Hi everyone!
Welcome back to my channel.
I’m coming at you live from a kitchen floor
somewhere because it was the only place that
I could film and I’m also filming on my
laptop so I hope that the quality is not too
bad, but, today I wanted to talk about the
idea that climate change is made by systems
of domination like white supremacy, patriarchy
and speciesism.
I realize that was a weird segue because I
was kind of talking about something casual
and then I was like “i’m going to talk
about white supremacy” but that’s what
is going to happen, so!
Before I move forward, lets think about what
these systems share, and what it is about
these systems that make them so essential
to creating and maintaining climate change.
I think at their chore, what they have in
common is that they are all systems that rank
the relative importance of living beings in
one way or another.
They are systems that create an us, and a
them, a dominant group, and an “other”.
Accordingly, many brilliant people have also
called these hierarchies, systems of “othering”
, which is a term I’ll be using a lot today.
So, what do systems of othering, have to do
with climate change?
And why would I, and many people before me,
go as far as saying that “othering” is
an indissociable part of climate change?
Well, since you’re dying to know, I’m
going to tell you why!
But first, I want to credit Naomi Klein, a
world renowned social activist, author, and
film-maker for her incredible work on this
topic.
Her keynote address “Let them drown” at
the London Review of Books conference was
hugely inspirational to me and I can’t recommend
enough that every single one of you go and
listen to it for yourself.
So now let’s get into the crux of the video,
which is that: Fossil fuels are inherently
dirty and destructive, so a world economy
that runs on them presupposes that certain
places and living beings will be hurt.
It’s just mathematically, inevitable.
To borrow a term used by Naomi Klein, we need
to not only sacrifice natural resources, but
also we need to sacrifice humans and other
animals that will be poisoned or displaced
due to pollution.
So, to legitimize itself, our economy requires
the creation and the perpetuation of many
“others” whose lives are relatively less
important than those who benefit from the
fossil fuel economy.
Are you following me?
So let’s think of a few examples.
The battle at Standing Rock, is a recent illustration
of how white supremacy and climate change
reinforce each other.
Violence against native americans has always
been legitimized by theories that deem them
“less than”.
The “otherizing” of native americans is
still entrenched in our dominant culture,
where they exist as essentialized racist tropes
and are reduced to props we exploit for entertainment
value.
The narrative that native americans are “less
than” has been key to legitimizing the building
of pipelines across their lands for decades,
which implies violating constitutional treaties,
contaminating their drinking water, and looting
their land.
As Native activist Kelly Hayes wrote, “we
feel the need to point out that the dialogue
around #NoDAPL has become increasingly centered
on climate change […] It is crucial that
people recognize that Standing Rock is part
of an ongoing struggle against colonial violence…Our
efforts to survive the conditions of this
anti-Native society have gone largely unnoticed
because White supremacy is the law of the
land.”
A glaring example of this is the fact that
the pipeline was initially designed to run
through the city of Bismarck not standing
rock, which is over 90% white.
But then those residents complained so it
was rerouted.
Therefor, understanding the colonial politics
of oil drilling is crucial to understanding
how to effectively push for climate justice.
In her talk, Naomi Klein explores how Orientalism,
a term coined by Edward Said to describe how
Europeans established a basic distinction
between a Western civilized world, and an
Eastern uncivilized world, has been crucial
to legitimizing oil extraction in the Middle
East for decades.
It is also painfully obvious now, how conflict
in the region is directly linked to food and
water shortages due to environmental degradation.
These sacrifice zones for the fossil fuel
economy exist all across the globe, from the
Niger Delta which has been completely poisoned,
to e-waste sites destroying the global south,
to neighborhoods in the west polluted by energy
plants, causing mostly black and latino to
suffer.
These are all graveyards of the fossil fuel
industry.
Patriarchy is another underbelly of climate
change, because women are disproportionally
affected by climate change due to social and
economic inequalities.
Anyone serious about tackling climate change
must put women’s vulnerability to global
warming at the forefront of their agenda and
include women in the climate planning agenda.
Thankfully, gender inequalities have become
a leading issue for the UN’s climate change
plan and was at the forefront of the Paris
Climate Talks.
To learn more, check out The Women’s Global
Call for Climate Justice.
And lastly, speciesism, which predicates human
supremacy over other animals, is another type
of othering hierarchy that is directly embedded
in perpetuating climate change.
Experts estimate that we are currently wiping
out 0.01% to 0.1% of all species each year—
this is an estimated 10,000 to 100,000 species
mostly due to deforestation, drilling, oil
spills, and the excessive release of greenhouse
gases.
Of course, speciesism is doubly entrenched
in climate change, as it commands the fishing
and slaughtering of hundreds of billions of
animals each year in the food industry, which
is extremely energy intense.
Speciesism must urgently start being considered
alongside patriarchy and white supremacy by
those who seek to dismantle the system effectively.
All animals must be a part of our revolutionary
framework.
So when fighting climate change we need to
think about how relationships of power are
directly responsible for allowing the wheels
of these terrible industries to turn in the
first place.
What systems of othering allowed the doors
of these corporations to open, and allows
them to stay open?
Klein says that “The most important lesson
to take from all this is that there is no
way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic
problem, in isolation.
It must be seen in the context of austerity
and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism,
and of the various systems of othering needed
to sustain them all.
The connections and intersections between
them are glaring, and yet so often resistance
to them is highly compartmentalised.”
That’s why climate justice must be concerned
with colonialism and speciesism, that’s
why animal liberation must be explicitly anti-racist
and anti-sexist, and that’s why social and
economic justice for humans must be concerned
with both.
I hope that you enjoyed this video.
I thought now was an appropriate time to make
it, because we are just entering Trump’s
America, which literally symbolizes the exact
opposite of this ideology,.
Trumps America believes that it is through
systems of othering that we will bring about
equality.
And that is extremely scary and we must stay
extremely vigilant and unapologetic about
our demands for justice.
Now more than ever, our fights need to be
intersectional and we need to reject every
single type of oppression and discrimination.
There are no compromises that can be made.
We must unite and fight together because no
single issue activism stands 
a chance.
