Earth Hero Interview: Climate Justice Alliance
For the Climate Justice Alliance and its member organizations, ending emission of greenhouse gasses isn’t enough to address climate change. The real solution requires addressing the extractive economies that demand the fossil fuels that put those gasses into the atmosphere, says CJA Storytelling and Brand Manager Mark Chavez.
“If we're only focused on solving for a symptom of the problem, we're not actually going to solve the problem,” he says. “If we're trying to cure cancer in somebody's body and we get rid of the tumor, but we don't get rid of the polluting industry in their neighborhood, we're not actually solving the problem.”
Formed in 2013, the Climate Justice Alliance aims to augment the voice of front-line community organizations across the United States—more than 100 grassroots groups and like-minded alliances and networks collaborating on working groups, campaigns, and special projects. Its mission revolves around six strategies: fight the bad, build the new, change the rules, move the money, build the bigger we, and change the story. Ultimately, the goal is a “Just Transition” from the extractive economy to a regenerative economy.
On the ground, its wide scope of work has ranged from co-organizing protests that have drawn hundreds of thousands to the annual Climate Week in New York City, to establishing a Black Caucus within its members to help them organize their communities and prepare the next generation of climate leaders. The Climate Justice Alliance is also a lead member of UNITE-EJ, which has been selected to distribute $50 million in grants to front-line environmental and environmental justice communities in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s western regions through the agency’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program.
“[We] work together to aggregate the potential scale and impact of the work of all of these different individual communities across the country so that they can influence the national scale or the national perspective on climate change and climate issues and be able to be on a similar footing to what people may call like a Big Green or one of the larger environmental organizations,” Chavez says.
In this interview, Chavez discusses what the Just Transition looks like in function, the distinctions between the environmental and climate justice movements, and the components of a new economy. This article has been edited for clarity and length.
Looking at the Climate Justice Alliance's website and its mission statement, it's clear that the Just Transition is central to your mission. At the ground level what does the “Just Transition” look like?
The Just Transition, it's a set of both kind of principles and practice and a framework. So, it's kind of an all-in-one approach that really says no people or communities should be left behind during this transition from our current harmful, extractive economy to new, localized, regenerative ones. And so what that looks like on the ground, to me, that looks like people having self-determination and community determination over things that are going to impact them. It looks like the relocalization of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and food.
It looks like democratic community control over companies and financial institutions, so that money and wealth and power are not extracted out of our communities, but is able to be maintained by our communities, so that our communities can really determine their futures and make sure that they're getting everything that they want and need and are able to live good lives without living better than others.
And what is the Climate Justice Alliance doing to help make this a reality?
Just to illustrate how the Climate Justice Alliance works, I think it's important to recognize that a lot of the tangible work happening on the ground in communities right now is happening with local community organizations and local community groups. Some of them have been around for decades, like 40, 50 years. They have been working to advance the well-being of their communities.
And then Climate Justice Alliance provides something of an ideological umbrella under which these communities are gathered together. And they say the work that we're going to do is going to be in alignment with the Just Transition principles and the Just Transition framework and other principles that have defined our movement over the years, like the Jemez Principles. There's also the Environmental Justice Principles of, I believe that was 1991. And so we work together to aggregate the potential scale and impact of the work of all of these different individual communities across the country so that they can influence the national scale or the national perspective on climate change and climate issues and be able to be on a similar footing to what people may call like a Big Green or one of the larger environmental organizations.
One example I like to point to is we have members who have very pretty small budgets. They might have a following of a few thousand people on social media. Aside from the really direct impact they're having in their community, they aren't able to really reach beyond their community for influencing other people and sharing what they're doing. And Climate Justice Alliance, we have a fairly significant following on social media at this point. And so when we repost something from a smaller member organization, we're able to take what they're saying and amplify it to a national scale and bring it into that national perspective so we can help kind of change the direction that conversations are happening around climate policy and just the significance and the importance of how we address climate change. Because there's a fairly significant difference between how the climate justice movement is orienting to climate change and the mainstream environmental movement.
What are those differences? And then what is the value of being able to amplify the message or the work done by very local organizations?
So, as far as the differences go, I think there's a misconception that what has grown to be called the climate justice movement is just like woke environmentalism. But they're actually very different movements with significantly different histories. If you look at the climate justice movement, it has its roots in the civil rights movement and other movements dating back to the ‘60s and ‘70s. And if you trace those lineages back even further, you go back to a very clear and direct resistance to colonization, slavery, genocide, other things like that throughout the history of what is called the United States.
On the other side, the more mainstream environmental movement in the United States has its roots directly in the conservation movement of the 1800a and early 1900s. So the people we hear the names of, Audubon, Muir, Thoreau, typically, it's a lot of old white men a long time ago. Their differing perspectives on whether they were just kind of creatures of the moment, or if it was really problematic behavior, even for their time. But there was xenophobic behavior, there was exclusionary behavior of not allowing women, people of color, other people other than white men, into their membership of their organizations.
At the beginning, a lot of them had a belief that Native American people were very backward and uncivilized and weren't worth following or recognizing the importance of their contributions to the ecological well-being of this continent before contact.
So that I would say that's the difference in a lot of ways. I think that the mainstream environmental movement has grown a lot, and it's recognized the need to be more inclusive and respectful and really just bringing in a broad coalition of different identities and people who want to make positive change in the world. But ultimately, there is, at its core, a difference between the two.
And I think one of the other big differences that we've seen come up recently is, it's a question of the cause of the problems we face right now. What I've seen is that the mainstream environmental movement and the movement to address climate change is focused almost exclusively on the emission of greenhouse gases, whereas the climate justice movement would argue that those emissions are not actually the cause of climate change because they're also just another symptom of the cause of climate change, which is extractive capitalism and just extractive economies. If we're only focused on solving for a symptom of the problem, we're not actually going to solve the problem, right? If we're trying to cure cancer in somebody's body and we get rid of the tumor, but we don't get rid of the polluting industry in their neighborhood, we're not actually solving the problem.
We may have, like, temporarily fixed it. It's a Band-Aid solution, but it's not actually going to change the overall trajectory of that person's life if they're being subjected to the same pollution that caused the cancer in the first place. And so I would say that's really the crux of the difference right now, is that question of what are we trying to solve. Is it about emissions or is it about the underlying extractive economy that got us here in the first place?
I want to come back to those questions of the new versus old economy, but first, let me roll it back a little bit. How did the Climate Justice Alliance form, and then as you have proceeded through your work has the mission changed at all?
So Climate Justice Alliance was formed after what was called the climate justice alignment process that happened in the early 2010s. From what I've heard, conversations were starting as early as probably 2008, 2009. And there were kind of informal conversations that were happening on the side. And then there were a few kind of really formal gatherings that happened of what are still called environmental justice communities. ** **The concept of environmental justice being that specific communities have been specifically chosen to be the siting for toxic and polluting industry historically in the United States. And that has been based on both race and class. There's a lot of documentation for that. And so in the early 2010s, we're still in a place of talking more about environmental impact rather than climate change.
But we're kind of starting that transition. You're starting to see protests around the White House. You're starting to see people trying to stop pipelines and things like that because of the future emissions. But prior to that time, a lot of the work was happening around just environmental impact rather than thinking about the climate change component. And so these conversations were among a lot of the groups who, like I said, have been around for 30, 40, 50 years.
The way that I've been oriented to the formation of CJA is there's the Conference of Parties, the U.N. conferences that happen every year. And a lot of the groups that founded CJA, they would be at the Conference of Parties or they would kind of be watching it from a distance. And what they noticed was that the kind of, quote-unquote “Big Green” environmental organizations had a lot easier time accessing the power brokers in places like the U.N. Conference of Parties than they were able to have as communities that were most impacted. And so they started asking themselves, how could we organize collectively in order to try to have that level of power and influence in our society? And ultimately what they decided on was to form an alliance that could, like I said earlier, aggregate their own kind of individual community power to a larger scale and be able to have that level of access and influence that's granted to larger organizations within our society.
And there was also just the desire to come more into alignment. They were doing a lot of the same work, but they didn't have all the same language and terminology and the same framework that they were doing it under. So trying to bring things together under the same framework of the Just Transition so that they could communicate more effectively and more clearly with everybody else and with each other about the work they were working on accomplishing.
What operationally by the CJA or its member organizations is involved in moving the money? And what are the public and private vehicles that facilitate that process?
So for us, the idea of moving the money ultimately comes down to we're not going to be able to win if we don't have the resources to do it. And so we can't just be in an oppositional standpoint. I think for a long time, more progressive communities have had a hard time orienting to financial capital because a lot of it comes from slavery and genocide and other really difficult things to grapple with. And it feels like if we receive that money, then we're complicit in what happened historically.
One of the orientations that we have as the Climate Justice Alliance is that really we need the financial capital in order to build the new and build new economic structures within our communities so that we can start absorbing capital from the extractive economy, but putting it to use and in a way that can actually turn it into a positive thing in our communities. And so that's the kind of high-level way of thinking about it.
The actual tangible way that looks: We receive grants and donations and things like that, and we work to move as much of that as we can to our member organizations and the work that they're doing and supporting what they do.
But one of the big components of moving the money that we found is a project we also have called Reinvest in our Power. And that was birthed largely out of the student divestment work that was happening also in the early 2010s around trying to divest universities from fossil fuel companies. And we, the communities that CJA is composed of, were really asking itself if we're saying divest from something harmful, but we just move that money to a different place within the inherently extractive stock market, we're not actually solving a problem, right? We're just putting the money in a different place in a harmful system.
And so we need to actually create things outside of that system that can be utilized in order to build, and like I was saying, absorb and extricate capital and power from the dominant system, and we can kind of regain that control of capital within our community. The three main ways that have identified to accomplish that are community land trusts, or there's another newer version called a permanent real estate cooperative. Those can be either nonprofit or for-profit legal entities. But ultimately the underlying idea behind a community land trust or a permanent real estate cooperative is that there's a fundamental flaw within the current speculative real estate market that allows people from outside of communities to buy into and to see land as an investable commodity, and allows them to pull out wealth and resources and community self-determination by owning something that's physically and tangibly within a different place than they're located.
And so that's one way is kind of regaining community and communal control of our land and our housing. The second area would be worker-owned cooperatives, so creating businesses within our communities that are owned by and controlled by the community, so that profits and revenue that are generated by that community, the community determines what happens, rather than some outside investor.
And then the third avenue is something that we call non-extractive financing, or essentially it's a loan fund. It looks at redistributing or getting money out into communities through a loan mechanism. And we've restructured it in order to have little to no collateralizations. So if there is collateral, it's what's bought or what is purchased with the money, with the loan, rather than being your life could be ruined if you default on a loan kind of thing. Another area is the term of the loan is generally a lot longer, so it can be potentially five or even 10 years of paying back a loan, which brings a monthly cost down significantly. And then the third would be the interest that's associated with the loan. And so the interest generally, there are loan funds that we know of, or that are currently being built that even go as low as 0% interest on their loans. The ones that do have interest on their loans are either that money is sometimes going back to investors, but ultimately the goal is to have it actually just go back into the communal loan fund, kind of in a pay-it-forward way. So that investment, or the reinvestment of what was taken as a loan with a little bit on top, is able to help cover the costs of operating the loan fund, but also puts more into the pool so that other people are able to access more capital in the future.
And so those are some of the ways that we tangibly are working on kind of altering the trajectory of capital and money within our communities so that we can hopefully just actually build the new while we're also fighting the bad.
I feel like you probably answered part of my next question already, but what is the new economy and how does it function?
That is such a juicy question there. I think the new economy, and this is me kind of just speaking personally. Ultimately, for me, when I think of the new economy and how that differs from the current economy we're in, it looks like the relocalization of the production and consumption of everything possible.
So bringing back our food systems into our local communities, bringing back the production of textiles and goods, and basically, if we need to consume it, we should know exactly where it's coming from. It's also called the solidarity economy. It's called the regenerative economy, it's called the new economy. There are differences because those definitions are coming from different communities, but generally they have a lot of overlap and a lot of time those new economies actually look really, really, really old.
When you think about it, a lot of it is looking back at how have our economic systems existed in the past as humanity and how can we take lessons from how we used to do it and apply it to right now in a very different context of the world. I think ultimately one of the ways we like to orient to this idea of the economy is, if you ask people how they feel about the word economy, you might hear, you know, there's so many different feelings that come from it, but a lot of times it comes, people are thinking about wealth and rich people and poor people, and it kind of can be scary and confusing and complex. And it's this huge thing that we can't really wrap our heads around.
We have a worldview right now that's very dominant throughout a lot of the world, or at least those who have the power to influence the rest of the world, that the capital E economy needs to be served by any means necessary. And ultimately, what the new economy comes down to is making sure that our economy operates in service to social and ecological well-being.
So if the economy or something that's being produced by the economy is harming people or it is harming our planet, we need to find a way to alter that trajectory so that we can bring that back into alignment, so that we can actually have a world in which people can live well, people can feel secure, and people can have good lives without living at the expense of others and without living at expense of the natural world around them.
Earth Hero's mission is to advocate for individual and community engagement on climate change. How can people get involved in the Climate Justice Alliance or its more local member organizations?
Climate Justice Alliance itself doesn't tend to have a lot of big volunteer opportunities. People are always welcome to reach out to see if there's anything specific. But what I often do is refer people to the communities that we work with directly because that's where there's the largest potential for impact. And I think people should really be getting rooted in and connected to the communities closest to them. And so I encourage people, if they're ever looking for volunteer opportunities in the realm of climate justice, go to our website, climatejusticealliance.org. And we have a list of our members that is broken down. It tells you what city and state they're in.
People can find these groups all around the country and lend your skills and abilities to these different groups. There's a few different things to keep in mind. Be ready to kind of in a listening and learning position if you don't come from that specific community or a similar community with a similar experience.
I think one thing to just have in the back of your mind is if you are a really skilled, let's say, photographer that wants to go and help a community get some pictures of a protest or something like that. Like, you may have it in your mind that's how you want to come serve a community, and you might get handed a ladle and asked to serve, right? And so I think really being ready to come in with a lot of humility and really ready to do the deep trust building with people before you can really start to call the shots, you know, or don't even think that you're gonna ever be calling the shots, you know. It's really about coming in to and just being ready to be in service.
Be ready to that to learn what these communities are for, what they're against, what their challenges are, and just be really ready to show up in a good way, like you would be showing up at a relative or a neighbor's house, Don't assume too much and just be ready to be learning and taking in a lot of things. And generally, it's a really amazing experience and people are going to appreciate the support.
This is the second in a series of occasional articles on organizations fighting climate change. Read Earth Hero’s interview with As You Sow CEO Andrew Behar here. You can find additional articles from Earth Hero here.
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