October: Green

Session 4: Climate Justice

We’ve broken this unit on Green into two sections. The second, “Climate Justice” emphasizes how fighting environmental degradation and planetary destruction must be a political struggle waged alongside struggles to abolish the prison industrial complex. What is the relationship between capitalism, climate change, and state violence? How do different communities experience climate change? Proposed solutions to the climate crisis are often framed through technological advancements and other reforms that leave in place the very structures which have caused it. How can we understand such solutions alongside similar technological “fixes” for policing, prisons, and other aspects of the punishment system that augment and advance, rather than interrupt, existing structures of violence? How are human relationships to nature structured by white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and other forms of hierarchy and domination? Look into where the nearest prisons in your area are sited. What is the connection between the prison and the environment around it? How does that environment shape life for the people inside the prison and the communities that surround it? What would climate justice mean without abolition? What would abolition look like without climate justice?

Don’t forget to check out the facilitator guide!

Readings

Core Texts

  • Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, “A Jailbreak of the Imagination: Seeing Prisons for What They Are and Demanding Transformation,” “Moving Past Punishment,” and “Justice: A Short Story” (p. 18-25 and 148-162)

    • Free e-books are available from Haymarket Books by clicking the link above. If you would like to send a full PDF of We Do This 'Til We Free Us to an incarcerated comrade, please write: dana [at] haymarketbooks.org.

  • C.T. Butler and Keith McHenry, “Why Food Not Bombs” (1992) in Remaking Radicalism

  • First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, “Principles of Environmental Justice” (1991) in Remaking Radicalism

  • John Trudell, “We Are Power” (1980) in Remaking Radicalism

  • Youth Greens, “Summary of Youth Green May Gathering” (1989) in Remaking Radicalism

Supplemental Texts

Discussion Questions

Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us

  • Hayes and Kaba note that PIC abolitionists are normally dismissed as “politically inactive academics” with impossible ideas. What do they say is true of abolitionists, instead?

  • How does Martin Shkreli’s case illustrate the failure of the PIC to promote “justice,” even when the person going through the system is one who is responsible for massive harm? If the system punishing Shkreli is the same one that killed Tiffany Rushner, what does it mean to applaud in the case of the former while decrying the latter?

  • “Cages confine people, but not the conditions that facilitated their harms or the mentalities that perpetuate violence.” How does a quote like this, paired with the authors’ use of Moten and Harney, expand what abolition is calling for? How does separating between “harm” and “crime” broaden our analysis when it comes to conceptions of dangerousness?

  • What is the difference between restorative justice and transformative justice? What does each focus on?

  • What does Kaba mean by “abolition is not about your fucking feelings”? Where does the instinct for punishment come from, and how does it conflict (or not) with abolition?

C.T. Butler and Keith McHenry, “Why Food Not Bombs” (1992)

  • How does this reading reframe scarcity as a question of abundance and unequal distribution?

First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, “Principles of Environmental Justice” (1991)

  • How does this piece reframe discussions of scarcity into abundance and distribution? 

  • What are some misconceptions you had about hunger and food distribution before reading this piece? How is food justice related to other forms of liberation?

John Trudell, “We Are Power” (1980)

  • What does Trudell identify as power and misnomers of power? Where does our power lie, according to him?

  • Trudell writes that “I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed. They feel powerless. When I go amongst my own people, we do not feel powerless. We feel oppressed.” What does he mean by this distinction between oppression and powerlessness?

  • He also distinguishes between revolution and liberation; and human, civil, and natural rights. How does he define these differences?

Keala Uchoa, A Zine About Critical Abolitionist Environmental Justice

  • What does Uchoa identify as the limits of the current environmental justice movement? How do its theories of justice fall short of pursuing the transformation needed to realize an abolitionist world?

  • Who does Uchoa bring into the history of the environmental justice movement? How does reshaping EJ history to include those fighting about state and carceral violence reshape our understanding of EJ and abolition?

  • What does it mean that “the fossil fuel industry and carceral state are symbiotic”? And how do they work together to repress political action?

Julian Brave NoiseCat, “Standing Rock is burning – but our resistance isn't over” (2017)

  • For indigenous people, land and water are regarded as sacred, living ancestors. How does this understanding of the relationship with the land differ from the notion of “property”?

  • How does NoiseCat assert that settler-colonialism is very much alive today? Can you think of further examples of modern-day settler-colonialism in the United States?

Mariangelie Ortiz Ortiz, “Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One House at a Time” (2018)

  • Ortiz criticizes the United States’ inaction in providing aid that was promised. Similarly, activist Naomi Klein described Hurricane Maria as “not just a natural disaster, not just a tragedy, [but] state-sponsored mass killing.” Do you agree with Klein’s assessment? Why or why not?

  • Naomi Klein defines “disaster capitalism” as the practice by a government/regime of taking advantage of a major disaster to adopt economic policies that the population would be less likely to accept under normal circumstances. How do we see this reflected in post-Maria Puerto Rico, and after other disasters in recent past and present?

The Red Deal, Part II

  • How does the “divest” framework of “defund the police” fit with the solutions proscribed in the Red Deal?

  • What does MMIWG2S stand for? How does the Red Nation frame it and what do they say is necessary for future MMIWG2 campaigns?

  • What is a bordertown? What is their history and how do they operate in perpetuating settler colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy?

  • What are some of the bullet points in the “What can you do about it?” sections that you feel able to address now? Note any ways to expand your current organizing to incorporate these points, perhaps by forming new coalitions or by broadening existing work you or your organization are doing. Always begin by researching to find out where the work is already being done.

Monica White, “A Pig and a Garden: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative”

  • Fannie Lou Hamer declares in the chapter’s opening, “Down where we are, food is used as a political weapon.” What did Hamer mean by this and how did food and land autonomy shape her vision of collective agency and community resilience?

  • What were the political and economic conditions that likely informed Hamer’s decision to select Sunflower County as the site for the Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1967?

  • How did white politicians, business leaders, and police utilize the law to stymie organizing efforts in Mississippi by SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP? In what ways did Freedom Farm serve as an alternative strategy of resistance to sustain activism?

  • What are the lessons that can be learned from Freedom Farm? Discuss what you believe Monica White means when she writes, “The organizing strategies of black farmworkers in the 1960s offer lessons that are important today for families displaced by the automobile industry and for others in urban areas currently struggling to access healthy food, adequate and affordable housing, clean water, quality education, health care, and employment” (87).