-Rachel Siegel, PJC Executive Director

Because there have been so many powerful, global climate justice actions recently, we have been asked at the Peace & Justice Center on more than a few occasions if environmental justice is part of our mission. My answer has usually been that we support the amazing work that other groups (350VT in particular) are already doing locally. Rather than reproduce what is already being done, it makes more sense for us to focus on the social justice and anti-militarism issues that feed and are fed by climate disruption.

I still hold this to be true. But more than ever I see that these things are not separate. They don't just intersect like threads in a web, but they are interwoven -- they are of one cloth. I recently had a wonderful conversation with Ruah Swennerfelt, former Board member and local activist, and came to see that we are not framing this connection clearly.

The areas we focus on (racial justice, fair trade, and nonviolence/anti-war) are not separate from ecological justice. The climate emergency is a reflection of racial capitalism -- the human made economic power system that we live under. It's a system that depends on endless growth at the expense of not just individual human laborers and irreplaceable, unsustainable resource extraction, but of life on this planet for many species including our own. 

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-Jennifer Decker, PJC Member 

 

How do healthy relationships happen in movement and political spaces?  The present time has immense potential because so many activists are engaging with this question.  

Healthy relationships rely on curiosity, understanding, safety, delight, play, time, care, affection, space, love and mutual understanding.  Cornel West says "Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public". Yet in politics, we often see injustice and hatred. How can we effectively dismantle a system that relies on discord and the exclusion of certain voices and perspectives?  One way is to be able to immediately perceive the healthy and unhealthy qualities in any interaction and to name them out loud. In order to do this effectively, self-awareness and awareness of one's impact on others is a necessary precondition.  

As a former mental health counselor who has worked primarily with poor and low income communities for twenty years, I am able to name that the social services system in this country upholds an oppressive system.  Yet the tools of this system can also be put to good use for collective liberation. Audre Lorde's compelling statement that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Micah White, co-creator of Occupy Wall St., from the Activist Graduate School frames it this way "We cannot disrupt our oppression using the logic that justifies our oppression." My only point of tension here is that sometimes creative tools emerge even in toxic environments. And my suggestion is that many of these tools can and are being put to good use in social justice movements.

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