Third blog in the blog series about the intersection between race and the environment.
What does it mean to be an activist?
This past semester I took a class with a workshop on social justice. At one of the sessions, the professor asked my classmates and I.. “Do you see yourself as an activist?” This was an environmental study abroad program, so I assumed that everyone would definitely say “yes”… but this was definitely not the case. To my surprise, it was actually pretty 50/50. When asked why those that said no believed such, they answered things like “I don’t really get involved in much. I don’t really go to protests or call up local government officials.” I, on the other hand, was quick to say, “of course I am an activist. Like most people in this program, I am passionate about the environment and other social issues and I go out of my way to educate people about those issues and advocate for solutions.”
Why was my response so different than half of my peers?
Right when you look up the definition of an activist, the words “Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct, or intervene in social, political, economic, or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good.” automatically come up. So that active college student on your Facebook page that posts those intriguing news articles would be an activist according to this definition. Maybe this is why I thought I was/am an activist. Going off of that definition I wanted to talk about how to be an activist for more than one issue.
One of the things I hear from a good number of environmental activists is that fighting on behalf of the environment is a hard job and even though Black Lives Matter and other social justice campaigns are important, environmentalism is a lot of work and takes a lot of energy. So how can they become activists for more than one cause? Well, as an environmentalist, especially an intersectional environmentalist (previous blog post on this topic here) you are already fighting for so many different issues. A big part of environmentalism is economic change, since climate change is mainly a result of political and corporate focus on economic growth, so you are already indirectly fighting for economic change already!
When push comes to shove, environmentalism is important but we cannot fight for the environment when we allow racial and social injustice. The possibility of doing both is definitely in your grasp and as an activist, you have the ability to facilitate change on the big and small levels. Believe in yourself!
Written by Dominique Agnew, Cornell University Class of 2021 and Climate Justice Now Intern.