Local climate activist Melinda Tuhus weighs in on Earth Day 2020, Covid-19, and pushing for a Green New Deal amidst the pandemic.
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Julie Wagner submitted the following write-up about plans:
Climate activists have long been planning massive rallies, strikes, and actions for Earth Day, Wednesday April 22, 2020 – the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. Then COVID-19 hit and physical distancing upended those logistics, but the spirit of the day has only strengthened as activists pivot to organize online. “We’re shut in, but we won’t shut up” is the Earth Day call for the online rally, planned by the New Haven hub of Sunrise Movement, America’s young person-led climate movement, alongside partner climate justice groups. Indoors and in defense of our planet, New Haven Climate Movement has a full schedule of home-based Earth Day community actions.
As devastating as the pandemic is, climate activists are not entirely surprised at the disruption it is causing. The pandemic simply reinforces what we’ve been saying for decades – that, having pushed planetary boundaries to the brink, our existing systems that we turn to for safety, health, and wellbeing are crumbling beneath our feet. Systems for healthcare, housing, food, labor, criminal justice, immigration, and even our own democracy are all unraveling and the suffering is immense. The pandemic has laid bare what disaster happens when our systems protect corporations rather than people and are designed to promote economic growth rather than sustainable living. Upon closer examination we see that in fact those systems we have been socialized to believe in were never intended to provide safety, health, and wellbeing for all. As with climate disasters, the pandemic reveals how these systems press their injustices hardest upon the bodies of poor, brown, and black people.
In the rubble of our collapsing systems, beneath and around the feet of the leaders who have failed us utterly, green shoots have sprouted and taken root. As an over-35 ally to Sunrise and a friend of New Haven Climate Movement, I see these groups as seedlings not because their members are young in chronological age, but because their principles and strategies are grounded, fresh, positive, and locally grown, and because their landscape is spacious enough for all, even and especially the wildflowers growing along the side of the highway.
These movements bring to bear two crucial qualities — conviction and compassion. Exercising conviction, we can decide what we stand for and how we will live. A way out, if there is one, will actually be many ways out – renouncing ways of comfort and convenience that we must let go of, reclaiming ancestral ways that have been suppressed, localizing our lives, reconciling with each other, and creating new systems. Sunrise champions a Green New Deal as a national and state governmental approach to clean energy, modern infrastructure, fair labor practices, and healthcare. The Green New Deal is an approach to new systems that puts people before profits and strives for equity in safety, health, and wellbeing. Was such an approach in place a few months ago, thousands of lives might have been saved from COVID-19.
In compassion, we can recognize that we each have been cruelly isolated by a political economy that pits us against each other. We can wake up to the truth that we exist as a net of relationships with reciprocal lines of influence and that this awareness can strengthen our solidarity. On 9/11 the world said “Now we are all Americans”. Climate activists have said “We are all burning in the wildfires and drowning in the floods”. Now we must recognize that “We are all infected with the virus.” How close does the dragon’s spume have to come before we realize our shared mortality?
This pandemic is a tragedy that is awakening some to the state of the world and spurring others to action. Earth Day is an opportunity to coalesce conviction and compassion. Rally online with Sunrise, New Haven Climate Movement, and partner climate, economic, and racial justice groups. Spend your Earth Day 50th anniversary in community with others sowing seeds of positive change.
