Grace Zhang is a rising senior at Hathaway Brown School, a private all girls high school in Shaker Heights, OH. She plans to study political science in college.
When I ask for tools to make a compelling argument, one of the most common answers is sharing my personal story, and when it comes to climate activism, it isn’t any different. And at first I thought “Nice! That sounds easy enough right?” But when it comes to my experience with climate change, I find that I have nothing worthy to share. “I have been incredibly lucky,” I think to myself. I read the news every morning and find the headlines dominated with the horrible effects of climate change. Wildfires are consuming California whole. Runoff from factory farms are creating algae blooms that are murdering hundreds of fish. Rising water levels are threatening to submerge entire communities and destroy livelihoods. Everyday I feel almost assaulted by negative news and suffering, but when I look outside my window, I see nothing resembling what I read about and inevitably, I move on.
However, I recognize this isn’t luck, it’s privilege. I recognize that with everything I have been blessed with, a nice house in a safe neighborhood, a quality education, a loving family, etc., I am able to effectively escape the consequences of climate change for now and continue my life in blissful ignorance.
The truth is too many of our personal stories look like mine. While the news shoves depressing headlines in our faces, the personal stories that we interact with more often don’t often leave space for the most marginalized and the most victimized by our destruction of the planet. We have the privilege to tune out these stories and fail to look beyond the safe confines of our little bubbles.
There’s also another problem whose consequences have become increasingly apparent over the course of this summer: police brutality. While the climate justice movement and Black Lives Matter seem to occupy completely different spheres, US climate activists have much to learn from those protesting for the end of police brutality. Similarly to my experiences with climate change, my experiences with police brutality are almost non-existent, and I’m sure that’s the same for many of you who are reading this. We could just as easily ignore it and move on with our lives. So why has BLM managed to acquire such mainstream support and incite widespread action?
I think the answer once again lies in stories. BLM has been able to do what we have not. They have elevated the stories of individuals and given a platform to the oppressed and victimized. They have done this so successfully in fact that when one thinks of BLM, they think of specific individuals and their experiences. These people’s pain and suffering suddenly seem so much less foreign and eventually, despite all our differences, it connects us all in our collective humanity. The movement reminds us that it’s about way more than any of us individuals, it’s about our responsibility to each other and in that way, our fight to stop climate change shouldn’t be any different. We also amplify the voices of those who are disproportionately affected by climate change and we have to realize that it's a problem that other, more powerful and privileged people contribute the most to. Just by looking at the world around us, we see that the most developed and wealthy countries continue to speed headfirst towards the destruction of the planet, while the poorer ones feel the effects of the crash.
We must also remember the systematic racism that led to BLM and so many movements before also deeply affects our cause as well. Unfortunately, some of the people that are hit hardest by climate change are also victims of the U.S’s bitter struggle with racism. They are the hardest hit by extreme weather, air pollution that leads to unnaturally high rates of asthma, highly dangerous water, etc., to the better world we all dream, it is essential that there is justice for them as well.
In order to successfully fight climate change, we have to look beyond our personal stories because we aren’t just fighting for us. We’re fighting for the entire world and every single living that calls our planet home. We must set aside all our differences and remember why we do what we do: to create a better Earth for all of us . The key to doing that is letting this movement become more than just ourselves.