Top Quotes: “The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet” — Leah Thomas
“Take Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” where over two hundred petrochemical plants line eighty miles of the Mississippi River. The EPA says the cancer risk for the areas majority Black population is up to fifty times the national average. When the local government quickly granted permits for a new $1.25 billion plastics plant that would further poison the area with toxic chemicals, former teacher Sharon Lavigne and the community-based organization she leads, RISE St. James, organized, mobilized, and ultimately stopped the plant from being built. They gained recognition from the United Nations, Sharon was honored with the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, and her story was covered in People magazine.
Other everyday heroes come from the Four Corners region of the western United States, where fifteen thousand Hopi and Navajo families live in homes without electricity. This is despite decades of outsiders benefiting from coal, uranium, oil, and gas extracted from reservation land. Two Navajo women — organizer Wahleah Johns and engineer Suzanne Singer, PhD — started Native Renewables to design and deploy affordable solar photovoltaic arrays and storage systems that can, for the first time, bring electricity to far-flung off-the-grid homes on the reservation. Native Renewables also trains Indigenous people for clean-energy jobs. Now Johns is senior advisor for the Department of Energy’s Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs, seeking to apply her experience to helping the more than five hundred other Indigenous nations within the borders of the United States.”
“In the 1976 case DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, the presiding judge ruled that Black women specifically could not be treated as a legally protected class even after only Black women were laid off in a round of firings in which white women and Black men kept their jobs. While sex and race are protected classes, the combination of the two was a loophole in the legal system that led to the court absolving General Motors of this clear example of a combination of race and sex discrimination at play. General Motors was able to use the existing protected classes to cancel each other out. Crenshaw did not argue that a separate protected class needed to be created for those with intersectional identities, but that disregarding these intersections made Black women vulnerable targets for both racial and sex-based discrimination or judiciary dismissal.”
“Ecofeminists argue that the treatment of women in society is a likely indicator of the treatment of the earth and vice versa; that because we live in a capitalist and patriarchal (or male-centered) society, the oppression of women and the destruction of nature are a natural consequence.”
“Intersectional environmentalism argues that the same systems of oppression that oppress people also oppress and degrade the planet. When a nation, such as one in the Global North, prioritizes extractive industries and profit over the planet, then it will likely also have interlinked social inequality. Degrading the planet also requires overlooking the negative impact on people, whether in the present or the near future.”
“The movement finally ignited in 1969, when disturbing images of Cleveland, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River engulfed in flames (yes, a body of water with fire raging on top of it!) were published in Time magazine; the United States was shocked and wanted to know more. The river fire, caused by extremely flammable oil, gas, and toxic waste dumped into waterways, was far from anomalous during this time period, but with this one article, the nation came face-to-face with what a world on fire could look like if policies didn’t adequately protect the planet.
In response, millions took to the streets, protesting and pressuring politicians to implement federal environmental policies. This collective action led to the largest environmental demonstration in history, on April 22, 1970: Earth Day, in which twenty million Americans called for a drastic improvement in environmental policy. The first Earth Day was a spectacular feat, with gatherings and activities across the world.”
“Although the Earth Day movement led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of several prominent federal environmental laws, like the Clean Air Act (CAA) and the Clean Water Act, it can be argued that these laws did not equally protect all Americans. While primarily white communities in the U.S. saw a 70 percent reduction in air pollution after the CAA was passed, low-income and Black, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Latinx communities were seemingly left out of the parameters of protection outlined in these laws. In fact, some of the new environmental legislation passed in the 1970s directly diverted toxic waste into Black, Brown, and low-income communities.”
“12 PERCENT of people living in tribal communities are impacted by asthma. This is almost double the national average. This increase has been linked to poor indoor air quality.”
“INDIGENOUS PEOPLE in the U.S. are the least likely to have access to safe running water. With a lack of access to clean water for cooking, cleaning, and handwashing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Navajo Nation was hit with an infection rate of 2,500 per hundred thousand residents – surpassing that of the nation’s epicenter at the time, New York City in early 2020.”
“20 PERCENT of rural Alaskan homes lack access to piped water and a flushable toilet, which can leave these populations without access to potable water and clean water to use for washing.
FIFTY-EIGHT OUT OF every one thousand Native American households lack plumbing, compared with three out of every one thousand white households.”
“Nations like Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands are already dealing with salt water contaminating sources of drinking water and agricultural fields as a direct result of sea level rise.”
“The fashion industry is one of the most polluting industries in the world, producing 10 percent of global carbon emissions.“Fast fashion,” a term coined in the New York Times in the 1980s, describes a shift in the fashion industry to speed up manufacturing and shipping to keep up with consumer demand — a demand that was carefully cultivated by fashion brands to change consumer behavior and make people want more and more, and quickly. Fast fashion is largely responsible for the shockingly high emissions, waste, and harm caused by the apparel industry.
Prior to the 1990s, shopping for clothing in the United States was based more on need. Clothing was also more durably made and was intended to last. Fashion insiders had the privilege of previewing collections during runway shows and private exhibitions before trends hit the shelves, but for the average American, clothing was mostly purchased on an as-needed basis. With the increased availability of clothing and the explosion of cable TV in the 1980s and ‘90s, consumer trends started to shift. With networks like MTV showcasing the latest trends, shoppers began to dive further into their personal styles than ever before and chase the instant gratification that came with buying new things. It’s unfortunate but simple: if the styles and trends keep changing, consumers will just keep buying and buying to stay on trend — especially when the price of clothing becomes more affordable. Pre-fast fashion culture, stores wouldn’t restock their inventory every other week with new styles. Consumers had no reason to return to the same store over and over.”
“AS OF 2015, the world consumes 400 percent more clothing than it did twenty years ago, producing around eighty billion pieces of new clothing every year.
WASHING CLOTHES releases microplastics into our waterways and ecosystems, the equivalent of fifty billion plastic water bottles each year.
THE FASHION industry is the world’s second-largest industrial consumer of water. It takes seven hundred gallons to produce one cotton shirt and two thousand to produce one pair of jeans.”
“Around 70 percent of the world’s lithium exists in South America, within Indigenous lands. These lithium reserves are primarily concentrated in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, in an area referred to by the industry as the Lithium Triangle. Argentina has the largest lithium reserves, followed by the Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia.”
“In October 2019, protesters from Chile’s Indigenous communities blocked off access to SQM’s mining operations to show solidarity with the Chilean social justice protests and to take a stand against environmental degradation.”
“If everyone globally stopped eating meat and dairy products, global farmland use could be reduced by 75 percent, an area the size of China, Australia, the U.S., and the EU combined! A 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that both agriculture and forestry have contributed almost a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock, or animal agriculture, contributes a whopping 14.5 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.
From 2014 to 2017, there was a 600 percent increase in the U.S. of people identifying as vegans (from 1 percent to 6 percent). Global Google Trends search data also shows an increase in veganism searches worldwide, with top locations being Israel, Australia, Canada, Austria, and New Zealand. Research predicts that China’s vegan market will grow more than 17 percent from 2015 to 2050, and in 2016, the Chinese health ministry guidelines encouraged the nation of over one billion people to reduce its meat consumption by 50 percent by 2030.”
“A Pew Research Center study found that 8 percent of Black Americans identify as strict vegans or vegetarians, as opposed to 3 percent of the general population. A 2020 Gallup poll found that people of color in the U.S. reported reducing their meat consumption at a much higher rate than white Americans (31 percent versus 19 percent).
When we look globally, the countries with the largest increase of vegetarian populations between 2016 and ‘17 are (ranked from highest growth to lowest) Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Germany, Brazil, Turkey, Kenya, Thailand, and Italy. Many of these countries are in the Global South, although mainstream representation of plant-based diets is largely centered around perspectives from the Global North.
These countries have the most vegetarians overall per capita: India (31 to 42 percent), Mexico (19 percent), Brazil (14 percent), Taiwan (14 percent), Switzerland (13 percent), Israel (10.3 percent), New Zealand (10 percent), Sweden (10 percent), Canada (9.4 percent), U.S. (5 to 8 percent), and Russia (3 to 4 percent).”
“The term “veganism” was coined by British woodworker Donald Watson in 1944 to make a distinction between vegetarians who consumed animal products (like dairy) and those who did not. He later went on to found the Vegan Society to further promote vegan lifestyles, which gained mainstream traction in the 2000s. While Watson did coin the term “veganism” and helped popularize it, vegan ideologies could be found in Eastern religions like Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism for centuries prior to 1944. The concept of cruelty-free eating can also be found in the Ital diet of Rastafarians, which encourages consuming plant-based and unprocessed foods.”
