Monday is Earth Day, a commemoration first celebrated in 1970 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. But in the 54 years since, what started as a call to action to address environmental challenges at the time, Earth Day has grown into an international effort to spread awareness and call for large-scale change to address our current climate crisis.
Climate change will leave no corner of the globe untouched, but some communities will be more deeply impacted by its effects — a reality we’re already seeing (and feeling) across the U.S.
In Texas prisons, incarcerated people are suffering from heat-related illnesses as state prisons refuse to install or repair faulty cooling systems that routinely fail to keep prison facilities cool.
“While the state pussyfoots, heat strokes are becoming as common as belching,” Kwaneta Harris, an abolition feminist who has been incarcerated for the past 17 years, writes in an essay for URL Media partner Scalawag.
Even as those working in the prison have access to properly working air conditioners, the incarcerated resort to what Harris calls “shameful survival tactics” to beat the oppressive heat.
“In this foxhole, enemies become friends and friends become family,” she writes. “There’s no room for dignity, pride, or bias. We share a common deadly enemy: the extreme heat.”
But it’s not just the heat that’s putting the lives of the most vulnerable in danger.
Last August, as Hurricane Idalia loomed off Florida’s coast, a decision was made to not evacuate the state’s incarcerated population from a county jail within a mandatory evacuation zone.
“Essentially, the detained community was to stay in place, despite the urging of the sheriff earlier in the day that everyone heed the evacuation order,” community activist Angel D’Angelo writes for Scalawag.
Related: What Detroit’s climate change battle will look like (Outlier Media)
While incarcerated populations are uniquely susceptible to the impacts of climate change, they are far from the only vulnerable community. As URL Media partner Prism reports, an estimated 13 million people in the U.S. will be forced to leave their homes due to rising coastlines. It’s unknown how many more will choose to leave due to climate-related impacts.
“A lot of people probably don’t know how to start the conversation [about where to go next] because people have created a community together [where they are],” Mark Rupp, the adaptation program director at the Georgetown Climate Center, told Prism. “The idea of talking about how you need to move people out of a shared community is not an easy conversation to have.”
This is especially true when these communities rely on the land in which they live.
In California’s vast Salinas Valley, often referred to as the nation’s “salad bowl” due to its agricultural industry, the first year of the pandemic brought a number of challenges to those who worked in the fields. Between the ongoing pandemic and the largest wildfire season recorded in the state’s modern history, URL Media partner palabra. reported on the impact of climate change felt by those working in the fields.
“It was just raining ash the whole day for a couple of days here,” 17-year-old Christopher Camarena told the outlet in 2020. “The sky was very gloomy, very dark. The oxygen was horrible. It wasn’t a safe environment to work in.”
At one point it got so bad that Camarena’s father was sent home early, causing him to stress over that day’s wages.
And though a report last fall found that the U.S. was making progress in reducing pollution, URL Media partner Capital B reports that it’s simply not enough.
“We have to talk about environmental and climate justice issues with nuance – it is not enough for us to make pollution reductions if we’re not being really clear about which communities are receiving resources,” Abre’ Conner, the climate justice director at the NAACP, told the outlet.
So this Earth Day, instead of focusing solely on how to best address climate change, let’s re-center our efforts to focus on the needs of our nation’s most vulnerable communities and work together to reduce the impacts. — Alicia Ramirez
P.S. If you’re in the New York City area, URL Media partner Epicenter-NYC has put together a list of events in the city celebrating Earth Month.
Uplift. Respect. Love.
