June Happenings
Hi, all.
June is proving to be a busy time of year! Pride month, Juneteenth, World Refugee Day, and more all happen to fall around now, and though each event/day is significant in and of itself, they also help remind us how intersectional the issue of climate change is. On that note, I have some articles, ideas, and actions I want to highlight this week that connect with some of the other things happening this June and serve as a reminder that taking action on climate means working for a more just future for all, and vice versa.
In Atmos Magazine, Daphne Chouliaraki Milner writes an excellent article about Queering the Food System– i.e. how making farming a more inclusive and welcoming space can benefit people and planet in a big way. Queering the food system imagines ot only diversifying the types of people who are farmers and making farming communities more inclusive, but also how such a philosophy can encourage the diversification of ways of growing food away from monocultures and heavy fertilizer and pesticide that are deplete soil health and are carbon intensive. As one of the farmers interviewed for the article explains, “Queerness, which is about inclusivity, is about embracing difference, and cherishing it. That’s actually good for agriculture. It’s good for the crops that we’re producing. It’s good for the planet.” So true!
In observance of Juneteenth yesterday, a big list of Black-Led Climate Justice organizations was circulating on Twitter, and I definitely want to share that here. It includes organizations from all over the country doing all types of really great work and lots of different ways you can get involved with them. (We will definitely be working to add these orgs and their actions to our Climate Action Explorer in the coming weeks!)
In addition, Just Solar (which I wrote about in a Movement Monday a couple of weeks ago) published an excellent, brief article on the connection between Juneteenth and environmental justice with a link to sign a petition to promote the Build Back Better Act (yes, that is still a thing! And we still really want it to happen!).
And, climate writer/thinker extraordinaire Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote a piece in Atmos Magazine about Climate Denial’s Racist Roots and it is definitely worth a read.
Today (June 20th) is World Refugee Day, and with the way things are going right now, it is predicted that there could be 1.2 billion climate refugees by the year 2050. Not to mention the fact that currently 1 out of every 78 people on planet Earth is displaced. That number is truly incomprehensible. Check out this website for more on how to get involved in addressing the refugee/climate crises.
Other things happening in climate world:
There’s been a lot of hubbub around the world’s food supply recently, and climate-change related extreme weather events are colliding in a bad way for crops. This twitter thread says it all.
Tomorrow (June 21) #ShowYourStripes day. Ed Hawkins, an English climate scientist, popularized a method of visualizing climate change with stripes–specifically, a stripe for every year colored according to how far above or below the average temp from 1970-2000 that year’s average temp is. It’s a pretty striking visualization and sharing it tomorrow is a good way to get conversations going. You can read more about the stripes here.
Thanks for reading, and happy June!