Guest Episode: How To Save a Planet

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Speaker 7 Hello, Gastropod listeners. We have something extra special for you this week.
We are sharing an episode of a great show called How to Save a Planet.

Speaker 3 If you don't know it, you are in for a treat. How to Save a Planet is a podcast that asks the big questions.
What do we need to do to solve the climate crisis and how do we get it done?

Speaker 3 If you're like me and climate change freaks you out, it is very reassuring to listen to Dr.

Speaker 3 Ayana, Elizabeth Johnson, and Alex Bloomberg talk about what really works, what changes we need to make, and how to actually make a difference.

Speaker 7 They've told lots of fascinating stories and debated lots of tough issues. A few recent ones are: is it worth recycling? What is a carbon footprint?

Speaker 7 And the question of what should be our climate anthem. For you all, we picked something we thought was super thought-provoking.

Speaker 7 It's about how successful the Black Lives Matter movement has been this past year and whether the climate movement can learn anything from it.

Speaker 3 We picked it because it really surprised us. We consider ourselves pretty informed on these topics, but this really gave us a a lot to think about.

Speaker 3 So we figured you might find it super interesting too. We'll be back next week with a new Gastropod episode, but for now, enjoy.

Speaker 9 This is How to Save a Planet.

Speaker 10 I'm Dr.

Speaker 11 Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.

Speaker 12 And I'm Alex Bloomberg. And this is the podcast where we look at what we need to do to address climate change and how we make those things happen.

Speaker 11 Earlier this year, as we were working to get ready for the launch of this podcast, George Floyd was murdered.

Speaker 10 And Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Aubrey, and Tony McDade, and so many more whose names we don't even know.

Speaker 15 And so rarely is justice served, as we have just seen heartbreakingly, but unsurprisingly, in Breonna Taylor's case.

Speaker 10 And when these tragedies happen, it's hard for me to care about anything else for a while, including this show.

Speaker 20 I experience this unfamiliar inability to get things done.

Speaker 10 And I'm reminded of this Tony Morrison quote: The very serious function of racism is distraction.

Speaker 21 It keeps you from doing your work.

Speaker 13 It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being.

Speaker 10 So, yes, I'm a marine biologist and a policy nerd, and building community around around climate solutions is my life's work.

Speaker 10 But I'm also a black person in the United States of America, which means I work on one existential crisis, but some days I can't concentrate because of this other one.

Speaker 12 And you ended up writing this really great op-ed in the Washington Post, Ayana, in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests.

Speaker 12 And you talked about how black people are forced to deal with racism at the expense of doing what they're passionate about and truly gifted at.

Speaker 10 Yeah, and the main point of the op-ed was how all of that is actually connected to climate.

Speaker 26 It was basically a letter to white environmentalists where I was asking this big question.

Speaker 10 How can we expect black people to focus on climate when we're so at risk on our own streets and in our communities and even in our own homes?

Speaker 12 And I remember seeing this tweet that you posted after you published that piece, which said simply, if y'all could fix racism so I can focus on saving the planet, that would be great.

Speaker 6 Thanks.

Speaker 12 XO.

Speaker 12 Nice touch, XO.

Speaker 29 Yeah, I mean, let a girl dream, right?

Speaker 18 So have you fixed racism for me?

Speaker 12 I've not yet.

Speaker 31 Not yet. Well, you know, long game.

Speaker 17 Keep working on it. Don't give up.

Speaker 9 So as I was writing this piece, I was hearing the protests outside my window in Brooklyn, and they continued to grow and grow.

Speaker 21 And so far, between 15 and 26 million people have participated in Black Lives Matter protests across the country.

Speaker 20 It's now considered the largest movement in U.S. history.

Speaker 38 There were protests in major cities and tiny towns, even in places where there are almost no black people.

Speaker 12 And that was just in the United States.

Speaker 12 There were protests all around the world in Bristol, Lagos, Beirut, Guadalajara, Helsinki, Galway, Hong Kong, across Japan and Italy and the Caribbean, in over 60 countries across every continent except Antarctica.

Speaker 12 It was astounding to watch all this unfold.

Speaker 31 And what struck me was here are these two movements that I care deeply about, that I'm a part of, climate and Black Lives Matter, and they've been going on for decades, centuries even.

Speaker 14 But what was happening with Black Lives Matter felt like something new.

Speaker 14 How fast it grew, the urgency, how quickly it seemed it was changing the conversation, just this massive cultural shift and all this new accountability.

Speaker 12 And of course, it's way too early to say if this will actually lead to meaningful change, but the velocity with which everything happened, it got us thinking.

Speaker 35 Yeah, what made Black Lives Matter so successful at engaging so many people in so many places so quickly?

Speaker 24 And in the first half of today's episode, we're going to talk to someone who can answer that question.

Speaker 12 And then the second half, we'll ask: what lessons are there for the climate movement in all of this? Turns out, there's a pretty big one. So stick around.

Speaker 9 So why has the Black Lives Matter movement been so successful at mobilizing so many people?

Speaker 12 To answer that question, we reached out to a guy named Maurice Mitchell. It'll become clear why we reached out to him in a little bit.
But first, let's meet him.

Speaker 12 Maurice currently runs a political party called the Working Families Party. And he says at root, he's an organizer, always has been.

Speaker 40 So very, very early on, when I was in fourth grade or fifth grade, all the essays I was writing was about the stuff that I'm doing right now. You know, and I'm sure my teachers were like, okay.

Speaker 17 Isn't that amazing?

Speaker 40 You know, but I just, I knew.

Speaker 11 I was writing about like environmental policy when I was 12, too.

Speaker 31 I'm like, Ayana, like really one trick pony.

Speaker 17 Oh, yes.

Speaker 40 No, if this doesn't work out, I'm useless to the world. Like, this is all I got.

Speaker 12 I can't believe that you were actually doing that. It's so funny to me.

Speaker 8 When you know, you know.

Speaker 12 I was not making a yet-to-be-invented thing called a podcast when I was 12. I'll tell you that.

Speaker 19 Were you fake radio DJing?

Speaker 6 No.

Speaker 20 Were you like pretending your hand was a microphone?

Speaker 40 I was a very late bloomer.

Speaker 28 Oh, Alex.

Speaker 8 Okay, so back to Maurice.

Speaker 12 In 2014, Maurice was running a nonprofit focused on voting rights when Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. His body was left outside on the sidewalk for hours.

Speaker 12 Maurice remembers watching from his office on live stream as the community in Ferguson came out in spontaneous protest and mourning.

Speaker 12 He remembers watching as those protesters were met by police in riot gear with tanks and tear gas and dogs.

Speaker 20 And Maurice thought, I can't just sit here in my office.

Speaker 27 I have to go there and help.

Speaker 16 So Maurice and another organizer friend of his headed to Ferguson for what they thought would be five days.

Speaker 40 What we witnessed transformed my reality. Young black folks with with just their t-shirts against a phalanx of armed police officers,

Speaker 40 dressed like warriors, dressed like they were ready for battle with tanks and all types of munitions, engaged in this organic resistance that was beautiful and righteous and black and triumphant.

Speaker 40 And I was like, man, I see into the future this thing that I've been obsessing over since I was five. It's possible and it's happening live right now.

Speaker 40 And if we could help sort of like just like breathe into the embers of this resistance, we could start a movement. And so those five days quickly turned into five months.

Speaker 40 I quit my job, I left my family, I left my friends, I left my home, I packed up my apartment in Brooklyn, I moved into the attic of this activist in St. Louis.

Speaker 40 And I worked every single day very closely with folks on the ground there that I still call my friends and my family and my comrades.

Speaker 40 And together, we helped build the sort of nucleus and the framework of what will become the Movement for Black Lives.

Speaker 24 So, this is why we wanted to talk to Maurice.

Speaker 19 He was there at the creation of what we currently think of as the Black Lives Matter movement, and he's been involved with it ever since.

Speaker 9 And Maurice says, from his perspective, there's a key reason for the success the Black Lives Matter movement has had at mobilizing so many people so quickly.

Speaker 9 Although he is quick to point out that this is just his take.

Speaker 40 My story is one movement for Black Lives story. There are several.
They're probably in contention with one another and they're all true.

Speaker 12 Maurice's story, his take, is that a lot of the success of the movement has to do with its organizing principles, which were developed very intentionally during those formative months in Ferguson.

Speaker 16 Maurice and the other organizers spent a lot of time thinking about how Black resistance movements of the past had been structured.

Speaker 40 The civil rights movement. the Panthers, the movements in the 80s against apartheid, the movements in the 80s and 90s against police brutality.
And we learn lessons from them.

Speaker 40 Having movements that are led by one solitary charismatic leader, there's upside and there's downside. And many of our movements experience both.

Speaker 40 There's the downside of the cult of personality. Just like if this charismatic leader does exceptional things, the movement moves

Speaker 40 in exceptional ways. If this charismatic leader does things that are flawed flawed, like we all are, then the movement carries those flaws of that leader, right? So there's the cult of personality.

Speaker 38 And if that leader disappears or is assassinated.

Speaker 40 If that, and there's multiple forms of assassination.

Speaker 40 If that leader's character is assassinated, if that leader is disappeared, if that leader is incarcerated, if that leader is assassinated, literally killed, right? Then the movement is askance.

Speaker 42 Maurice and the others in Ferguson wanted a new structure that didn't depend on a solitary charismatic leader.

Speaker 9 And so they came up with a structure that's tempting to call leaderless, but they refer to it as leaderful.

Speaker 12 Maurice says having a leaderful movement has lots of advantages. More leaders means more people ready to speak on behalf of the movement.

Speaker 12 It's easier for those people to tell their own stories and not have their stories told for them.

Speaker 40 What we saw when we were on the ground in Ferguson was all of this beautiful resistance. And then on TV, we see speaking heads say, So, what does the movement for black lives mean?

Speaker 40 Or let us tell you the five things you should know about Black Lives Matter. And we were like, Wait a second, who are these people disconnected from what's actually happening here?

Speaker 40 We need to interrupt that, but we don't interrupt it by choosing one person to be the voice of the movement, we interrupt it by making sure that there is a cadre of dynamic young black people, including women and queer folks and trans folks, and working-class people who, directly from their experience, are telling their story directly.

Speaker 40 We have organizers and leaders in the Bay Area, and in St. Louis, and in New York, and in the Midwest, and in the South.

Speaker 40 So, the Movement for Black Lives now is an ecosystem of more than 150 organizations and dozens and dozens of leaders who are powerful in their own right.

Speaker 40 And we're learning from one another quickly and adapting quickly. It's an organic movement.
It is an ecosystem approach to resistance.

Speaker 38 An ecosystem approach.

Speaker 17 Obviously, that's my language.

Speaker 8 I'm an enormous fan of ecosystems.

Speaker 12 There's one thing I know. It's that you love a good ecosystem.

Speaker 20 Yeah, it gets me every time.

Speaker 38 And this movement very much is an ecosystem.

Speaker 38 The organization that is called the Movement for Black Lives is actually a coalition of around 150 organizations that are all coordinating and moving in the same direction.

Speaker 12 And it's this leaderful structure that makes that kind of ecosystem possible.

Speaker 18 In many many ways, the climate movement is also leaderful, but it hasn't hit this same kind of watershed, cultural zeitgeist moment, at least in the U.S., that the Black Lives Matter movement has.

Speaker 23 And so we asked Maurice, what can the climate movement learn from the movement for Black Lives?

Speaker 40 Let's get into it.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 40 So this is something that is not academic for me. I'm not removed from this.

Speaker 12 Maurice told us that that's because in 2012, his home, the home where he grew up and still lived with his family, which was in a city called Long Beach on Long Island, was destroyed by Superstorm Sandy, the type of incredibly damaging storm that climate change makes more likely.

Speaker 40 I lost everything.

Speaker 40 Everything that I owned, everything that I accumulated for my entire life, gone. In an instant, washed away completely.
My car washed away completely. Everything.

Speaker 40 I need underwear. I need a toothbrush.
I need money. I need a place to stay.
I was one of those people that would watch it on TV and say, man, that's really sad for those people.

Speaker 40 Until it came to my door and to my family. And I thought about the relative privilege that I had.
Okay, like I speak English fluently. So do my parents.

Speaker 40 My parents are immigrants, but they have green cards.

Speaker 40 I was tech savvy. We were able to camp out with my brother and sleep on their floor and they had Wi-Fi.
I was able to apply for my parents and myself for the FEMA program.

Speaker 40 There's so many people who didn't have that privilege relative to ours, and our life was hell.

Speaker 40 I tell people that the climate crisis is here.

Speaker 40 So what does the Movement for Black Lives have to teach the climate movement?

Speaker 40 If we want to turn this around,

Speaker 40 We have to fight white supremacy.

Speaker 12 I just want to pause the conversation with Maurice here for just one second, Ayana. I've been waiting to ask you this question.
When Maurice said that, what did you think?

Speaker 38 I was like, yeah, of course.

Speaker 17 It's obvious.

Speaker 38 This is obvious.

Speaker 29 I mean, how are people of color going to help with the climate movement if they're dealing with the burden of white supremacy?

Speaker 19 It's like kind of a distraction and it really gets in the way.

Speaker 12 Right. Absolutely.

Speaker 18 Besides, also being like a murderous problem, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 29 Why, what did you think?

Speaker 43 Do we really have to fight white supremacy right now?

Speaker 12 No, I mean, I obviously, I believe very deeply that we need to fight white supremacy. And I'm, I am, but I, but there's Alex, I made you stutter by asking you a question about race.

Speaker 29 How to save a planet for all of your difficult conversations about race.

Speaker 12 Modeling for all the other white people out there. Just bottle your way through, people.

Speaker 6 Courageous conversations.

Speaker 17 By on that Alex.

Speaker 12 But no, no, I mean, no, I know we need to fix racism, but I guess when I just heard Maurice saying it that way, what I heard was, we can't worry about the climate until we fix racism.

Speaker 12 Like before we even get started on this one huge problem, we have to solve this other huge problem. You know what I mean?

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 19 That's a common thing that like people in the climate movement say.

Speaker 6 Right. Right.

Speaker 20 Like climate change is a big enough problem.

Speaker 19 Like, can we please focus on this right now so we can all live to fight another day and then we can fight white supremacy.

Speaker 12 But what Maurice was saying is that that way of thinking is like, oh, we can't solve this thing because we have to solve this other thing first.

Speaker 12 Like this sort of like sequencing and prioritization, that's actually the wrong way to go about it. And, you know, he's talked about this term intersectionality.

Speaker 12 which is a term that, you know, I'm sure lots of people have heard, which is the simple notion that like one people are more than one thing. We all have multiple identities.

Speaker 12 It doesn't just make sense to choose one of those things to build your movement around when they're all intertwined.

Speaker 29 Yeah, I can't, like, not be a woman or black one day.

Speaker 17 Like, I'm always all of those things.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 12 And in fact, the lesson is that taking on white supremacy and other issues facing people who also care about climate, embracing that intersectionality, actually makes it more possible to save the planet.

Speaker 12 It doesn't get in the way.

Speaker 19 Yeah, we got to walk in two gum, people.

Speaker 40 We live in a both and reality. We live in the Afro future, right? We could do many things at once, brilliantly, right? So, no,

Speaker 40 we live in an intersectional reality where, like, my mom is my mom, she's a woman, she's an immigrant, she's black, she's all those things at the same time, right?

Speaker 40 And one of the interventions that we made with the Movement for Black Lives is: we say the Movement for Black Lives, by the way,

Speaker 40 is an immigrants' rights movement.

Speaker 32 Why?

Speaker 40 Because people like my parents are black immigrants and it's a Latino movement. Why? Because there's Afro-Latino folks who are fighting for their black lives.

Speaker 40 And it's a climate movement because people like myself, black folks in the Gold South, are experiencing the burden of climate calamity.

Speaker 40 It is a public health and COVID movement because we know Black people are 13% of the population and 33% of the people who are dying. due to this pandemic, right?

Speaker 40 So the Movement for Black Lives is actually a prism to look at all of our work. And we know now that the Movement for Black Lives is black-led, but it's also a multiracial movement.

Speaker 40 When you look out in the streets and you see people marching for George Floyd, you see everybody. And so it is actually a way to look at the change that we want.

Speaker 19 And this is why white people who care about maintaining a habitable planet also need to become actively anti-racist to understand that our racial inequality crisis is deeply intertwined with our climate crisis.

Speaker 19 And that if we don't work on both, we're actually not going to succeed at either.

Speaker 12 And the climate movement traditionally, I think it's not crazy to say, has not done such a great job taking that lesson, the intersectionality lesson, to heart.

Speaker 12 But what would that actually look like? What does it look like when a movement does it well, when it does take intersectionality seriously with regard to the climate?

Speaker 12 After the break, we will show you exactly how it looks. Hint, it looks fantastic.

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Speaker 9 Welcome back to How to Save a Planet.

Speaker 37 We're going to spend the second half of the show looking at what the climate movement can learn from the Black Lives Matter movement.

Speaker 26 And I knew exactly who we should call to talk with about this.

Speaker 4 Hey, y'all, I'm Colette Pichon-Battle. I am the executive director of the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, located in Southeast Louisiana.

Speaker 12 When people say, what, you know, like if you're at a party and people say, what do you do for a living? What do you say?

Speaker 4 Oh, that depends on which party I'm at.

Speaker 32 I go to a lot of different parties.

Speaker 33 Sometimes I pretend to be a yoga instructor because I don't want to be able to do that.

Speaker 28 It's true.

Speaker 28 It's true.

Speaker 30 I'm like, which room am I walking in right now? So

Speaker 4 at a community space,

Speaker 4 I tell folks I'm a lawyer.

Speaker 4 And in other spaces, family spaces, I just say I'm trying to save the planet, whatever that means.

Speaker 4 Just a warrior for justice and liberation and someone who cares about this earth and the people on it.

Speaker 20 Colette has been running the Gulf Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy for over a decade.

Speaker 19 It's located in South Louisiana, where Colette was born and raised.

Speaker 4 I grew up in a community called Bayou Vincent.

Speaker 4 Where I live is on my grandfather's property. It's a house that my grandfather built with his own hands in Bayou Liberty.
All behind it is just trees. We have big, tall yellow pines, oaks, magnolias.

Speaker 4 There's a

Speaker 4 big ditch. I know it sounds horrible, but we got a lot of water.
And so the big ditch was where you could always find something swimming around, a frog, a turtle, sometimes a baby alligator.

Speaker 4 And we didn't wear shoes a lot. We picked up stuff that was crawling a lot.

Speaker 12 So you had this ecological grounding from where you grew up, but thinking about like the climate, the climate wasn't something that was necessarily on your mind or climate change.

Speaker 18 Nope.

Speaker 4 Climate change, nope, not on my mind. Climate, not on my mind.
And I remember being called an environmentalist like in 2006. And I was like, I'm not an environmentalist.

Speaker 4 That was like a dirty word down here, by the way.

Speaker 30 Like, I was like, I'm not an environmentalist.

Speaker 4 I'm a buyou girl, you know. And they're like, well, you want us to do something about the trees.
And I'm like, everybody around here wants you to do something about the trees.

Speaker 4 We're not environmentalists. We just love trees.
You know, like, it's

Speaker 28 just a tree hugger, but only in the light of the

Speaker 30 tree hugger.

Speaker 32 Have never met a lot of people.

Speaker 37 I'm not a tree.

Speaker 32 Only an actual tree.

Speaker 28 I'm going to.

Speaker 48 It makes you think I'm an environmentalist.

Speaker 28 It's true.

Speaker 12 It's true. What did it mean to the people that you grew up with and to you, maybe, at that time? I don't know.

Speaker 4 I mean, as a black person, environmentalists meant white person. And they are people who don't actually like nature.
They just like looking at it, right?

Speaker 4 They like it to be preserved, but they don't know anything about it.

Speaker 12 The truth of this is just brutal.

Speaker 6 Anyway, keep going.

Speaker 18 How does it feel, Alex, to have someone read read your soul through the phone.

Speaker 4 We are all who we are, but I'm just saying, like, that's what that meant.

Speaker 12 So how then did Colette find herself running an environmental organization? Well, after getting her law degree, she was in D.C. working at a law firm.

Speaker 12 And in August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina formed in the Caribbean and started barreling toward the Gulf Coast where she grew up.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I remember looking at the television and they showed the storm in the Gulf. And I just, just glancing over at the television, I was like, that storm is too big.

Speaker 4 Now, we get hurricanes every year. They're part of our life.
None of them were that big. None of them in my whole life had I seen one that big.

Speaker 44 When the storm hit, it was absolutely devastating.

Speaker 35 Communications went down.

Speaker 20 People couldn't get through to any of the local cell numbers down in Louisiana.

Speaker 19 But Colette's 202DC area code kept working, so she set up a sort of switchboard in one of her firm's conference rooms, connecting people with their loved ones back home.

Speaker 9 And she realized that because of her job and her education, she had access to all these resources and money and expertise that she could deploy to help.

Speaker 15 And after a month of coordinating from this remote command center, she finally went back home to Slidell, Louisiana to visit.

Speaker 4 I had to go through a wildlife refuge to get from New Orleans to Slidell, and I remember when I got to that place, it was so brown.

Speaker 4 The lake swole so big that there were fish on the main street.

Speaker 4 The fish didn't know that it wasn't the lake. The fish just came where the water was.
And so it was like dead fish. And the smell,

Speaker 4 which you could still smell in October when I went home, I mean, it was just, it was death.

Speaker 17 It was dead.

Speaker 4 everything. It was dead grass, dead fish, dead trees.
It was a mess.

Speaker 12 She drove past house after house that had been gutted to clean up the flood damage, with all the family's belongings piled in the front yard, including her own family's house.

Speaker 48 So it was just, you know, you just, you walk by your

Speaker 4 comforter and your yearbook and your pictures of Jesus and your, it's all outside.

Speaker 30 It's all outside in a pile.

Speaker 4 And that was tough.

Speaker 12 The house, the house was still standing?

Speaker 4 The house is still still standing because my grandfather is a G.

Speaker 32 That's why.

Speaker 4 That's right. That was when carpentry was a skill.

Speaker 4 Interestingly enough, these men made houses so the water would flow underneath it, believe it or not. They live with water.
Turns out these bayou people know what they're doing.

Speaker 12 Because of Hurricane Katrina, Colette started learning more about climate change.

Speaker 12 Warming water in the Gulf due to climate change led to more destructive hurricanes, and she started to notice other changes where she grew up as well. More flooding, way more heat.

Speaker 12 She realized that climate change, the thing that she hadn't really thought about that much, was actually threatening the places and the people she loved most in the world.

Speaker 26 So Colette quit her law-firm job and moved back home.

Speaker 42 Then she started a nonprofit to help her region figure out how to deal with the changes that were coming, which often means lots of conversations with folks in her community, making sure they understand the climate risks they're facing and actually have a chance to be part of figuring out the solutions.

Speaker 16 But in these conversations, she doesn't just barge in and start talking about climate change.

Speaker 4 We can walk in any door you want to, and I will get you to climate change. But I don't start with climate change, I just make sure I end with it.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 12 talk about those doors. Yeah,

Speaker 12 like, so, like, for example, tell me a conversation you had recently that went through one of those doors.

Speaker 4 Okay, here's a conversation recently.

Speaker 4 There is a entrepreneur, a black entrepreneur on the North Shore who

Speaker 4 was,

Speaker 4 you know, he wants in on sort of state dollars or money that can, that, you know, he can be a part of a contract on.

Speaker 4 So I say to him, you know, there's this new program that has $1.2 billion coming to Louisiana. It's for flood mitigation.
And he starts talking about the flooding in his neighborhood.

Speaker 4 And I say, yeah, did it used to flood like that? No, it didn't used to flood like that. Now we have a conversation about history, right? When did it start?

Speaker 4 Oh, when they built that subdivision over there, we're seeing lots of flood. Have you seen any changes in the rain?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's raining a lot more and it's heavy downpours instead of like a more steady piece.

Speaker 4 And I'm like, well, you know, increased precipitation, more rain is actually what they link to climate change.

Speaker 30 Well, climate change, like climate control, that's what everybody says, climate control. And I'm like, no, not climate control, climate change.

Speaker 12 What do they mean when they say climate control?

Speaker 48 I've never heard that term.

Speaker 4 Climate controlled is basically air conditioning, which is, you know, come to this storage place, that's climate control because it's hot down here.

Speaker 32 Listen, it's hot.

Speaker 47 These are people who deal with heat.

Speaker 4 And I have to know that because when I say climate change, I have to know that they didn't go to climate control.

Speaker 29 This is why white people from New York are not qualified to do environmental work in Louisiana.

Speaker 28 This is why people like to do.

Speaker 4 This is why you need local people on the ground.

Speaker 30 Very well understood.

Speaker 29 I'm sure everyone is on board with my ideas.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you know, and it takes two seconds to go from the rain that we had this year to the rain that we had in 2016 that caused a rain event that flooded Baton Rouge.

Speaker 4 And then you go to Katrina and floods. I mean, you can get to these disasters, these climate disasters that people here have gone through.

Speaker 4 So it's not that I have to convince you about the factual coming of climate change, it's that I've got to relate some practical door to an experience that you've had and then introduce that word to you so you understand that what you're experiencing is what people are talking about.

Speaker 4 When people say climate change, you know, unfortunately the environmentalist got a hold of it first. And so the polar bear and the bird, like that's what people associate with it.

Speaker 4 But climate change needs to be associated with Hurricane Katrina. Climate change needs to be associated with Harvey and Maria and the wildfires.

Speaker 4 And like people need to understand that what we're talking about are these things that they're experiencing. It's changing.
You're in it already. We're already experiencing it.

Speaker 4 You can call it whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 12 Glet has been working on climate issues in her community for 15 years now.

Speaker 12 And over that time, she's increasingly found herself on panels and in conversations with various environmental groups and activist organizations.

Speaker 20 And the more she got involved in the climate world, the more apparent something became.

Speaker 33 It's extremely white.

Speaker 12 Have you noticed that, Aya?

Speaker 17 I have noticed.

Speaker 17 I wasn't sure.

Speaker 27 Yeah.

Speaker 19 And when Colette was with these environmental groups, she said she never felt fully included or like her perspective was being valued.

Speaker 36 And she also wasn't getting invited to be part of the larger national conversations these groups were having about what to do next.

Speaker 12 But a couple years ago, Colette did get invited to sit on a national environmental planning body. That invitation, though, did not come from a national environmental group.

Speaker 12 It came from the Movement for Black Lives. The Movement for Black Lives was putting into practice its principle of intersectionality.

Speaker 12 They reached out to Colette, a Black woman who, by the way, is also from the South and cares deeply about addressing the climate crisis, and asked how climate could be part of the Movement for Black Lives.

Speaker 47 I was brought in specifically about two and a half years ago to bring a climate analysis into this work. And in the Movement Movement for Black Lives, it's a valued perspective.

Speaker 47 In this Movement for Black Lives Black Space, it's been a place for me to bring in climate science, equity, Green New Deal, and really an economic understanding as a root cause for our climate crisis.

Speaker 47 I couldn't be more excited about it. I feel like this is a moment that I've been waiting for for about 15 years.
So I'm super excited about it.

Speaker 12 Talk to me about the waiting and

Speaker 12 what that felt like.

Speaker 47 This moment is a moment I've been waiting for because I'm not generally talking to an audience of black people.

Speaker 47 I'm usually talking to white folks who don't understand blackness or who don't believe in the value of information that comes from the front line.

Speaker 47 But this moment, the moment where the movement for black lives takes up a national movement on black leadership and says, what's next after policing? What else do we need to divest from and invest in?

Speaker 47 And I get to say a Green New Deal and climate change and the whole crew say we're ready, like let's go.

Speaker 47 And,

Speaker 47 you know, that feels so great to me because I don't have to spend my time explaining blackness to black people

Speaker 47 and and and spending my time explaining climate science to black people is totally fine with me because I've had to do that in community for the last 15 years and so being able to speak this language in a way that people can understand is something that I feel like I've got the tools to do.

Speaker 47 And here we have a national moment where even green groups are saying to themselves, maybe we've got this wrong. Maybe we should do this a different way.

Speaker 47 And to be ready and on deck as a person that the green groups know, the black groups know, the justice folks know, and the folks on the ground know, it feels like an honor.

Speaker 22 Can you give us an example of

Speaker 24 what's at stake or what's missed when these larger, more established, predominantly white environmental groups fail to include justice and fail to think about communities of color in their work?

Speaker 24 Like, what are we losing?

Speaker 47 Yeah, when environmental groups are not thinking broadly enough on racial justice, we get what we have right now.

Speaker 47 We have beautiful parks and things that have been outlined as a place to go experience nature. But we don't have nature throughout our existence.
We don't see ourselves as part of an ecosystem.

Speaker 47 We see the ecosystem as a thing over there to go drive to on the weekends and be a part of. We commodify the very thing we need to survive when the environmentalists don't bring in racial justice.

Speaker 47 When you bring in racial justice, you cannot just focus on the rivers that you like to kayak.

Speaker 47 You've got to focus on the communities that are poisoned every day for you to get your gas to get to the river and go get in the kayak.

Speaker 12 Clett says she's seen these communities, like in South Louisiana, where there are lots of refineries, most of them located in poor communities of color.

Speaker 12 And these communities have higher than normal rates of respiratory illness.

Speaker 47 Many of us are privileged enough to never have to see how poisoned communities are. And many of us never have to read the facts that those communities near refineries are black and poor.

Speaker 47 And it doesn't have to be told when you move from privilege. And privilege is not a judgment statement.
It's a factual statement, right?

Speaker 47 If you don't have to think about things like where your gas comes from or how it's made, I mean, that's a privilege.

Speaker 47 So the racial justice aspect of this work requires the truth to be told and requires the whole story to be told.

Speaker 33 One of the things that really stands out for me,

Speaker 9 please forgive me, I'm going to bring this back to the data for a hot second.

Speaker 20 The polling on who's most concerned about climate change out of Yale and George Mason universities has shown us so clearly that communities of color get it.

Speaker 36 In fact, you know, their data is that 49% of white people are concerned about climate or alarmed, compared to 57% of black folks and 69% of Latinx people.

Speaker 24 And so one of the things that I think about a lot is like, do we want to win or not?

Speaker 21 Like, how do you think you can win without people of color?

Speaker 33 These are the people who are more on board already.

Speaker 31 If we need to build the biggest team to solve the biggest challenge, we should for sure be deliberately reaching out and partnering with and collaborating and welcoming in people of color.

Speaker 33 And so it just strikes me that part of

Speaker 49 what you've kind of been hinting at or not hinting, but saying

Speaker 49 around the privilege of enjoying nature.

Speaker 44 as symbolic of being an environmentalist is a really dangerous mythology, right?

Speaker 11 That somehow black people don't care as much because they're not backpacking as much.

Speaker 44 They don't own as many Patagonia fleeces, so clearly they don't love trees as much as you do.

Speaker 17 Right.

Speaker 33 So to me, I'm excited to see this kind of like

Speaker 31 aha moment, even if nothing's really happened quite yet, as far as a shift in the environmental movement.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 24 In this moment, where the movement for black lives is having this beautiful rebellion and resurgence, It is the largest social movement in history, by some accounts.

Speaker 24 The climate movement also needs to grow, right, massively.

Speaker 23 What can the climate movement learn from the movement for black lives?

Speaker 47 In the movement for black lives formation, I've seen some of the smartest black folks I've ever been around. They are radical.
Many are very young. A very large portion of them are queer.

Speaker 47 I'm not the only southerner.

Speaker 47 The south is represented.

Speaker 47 And many of them are leading real transformational work in their place, meaning they work at a national level, but they are also anchored and accountable to a place.

Speaker 47 And I think the Movement for Black Lives leadership team, many of them, have an accountability system in their local space.

Speaker 47 You know, I tell people all the time when I walk in the grocery store, someone is inevitably asking me a question or calling my mother to tell my mother to tell them to call me.

Speaker 47 I mean, like, there's a different kind of accountability when people know you, know your family, and know how to find you.

Speaker 47 And that's not, and the climate movement is full of people who have like great ideas, some, you know, some good friends in the, on the coast.

Speaker 47 And I think a lot of them move from in the environment and climate space.

Speaker 47 A lot of them move from either a place of extreme idealism because they have no experience in anything difficult, or they move from a sort of

Speaker 47 bound practicality because this is how things have always been done. The movement for Black Lives is full of people whose lives have to be creative every day just to survive.

Speaker 47 And so, you see these creative, you know, these creative flares, just like who would have even, I would have never thought to say anything like defund the police. That is,

Speaker 47 I mean, yes,

Speaker 47 okay, you know, like, but that, you know, but why not? I mean, if you are in extreme pain,

Speaker 47 if you are in extreme tension, and if somebody says, what do you need to stop? And you say, I need these police to stop killing us,

Speaker 47 and then the statement becomes, how do you do that? Or you take their tools away. I mean, this is where you get to.

Speaker 47 People who don't have that experience would say, well, defunding the police is not the right first step. Not for you, because you're not getting killed by them.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 47 For you, the first step is to have some conversations over coffee. For people getting killed, it is to take the weapons away from them.
And these city budgets and local budgets are their weapons.

Speaker 47 That's what, that's the difference. You get a strategy, you get fire.

Speaker 12 I feel like that's such a powerful point because this tension that every movement faces, which is like the tension between practicality and like the better future, the tension between what could be and what is.

Speaker 12 So many movements sort of fall apart on one end or the other. Like they get too like, okay, we're just going to just like, that's too much.

Speaker 12 We're just going to like sort of improve at the margins, or we're just going to be sort of like orthodox radicals and anything that isn't exactly up to the standard, we won't do. Right.

Speaker 12 And I'd never heard it expressed until you just said that. But what has been so amazing about watching the Movement for Black Lives is exactly this creative way that that tension has been resolved.

Speaker 12 Right. Where it's like both practical and local, and like

Speaker 12 have we have a plan, but also incredibly sort of idealistic and thinking way beyond

Speaker 12 what people had thought. And that is so what the movement needs.

Speaker 12 We need like radical idealism, but it can't be the kind that doesn't get anything done. That's right.
We don't have time to knock anything.

Speaker 45 We don't have time for that. We don't have time for that.

Speaker 47 I mean, I think there are lessons here, and they're different. These movements are different, but there are definitely lessons.

Speaker 15 There's four words that you said that I think are going to stick with me for a really long time.

Speaker 34 And that is roots, you're sort of being root in a community, creativity, strategy, and fire.

Speaker 23 Like that is the magical combination of things, right? Like, and absolutely, I can see how that's been missing in the climate movement.

Speaker 27 And I think the creativity piece, the ability to imagine a wildly different future is something that Alex and I talk about a lot.

Speaker 14 And we hope that this podcast will help people think through that.

Speaker 11 Like, yes, we are in the middle of a climate crisis.

Speaker 24 Yes, a lot of change has already happened.

Speaker 20 And yes, a lot more is for sure coming and it's not going to be great.

Speaker 19 But we also still have a wide range of possible futures and we get to decide what that looks like.

Speaker 24 And so bringing some of that,

Speaker 44 I sort of hesitate to say it, but like bringing some of that defund the police energy to the climate movement could be be really interesting, right?

Speaker 23 Because we have to imagine a world without fossil fuels in the same way as we have to imagine a world where cops don't murder black people with impunity and like a whole different system of justice, a whole different system of energy and transportation and manufacturing and agriculture and all of it.

Speaker 47 And this is the opportunity for the climate and environmental movement to do what the Movement for Black Lives did, which is say, what's happening to the people and can we stand against the bad things that are happening to the people?

Speaker 47 I mean, why is there a climate movement focused on emissions when you can get to the same, if not a better, more healthy environment by focusing on what's happening to the people next to those emissions?

Speaker 47 I mean, we ought to care about the communities that are literally not breathing.

Speaker 47 because the air is too bad and the water is polluted and the soil is like the death of that black man on TV, George Floyd, is

Speaker 47 what is happening in black communities every day, especially here in South Louisiana, in Cancer Alley, on the southwest side of Louisiana, in South Mississippi, in Uniontown, Alabama.

Speaker 47 This is what's happening. These are just humans that we have agreed to as a society to devalue and to invisibilize.
And what we have to do is visibilize them.

Speaker 47 And that's what the Movement for Black Lives did. It visibilized that black man whose death catalyzed a nation.

Speaker 47 And that's what we're going to have have to do: visibilize these communities whose struggle, whose daily struggle to breathe and engage in a healthy life is what catalyzes this climate movement to reduce emissions.

Speaker 47 Not because we want to be part of a treaty, not because we want to be part of a kind of a leader in the solutions, but because we ought to care about those people who are dying.

Speaker 42 Thanks for listening to this week's episode.

Speaker 14 It's super meaningful to me to be co-hosting a climate podcast where we talk about race

Speaker 43 because these have always been two parts of my life that never really came together.

Speaker 43 And to have episode number five of How to Save a Planet be Black Lives Matter and not have anyone else on the team bat an eye about whether this was the right topic to cover

Speaker 42 is really exciting.

Speaker 43 And it feels like we're finally getting somewhere in the conversation with connecting the dots and maybe like living into this intersectionality a bit instead of just throwing the word around.

Speaker 37 So thanks for tuning in.

Speaker 40 Yes.

Speaker 12 Thank you. And this week, like every week at the end of each episode, we are offering you ways to get involved.

Speaker 19 And today we have a few options for you.

Speaker 36 The first one is super simple.

Speaker 19 You can support the Movement for Black Lives, the coalition of organizations that's working to ensure that Black Lives Day matter.

Speaker 12 One way to do that is to go to the website m4bl.org. That's Movement for Black Lives, M4BL dot org.
And we'll put that link in our show notes.

Speaker 12 And Ayana, there's another idea we have for people, which I know is right up your alley. I know that you love a good policy document.

Speaker 17 I do.

Speaker 43 And there's one I would like for people maybe to read.

Speaker 19 The Movement for Black Lives has released something called the Breathe Act, which puts into policy terms what Maurice and Colette have been talking about.

Speaker 27 What could it actually look like to divest from incarceration and policing and invest in communities?

Speaker 27 And one of the core elements of this Breathe Act is climate change and sustainability.

Speaker 18 If you want to give it a read and maybe support the work to carry that vision forward, you can learn more about it at breatheact.org.

Speaker 12 And if you want to read more of Colette's story, she has a poignant essay in the anthology Ayana co-edited, We Can Save, that was published this week. It is out this week.

Speaker 12 So if you haven't reordered, like we told you to last time, you can grab yourself a copy. Over 40 essays from a very diverse group of climate leaders.

Speaker 12 It is exactly all the things that we've been talking about today, collective, intersectional, and leaderful. Pick it up.

Speaker 16 How to Save a Planet is a Spotify original podcast and Gimlet production.

Speaker 12 You can follow us at How to Save a Planet with the number two on Twitter and Instagram and email us at how to save a planet without the number two, T-O. How T-O Save a Planet at Spotify.com.

Speaker 38 How to Save a Planet is hosted by me, Dr.

Speaker 12 Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and me, Alex Bloomberg. Our reporters and producers are Rachel Waldholtz, Anna Ladd, Kendra Pierre-Lewis.
Our senior producer producer is Lauren Silverman.

Speaker 12 Our editor is Caitlin Kenney.

Speaker 20 Sound design, mixing, and original music by Emma Munger.

Speaker 12 Additional music by Bobby Lorde, Katherine Anderson, and Billy Libby. Our fact checker this episode is James Gaines.
Special and very heartfelt thanks also to Emmanuel Jochi, Said T.

Speaker 12 John Thomas Jr., Kendra Pierre Lewis, and Lydia Polgreen.

Speaker 49 Thanks for listening.

Speaker 19 We'll talk to you next week.

Speaker 46 This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

Speaker 46 We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well: collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers. But what does it actually mean to be well?

Speaker 46 Why do we want that so badly? And is all this money really making us healthier and happier? That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.

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