For the last two decades, environmental justice communities have fought to win the right to live, work, play, and pray free from toxins and poisons polluting our air, water, and lands. Nearly twenty years after the Principles of Environmental Justice were drafted, our social movements understand that the systems that have allowed the poisoning of our communities have also stolen some of us from our lands while stealing the land from others. Meanwhile, more and more of the earth’s precious resources have been stripped and misused, leaving once resilient natural systems and the earth’s climate systems on the verge of collapse.
While the US government tries to advance a carbon trading plan that brings another commonly-held resource --atmospheric space-- into the market sphere, communities-of-color, Indigenous Peoples, and low-income communities will be hit first and worst by the effects of climate chaos.
In this critical moment, the USSF provides a key site for indigenous peoples, environmental justice, immigrant rights, economic justice, and other racial justice movements to come together to strategize to win community control over our lives and resources. The voices of indigenous peoples and grassroots community organizations in impacted communities must be central to helping us foster communities of resistance and resilience that can rewrite the rules of the game based on transformed relationships—with each other and the earth.
At this Ecological Justice PMA, we hope to advance proposals from the grassroots for shared work on climate and ecological justice rooted in an understanding of the need to transform the global systems that determine the ways each of us gets to live, work, and play.
