The Connections between environmentalism and imperialism
Hello everyone, I’m Logan Praneis and I’m an organizer with the Climate Justice Committee here in the Twin Cities.
The Climate Justice Committee was formed in 2020 and has been doing on-the-ground environmental organizing in East Phillips ever since. As you will hear from other speakers, East Phillips is a neighborhood in Minneapolis which has been historically polluted by heavy industries like foundries and chemical plants–industries that have no place in a residential area. East Phillips is also unsurprisingly one of Minneapolis’s most diverse neighborhoods–housing indigenous communities like Little Earth, a large immigrant population, and in general, lots of working class families. The city has no issue offloading the harms of pollution onto marginalized communities, and if left unchecked, they would continue to build new industry that further pollutes them. This is environmental racism in action, and we in the CJC believe it is the most pressing issue for the environmental movement today.
The CJC has been working tirelessly with some of the other great activists here for the past few years to put an end to the cycle of industrial harm and targeted pollution in East Phillips. The Roof Depot building was the site of an old pesticide plant that for years released arsenic into the soil. When the plant finally closed, the city purchased the building and eventually wanted to demolish it, so they could build a Public Works site in its place that would bring hundreds of diesel trucks in and out of the neighborhood every day–filling the air with black smoke. And again, these are development plans being considered for a residential neighborhood. The Roof Depot is right across the street from a daycare and just out of sight of Little Earth. And so what did the neighborhood do? They stood up and said enough is enough. Over years of struggle, protest, legislative work, an occupation, and grassroots outreach campaigns in the neighborhood – the community of East Phillips and its allies gave city politicians no choice but to hand over the Roof Depot to the people! The city agreed to sell the building to the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute, so they can turn it into an urban farm. However, the fight is not over. Across the street from the Roof Depot facility lies an iron foundry, which is the top lead polluter in Hennepin County. The CJC is working to pressure the city, the state, and the Minnesota Pollution control agency to shut down Smith Foundry : heavy industry has no place in our neighborhoods! Our focus is on mobilizing the people most affected by this pollution. We hold rallies and protests, both in the neighborhood and against political targets who choose to stand by and uphold this blatant environmental racism. We hand out flyers and doorknock to raise awareness, bringing as many people as we can into this fight. We work with community groups like EPNI and other organizations to build a strong movement, and we know that together, we have the power to hold polluters accountable and win real environmental justice for East Phillips and beyond.
The CJC, unlike some other environmental groups, knows that the issue of climate change is a systematic problem, not an individual one. Sure, not eating meat or riding a bike reduces your individual contribution to climate change, but individual choices make up a small fraction of the harm being done to our environment. The systems in place also make it harder and harder for individuals to even resist the status quo. Riding a bike is harder if your city prioritizes infrastructure for cars, for example. But it’s not just the individual vs. the system. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s the collective (in this case, working and oppressed people) vs the capitalist system that enforces and reinforces the destruction of the environment. East Phillps has been polluted because the city does not care about marginalized residents but also because land there is cheaper than in richer, whiter neighborhoods. Every policy that pollutes communities of color is intentional on the part of lawmakers and those in power, and it is our responsibility to build an organized movement to hold them accountable and stop the climate crisis. Our power is in collective action!
The Climate Justice Committee also got our start in the anti-war movement. The CJC was founded by members of the antiwar committee who saw how the US military destroys the climate both at home and abroad. Many people have heard the statistic that the Pentagon is the world’s largest individual polluter. But what does that actually mean? If you consider the over 500 military bases around the world, the heavy machinery, vehicles, and ships that support them, in addition to the large-scale manufacturing of weapons, we’re talking about nearly 70-80% of the United States energy consumption, not just this year but since 2001! If the United States ceased military operations and spending today, we’d be in a much different situation when it comes to the climate crisis, and we’d be able to prioritize a whole host of other things to improve the lives of the American people. Legislators debate over increasing green energy by single-digit percentages year after year when a clear solution exists–ending US Militarism! However, the military continues to grow by leaps and bounds and justifies its growth by controlling other countries’ oil. The military has waged campaigns of mass destruction so that U.S. corporations can continue to buy and sell fossil fuels, laying waste to our planet in the process.
Beyond its long term contributions to climate change, the US military and its allies also create immediate environmental destruction through bombing and chemical warfare. Bombing campaigns not only kill innocent civilians and destroy cities and cultural landmarks, but they also cause long-lasting, often irreversible damage to the land. I’ll give you some examples. There are lots of buildings that contain toxic chemicals, and during a planned demolition of a building, these chemicals can be safely removed, but when a building is bombed, they leak into the ground, contaminating soil and bodies of water for decades. Chemical weapons like White Phosphorous can remain in the earth with long-lasting effects on the next generation, and when it inevitably gets into the water supply, it can flow to lakes or rivers, where it can stay for thousands of years, building up in the bodies of fish and aquatic plants that people later consume. Residents here in the Twin Cities fought and won to prevent a building from being demolished that sat on soil laden with arsenic. Buildings like this exist all over the world. However, when the US decides to bomb these countries and destroy these buildings, harmful chemicals are released without giving the people a chance to fight for the future they deserve.
The US spends nearly a trillion dollars each year on so-called “defense” and increases that amount nearly unanimously every year. What do these tax dollars go towards if not death and the destruction of our environment? Meanwhile, environmental spending pales in comparison. Is protecting the environment and ensuring a clean planet for future generations not a defensive act? Concrete climate solutions like renewable energy are often discarded and mocked for their cost relative to traditional fossil-fuels. However, nobody in Congress second guessed the 200 F-22 Raptor fighter jets the US military bought from Lockheed Martin for 350 million dollars EACH. For the price of just three jets, you could build solar energy to power every single family home and apartment complex in the city of Saint Paul! The US has the resources, funds, and scientific expertise to completely divest from fossil fuels. However, doing so would require diverting money from the US’s military projects, and so we continue to burn fossil fuels in defiance of the countless scientific reports showing how dire of a situation we’re in. We are hurtling towards a point in no return in the climate crisis and the only way to pump the breaks is by ending US imperialism!
As we all know, the United States is propping up a genocide right now–supplying weapons, aid, and support to the Israeli government to massacre Palestinians and decimate their homelands. Part of the UN definition of genocide is the destruction of conditions of life, and through this lens we can view the environmental destruction of Gaza as part of this program of genocide–not simply as a consequence of it. This has always been a tactic of the Israeli occupation. Why else would they have purposefully destroyed so many Palestinian olive groves? The constant bombing in Gaza has significantly worsened air pollution, not only because of the debris, but also because of the toxic gasses released from the rockets themselves. Being forced to breathe this polluted air will surely lead to respiratory issues down the road for Palestinians. The pollution from white phosphorus has made the soil too acidic for many crops. The bombardment of the Gaza strip has had a larger CO2 impact in these last few months than more than 20 countries combined. Israel is destroying the environment of Palestine, plain and simple, while at the same time trying to greenwash its genocide and occupation to the rest of the world. At COP 28, Israel tried to pass off its settlements as environmentally friendly or “green” and positioned itself as a world leader on climate innovation, with its stated goal to be zero-emissions by 2050. During this same two week conference, Israel dropped more than 5,000 bombs on Palestine. Environmentalists of the world shouldn’t wish for zero Israeli emissions by 2050. We should dream and fight for a world where by 2050, the Israeli occupation no longer exists.
Climate activists need to join in the fight for a free Palestine and an end to the destructive practices of war and occupation. We need to stand together and protect the sovereignty of land, political power, and Earth for all those targeted by imperialism. From the river to the sea, Palestinians should have the power to determine how their land is used, with the agency to take action to protect that land from climate change. Instead, they are forced to watch their homelands be scorched by bombs made and paid for by the United States. There can be no climate justice without the liberation of Palestine. Climate activists in the US also need to make these connections at home! Indigenous communities have long been subject to environmental disaster, dating back to the formation of United States through genocide and forced removal. And today, many reservations reside on or near large coal or heavy metal mining. Oil pipelines such as lines 3 and 5 here in Minnesota transport millions of gallons of oil through reservations. Who has to suffer the consequences of environmental destruction when a pipeline bursts or a mine pollutes the air? Surely not the multinational corporations who get little more than a slap on the wrist. In the CJC, we fought with the indigenous residents of Little Earth to prevent yet another source of pollution from entering East Phillips, and we’ll continue to fight until East Phillips is free from all heavy industry. We know this is just and we know this is possible, especially if we look to the resistance of the Palestinian people, who are teaching us all what it means to fight for a world that future generations will inherit.