Skip to main content

Environmental Activism: How to Help at Every Level

 Environmental justice activism, as we’ve discussed at length in class, is very much tied into other forms of social activism. That can mean either being actively anti-racist/being pro-environmental activism within the context of your future career and personal life or dedicating your future career and personal life to helping to solve a systemic problem like climate change. However, knowing that my peers are my age and have already started to plan their futures out, I would think that most of them would be most easily swayed by the former option. For those people, Rare (a global conservation nonprofit) has a couple of answers: eat more plants, fly less, use renewable energy, don’t waste food. Rare states that making climate change “personal” is the best way to ensure that most people will become invested in the cause. This approach to connecting with people about climate change was notably backed up by both guest speakers on the “How to Save a Planet” podcast. 

For the other group of people, those that are more inclined to want to make a more impactful difference on a larger scale, the answer becomes more complicated. I think that in this context, it is important to remember the difference between actually helping your cause and just focusing on the minute that only inevitably distracts you from making a big difference. Essentially, my point is that it is okay to make little “mistakes” (like using plastic straws or driving a gas vehicle) while making big changes (like changing laws that would incite an increase in large scale renewable energy or that would help those most affected by climate change). This point becomes doubly true when considering that quite a few of the easy and everyday options that combat climate change on an especially personal level aren’t actually all that available to everyone. Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, a disability activist, makes a point in her video Banning Straws Hurts People that a lot of disabled people rely on plastic straws, and the alternatives just aren’t as accessible. 

The University of Chicago put out this infographic about 2 years ago in early 2019:

It shows that not only have Americans grown to find climate change to be a more pressing issue, often due to it affecting them personally, but they also think that the government should have a large role in reducing climate change. The Sunrise Movement’s take on how to make this change is from a large-scale perspective. Pushing initiatives like the Green New Deal that help not only the environment as a whole, but those affected by climate change firsthand, are changes that need total and unequivocal support from those behind the movement. 

“Performative activism” and “environmentalism”, as it were, do not have to be completely turned away as a useless pursuit, but they most certainly cannot overshadow the big systemic change. After all, Edison invented electricity by candlelight- we have to allow ourselves some graces to make the real change we want to see in the world.

Comments

  1. EllaMarch 12, 2021 at 6:58 PM

    This is so insightful. One line that really stuck out to me was "it is important to remember the difference between actually helping your cause and just focusing on the minute that only inevitably distracts you from making a big difference". I think often times people get caught up on little things - like the plastic straw example you gave - so much that they neglect doing work that can actually make a change.

    ReplyDelete
  2. anyaktMarch 25, 2021 at 2:15 PM

    This blog post was really well done and you make a lot of great points. I particularly liked the idea of the consequences of small "mistakes" like using straws compared to the huge effects that the actions of larger entities like the government and big companies can have, either positive or negative. I also liked the reference to Jessica's video I had seen it previously and thought it was really well done. Great post!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Service Learning: How Does It Benefit Us?

My relationship with community service is an interesting one. If you read my first blog post you might come away with the idea that I value large social change over small acts of service to the point where I might not even be able to see the benefit of something like community service. And at one point or another in my life, that may have even been the way I thought. However, over the course of my educational career, I have grown to see the extreme value of service learning both in and outside of the educational pretext. I have learned that volunteering and community service keeps me grounded and, however much I value social justice advocacy on a systemic level, I have to have those values grounded in something. Serving the community at the ground level can provide a motivation for anyone to continue that trajectory of community serving.  In an educational environment, service learning and community service becomes almost necessary to foster a well-rounded individual. Service learn...
4 comments
Read more

Youth Climate Activism: Do We Matter?

Something that I’ve noticed about youth climate activism is that youth activists are constantly compared to older generations. However, it’s about how they are compared that really intrigues (and annoys) me. Younger generations of activists are, generally, not presented as following in the footsteps of older activists, nor are they shown to be working with older activists at all. Most of the time, I see these young people presented as our “last hope,” completely separate from older generations. Xiye Bastida sums it up well in “Calling In” when she says that “many people are now giving all the credit to young people when looking for key players in the climate movement. But as youth, we know that we didn’t start the movement at all.”  The journal Nature does this exact thing when an article from 2019 says that “because young climate protestors don’t represent someone else’s agenda, their message is strikingly direct and unvarnished.” The article then goes on to talk, in part, about...
2 comments
Read more