Justice Interconnections: Climate, Race, Economy, Health, Migration & More

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

“The Climate Crisis is very real.”   And as we look at the climate crisis, we unfortunately have a tendency to oversimplify it.  We tend to look solely at the scientific aspects of climate and forget about how climate interconnects with so many other aspects of our daily lives.  In order for us to achieve a just resolution to the climate crisis, we must look at its relationships to racial justice, economic justice, health care justice, migration justice, and many other justice related issues.  And make no mistake about it, the climate crisis is a justice issue.

Justice is a major focus in our Judeo-Christian tradition.  I believe that in our discussions of climate and creation care, there are four major relationships that it is important for us to understand.  First, there is the relationship between God and creation.  In the first chapter of Genesis, God created the earth and the plants and the animals and said that they were good.  The second relationship for us to consider is the one between God and humankind.  God gave dominion – not domination – but stewardship to humankind over all that God had created.  In so doing, God established the third relationship, that between humankind and all that God had created.  The fourth relationship, indeed the one that most people fail to recognize in this creation narrative, is the relationship between ourselves and the rest of humankind.  And this is the relationship upon which our faith brings us to the understanding of how justice connects all of this together.

Why do we have a climate crisis?

Why do we have a climate crisis?  We have a climate crisis because the average temperature of our planet is increasing far too rapidly and it has become an unhealthy place to live.  Think about it for a moment – what is your normal body temperature?  98.6 degrees F.  If your temperature were to increase by 2 degrees to 100.6 degrees, you would be sick.  Well, guess what?  The average temperature of our planet has increased by over 2 degrees F.  If our bodies did that, we would be taking measures to decrease our temperature to a healthy level.  Why are we not taking healthcare measures with our planet to bring its temperature back to a healthy level?  To not do so is an injustice to both our planet and its inhabitants.

So, what is causing this rapid increase in temperatures?  Primarily it is caused by the use of fossil fuels.  They are used to fuel transportation, manufacture plastics, and many other uses.  Burning fossil fuels – both coal and oil and gas – releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  And carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas that causes the air inside earth’s bubble to get warmer.  The gas, and therefore the heat, can’t escape.  Much of our transportation infrastructure – our highways – is built close to poorer, more vulnerable communities of color, especially in our cities where a large amount of concrete also traps the heat.

'Resilient Congregations for Dallas'

"Resilient Congregations for Dallas: Energy and Environmental Opportunities for Houses of Worship," a workshop sponsored by Texas Interfaith Power and Light and the City of Dallas Office of Environment and Sustainability, will take place July 15 and 16 at Lovers Lane United Methodist Church, 9200 Inwood Road, Dallas.

Sessions will be held from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, July 15 and from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday, July 16. The workshop is free to participants, funded by a grant from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

But rising levels of heat are not the only downside of this climate crisis.  These increases in temperature are also causing weather patterns to change and become more severe.  Heat waves become more intense, cold waves are more brutal, rain and snowfall amounts increase, drought conditions become more severe, and weather becomes more and more unpredictable.

And just as all these changing weather patterns cause increasing amounts of damage, other factors come into play that disproportionately impact populations, especially the poor, indigenous peoples, people of color, children and the elderly.  Because temperatures are rising, the ice caps at both the North and South Poles are melting at alarming rates.  And with this glacial ice melt comes rising sea levels.  Flooding is occurring on inland rivers as well as in coastal regions.  Just this year alone, we have seen massive amounts of snowfall which are causing flooding as they melt.  We’ve seen increasingly powerful tornadoes wreak total destruction on towns across the country.  We’ve seen towns and streets flooded on sunny days due to sea level rise.  We’ve seen whole communities forced to relocate as their ancestral homes are flooded. 

And we continue to hear the naysayers tell us that all this is just natural weather patterns.  It’s not.  All of this could have been prevented, and more of it will happen unless we make a concerted effort to mitigate the effects of climate change.

So, who suffers as a result of the climate crisis and why are these changing conditions a justice issue?

It is a justice issue because the poor and black and brown communities suffer disproportionately.  Race and the economy come into play because these communities have historically been segregated in low lying easily flooded areas, near industrial plants and refineries, in communities divided by major highways, and through redlining that prevented many people from moving to more desirable locations. These are areas that, more often than not, lack good health care and are often food deserts. They often lack this basic health care because their state governments refuse to expand Medicaid health care coverage to those most in need.  They are in food deserts because corporate grocery chains can make a better profit in affluent suburbs.  These areas are often surrounded by industrial plants and refineries that pollute the air and the ground with toxic chemicals that cause increased rates of severe diseases, especially cancers and asthma.

False narratives hinder justice

Many of these problems could be solved by enforcing stringent regulations, but far too often this does not take place because politicians claim that it would be a job killer.  Once again, this is a false narrative.  This is a justice issue, because people’s lives and their health are more important than corporate profits.  And, besides, if we were to address these causal problems, we could be creating many more new jobs in a newly expanded economy.

So you can see that there are many intersections between race, the economy, and healthcare with the climate.  And all of them revolve less around science and more around justice.

We haven’t even touched on migration yet, even though much migration is caused by the climate crisis.  Drought and increasingly powerful storms are forcing peoples in the developing world from the lands they have historically lived on and made a living from.  Much of these changing climate patterns are caused not by the peoples who live in these lands, many of whom are in the Southern Hemisphere and in the Arctic region.  Instead, they are caused by increasing use of fossil fuels in the developed world.  And when their lands become uninhabitable, they seek to migrate to a place where they can provide for their family and live a better life.

Unfortunately, the USA does not have a category for climate migrants who come here seeking asylum.  And yet many of them come to our borders because they lost not only their homes, but also their land when it washed down the mountainside in a tropical weather event – a hurricane or cyclone.  To not respond to these people in their time of need is an injustice that calls for remediation.

We have all these interconnections between injustice and the climate crisis.  Healing the climate in and of itself won’t solve all these injustices, but it would be a first step in bringing justice to all of God’s people.

The Rev. Mel Caraway, a retired clergy member of the North Texas Annual Conference, is a United Methodist EarthKeeper and Past President of Texas Impact Board of Directors. He currently serves as Texas Impact/TXIPL Interfaith Climate Coordinator, Climate Reality Project Leader and on the steering committee of United Methodist Creation Justice Movement.