Climate Justice as a value

Updated Resolution:

Climate Justice as a Value

Because climate change is happening and detrimentally affects all communities and the earth as a whole.
And Because opportunities for real climate justice* and timely and effective responses to climate change are both possible & necessary.

We commit to challenging false corporate solutions* to climate crisis and to creating just, community-controlled solutions that work.

And call on others in Portland and the United States to work earnestly on this issue, in a timely and effective way, before conditions are beyond repair.

Footnote: explanative definition of climate justice and “false solutions”:

Challenging environmental racism and keeping the struggle for environmental and climate justice in the forefront of our thought and actions is the crux of this resolution. The people hardest hit by climate-induced natural disasters have been and will continue to be those most disenfranchised by our society and least responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases: the poor, women, and people of color.

We believe climate change can best be addressed by exposing the intersections between the oppressions of humans and the earth. The “natural” disasters caused by climate change amplify the injustices inherent in our society; we must respond to these disasters in ways that do not continue that oppression.

We do not believe that the dominant, business-friendly means of addressing climate change will have any significant impact preventing catastrophic global warming. Market-based “solutions” like carbon offset schemes – whereby corporations are allowed to profit from their “sale” of greenhouse gas pollution – create social and ecological problems of their own, and serve to reinforce the same unsustainable system that got us into this mess. Power hungry politicians, communities disconnected from each other and the planet, and an economics based on money making and careless consumption are fundamentally at odds with the concept of environmental sustainability.

To this end, we believe in an immediate end to all new fossil fuel exploration and extraction, and a just, rapid transition away from the burning of fossil fuels. We advocate for a drastic increase in energy conservation and support a transition to clean energy sources such as wind, solar, and micro-hydro power. Ecosystem preservation, recovery and restoration is essential to sequestering carbon and curbing the exponential rate of species extinction. Our agricultural systems also must be made to work more in harmony with the Earth’s systems; moving away from industrial agriculture in favor of small- scale, local food sources. Hope rests not with the companies who have created this situation, but instead with communities organizing themselves to take control of their lives and their land, and with finding more simple ways of living in which we are not dependent upon the highly centralized industries that are destroying the Earth’s life-support systems as well as more sustainable and traditional cultures. In addition to challenging the root causes of climate chaos, we actively support these real and viable solutions.