Investing in Black Imagination for Environmental and Climate Justice

So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination - Saidiya Hartman 

Investing in the imagination, innovation, and dreams of Black folks is a critical and necessary intervention in the climate and environmental crisis. As wildfires rage, floods swell, and heatwaves become the norm, Black communities, who experience these disasters harshly and disproportionately, are largely cut off from the resources necessary to intervene and innovate. 

Many of the climate solutions that are currently being developed and financed come from a small and largely white part of the population and will remain inaccessible to most. These “solutions” fail to understand that climate and environmental justice intersect and underpin the movements for economic, gender, housing, and LGBTQIA+ justice as well as the many other struggles. Additionally, many of these solutions are created in isolation, without community input, and without the praxis necessary to address the core of the crisis. 

Why is it that those most privileged in society are being resourced to mitigate a crisis fueled by their own dismissal of Indigenous traditions, hoarding of resources, and extractive practices? 

In a capitalist society, those with disposable financial, social, and time resources are allowed the space necessary to ideate, innovate, and implement. While those without access to the resources, but with critical ideas, lived experience, and community input, are blocked from the capital necessary to innovate at scale. 

Movement Generation offers that “a just transition requires us to build a visionary, regenerative economy based on caring and sacredness of relationships to each other and the world upon which we depend. This calls for strategies that democratize, decentralize, and diversify economic activity while we damper down consumption, and (re)distribute resources and power.” To realize a just transition, we will need to direct significant financial, social, and time resources to Black folks to imagine, design, and dream toward a liberatory and climate-just future. 

Who is more critical to invest in than those who have been systemically cut off from resources yet still survive?

The times are calling for us to access the edges of imagination and creativity and direct it toward building the world we know is possible. We must root ourselves in the reality and scale of the issues while boldly stretching and reaching toward a new world. For too long Black folks have been asked to attempt to live in a reality that has been imagined by a small group of white men. Tell me, what did they care about Black liberation, freedom, or dreams? 

The existing paradigms are limited, lack imagination, and stifle possibility. Large white-led environmental and climate organizations have and continue to get boatloads of money and yet, we are. Instead of moving resources toward proximate leaders - those “who arise from the communities and issues they serve have the experience, relationships, data, and knowledge that are essential for developing solutions with measurable and sustainable impact” – foundations and donors pump money into these institutions without a second thought and make grassroots Black-led organizations compete for the leftovers. 

At the same time, there is an increasing focus on recruiting Black folks into the mainstream climate and environmental workplaces that are often hostile to them. Upon entering these workplaces that weren’t created with them in mind, they are often tasked with using precious brain space to educate their non-Black peers and siloed into powerless positions resulting in many of us feeling isolated. We deal with this while we are being undermined, undervalued, cut off from leadership opportunities, and expected to take low pay. 

Some of the most brilliant Black folks in the climate space are working full-time at organizations where they still have to frustratingly communicate to the leadership and board that “yes, Black people care about the environment.” Eventually, it becomes harder and harder to drown out the limitations that are being communicated by those who have never had to maneuver and manipulate a system to work for them. 

White supremacy and capitalism seek to flatten us, our experiences, and our imaginations. The increasing apathy that we are witnessing – emotionally, politically, socially - is most definitely a byproduct of living within oppressive systems that were designed without us yet we expected to survive in. 

What do we risk by not making space for Black imagination?

I think we’re seeing it now. Genocide. A tired two-party system. A burning planet. A repetition of patterns that serve the interest of a few but put the burden of responsibility on most of us. With trillions of dollars going toward militarization, it’s hard to believe that the best we’ve got is paper straws.

Those existing at these intersections understand the need to connect our movements for justice for a climate future where we all have what we need. Black folks – especially those with multiple intersecting identities – are positioned to develop and implement solutions that center and acknowledge a community and don't put the onus on an individual. 

Directly and abundantly funding the people who have always had to resist, create, imagine, and redefine societies that weren’t created for them to survive is an intervention. Deep societal transformative work needs to be steeped in long-term, abundant, and power building resources for Black folks that start with giving space for ideation, innovation, and imagination. Resourcing imagination creates possibilities that ripen the soil for more ideas to take root. 

With an increasingly devastating and visible climate crisis, the questions that I’m holding as I look toward the future are: “How are we hoping to intervene? And who is in the best position to imagine, design, and implement the paradigms we need for a climate-just future? How do we create fertile ground ripe for creation by resourcing imagination?