Did you know that June 5th is World Environment Day? The purpose is to amplify communities disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis.
Well, at Debt Collective, we’re excited to announce a free, downloadable and accessible report that does just that: From Climate Debt to Climate Justice: Debtor Organizing and the Fight for Climate Repair.
This report was written by Hannah Appel, Andrew Ross, Matt Schneider, Erik Hazard and Maizah Ali. We’ll be sharing art and excerpts from the report in the coming days. In the meantime, we spoke with Maizah Ali about climate justice, art and “flipping the script”on our extractive global economic system. Who owes what to whom?
Maizah Ali is an illustrator, community artist, and aspiring scholar who graduated from UCLA with degrees in International Development Studies and Cognitive Science. Currently, she works as a teaching artist with Stay Arts, an arts education non-profit organization serving the Southeast LA community. She will continue her academic studies at LSE in the fall, where she plans to research the intersections of geopolitics, critical technology studies, and multimedia storytelling.
Report Abstract: How are climate change and debt – whether sovereign, municipal or household – related under racial capitalism? When faced with a warming planet caused by centuries of racial capitalism, how are people organizing the necessary ideas and social movements to fight back? What are the alternatives and solutions to racial capitalism-driven climate change proposed both by movements on the ground, and by those in (or near) halls of power around the world, from multilateral institutions to national governments to research universities?
This paper offers an accessible introduction to many of the large-scale transformative ideas out there, from green central banking to degrowth, from climate reparations to de-dollarization.
In addition, based on interviews with Argentina’s Debt for Climate, Britain’s Don’t Pay UK, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, Chile’s Ni Una Menos, and the South Africa Green Revolutionary Council, this paper shares tactics and strategies used by social movements around the world to resist debt and climate change in the same frame.
