Just so we’re clear, the reason a lot of people protest climate change isn’t because they like trees and hiking. It’s because we’re making the Earth unlivable for all humans, and that humans in the poorest countries are the ones worst hit.
Protesting climate change ain’t a white privilege thing. The people protesting climate change the hardest are Indigenous people, Island nation people, and poor people in hot countries. They’re terrified.
People are dying because of climate change. Climate change isn’t just killing our planet, it’s killing people, and it’s those who live in poverty stricken areas that are dying first. More than 2,300 people died in India during their heatwave last year, and it’s only getting worse.
Temperatures in some areas in North Africa and the Middle East are reaching as high as 140 F/ 60 C during the summer. Scientists are projecting that by the end of the century, unless we take drastic measures, these parts of the world will be entirely uninhabitable. We will actually have refugees from these areas fleeing their homes because they physically cannot survive in that environment.
that’s not even getting into the amount of damage caused by natural disasters–and natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, forest fires, droughts and blizzards all become more frequent and more severe the worse climate change becomes. Those can hit anywhere (if it’s not a tornado in your area, it’s a hurricane, or a forest fire, or a blizzard), and do damage to both agricultural areas and densely-populated cities.
People protesting for ecological protection— often indigenous people btw— are also being killed in assassinations & mass slaughters all over Latin America, and have been for well over a decade now, often in the interests of local governments making deals with international big agribusinesses (globalization = outsourcing the most toxic slave labor / sweatshop labor to the cheapest bidder, because imperialismis just keen like that).
The areas most affected by slash and burn deforestation + the subsequent land development are often in what is (theoretically) legally protected indigenous territory, and the people affected most by it are poor & rural indigenous people, on top of the “bigger picture” global ecological effects of those moves.
It’s literally bad ecological action as a combined front for imperialist exploitation and a continued deliberate genocide of Native people in these nations, but Greenpeace only takes the carbon emissions angle to run with.
People aren’t just dying because of climate change, people are being mob executed and merced by SWAT teams in protest of human-created ecological and climate change that in advance of ever getting underway writes round 2 of its victims off as collateral damage.
And then there is the fact that a lot of the current refugees are fleeing from social unrest and hunger caused by climate change.
The mass grave in the Mediteranean, the ever more militarized borders, all these things are climate-change related.
They’re the west saying: “we ruined this world, we’re not planning to fix it, so we’re building walls around our homes are firing at will so that we can live in here while you guys die from our crimes.”
QueerAnarchism 