Closing the Gap: The Intersection of Racial and Climate Justice
MN350 Executive Director Sam Grant
Numerous scientists, climate experts, and government officials agree that 350 ppm (“parts per million”) is the “safe” level of carbon dioxide for our atmosphere. MN350 takes its name from this critical number, underscoring the urgency of combating climate change. What makes this Minnesota-based organization so powerful is its growing emphasis on cross-movement work and its ongoing evolution from being primarily white-led to being substantively led by Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). “By centering environmental justice, you’re sort of braiding the things that we’ve divided in creating the world we’ve created.”
The organization’s work encompasses a vast range of interrelated issues, including:
growing the number of BIPOC farmers and highlighting the need for land justice;
honoring treaty rights, native forestry, and co-management of natural resources.
fostering open science partnerships, whereby scientists learn to partner effectively with people in communities that are impacted by environmental injustice;
organizing for the Green New Deal from the bottom up, with a focus on people in local communities;
emphasizing local politics, not just state politics;
working toward clean transit;
engaging in ongoing resistance to the Enbridge pipeline project;
fighting for food justice and the elimination of food deserts and food swamps in BIPOC communities; and
increasing BIPOC access to parks – national, state, and local.
Changing the face of MN350
At the heart of climate change mitigation is the transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. As we make this transition, we must focus on equitable and just transition. MN350 is focused on precisely this goal: working toward a form of civilization that is based on respecting the earth, practicing full reciprocity with the ecosystems on which our lives depend but also honoring healthy human relations.
“If you’re doing climate justice work from a racial justice vantage point, you’re thinking about the challenges of climate adaptation, climate mitigation, and climate resilience from the lens of communities impacted by racial injustice and climate injustice,” said Sam Grant, the executive director of MN350. “It’s necessarily an intersectional framework that thinks about the core challenges in people’s lives and how to address those core challenges in people’s lives as the strategy, as the pathway to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. By centering environmental justice, you’re braiding the things that we’ve divided in creating the world we’ve created.”
Grant told the story of coming on board as MN350’s executive director, the first African American to hold the position. While the organization had begun to bring some people of color onto the staff and onto the board, it was not enough. “If you guys want me to be the executive director,” Grant told the organization, “we have to be really committed to the intersection of racial justice and climate justice and open ourselves to redefining our sense of what it means to fight for climate justice.”
Now the board is about 65% BIPOC and the staff almost 50% BIPOC, and the number of BIPOC members and volunteers is growing. Important to this shift is MN350’s emphasis on direct investment in people’s well-being. “Racial justice isn’t a numbers game,” Grant said. “Racial justice is a values orientation.”
Grant stressed that it is crucial to consider who is in the conversation, making sure that communities who are most impacted are at the table. Grant identified the questions MN350 and other organizations need to be asking. “Are we investing in people from BIPOC communities to shape the collective discernment about what it makes sense to do? Are we paying attention sufficiently to what’s happening in that conversation and investing in that?”
Most importantly, Grant said, we need to make sure the investments we make reduce greenhouse gas emissions, mitigate climate injustice, support the engagement of people in just transitions, support racial healing across the divides, and help us move the world to a more positive outcome over the next centuries.
Using a participatory model borrowed from Habitat for Humanity, MN350 nurtures its volunteers as owners of an ecological foundation. “Part of the strategy has to be about honoring the end result that you want by investing in it today,” Grant said. “It’s being intentional about finding great leaders, supporting great leaders, and then investing in those leaders to offer leadership roles to the future of the organization.”
While BIPOC communities have not generally been the primary contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, they have been harmed disproportionately by the resulting climate change – and they need to be in the driver’s seat as we make our way to a new way of doing things. “It’s the people who have been left out of the benefits of a destructive economy who have more of a reason to be the leaders of a different economy,” Grant said.
Healing mind, body, and soul
“If we’re not healing mind, body, and soul,” Grant said, “we can’t offer the kind of leadership that moves the planet in a new direction.” To that end, MN350 is “centering racial justice comprehensively. We’re not letting any conversations happen that don’t rotate around the intersectionality of racial justice and climate justice.”
Working on a 10-year campaign, MN350 wants to have a strategy by 2030 that significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50% and that has every region in Minnesota thoroughly committed to just transition pathways. The goal is a state where regardless of what kind of a body, culture, or geography you’re in, you have resources for carbon-neutral health care, transportation, education, work, finances, housing, and faith. “Anywhere you look,” Grand said, “you’re going to be covered and included in a just transition so that you are a responsible co-agent of healthy people on a healthy planet.”
In doing this work, Grant said, we need to focus on “transformative justice orientation, which requires a whole-scale reconsideration of the society we’ve created, where we’re committing to no longer reproduce any form of harm to any kind of body anywhere in the United States or anywhere on the earth.”
Grant acknowledged that this is asking a great deal. “Let’s cancel privileges, come into deep relationship, and practice dutiful, mutual care from that new sensibility,” Grant said. “We’re saying we’re not going to cause harm to each other anymore. To build trust, we have to clean up the way we’ve poorly treated each other in the past, and that means numerous forms of reparations are required. There’s some psychological repair, cultural repair, socio-cultural repair, ecological repair, economic repair, and changes in policies.”
As we work collectively for solutions to climate change, economic growth matters – but other measures that matter, Grant said, include ecological health, human health, reductions in social violence and social unrest, and elimination of insecurities in food, energy, housing, water, and livelihood. Ultimately, Grant emphasized, people must “feel like they are supported to be vital contributors to a mutual thriving framework on the planet as a whole.”
As he thought about the intersectionality of racial justice and climate justice, Grant concluded, “All issues are environmental issues, and therefore all environmental issues are ours.”
A note on the Closing the Gap series: Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)-majority communities experience climate change and its harmful effects to a greater degree than other communities in the United States. The knowledge of this disproportionate impact of climate change is the basis of the modern environmental justice movement. What is not as readily evident or celebrated is how effectively BIPOC communities and organizations within these communities address climate change. This series of organizational profiles – known as “Closing the Gap” – highlights environmental organizations from across the country led by and/or serving BIPOC communities. The series is an extension of the Closing the Gap initiative, part of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity in Environmental Philanthropy (InDEEP).