By Quinton Sankofa, YES Magazine
The dominant narrative of the climate crisis goes something like this: “The burning of fossil fuels has produced so much carbon dioxide that our atmosphere is being damaged, our climate is changing, and our planet is warming. This situation is leading to extreme temperatures, severe drought, devastating wildfires, and ultra powerful hurricanes. The best ways to respond to this crisis are to create a change in human consumption patterns and to have an enormous technological intervention.”
If we want to sustain life on Earth in the face of this crisis, we’re told to do everything from buying electric vehicles and taking shorter show-ers to avoiding plastic straws and shopping with reusable bags. The elites promote the idea that “technology will save us” with solar panels on every home, mirrors in space to reflect the sun away from Earth, and cloud seeding to make it rain during a drought. So-called tech “solu-tions” offer an attractive and compelling narrative, but these false promises crumble under scrutiny.
Movement Generation (MG) offers a different understanding of the climate crisis and how we should respond. In our analysis, the climate crisis is better understood as part of a larger ecological crisis, which can be described as a crisis of disconnection: We are disconnected from the land, and we are disconnected from each other.
The ecological crisis predates climate change. It did not begin with the burning of fossil fuels. It began with the trans-Saharan/transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the taking of Indigenous lands through colonialism and imperialism. The magnitude of these events and the impact they had on humanity and our ecosystems are incomprehensible.
In the span of about 1,250 years, from 650 CE to 1900 CE, more than 50 million people of African descent were taken from their homes and forced into enslavement. More than 50 million Indigenous people in the so-called Americas were killed, and more than 1 billion acres of their land were stolen. Trillions of dollars were generated and circulated almost exclusively among people of Arab and European descent.
The forced labor was used to heavily exploit and extract natural resources all over the world. Entire landscapes and ecosystems were de-stroyed to create colonies that grew into countries. The tremendous amount of money that was created during the period of enslavement fueled the industrial revolution. Since the burning of fossil fuels would not have been possible without slavery and genocide, then the re-sponse to this crisis requires Black liberation and ecology. A global redistribution of power and wealth through reparations and Indigenous sovereignty will move land away from the few who see it as an object to exploit and transfer it to the many who long to care for it but have been violently denied the right to do so.
In 1970, Nathan Hare, Ph.D., the first coordinator of a Black Studies program in U.S. history, published “Black Ecology,” a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Black Studies and Research. “The emergence of the concept of ecology in American life is potentially of momentous relevance to the ultimate liberation of black people,” Hare wrote. “Yet blacks and their environmental interests have been so blatantly omit-ted that blacks and the ecology movement currently stand in contradiction to each other.”
One year later, Marvin Gaye released his iconic album What’s Going On, with songs that played to the theme of Black liberation and ecolo-gy, including “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” “What’s Going On,” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” In 1977, Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya to empower African women and their communities to plant trees and think more eco-logically. With just a handful of examples, we can see what our ancestors have long known: Black liberation and ecology go together like soil and water.
So what does that mean for us today? I think about Black liberation as the process of obtaining safety, sovereignty, and self-determination for people of African descent. It is inherently revolutionary and the antithesis to the myth of white supremacy. Black liberation seeks to cre-ate a world where people of African descent can reach their full potential. It seeks to restore people of African descent to their traditional greatness—part of which includes being the original stewards of the Earth, the people who have an 80,000-year-old relationship with the Earth.
The evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens—the currently agreed upon ancestor of modern humans—occurred about 150,000 years ago on the continent of Africa, likely in central Africa. Our species lived exclusively there for the next 80,000 years, before the great migration out of Africa began. Therefore, for the first 80,000 years of our existence, all humans on Earth were exclusively people of African descent.
In that time, our ancestors created the building blocks of life as we know it today. They mastered the use of fire, created complex tools, de-veloped languages, created art, engaged in trade and resource sharing, and advanced cognitive abilities like planning and problem solving. An instrumental part of their progress was ecology, the study of home. It was an 80,000-year study of animal behavior, human growth and development, plant medicine, seafaring, cartography, astronomy, and the relationship between earth, water, air, fire, and spirit.
MG understands ecology as the study of home/earth. (Eco comes from the Greek word oikos, which simply means “home,” while -logy is a word rooted in Latin meaning “the study of.”) Home can be as big as the planet or as small as a drop of water. It all depends on the perspec-tive of the student. Ecology invites us to study the relationships that make up home, not just the container that is home. Through relation-ships of home, we can explore concepts like interdependence, reciprocity, dynamic balance, growth through conflict, zero waste, and regen-eration. Ecology is a modern word for an ancient practice, and I believe it is vital to the survival of our species.
One of the most important and enduring teachings from our ancestors is the idea that humans are not separate from nature. We are all con-nected. What you do to the land, you do to the people, and what you do to the people, you do to the land. This overarching message has been a foundational belief of humanity from our earliest days on the African continent up to the present moment.
However, in the last few hundred years of our story, the dangerous myth of white supremacy has sought to eradicate this belief. This myth makes a delusive claim that white people are innately superior to other races (especially the Black race), animals, nature, and life itself.
Human activities that would be considered atrocious to our ancestors are now celebrated as proof of white superiority: the construction of mega dams that disrupt entire ecosystems, the discovery and burning of fossil fuels that create climate disruption, the development of chemical pesticides and fertilizers that deplete soil and pollute groundwater, and the over extraction of rare earth minerals to power the in-formation economy. All of this is made possible by the myth of white supremacy and its evil economic offspring, the extractive economy (more broadly referred to as capitalism).
If we are going to create a sustainable future with life-affirming, regenerative economies, then we must fight for global reparations—not only cash payments but also an opportunity to repair our relationships with the land and with one another. We must earnestly study our planet and develop responses to the crisis that are rooted in regeneration, care, and cooperation with the purpose of creating ecological and social well-being. Traveling the path of Black liberation and ecology will increase our chance to survive as a species in the face of catastrophic changes to our ecosystem that have just begun.
This editorial was originally published in YES Magazine.
