Climate Justice Alliance

Interview

* Tom Llewellyn: Can tell us a little bit about who’s in the Alliance and what you have accomplished so far?

Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan: "It’s an amazing body of people who have been organizing in their communities for decades. It includes the Indigenous Environmental Network as a founder and Grassroots Global Justice Alliance as a founding member, right to the Right to the City Alliance as a founding member. Those are networks of grassroots groups that are deeply rooted in place. They bring a perspective of the root causes of these crises that we find ourselves in. Understanding that when we talk about climate change, we’re not just talking about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That is a problem, but it’s only a symptom of the root causes of the problem, which we see right here on the ground, right here in communities like New Orleans, like North Dakota, like Detroit, like Richmond, California, like Kentucky. These are some of the sites that our communities are leading with a vision for a different path that this can take.

That’s really what the groups in the Climate Justice Alliance are advancing — a connected, trans-local set of regenerative economies — which is what we need not only to solve the climate crisis, but really to solve all of these crises that we see in our times. Such as the crises of inequality, which in this moment of this global pandemic, we see that everything from the prison industrial system to a virus like COVID-19 will travel the same path of inequity. And so that has to be addressed. Those are the kinds of things that these frontline communities and the Climate Justice Alliance are designing for, from the ground [up].

I also want to encourage people to check out a zine that Movement Generation created along with the Climate Justice Alliance." (https://www.shareable.net/navigating-a-just-transition-through-covid-19-and-the-climate-crisis-a-qa-with-michelle-mascarenhas-swan-of-movement-generation/?)