Activists say climate justice is the new climate action. Here’s what that means — and how to switch.
Why It Matters
The people who are most responsible for climate change are least impacted by it, and those who are most impacted have contributed the least to creating the crisis. If social impact organizations’ climate action doesn’t take this into account, it’s not only tone-deaf, but it’s ineffective.
Back in 2019, during the federal election cycle, Manvi Bhalla was talking to friends at a wine and cheese night when the group collectively realized they didn’t have a clear understanding of each political party’s environmental platform — and didn’t know how to find a breakdown.
So they decided to make one themselves, put it on social media, and Shake Up The Establishment — what’s now a youth-led, grassroots organization that disperses information about “human and social justice issues that are exacerbated by the climate crisis” — was born.
But the organization’s principles weren’t always what Bhalla, who’s now the group’s president, would call intersectional, a term coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how different socioeconomic factors like race, class and gender affect a person’s experience of the world. Many of the gr
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