You Have Stolen Our Childhoods.

By JOYCE LI

On September 23, sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg gave a tearful address at the UN Climate Action Summit, condemning world leaders for their failure to act against climate change. Within hours, her speech went viral on social media, sparking hundreds of climate strikes across the globe in the weeks to follow. Dubbed “the Joan of Arc of climate change” and “the voice of a planet,” Thunberg is consistently portrayed in the media as the leader of the international environmental movement, a lone voice cutting through a sea of indifference.

Greta is not alone in her fight for environmental justice, and just as she says in her UN address, she is “one of the lucky ones.” While the Swedish teenager learned about the catastrophic effects of climate change from a documentary, young women an ocean away experience these disasters firsthand. 

In the United States, a young Indigenous activist is ensuring that marginalized voices are heard in the push for climate justice. Seventeen-year-old Xiye Bastida, a member of the Indigenous Otomí tribe, grew up in the Mexican town of San Pedro Tultepec. As a child, she lived through floods, droughts, and heavy water contamination in her hometown, but did not connect it to the climate crisis until she moved to New York. That year, she saw Hurricane Sandy tear through the American east coast, flooding cities, destroying power lines, and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate. It was then that she realized that climate change was a force that would follow her no matter where she went.

Xiye noticed something else: some people were were hit harder than others. Indeed, though natural disasters don’t discriminate, preparation and recovery efforts often do. In the case of Hurricane Sandy, for example, low-income, predominantly black or Latino neighbourhoods suffered more, both in terms of initial damage and recovery from the aftermath, as they were located in vulnerable, low-lying areas along the coast and lacked sufficient infrastructure and insurance for the flood. The same pattern can be observed in cases like Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Maria—as climate change worsens, less affluent communities of colour are hurt disproportionately more than wealthier ones. 

Despite experiencing the worst of these climate disasters, these same communities are also severely underrepresented in conversations about climate action measures. As an Indigenous person, Xiye is especially indignant about the lack of visibility for communities like hers, who have been taking care of the Earth long before it became a hot-button issue. For millennia, they have found ways to make sustainability a part of their everyday lives, having developed “sophisticated codes of conservation to stop overhunting and preserve biodiversity.” Xiye says that the purpose of involving Indigenous communities in conversations regarding climate change is “to communicate how they [are sustainable] for people who are completely foreign to that.”

Including activists of marginalized communities, such as Indigenous climate activists, proves to be a challenge for the mainstream media. And the hardest part, Xiye says, is that the environmental movement most people are familiar with started in Europe.

Xiye herself was inspired by Greta Thunberg—specifically, by the TED talk she made in November of 2018. “Greta is amazing,” she tells Huffington Post, “but she is a white girl.” Racial divides in the climate movement may not be a topic that comes up internationally, but it is certainly prevalent in the United States, evidenced by the fact that the better-known environmental organizations of the country are almost always founded by and consist predominantly of white people. That doesn’t necessarily mean the issue doesn’t exist beyond US borders, however—the fact that Greta has received so much more attention than young activists of colour is proof that it is an international problem.

Xiye hosted a Global Strike on September 20th, selecting performers and speakers to represent a variety of marginalized communities across the country to counter the repetitive narratives that have been associated with the mainstream climate movement. “Maybe it sounds bad to say, but we don’t really want anybody who has had a voice before… to come up and say the same thing,” she says. 

The climate movement has not made nearly as much progress as it should have over the past few decades. The general public has been shown so many devastating statistics that they have become desensitized to the gravity of the situation. In such demoralizing times, it is vital for the youth to be heard, to show that we are not merely a statistic. However, a single voice cannot represent us all; the experiences that Greta and Xiye have shared have each added a layer of depth to the issue before us and the solution we must pursue, but theirs are only a fraction of the stories that need to be told.