asking again (is the third time the charm?) for you to sign on to support the NYS Climate Community and Investment Act (CCIA), which is designed to make corporations pay for their greenhouse gas emissions so that we can use those funds to invest in infrastructure to protect frontline communities, facilitate green transportation and manufacturing, and provide a just transition for folks who will lose their jobs in the sectors of the economy that must be scaled back.
I’m a systems thinker and I know we can’t donate our way out of this mess. My state senator, Kevin Parker, told a group of us from NY Renews that organizational memos are influential with legislators. I want to send one from the roughly 115 of us who live in NYS.
Please trust me and record a YES or review the materials linked to this doc and then, tell me what you think about sending an organizational memo in support of the CCIA from us, Work from home for justice.
Professor Mark Hellerman — concrete mixer for our free pantry, contributor of the replacement KWT community fridge, and all-around good earthling — is hosting a webinar on Food and Climate Connections at New York City College of Technology’s ECO-FEST today at 3 PM. His guests include authors Elizabeth Royte, and Thomas Philpott and Bruce Friedrich, Co-founder of the Good Food Institute.
Register now for the Food and Climate webinar today at 3!
And just in case you weren’t sure that everything is connected, the good folks at Corporate Accountability connect some dots:
[Coca-Cola and other transnational food and beverage corporations] can do all the grandstanding they like for voting rights, for civil rights, for racial justice...but until they stop underwriting voter suppression and corrupting our democracy with their giving and influence...it’s just face-saving. And this is to speak nothing of these corporations’ impact on the health and well-being of Black and Brown communities--during a pandemic no less--that are disproportionately targeted with junk food marketing.
Please sign this petition to demand that Coca-Cola and Big Food defund voter suppression, and get out of politics.
Have a good day on earth!
with love,
L