As a young adult, I’ve had the exponential urgency of the climate crisis revealed to me over the course of my lifetime. I was in high school when Al Gore ran for U.S. president, lost, and ended up making the film An Inconvenient Truth, bringing climate change into mainstream awareness.


In the last ten years the unworkability of an economic system based on a history of imperialism, genocide, and domination has become very real to me; not at all abstract. My peers and I face a system that has become so irrational, destructive, inhuman, and cruel that we spend much of our time together commiserating about it. We have tried to hold and love each other in the face of systems that constantly assault our value and goodness. Capitalism has infiltrated deeply into our lives, and we are constantly fighting it—on micro and macro levels.


The climate crisis does not stand apart from any inequity or injustice. It unifies all the “issues” we may have attempted to fight separately. They are not separate. This is why taking a stand on the climate crisis is important to me.


I think that those of us in the United States are more complicit in, and responsible for taking a stand on, climate change. Our lives are energy-expensive! When we have children, they use up several times the resource that children in other nations do. Patterns of living we consider commonplace are completely unworkable. 


Also, I am not satisfied with letting white people lead and dominate the environmental movement. The world belongs to me and my people. We are the ones who can tell [see] that fighting climate change is not separate from fighting racism, capitalist modes of production, sexism, and so on.


NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT FOR THE RC COMMUNITY TO DO

I can’t think of anything more urgent, important, and transformative for the RC Community to do than prioritize addressing climate change. This is the moment we have been waiting for, that we were made for. This is our time to shine and build the future we want. It is a potent moment in which the connections between many disparate “issues” are being revealed. Why would we sleep at this moment?


I don’t think there is a disconnect between fighting for our liberation and re-emergence and building a more rational society. That is why I am a member of the RC Community. And in the urgency of these times, we need to put direct attention on the crisis at hand.