Consider This from NPR - Social Justice and Climate Justice: How One Environmental Leader Is Moving Forward

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

The Sierra Club has been at the forefront of the American environmental movement for decades. However, the group has also face criticism for racist and exclusionary attitudes embedded in some of its founding ideals. The Sierra Club's new executive director, Ben Jealous, explains how he aims to advance the group's climate goals, while also reckoning with that past.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Four years ago, a Swedish teenager addressed world leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City, and she opened her speech with a simple message. My message is that we'll be watching you. Greta Thunberg was only 16, and her speech introduced immediacy and anger to the fight for climate justice. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass, she became Time magazine's youngest ever person of the year, and she's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the last four years. In an interview with NPR the other day, Tunberg explained how she sees the fight for climate justice.

Right now, it's like saving the climate is in like an act of tree hugging. It's not being seen as a way to protect our civilization as we know it and to save countless of human lives. That is being put against jobs and workers when it's actually the opposite. The fight for social justice is the fight for climate justice. We can't have one without the other. We can't put them against each other. Consider this.

Many environmental activists see climate justice and social justice as inextricably linked. Coming up, how the new leader of one of America's most prominent environmental groups is thinking about it. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Monday C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Yosemite is renowned for its towering sequoias and waterfalls and polished granite domes. It became a national park thanks to the lobbying of conservationist John Muir, whose legacy lives on in the organization he founded, the Sierra Club. That group has been wrestling with the racist and exclusionary attitudes embedded in some of its founding ideals. Ben Jealous was recently chosen to be the group's executive director.

He was the former head of the NAACP and is the first person of color to lead the Sierra Club. Jealous begins his formal duties later this month, and he joined me to talk about the road ahead. Before we get to your role as leader of this organization, take me back to your childhood. What was your relationship to the natural world like? Oh, you know, my parents had met in Baltimore. Their marriage was against the law. Because it was an interracial marriage? Yes, because mom's black and dad's white. And we ended up on the coast of Northern California. I literally spent my childhood playing hide and seek between Redwood trees and Big Sur.

You spent most of your career fighting for equality and justice for people. Do you see a role at the Sierra Club as a pivot from that work or a continuation of it? Oh, it's a continuation of it and a continuation of my life. My first order of business at the NAACP was launching our climate justice program. We had just had Hurricane Katrina, and there was a deep awareness that poor communities generally and black communities historically, because of segregation, were in very vulnerable places, places like the Lower Ninth Ward. So, you know, that part of it, I'd say the climate change has pushed a lot of things together. There's an awareness that right now, the best thing that we can do for peace in our time

to assure the future of the human race is to fight to make this planet healthier. It's dying. That's a big task. And so how do you view your job at this particular moment as the leader of the Sierra Club? What's the concise description? Yeah, the concise description is to keep doing what we've been doing. We, the last 10 years, have run the most effective anti-climate change campaign in the United States. We shut down more than 250 coal-fired power plants. We also played a key role in passing the Inflation Reduction Act and the Associated Infrastructure Bill. And those have concentrated capital for essentially creating a tipping point in our economy, taking our economy from an economy, frankly, that's been fueled by industries that treat both the wild and people as disposable, and shifting towards an economy where we will soon be creating more jobs that help save the planet than ones that

help destroy it. There is this growing recognition that the American environmental movement was in many ways founded on exclusionary and racist ideas. Dorceta Taylor of Yale University has done some of this research, and here's something she told me in an interview last year. We see a taking of Native American lands to turn into park spaces that are described as empty, untouched by human hands, pristine, to be protected. So this is where the language of preservation really crosses over into this narrative of exclusion. And so how do you now build something inclusive on that foundation? amongst wealthy whites in this country in the 1920s. The reality is that if you want to rebuild any American institution, whether it's the U.S. Congress or it's the Sierra Club or it's Harvard University, you're going to have to reckon with the history of those institutions.

For the Sierra Club right now, the reality is that the urgency of the work on the ground has required people to really shift, I'd say, in many ways from Hurricane Katrina forward to figure out how to work across old lines of division. I think leading an environmental organization in this moment can be so reactive when there is every day another hurricane, wildfire, or flood. How do you avoid that gravitational pull and take the big picture? You've got to do both. We've got to work more on resilience. That's certainly one of the conversations.

People are scared because the big storms keep coming. So you've just got to deal with the real, you know, while you're focused on achieving great aspirations. What keeps us focused is knowing that we have specific goals that we have to meet to keep the planet from getting above one degree warmer, two degrees warmer, three degrees warmer. That's kind of a scientific equation with this crazy X factor that is politics. And so it keeps us very busy working to create consensus, not just in Washington, but in every state capital, in every major county, right down to small towns, about the steps that need to be taken. The good news is that we're as environmentalists, and I've been active in this movement since I was a kid, you typically show up with sticks. The Inflation Reduction Act

gives us the chance to show up with carrots. You know, you typically talk about stopping industry, and that means jobs. And now we get to talk about starting new industries. There is a chance to really build an inclusive economy. Ben Jealous is the incoming executive director of the Sierra Club. Thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you for talking to me. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.