Martin Luther King Jr., Injustice, and Climate Change

Back in mid-January my daughter asked me who my hero was. It was a homework assignment. Given what I have been writing and thinking about, I was surprised by how unprepared I was to answer that question. Lots of people I readily admire. But hero? I had not explicitly asked myself this for a long time. I passed her off to interview her Dad, but I sat with the question long enough to flicker through a couple possible heroes? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the first that came to mind. Well, except for the philandering, that’s not cool, and it is not like I really know that much about him. How about Barack Obama? I love him. Wise and fair. Maybe to a fault? Good family man and role model. No, it’s got to be Martin Luther King Jr., he saw things other people couldn’t. He helped us all see more clearly. He was courageous. His hope was boundless. His passion and love for mankind were so palpable. His sense of justice; he was so right. He stood up against all odds to fight for what was right. Yes, if I was going to pick a hero, it would be him. And yes, I am a little slow on the uptake because, of course, the reason Natalie got this homework assignment in the first place was because the following Monday was Martin Luther King day.

Then, on that Monday MLK day 2019, while I was lying in the couch with the flu, I thought it was all meant to be, because January 17th 2011, the day my daughter was born, was also a Monday, and also MLK Day, and today was the day I was scheduled to post about movements for my blog! But I guess it wasn’t meant to be, because here it is over a month later. Between being sick, and having this nagging feeling I needed to say something bigger about movements, I balked. But here’s what need to say about Martin Luther King Jr. and Climate Change:

I have been pretty vague and ambivalent about “movements” most of my life. It is an idea from a historical realm, and a political realm, neither of which I feel particularly well versed in. But as I have struggled with my inability to influence Climate Change I have come to see my desire to do more, coupled with other peoples’ desire to do more, creates more power than me by myself. I think of it as social potential energy. With enough people pushing together, you can move things. We can change things. That’s what happened with the Civil Rights Movement. That’s what happened more recently with the LGBTQ Movement. The Women’s Suffrage Movement. United Farmer Workers Rights Movement. Mahatma Ghandhi and the Indian Independence Movement. All cases where less-powerful people rose up behind an idea of fairness, or of basic human justice, and for a desired, society-level change beyond what the current system of rules permitted.

But Climate Change is different, right? While there is the very important and burgeoning idea of Climate Justice, one conceptual child of Environmental Justice, this whole thing is not usually framed as being about a suppressed people, as the other movements have been. What would a movement to fight Climate Change be about?

And this is why it is important to think about all the many things that are rolled up into our idea of Climate Change. There is no direct injustice wrapped up in accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Where is the injustice?

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…”

There is a lot of injustice. I am going to take a big leap here, but I think the original, or maybe foundational(?) injustice, that underlies our current crisis, was made to the very fabric of life on our planet—the creatures, landscapes, and ecosystems that have been treated recklessly, and with almost no moral consideration. Some human beings struggle to attribute any but the most utilitarian values to other human beings outside an inner circle of their own. What chance for empathy does a tree have against people with such limited perspective? Or an insect?

“…We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

But injustice to our natural heritage, and to our life support systems, is also an injustice to us all, our planet’s current and especially future peoples. While mankind is at some level both perpetrator and victim, we are innocent of guilt until we come to understand we are responsible for the harm. To the extent we are all dependent on the health of our living planet, and the non-living systems it creates (like our atmosphere), injustices to it are injustices to all of us. The more we come to embrace this reality, the more inclusive, and powerful, a movement related to Climate Change can become.

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. ”

Despite our legacy of destruction of the nature world, and our current dependence on systems that subjugate not only the natural world, but also many other human beings to the needs and desires of the few, many of us, I believe a large majority of us, want out of the outright abuse of each other and our planet. We believe that squandering the future of our children and the species that co-habitat this planet with us is fundamentally wrong, and we don’t want that imposed on us anymore.

We may have all come in different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

Speaking now for myself, I want to be free to live according to my values of stewardship. I don’t want to be locked into a vehicle that inefficiently burns fossil fuels because some fossil fuel mogul worked out how to benefit from our energy dependence at everyone else’s expense. How about you? If you could reasonably afford to buy all-renewable energy, wouldn’t you? If you could afford a quiet, fume- free electric car or lawn mower, wouldn’t you prefer that? But you probably can’t. It turns out capitalism has failed to give us the choices we need to honor our beliefs. That makes you and I part of the downtrodden and suppressed after all. We long for better but are prevented from getting there by all but the most heroic of efforts. The more we see this truth and refuse to accept it for our lot in life, the better chances we have of changing it. Thou shalt not pollute in my name! I will not passively accept my role of consumer-come-minion to support your bid for wealth and power! I will fight you in order to determine my own effect in the world, on my own terms!

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.

For this argument of injustice, I don’t even need to argue on behalf of the oppressed peoples laboring in mines or factories or fields in far away places in the world in ways that benefit others more than their own families. I don’t need to argue on behalf of polar bears, or spotted owls, or deforested Amazon Basins, or bleaching corals. But my arguments in defense of myself and my children’s futures are defenses for all these things too. Instead of lose, lose, lose, I want to stand for win, win, win.

“When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative. ”

I used three exclamation points in a row up there two paragraphs ago…I used “thou shalt not!” and “I will fight” language; have I gone too far? Do I sound too extreme and zealous and radical? I admit that is how I feel. I really feel trapped by history and systems out of my control into a life that doesn’t reflect my values and I am outraged by that. Outraged not like someone full of hate, but outraged like a cornered Momma bear defending her cubs; outraged like someone full of love. Living my life in any normal way causes me to do more damage to myself and others than I find acceptable.

I know I am not alone. I want to change this, but I can’t change these huge things by myself. I need to find others who feel the same way and join up with them. Isn’t that the core foundation of a movement? Wouldn’t Martin Luther King Jr. have agreed?

”True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

“We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made…” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If not me, who? If not this, what? If not now, when?

Martin Luther King Jr., March 1964