Until recently, I have to admit that I hadn’t given much thought to how racism affects sustainability work. Like many people, though, I’ve been taking a deeper look at a lot of things in my life recently.
And when I started looking for connections between racism and sustainability, it didn’t take me long to find out that the impact is significant. This is a big issue, with lots of layers, but one thing is clear.
We need to focus on racial equality if we want to have a chance of addressing climate change.
Here are just three of the reasons I’ve found about why this is so important.
People of Color Are Disproportionately Impacted by Climate Issues
While anyone can get COVID-19, we now know that people of color are more heavily impacted by the pandemic, for many reasons. These include:
- Higher rates of underlying conditions such as lung disease and diabetes
- Greater exposure to the virus due to working front-line jobs
- Less access to healthcare
What I haven’t seen discussed as much is that people of color are also disproportionately impacted by climate change issues.
Extreme weather events are already on the rise, and the global temperature is rising, and those effects will only get worse. These changes can be challenging for anyone to deal with, but marginalized groups have a harder time coping with them and are more heavily impacted by them.
Additionally, many black communities are located near oil and gas facilities. When those factories release methane and other pollutants, they create an ozone smog that violates air quality standards. This increases the risks of breathing issues and lung disease in the nearby black communities, and each year, school children alone experience over 138,000 asthma attacks.
Supply Chain and Food Security
Structural racism also affects the whole food chain, from production and processing to consumption and disposal.
This plays out in several ways. One is that our food supply relies heavily on immigrant farmworkers, and they have some of the lowest rates of pay while doing hard, manual work that often results in injury.
Similar problems occur in processing plants. In both cases, many of the workers are unable to get legal help because they’re undocumented. And since the majority of managers are white, they’re less likely to be attuned to or concerned about the problems of laborers who are people of color.
Additionally, while food insecurity impacts all races, trends from 2001 to 2016 show that people of color are twice as likely to be food insecure as whites. That includes black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native populations.
This clearly isn’t sustainable. Those who do the essential work of farming and food production shouldn’t face food insecurity or be subjected to unfair treatment or dangerous working conditions.
Those practices not only put our food system at risk – they also show a lack of respect for and acknowledgment of our essential food workers.
We Need Everyone’s Help to Address Climate Change
The third reason racial equality is important to sustainability is one that has become much clearer in the past few weeks.
People of color cannot help address climate change problems if they’re afraid for their lives.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and climate expert, wrote about this in an eloquent if painful piece in the Washington Post. She pointed out that the energy and time spent on protesting and worrying about racism diverts her and others from being able to fully focus on other pressing issues, among them climate change.
Furthermore, she highlighted the fact that people of color, both black and Latinx people, are already more concerned about climate change than whites, perhaps because they’re impacted more heavily.
As Johnson said: “To put that in perspective, it means that more than 23 million black Americans already care deeply about the environment and could make a huge contribution to the massive amount of climate work that needs doing.”
Additionally, diversity in teams working on climate change is crucial to get different perspectives and ways of thinking. We can’t afford not to include people of color and the valuable insights they bring.
If we don’t address systemic racism, though, we won’t have everyone on board, and we won’t be as effective when facing critical issues of climate change.
A Time of Opportunity
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by this. Climate change by itself is such a big issue, and so is racism. How could we possibly deal with both at the same time?
But there’s another way to look at this – as an opportunity.
This is our chance to focus on true sustainability, sustainability which includes people no matter what color skin they have. This is the perfect time to open the door to people of color, to hear their voices and ideas and concerns.
Even better, if we start making those changes, we’ll have a much better chance of finding a way for all of us to adapt to new climate challenges as they come. And that’s an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.