Wretched of the Earth

Last updated
Wretched of the Earth
Formation2015;8 years ago (2015)
Founded atUnited Kingdom
Type Coalition
Purpose Climate change mitigation
Migrant Justice

Wretched of the Earth is a coalition of climate justice groups led by Indigenous people and people of colour [1] based in the United Kingdom, [2] representing the interests of the Global South and people of color in response to climate change. [3] The organisation's name is based on Frantz Fanon's book on anti-colonial theory, The Wretched of the Earth . [4] The group seeks to challenge environmental organizations by asking groups like Extinction Rebellion to think critically about class, capitalism, and use of activist tactics that draw risk to people of color. [5] [6]

Contents

Activist work

The organization's demands include universal health care, the right to free education, corporate accountability, and demilitarization. [7] Coalition members include Black Lives Matter UK, Migrants Rights Network, Peoples Climate Network, Algeria Solidarity Campaign, Argentina Solidarity Campaign, Black Dissidents, Colombia Solidarity Campaign, Environmental Justice North Africa, Global Afrikan People’s Parliament, Global Justice Forum, Indigenous Environmental Network, Kilombo U.K, London Mexico Solidarity, Movimiento Ecuador Reino Unido (MERU), Movimiento Jaguar Despierto, PARCOE, The London Latinxs, South Asia Solidarity Group, Science for the People, and This Changes Everything UK. [8] [9] [10]

In 2015, Wretched of the Earth was removed from its previously designated position at the front of London's People’s Climate March of Justice and Jobs [11] by organizers of the event [10] March organizers saw the group's focus on anti-imperialism as too political. [12] The group responded with an open letter to the group's organizers expressing hurt that they were made to remove signs stating that ‘British Imperialism causes climate injustice’.The open letter highlighted the repetition of colonialism in suppressing indigenous and people of color voices. [8]

Wretched of the Earth issued an open letter in May 2019 [9] asking Extinction Rebellion to reconsider strategies that would be harmful to black, brown, and indigenous activists and to rethink the way its activist tactics build on white privilege. [13] [5] [14] This open letter posits that efforts to combat climate change will be meaningless unless they include and build on the experiences of people of color. [15] Taking a decolonial perspective on climate justice, [16] the organization states that environmental issues described as a current climate crises date back to 1492, when European settlers landed in the Americas. [7]

The collective took part in a September 2019 march as part of the Global Climate Strike, calling for use of indigenous knowledge and experience in fighting climate change, and making a case for aligning the migrant justice movement with the climate justice movement. [17]

Political objectives

The group's concrete political demands include: "implementing a just transition, holding corporations accountable, ending militarism, definancializing nature, replacing borders with radical hospitality, and guaranteeing universal health care, free education, healthy food, and adequate income for all". [4] In a publicised message of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the group aligned itself with political objectives such as defunding the police in favour of investing in community-led solutions and banning polluting industries. The group argues that "the Global North must pay its fair share of ecological and climate debt to keep below the 1.5 degree guardrail" including "a massive transfer in technology for climate adaptation". The group also argues for an external debt jubilee. [18]

Anti-imperialism and anti-racism

The group says that “[t]he climate movement will be decolonial or it will be nothing”. [19] Representatives of Wretched of the Earth argue that dominant climate-focused strategies in countries like Britain fail to take into account the impacts of imperialism and colonialism on the current climate crisis, and the responsibilities that colonising countries therefore bear for the effects of climate change. In relation to existing political strategies to tackle climate change, they argue that a "greener economy in the UK will achieve very little if the government continues to hinder countries in the Global South from doing the same through crippling debt, unfair trade deals, and the export of its own deathly extractive industries." [20] The group argues that the objective of environmental regeneration cannot be decoupled from the extractive politics leading to environmental degradation. [21]

The group draws philosophical as well as historical connections between the logics of imperialism and colonialism and ecological breakdown. In an open letter from 2020, they state: "The same European colonialism that colonised and plundered entire nations through the logic of white supremacy, was the same project that sought to control and exploit nature. This is the origin of the ecological collapse we are witnessing today." [18] Group members explain that while climate change is perceived in Western discourse as part of a projected future, climate injustice is in fact already occurring and impacting communities in the Global South and marginalised communities in the Global North, citing examples such as Cyclone Idais, Typhoon Haiyans, and Hurricane Katrina. [22] The group identifies issues of environmental racism that are intertwined with the climate crisis, including the idea that "those least responsible for causing the climate crisis are usually the most vulnerable to its effects, including displacement." [22]

They also argue that many mainstream climate agendas deprioritise the lives and livelihoods and communities of colour. [23]

The group penned a statement of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in June, 2020, stating: "We are indebted to the beliefs, visions and actions of people like Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Berta Cáceres, Franz Fanon and many others." [18]

Migrant justice

The group draws significant connections between migrant justice and climate justice. In a speech delivered in London in September, 2019, the group stated: "There can be no climate justice without migrant justice. The UK and other countries in the Global North must also acknowledge their historic and current responsibilities for driving the displacement of peoples and communities—and honour its obligation to them. That means ending the hostile environment of walls and fences, detention centres and prisons that are used against racialised, migrant, and refugee communities." [20] The group argues that the climate justice movement should ensure that migration is an inherent right rather than something people are compelled to do as a result of droughts, floods, and tornados that the victims of these disasters "had no role in creating". [20] One of the group's key demands, outlined in an open letter published in Red Pepper in May, 2019, was the ending of the UK's hostile environment "of walls and fences, detention centers and prisons" that the group argues "are used against racialised, migrant, and refugee communities". [24]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Environmental racism</span> Environmental injustice that occurs within a racialized context

Environmental racism, ecological racism or ecological apartheid is a form of institutional racism leading to landfills, incinerators, and hazardous waste disposal being disproportionately placed in communities of color. Internationally, it is also associated with extractivism, which places the environmental burdens of mining, oil extraction, and industrial agriculture upon indigenous peoples and poorer nations largely inhabited by people of color.

Spiritual ecology is an emerging field in religion, conservation, and academia that proposes that there is a spiritual facet to all issues related to conservation, environmentalism, and earth stewardship. Proponents of spiritual ecology assert a need for contemporary nature conservation work to include spiritual elements and for contemporary religion and spirituality to include awareness of and engagement in ecological issues.

Environmental justice or eco-justice, is a social movement to address environmental injustice, which occurs when poor and marginalized communities are harmed by hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses from which they do not benefit. The movement has generated hundreds of studies showing that exposure to environmental harm is inequitably distributed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecological debt</span> Environmental debt between Global North and South

Ecological debt refers to the accumulated debt seen by some campaigners as owed by the Global North to Global South countries, due to the net sum of historical environmental injustice, especially through resource exploitation, habitat degradation, and pollution by waste discharge. The concept was coined by Global Southerner non-governmental organizations in the 1990s and its definition has varied over the years, in several attempts of greater specification.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Environmental direct action in the United Kingdom</span>

The modern environmental direct action movement in the United Kingdom started in 1991 with the formation of the first UK "Earth First!" group for a protest at Dungeness nuclear power station. Within two years, there were fifty Earth First groups and activists linked with other parties in the road protest movement. There were large camps at Twyford Down and the M11 link road protest. By 1997, the Government had decided to reduce its road-building plans by two thirds.

<i>Ecological Imperialism</i> (book) 1986 book by Alfred W. Crosby

Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 is a 1986 book by environmental historian Alfred W. Crosby. The book builds on Crosby's earlier study, The Columbian Exchange, in which he described the complex global transfer of organisms that accompanied European colonial endeavors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rupert Read</span> British philosopher (born 1966)

Rupert Read is an academic and a Green Party campaigner and a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. Read is a reader in philosophy at the University of East Anglia where he was awarded – as Principal Investigator – Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding for two projects on "natural capital". His other major recent academic focus has been on the precautionary principle, having contributed substantially to work co-authored with Nassim Nicholas Taleb on applying the principle to questions of genetic modification of organisms. In further work, Read has theorised the utility of the precautionary principle in a wide range of areas, including: climate change, the environment, as well as financial and technology sectors.

Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary criticism. Her theoretical work extending ecofeminist thought into queer theory, queer ecology, vegetarianism, and animal liberation has been influential within women's studies. A cofounder of the Minnesota Green Party, Gaard documented the transition of the U.S. Green movement into the Green Party of the United States in her book, Ecological Politics. She is currently a professor of English at University of Wisconsin-River Falls and a community faculty member in Women's Studies at Metropolitan State University, Twin Cities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Environmental issues</span> Concerns and policies regarding the biophysical environment

Environmental issues are disruptions in the usual function of ecosystems. Further, these issues can be caused by humans or they can be natural. These issues are considered serious when the ecosystem cannot recover in the present situation, and catastrophic if the ecosystem is projected to certainly collapse.

Green imperialism or eco-imperialism or eco-colonialism or environmental imperialism is a derogatory epithet alluding to what is perceived as a Western strategy to influence the internal affairs of mostly developing nations in the name of environmentalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate change and Indigenous peoples</span> Description of how climate change disproportionately impacts indigenous peoples around the world

Climate change and Indigenous peoples describes how climate change disproportionately impacts Indigenous peoples around the world when compared to non-indigenous peoples. These impacts are particularly felt in relation to health, environments, and communities. Some indigenous scholars of climate change argue that these disproportionately felt impacts are linked to ongoing forms of colonialism. Indigenous peoples found throughout the world have strategies and traditional knowledge to adapt to climate change. These knowledge systems can be beneficial for their own community's adaptation to climate change as expressions of self-determination as well as to non-Indigenous communities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ende Gelände</span> Climate justice movement in Germany

Ende Gelände (EG) is a civil disobedience movement occupying coal mines in Germany to raise awareness for climate justice. Ende Gelände has been organizing mass civil disobedience actions against coal mines in Rhineland, Lusatia and Leipzig since 2015. Since 2017, it has participated in civil disobedience protests against coal mining and fracking in Poland, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. It supports Venice's movement against big cruising ships. Annual protests in Germany have been attended by between 3000 and 7000 participants. It regularly supports anti-racist rallies in Germany and has hosted a range of smaller local protests since 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Extinction Rebellion</span> Environmental pressure group

Extinction Rebellion is a UK-founded global environmental movement, with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse. Extinction Rebellion was established in Stroud in May 2018 by Gail Bradbrook, Simon Bramwell, and Roger Hallam, along with eight other co-founders from the campaign group Rising Up!

<span class="mw-page-title-main">School Strike for Climate</span> International youth movement for climate action

School Strike for Climate, also known variously as Fridays for Future (FFF), Youth for Climate, Climate Strike or Youth Strike for Climate, is an international movement of school students who skip Friday classes to participate in demonstrations to demand action from political leaders to prevent climate change and for the fossil fuel industry to transition to renewable energy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earth Strike</span> Climate activist movement

Earth Strike is an international grassroots movement that called for a global general strike for climate action. Their aim was a global general strike lasting from 20 until 27 September 2019. The movement has had public support from organizations including Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, as well as public figures including Noam Chomsky. The Earth Strikes were part of the worldwide September 2019 climate strikes, which gathered millions of protesters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Extinction Rebellion Youth</span> Youth environmental pressure group

Extinction Rebellion Youth is the autonomous youth wing of the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion (XR), made up of activists under the age of 30. It has the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse. XR Youth was established in the United Kingdom in February 2019 by a collective of young environmental activists from XR. In contrast to the rest of XR, the youth wing is more centred around climate justice and consideration of the Global South and indigenous peoples. As of September 2020, there are over 200 branches globally, including over 80 in the UK.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Land defender</span> Type of activist

A land defender, land protector, or environmental defender is an activist who works to protect ecosystems and the human right to a safe, healthy environment. Often, defenders are members of Indigenous communities who are protecting property rights of ancestral lands in the face of expropriation, pollution, depletion, or destruction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tricontinental Conference (1966)</span> Political meeting in Cuba

The Tricontinental Conference was a gathering of countries that focused on anti-colonial and anti-imperial issues during the Cold War era, specifically those related to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The conference was held from 3rd to 16 January 1966, in Havana, Cuba and was attended by roughly 500 delegates from 82 different countries. It founded the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL). The key issues discussed at the conference were countries that were in midst of revolutions, with a specific focus on Cuba and Vietnam.

Mikaela Loach is a climate justice activist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh who uses social media for campaigning.

Environmental defenders or environmental human rights defenders are individuals or collectives who protect the environment from harms resulting from resource extraction, hazardous waste disposal, infrastructure projects, land appropriation, or other dangers. In 2019, the UN Human Rights Council unanimously recognised their importance to environmental protection. The term environmental defender is broadly applied to a diverse range of environmental groups and leaders from different cultures that all employ different tactics and hold different agendas. Use of the term is contested, as it homogenizes such a wide range of groups and campaigns, many of whom do not self-identify with the term and may not have explicit aims to protect the environment.

References

  1. ↑ "Are Extinction Rebellion whitewashing climate justice?". gal-dem. 2019-04-18. Retrieved 2019-12-03.
  2. ↑ Thanki, Tatiana Garavito,Nathan (2019-09-18). "Stop Asking People of Color to Get Arrested to Protest Climate Change". Vice. Retrieved 2019-12-01.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. ↑ Braithwaite, Phoebe. "Art's Ecological Turn and the Sixth Great Extinction". Frieze. Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  4. 1 2 "Climate Control: From Emergency to Emergence". www.e-flux.com. Retrieved 2020-10-30.
  5. 1 2 Lewis, Aimee (2019-11-25). "Extinction Rebellion has race problem, critics say". KXLY. CNN. Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  6. ↑ Madden, David (2019-05-04). "Editorial: City of emergency". City. 23 (3): 281–284. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2019.1648734 . ISSN   1360-4813.
  7. 1 2 Demos, T.J. "Climate Control: From Emergency to Emergence - Journal #104 November 2019 - e-flux". www.e-flux.com. Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  8. 1 2 "Open Letter from the Wretched of the Earth bloc to the organisers of the People's Climate March of Justice and Jobs | Reclaim the Power". reclaimthepower.org.uk. Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  9. 1 2 "An open letter to Extinction Rebellion" . Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  10. 1 2 Arthur, Katie (Katie Louise) (2017). Frontlines of crisis, forefront of change : climate justice as an intervention into (neo)colonial climate action narratives and practices (Thesis thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/111292.
  11. ↑ "Darkening the White Heart of the Climate Movement". New Internationalist. 2015-12-01. Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  12. ↑ Johnson, Azeezat (2018-11-15). The fire now : anti-racist scholarship in times of explicit racial violence. Zed Books. ISBN   978-1-78699-381-6. OCLC   1056109558.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  13. ↑ Gayle, Damien (2019-10-04). "Does Extinction Rebellion have a race problem?". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  14. ↑ "Critics call out Extinction Rebellion's race problem". Grist. 2019-10-12. Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  15. ↑ Brown, Alleen (2019-10-12). "Can Extinction Rebellion Build a U.S. Climate Movement Big Enough to Save the Earth?". The Intercept. Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  16. ↑ "Climate justice and extinction". Global Justice Now. 2018-11-19. Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  17. ↑ Rikki (2019-09-30). "The Wretched Of The Earth Collective - speech at Global Climate Strike". Real Media - The News You Don't See. Retrieved 2019-12-01.
  18. 1 2 3 Earth, Wretched of the (2020-06-20). "Black Liberation and Black Joy, a statement of solidarity by Wretched of the Earth". Medium. Retrieved 2020-10-30.
  19. ↑ "Climate justice and extinction". Global Justice Now. 2018-11-19. Retrieved 2020-10-30.
  20. 1 2 3 Rikki (2019-09-30). "The Wretched Of The Earth Collective - speech at Global Climate Strike". Real Media - The News You Don't See. Retrieved 2020-10-30.
  21. ↑ "Art's Ecological Turn and the Sixth Great Extinction | Frieze". Frieze. Retrieved 2020-10-30.
  22. 1 2 "Extinction Rebellion Is Overwhelmingly Shaped by Middle-Class White People. It Does Not Serve Us". www.vice.com. Retrieved 2020-10-30.
  23. ↑ "Are Extinction Rebellion whitewashing climate justice?". gal-dem. 2019-04-18. Retrieved 2020-10-30.
  24. ↑ "An open letter to Extinction Rebellion" . Retrieved 2020-10-30.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.