“If we were to say global pollution, species extinction, ecosystem destruction, this language is a lot more startling and it also seems to have a stronger call to action. So I appreciate the language of climate justice ‘cause I think it is really important to talk more than just clean energy… We need more people thinking about this and also having a conversation on the depth of the issue.” ~ Travis McKenzie, Project Feed the Hood, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Community members gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Dec. 7, 2011 to have a dialogue about climate justice: What it means, Why it matters, and How to achieve it.  The event was held in solidarity with our allies making their voices heard both at the 17th annual United States Conference on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa, and the “1000 Durbans” initiative of Grassroots Global Justice; and to express ourselves in the face of the hearings in Santa Fe of the New Mexico’s Environmental Improvement Board, to consider a petition by big industry that calls for them to eliminate a 2010 law designed to curb the emission of carbon pollution into the atmosphere.

We live within a polarized world, with the divide between the haves and have-nots growing at an alarming rate. Our eco-systems that form the web of life are threatened by those who are so enraptured by a rapacious pursuit of profit that they trample on the ability of communities to create local, living economies. This pursuit of profit has historically led to incredible contamination of water, air, and land, as well as the homelands and sacred sites that are integral to the way of life of indigenous and traditional cultures. Now, the very climate that sustains our lives is threatened.

Yet wealthy nations–particularly the United States–resist calls to reduce their emission of greenhouse gases that the majority of the international scientific community say are causing the planet to heat up.  This global warming is credited with increasing droughts and catastrophic weather events like hurricanes and tsunamis, that have already led to mass displacements and migrations of traditional, indigenous and poor communities worldwide. And the future, scientists say, doesn’t look good. Adaptation and mitigation planning and efforts are already well underway globally.

In the face of this climate chaos, there’s a key question that threads its way through international negotiations, as well as the state and federal debate here in the United States: Who Pays and Who Benefits?

The 99% and the 1% 

Distinctions between the 1% and the 99% were raised repeatedly in the observations made be participants during the climate justice dialogue on Dec. 7th.

Sister Joan Brown of NM Interfaith Power and Light reflected on the need to ensure family’s needs are met at the micro level while a transformation in the larger system is also pursued. Leaders of that transformation “come from us”, she said.

“We need leaders who can deal with both of these, and those leaders come from us,” Brown said. “We are the ones who need to be encouraging that conversation and moving it forward. We’re going to continue to be hitting all of these challenges, there has to be some kind of transformation. That’s what I think the 1%, the 99%, the Occupy, is about.”

Anna Rondon, who is Navajo and New Energy Economy’s Tribal Outreach Director, made a similar call for people on the ground to step up to leadership.

Rondon described the environmental and community destruction caused by the Peabody coal mine on Black Mesa, which led to the relocation of 12,000 Navajo people to get to the coal. It was an abomination caused by both the U.S. and Navajo governments, she said, back in the 1960s when the Navajo people as a whole didn’t know what was happening in government spaces.

“Today we have the same enemies…the 1%, the 1% that control this energy here.  For us to take it back we have to get involved in the political arena. We have to ensure that our people we put in there are going to reflect what we want in a clean, healthy society.”

Rondon urged the audience to declare a state of emergency for “our survival as human beings” to wake up what’s going on in Santa Fe, in the counties, and in Washington, D.C.

The dichotomy of the 1% and 99% exists everywhere and threads its way through everything, said City Councilor Rey Garduno.

“1% pollutes the world. 99% suffers. That’s through everything. Whether its pollution in literal terms, money or greed in amassment of money, all of those things are divided in those two terms,” Garduno said. “…They are so insular; that right now they aren’t in a cold room. And they aren’t listening to this kind of conversation, because they don’t have to.  My take on climate justice is that we need them (the 1%) to feel the cold. We need to make sure they know what it’s like to be oppressed, to be the 99%.”

Garduno noted the 15-20,000 people amassed outside the U.N. climate talks in Durban—including farmers, unionists, teachers, peasants, students, indigenous—calling for “system change, not climate change.”

“That’s very important. That’s what we need to have,” he said. “Because the system has stayed static for a long period of time, if anything it’s become more divided.”

Another perspective turned the 1%/99% dichotomy on its head, and brought the crisis of global warming into stark perspective. Navajo environmental leader Norman Patrick Brown described humanity as the 1%, juxtaposed with all of the rest of living beings as the 99%.

“There’s this misconception of the 99%, of which I’ve been hearing over the past few months. In all actuality, we’re the 1%, humanity. The 99% is the plant lifes, the tree life, the insect life, the water beings that live in the ocean, the four legged…” Brown said. “…If you look at how we’ve come to this state of being where our mother earth is being threatened, there’s going to be reciprocity. …we talk about justice. We don’t know what that word justice means. But the dinosaurs know what justice means. Those extinct creatures, that’s climate justice.”