Climate Justice with Colette Pichon Battle

Aurora: And so we’re here. All righty. Let’s get this party started. Hello. Hello, welcome.

Colette: Thank you. Thank you all for having me.

Kelly: So happy to see you.

Aurora: It’s a pleasure. Good to see you again. And delighted for all that’s transpired since we last were in a room together.

Aurora: And since people don’t know how lucky they are right now, can you please introduce yourself and give us your pronouns, please?

Colette: Yes. Yes. It’s so great to see y’all. I’m Colette Pichon Battle. My pronouns are she/her. I’m the executive director of the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy in Louisiana.

Aurora: So, Ms. Colette, let tell us a little bit about what does that mean and what are some of the key milestones that you’ve traversed over the last several years in the role that you have shepherded?

Colette: It’s it’s such a great question right now. You know, I had to shift myself from being a corporate attorney, which is what I was pre Katrina. And had a very – you know, had a particular view on the world. Right. Work hard, make your money, buy your house, have your kids, you know, that kind of stuff. And there there was just a crack in the earth, as I call it, in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina and really, you know, understanding that I was in the greatest nation on the globe and people were gonna be taken care of And we’re we’re a wealthy nation – only to see that that was not the case, only to see years of injustice and inequity in rebuilding. I’ve had to learn so much. Right. I was working in immigration law. I had to learn housing and disaster and healthcare. And I mean, this is – it was it’s been a tremendous learning experience, which I think is good because I was one of those people who like learning and I like going to school and I like, you know, that kind of thing. It’s it’s a hard way to learn, though, because you’re you’re learning and the risks and the stakes are quite high. But I would say overall, the journey has taken me through some of the most amazing experiences, even the tough ones have been – have had elements of beauty in it. And over the last few years, I’ve really gotten a lot of recognition for work that’s been going on for more than a decade. And so I am an Echoing Green fellow. I’ve been able to sit with folks who are attacking the climate problem through social entrepreneurship. I’m an Obama fellow. I’ve been able to see folks who are, you know, not just tackling justice issues globally, but who are just brilliant thinkers. Don’t tell the TED people, but I didn’t really understand what a TED talk meant. Well, since the TED talk so many people globally have been reaching out and saying, you know, thank you for speaking about climate migration, here’s what’s happening in our country. You know, just this amazing network that got opened up for me. So it’s been a journey. But I feel like we’re in a new moment, maybe folks are listening and maybe there’s an ability to make some change.

Aurora: That’s amazing. Ms. Colette, can you tell us, right, so there were you know, there were several things that you were hit up against in the moment in trying to address a major catastrophe for our nation at that moment in time. You know, we lived in Houston at that time. You know, that entire period is a blur. What has changed within the moment that that happened? And then we’d love for you to share with us: and what do you see as the possibility of what can be reimagined a new?

Colette: Oh, man, so much has changed in the Gulf South since Katrina. I think the most important acknowledgment is that the people have changed. That storm is responsible for displacing thousands of folks who are still not back 15 years later. And you know, and so many conversations, I remind folks, you know, if you had small children or if you had health issues or if you had anything like that, it was really hard to come back here. There were there were no systems in place for you to do that. And, you know, you don’t blame people for not coming back. But that void, that mass displacement, left a void that was filled by lots of young, mostly white, highly privileged people, mostly from the northeast and the West Coast, who, you know, really sort of saw New Orleans, saw the Gulf Coast as an opportunity zone. Big grants, big investments. If you had enough money, you could buy a house for a little bit. And, you know, you could be part of rebuilding a neighborhood where folks were missing or, you know, still gone. And it was mixed messages, quite frankly. Actually, they weren’t mixed. Because our cities are based on income and tax revenue, the goal of rebuilding was to rebuild the tax base. And so rebuilding the tax base is, you know, it’s a particular group of folks you’re targeting to come in. And that’s who’s been targeted to come in. And a lot of the people who were here who held the culture that makes New Orleans and South Louisiana and the Gulf so precious and so unique – they’re in Houston, they’re in Atlanta, they’re in Memphis, they’re in Jackson, hey’re in Baton Rouge. They’re not here. And we have lost that culture. And the remnants, the essence of that culture has been highly commodified. So another change is that, you know, what used to be organic and beautiful has now become, you know, a sole source of income for folks or just a highly commodified use of tradition and culture, which is sickening for me. Someone was telling me, like, we got to, like, bounce workout classes and bounce music. When I was growing up was the way New Orleans identified their tribe. When you listen to when you listen the house in D.C., when you listen to Miami music, when you listen to the New York hip hop – New Orleans had bounce and it was a cultural piece of music. And now it’s, you know, Middle-Class White women use it to for their workouts. But it makes me think about things that have been taken, you know, like yoga, like it seems so harmless to go to yoga class like we do just appropriate, appropriate people’s cultures with no real accountability. And so that’s what I’m watching. You know, watching the New Orleans essence be turned into a commodity. And that’s that’s been really that’s been really sad.

Aurora: When we look at the devastation, the impact of these natural disasters, many times what mainstream America fails to connect is that it’s a direct impact in many cases that not only impacts the ecology of what’s happening in an environment, but it has a direct linkage to people in communities and predominantly communities that are most vulnerable. And it has a ripple and lasting effect that most are not cognizant of. And so by consequence, youth, there is a pillaging. There is an a taking and it’s almost like under the guise of: it’s like it’s all good. We’re helping. We’re helping. We’re supporting. When in fact, that’s we’re not stepping back and consciously understanding the ramifications of what is happening.

Colette: That’s right. That’s right. That is that is the assessment that is that is absolutely true. This country is wealthy. And the main method of action of this country is money, as opposed to this country being democratic. And the main weapon be voting, you know, or engagement. It’s not. It’s money. It’s dollars. And money is not bad by itself. You know, it’s a tool. But I think it’s often a tool used to assuage guilt or a tool used to, you know, offer a charitable assistance. But we need to see dollars used to transform communities, not just to continue the action of taking from them. Right. We need dollars used to actually help create change. I think people aren’t paying attention, mostly because at some point you just start caring about your life as opposed to caring about the whole right, the whole community and our individual culture. Is it really lends itself to what can I do with my money and my time and my desire to go live somewhere else? That’s how that plays out. And in a disaster zone, it means my community in the midst of trauma will be visited upon by people who are just making a decision about what they want to do with their life. And that imbalance is, I think, the essence of this country. Right. Who has the privilege to think like that versus who will be stuck with the ramifications of climate disaster, climate change. We’ve got to rethink this whole process. The guilt isn’t helpful. The the dollars to the wrong people aren’t helpful. And the focus on financial recovery as opposed to a transformed community is it’s out of balance.

Kelly: Yeah. Colette, how do you see the disparities in the disaster relief and the ecological support reflected in the racism and exploitation at the core of our country?

Yea, I’m going to answer that like a lawyer. Don’t we have a recovery and a response program that that helps all Americans? That helps all people. And the answer is no, we don’t. We have a response program that helps Middle-Class People. And if you understand race and class together, you’ll understand that the middle class is it’s got a significant number of Black folks in it, but not a significant percentage of Black people. Right. There is a large percentage of Black people who are in the lower economic class of things and therefore policies, regulations, the way we do processes, they’re not meant for those folks – we are the sort of marginalized exception to the mainstream rule. But there’s a racial tone to that, which means our laws that seem what we call in in the legal realm, “race neutral.” They actually have an impact on particular races of people. And if you have groups of folks whose race determines their economic status, their economic functionality or ability to to move, then you have an understanding about how class, which is how where our policies are drawn, will necessarily impact certain races a different way. And Black folks in particular, in the growing racial wealth divide are on what they call a flat line of all other races are on an upswing. And it doesn’t have anything to do with bootstraps or working hard or anything like that. It has to do with the systems that are in play that are meant to basically keep people there. So we have a system with laws and regulations meant to keep Black income on a flat line. And we have disaster recovery programs that are meant to only address the middle class. So that tells me as a woman, a Black woman in south Louisiana, that during the next storm – and there will be another Katrina and there will be another storm – when it comes, my people will not be the ones who were saved. My people will not be the ones who are valued like the communities that I come from. And so we have to depend on each other. We’ve got to get ready for this thing. We’ve got to understand what’s coming at us. And somehow when hurricane season is over, it’s also imperative that we engage in a deeper level of advocacy so that we start changing some of these systems and changing these structures. And that’s a long fight. But that’s the fight.

Aurora: And so that’s the intersection. Right. You cannot talk about climate climate change without acknowledging its intersection with social justice.

Colette: We call that climate justice. It is surprising for most people when I have to talk about climate science, which I can do not because I studied it in a classroom, but because it’s important enough for us to go do some of our own reading and our own learning on the planet is in peril and all of humanity is in danger. And if that’s not enough to catalyze you to go read up and figure out what’s happening. Even the hard science, even sit down with it, then I don’t know what is. It’s important to know the science because the scientist is telling us it’s giving us the data. The science is warning us. The science is telling us even what the solutions are. But we can’t just focus on the science or else we’ll miss the impact. And for people like me, I didn’t come in with the science. The science is what I learned. Second, the first part was seeing the people impacted. And the and the the second part was seeing the structures that we have in place are just inadequate. Not just for my community, but for yours, too. We’re not gonna make it out of this if this is our game plan and just trust everybody who went through Katrina, we don’t have a good game plan. It’s been the saddest thing to watch this COVID crisis because the answers to the COVID crisis, to managing it and even getting it to a place where we can eradicate it means to have a healthy social structure. But in this country, we have a completely imbalanced and broken social, economic and political infrastructure. And the pandemic really showed us that if you don’t care about the public health of the most vulnerable and marginalized and targeted people, if you don’t care about the systems of education, for special education students, for teachers, for cafeteria workers, if you don’t care about how your trash gets picked up and how your food gets made, if you don’t care about how the labor and the wages of the waitstaff and the people who who make these things, then you are not helping to build a system that will make it through the next climate impact. Justice across all of these systems would have eradicated COVID-19 before it could take hold on our country if we would actually invest in a public health system that everybody had access to, we would have stopped this thing in its tracks. We also would have been able to recover better from Katrina and from all of the other storms that need that public health infrastructure ready, not just the physical portions of it, but the mental health portions of it. You know, I’m hearing people talk about my my children are going crazy in the house. Yeah, yeah. That would make someone go a little crazy. Do we have a mental health infrastructure in place for children in crisis? Because we didn’t during Katrina. And it showed with suicide rates and murder rates. These are these are the systems – when they break for one crisis, they break for them all. And they are mostly weakened because they’re rooted in superiority and oppression as opposed to being rooted in equity and justice or had just humanity. What is it about this country that we don’t want everybody to have access to health?

Aurora: Oh, my gosh. There is so much there because it’s sitting at the crux. Right. You know, this season we’re talking about community and this is going to make me get emotional. And this – if we if we’re not learning that we are part of the human community, because I believe that socioeconomically and racially there are folks who operate and none of this shit affects them. You know, I saw it, you know, when we lived through Katrina. Oh, that’s not my. Oh, those. Oh gosh. Those poor folks down there. But I’m still walk into my grocery store. Everything’s still there. My water is still clean. I’m not displaced. I may have had to have a couple of my relatives move in for a couple of weeks, but everybody’s good. Right. And what I believe this pandemic has brought has shown us is that. Aint no money in your bank account gonna save you. Ain’t no gate across it in your in your driveway. Ain’t no fence around your house going to protect you. Because it’s not looking. This this virus isn’t assessing us.

Kelly: So, Collette, I just wanna back up a few steps you had mentioned climate migration. Can you describe what that is?

Colette: Yes. I love the question about climate migration, because it’s the right question right now. And it’s also complex. It’s got several layers to it. Climate migration is when folks or are forced to, for their safety, move from one place to avoid climate disaster. That’s one one way to look at it. That happened in Katrina. Katrina hit – many of the folks in the Gulf evacuated, actually. But there’s also climate migration that’s happening slowly, like sea level rise. Right. So Katrina’s fast moving. There’s fast moving migration. Sea level rise is slow moving. There’s slow moving migration. And this is happening mostly because of development and speculators and even government data that’s that’s showing the impacts of sea level rise. And people are having to move away from infrastructure and spaces that are being impacted. South Florida is probably the most well-known and how even the water systems of Miami Beach in South Florida, that the aquifers are being impacted by saltwater intrusion because the sea has come up so, so high, it’s coming in from the top and the bottom right. And in south Louisiana, folks are moving because sea level rise in conjunction with oil and gas exploration are making our land go into the sea a lot quicker than most places on the planet. And folks are moving. They’re moving to parishes just, you know, an hour away. I think we’re going to start seeing migrate economic, climate and economic migration out of the Midwest because the farmers can’t plant. How long can you hold a farm if you’re not planting? If the river if the Mississippi River has too much water in it because of increased precipitation and you can’t get your seeds down, how many seasons do you think they can hold those farms? Those farms are expensive. So we’re going to see all kinds of migration. I don’t think we’re ready. And we can’t be naive enough to not connected to the climate impacts that we’re feeling. And the slow ones are hard to remember that about. Right. They feel like, oh, I’m just ready to go – No, no. You’re ready to go Because the town has emptied out and the town has emptied out because the water is getting too high and it floods all the time. You know, you’ve got to put the connect those dots and put it together.

Kelly: One of my favorite places in the world is on a barrier island off of south New Jersey. And the house is there, still selling on the block for a million plus dollars. And I just kind of look and wonder, like how many years we. Have like what is the data say? I mean, another favorite spot of mine lived there for five years is Key West, Florida.

Colette: Yeah. Key West is in trouble. I’m I’m not sure about New Jersey, although I will say the flood predictions for New Jersey, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, Miami, Norfolk, these are all like they’re all together – the Keys. These coastal cities have a particular fate coming. Just like with COVID. Right. It’s been so interesting to watch this country in particular really battle between whether they prefer money or life. “How else are we going to live if we don’t make money?” Right. That’s how people think about it. And that’s actually a good question. How else could we live if we don’t make money? Let’s let’s think about that. Well, first, we can not give 42 billion dollars to the fossil fuel industry during this bailout and instead give it to the people who do want to pay their rent and do want to pay their water bill and do want to pay their light bill. That’s one way we could do it. We could start making policies that don’t benefit corporations and the extremely wealthy and build policies and regulations that balance this out. How do we live if we don’t have money? Well, we could have some base standards for housing, health, education and food. And then your job could become something you wanted to do as opposed to something you had to do, and then living could be us actually living and exploring who we are as humans, as opposed to maintaining a system rooted in the enslavement of people, which is what all of us are carrying, not just Black folks. If you’re a waiter, if you’re in the service industry, if you’re in any of these sort of down, down, down ballot jobs, that helps to upkeep a bigger corporation. This is a system that started hundreds of years ago rooted in building wealth for a very few. I don’t think people are afraid of socialism. I think they’re afraid of not being wealthy. And I get that because it’s hard not being wealthy. It’s not financial wealth that we should be valuing. It’s our humanity. It’s our health. It’s our environment. It’s these these trees and this water and this food. I mean, you know, Louisiana, we got such good food. You know we have good food? We have good food because our state is made from all of the silt of the Mississippi River, which pulls in the Missouri and the Ohio rivers. Everything you grow here is delicious. It’s delicious. We don’t just have good dishes because we know how to cook which we do. Like, why don’t we value that? We’ve got to have the courage to love other people the way we love ourselves. We’ve got to have the ability to not just see our individual cells, but see our collective responsibility and collective duty to each other. The way our society is functioning right now is a product of fear. This is what this is what we get. Yeah. This is what you get. If you go if you move in fear and individualism, you get what we got right now.

Kelly: So that’s why I will go back to your point of saying if we if we loved other people as much as we love ourselves. And I think that’s actually part of the problem. I think there’s not a lot of love for ourselves. I think there’s a lot of people hurting and don’t know that they’re hurting, which is why they’re projecting it on so many other people. And I’ll speak for myself. I mean, I walked around, you know, really clueless to the injury and trauma I was causing because of my own injury and trauma that I wasn’t aware of.

Colette: Yeah. What you just what you just did, though, Kelly, was, I think something people don’t have the courage to do. Right. You have to acknowledge one that you may have caused pain to, that you’re causing pain might and it probably wasn’t intentional, but it comes from pain that was caused to you. And that kind of self assessment and that kind of self-awareness it’s not prevalent enough. But we should we should be looking at ourselves. When you said that that internalized hatred like that, black folks have real problems with internalized oppression. That is a conversation I have to have in the south all the time. Half of the things we do is because we believe the colonized version of us, too. Right. We believe all the things that you were taught to believe. We have a lot of trauma that all of us are carrying. And this country is a great country. And we’ve done great things in a short amount of time, relatively. But it is not without its costs. We have built the wealth of this nation by devaluing. Exploiting. Killing. Kidnaping people. We’ve built the institutions of this country by excluding leaving out and discriminating against people, you know, like. There are consequences to this wealth and power that we have generated. And we are embodying that. And we have to be honest about that. There’s a principles – the JEMEZ principles, which are widely accepted through the climate world, that J-E-M-E-Z principles. They’re simply stated, but they’re not simple. And they were created by the environmental justice community as a response to the white environmental community who was leaving out black and brown folks from the conversation. But one of the principal says you you know, you have to have a commitment to self transformation. And this and this principle is it’s it’s one of my favorite because, you know, I I like to think I’m a pretty cool chick. I like to think I’m fun. I like to think I’m funny.

Kelly: Totally concur.

Colette: Drink with me. Who wouldn’t? Yeah. You know, but you know what? I messed up, too, kelly, you know what I’m saying? And you know how much you know how much courage you have to have self-awareness. You have to have to admit that. And if you’re dealing with the folks who are just like nothing ever happened to me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. It is it is years before they’re gonna be able to see what our understand even this conversation. Right.

Kelly: Or even this poor me this happened to me. And why won’t you look at me as as as being, you know, downtrodden as well.

Colette: That’s right. It’s it’s going to take a commitment to self transformation. It’s going to take the courage to see where you’re broke and what places you’re broken, and then it’s going to take a commitment to fix those places. You know, sometimes you just have to say an apology. Sometimes you just have to show up and not expect anything in return. I like to challenge white folks when they work with me. I like to not tell them stuff. And they really feel like they have a right to know things. And I’m just like, you know, sometimes you don’t get to know. I remember we did lots of community gatherings. And there’s just one part of the gathering was just for Black and native folks. And the white folks were just like, well, what do we do? Why don’t you go sit under a tree. It’s a nice day. You know, the nights then you go fishing right now, you could say a prayer. You could make some bead work. You could do lots of things. Like what? You know, what is it about this that you think you have a right to? And think about that. Think about why you think you have a right to know everything. This woman in the coffee shop. She was mad. She was a volunteer at a food kitchen, you know, that feeds the homeless people. And she was in the coffee shop with a whole bunch of Christian folks. And she was just like, I don’t even think those people were really hungry. I don’t know why they were at the food kitchen. And I was thinking to myself, well, first of all, there’s not a lot of people who go to the food kitchen for fun. Second – what if they – what if they did have food in their house but they came to the food, like, why do you think you get to know or have any say over their life? And this is that colonized mind. Right. This is the this is this is what we get from the systems of slavery. I have a right to know what those people are doing with the donation that I just gave them or with the food that I’m handing out at the food pantry, like you may not think you’re. In trouble. But if this is the way you’re moving in the world, you are causing trauma. You’re causing trauma, if not to the people who received your food, to the people who are just listening to your rhetoric. And this is trauma and trauma doesn’t have to be like a slap to the face. You know, it could be it could be very subtle and it can happen over a long time and it will corrode us, corrode our hearts and hinder our ability to empathize with another human being, which is what is happening during COVID. You see these death numbers? I don’t understand how anybody looking at these death numbers cannot wear face mask, not because of anything political, but just because you just want me to know that you care enough as a human to not kill me with your breath, you know what I mean? But but but when I remember when coronoa first happened, I talked to an indigenous chief. He said, Collette, something about this doesn’t sound right. He actually told me- he said, he said, Do you know how to locate a snake in the forest? And I said, No, Chief, I don’t know how to locate a snake in a forest. He said, well, if you walk in through the forests, we have swamps down here. If you walk it through, if you walk in through the swamp, you walk in, but then you can smell it. I said you can smell a snake? He said you can smell it. And he said, And something doesn’t smell right with this corona virus. And I’ll never forget because I was like, first, why didn’t they smell a snake as first thing? Second of all, what is really happening? When when we have this global pandemic and the politics of this thing make you say, I will I will not wear protective gear or I want to open my bar or my church or whatever. Despite the health of the whole, there’s something here that doesn’t smell right. I do think it’s a statement on the state of humanity right now. Right. The state of certainly U.S. humanity.

Aurora: Time and time to go back to the community.

Colette: Time to go back to the community, Ase.

Kelly: Mm hmm. So, Collette, what would your opt in be for our listeners today?

Colette: We have an election coming and this one is do or die for our country. I’m not speaking about personalities. I’m speaking about. A global message that we’ll be sending with whoever we put in this White House. I can critique both candidates. But instead, I’m gonna make sure that I vote. I’m gonna make sure I vote for change. And I’m gonna make sure that the rest of my time and energy is spent on getting people to acknowledge and be honest about where we are and this new climate reality and what it’s going to mean for our nation and for the people around the planet. We need folks to opt in on climate. We need folks to opt in on the truth of climate. And it’s time to start getting ready for something that none of us will have the ability to impact our control. The Corona virus and Katrina, if you’re lucky, are just warning shots. If you’re lucky. But they are warning shots made with great sacrifice. Two thousand people lost in Katrina. Hundreds of thousands of people lost in Corona. All of this could be stopped if we had not just better infrastructure and better disaster recovery processes, but if we had a better nation, if we had a better moral center, if we had a more compassionate society, we would be better. We would survive hard things if we had the courage to actually see each other, value each other equally and love each other. I think we should opt in to love.

Aurora: If we do not get it after you just so clearly and succinctly articulate it, what we need to do next.

Kelly: Yeah, because it’s like it is scary as shit when you say all that stuff and people stay there and it’s like we need courage, like we need to be loving in our fear and do the hard things in alignment with what is true.

Colette: Yes. Yes. I think about – I don’t know how many of your listeners are Christian, but I think about what it takes to actually turn your other cheek. You know what? It actually takes two to to bring things to people who are sick with a possibility of you getting sick, to take care of folks who are in need, not because of charity, but because you understand that, you know, their liberation is tied with your liberation. You know, what is that going to take? I think maybe it’s not just Christianity. Maybe it’s a deeper spirituality. And maybe that spirituality is is not just about humanity, but about a broader ecosystem that includes humans and everything else that humans need to survive and thrive. The courage to the courage to change the courage to love is real. It’s scary to do that. But but it’s so beautiful when we do.

Aurora: The question I do want to ask, because Kelly and I have this conversation all the time. There is something about our differences culturally. You know, you talked about the indigenous chief. Well, how would you describe the way in which we embody approach and think about community or individual, an individualistic view of the world. Ourselves, the planet. Everything that we touch that I think is it’s part of what separates us.

Colette: My deputy is a young white woman. She’s in a different generation, a different race and a different class than I am. And we’re good friends. I love her. But we have this conversation. Right. And I remember telling her – she was contemplating going to visit some family roots in a place abroad and people were discouraging her from going. And I said, you know what? You you have a living great aunt who survived the Holocaust. You need to go see her. You know, you have you have roots in another country where you still got family ties, like you should go visit that country. Because what I think my white allies lack is connection to place or identity that’s rooted in ethnicity, but identity in general. Right. I mean, the creation of whiteness didn’t just help white people, it harmed white people. But I am I am so grateful to be raised in the Bayous. I’m so grateful to be in a place where my my grandparents grandparents are from. Right. And I have an accountability and a responsibility and a deep love of this place. And I have an identity, a very clear identity. I don’t have the same identity struggles that some of my friends have. I’m clear about who I am and where I’m from. And I think that tie to place ties you to a community. And and that identity that ties you to place and ties you to community helps you to empathize in times like this.

Aurora: And what’s next. What should we be on the lookout to make sure that we’re supporting donating to?

Colette: I’m working with the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table to build out a climate agenda for black folks to engage in. And I’m so excited about it. I’ve been wanting to see more black people in this climate conversation for a long time. So we’ll be joining the folks who are in the climate conversation already, but really taking the time to get more black people in this country to understand it and getting the country to understand that if we want to care about black lives, we have to care about climate change.

Kelly: Thank you. Thankyou, Ms. Colette.

Colette: Thank you for reaching out. Thank you for just being who you are. This is great.

Aurora: Another fire conversation. 

Kelly: This conversation we connected all of the dots. 

Aurora: I love how Ms. Colette grounded us in why we have such different views of the world

Kelly: Thank you all for listening. Find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @the opt in.

Aurora: Music for this episode is by Jordan McCree. And the Opt-In is produced by Rachel Ishikawa.

Kelly: See you next week.

Aurora: Bye

Aurora: Wow, beautiful. And so, Dr. Kelsie, for those who may not be as in touch and those who may not have watched your TED talk. So for those listening, please make sure that you like and watch a phenomenal TED talk. Can you set context for the for those of us who may not know, what does water justice mean to you?

Kelsey Leonard: Yes, well, I think for me – and I and I feel that it’s really important that folks work to form to have a general understanding of the foundational concept of water justice from a global perspective, but also recognize that there is a local relevance and a local connection that needs to be formed to the broader concept and context. And so my personal definition of water, justice that I’m going to share with you now may be a little different from other folks whose definition of water justice. And I think that’s OK and that’s important. Globally, though, internationally, within the larger environmental justice movements that we see internationally, water justice is ensuring that there is adequate water security for peoples around the world. And that means that there’s an adequate quantity and quality of water to sustain our daily livelihoods. But it also goes a step further and in in understanding water, justice is not just what do we as people need to maintain our daily livelihoods, but what does the water need? What is the larger ecosystem that depends on different water scapes and water environments, hydro environments need to live and to survive and to thrive? And so in my work in promoting water justice, I do it from a particular localized concept of being a Shinnecock woman. In our language, Shinnecock means ‘people of the stony shore.’ So I really believe that our ancestors set out for us to be these protectors, to be the the folks that made sure that that shore, that place where freshwater and saltwater meets and forms this beautiful landscape, water escape that we now often flock to for solace and calm is something that we protect for future generations and for time immemorial. And so for me, I have this larger understanding of what water justice means at a global scale, but at a local scale. For me personally, it’s about how do I protect the ocean? How do I protect that beautiful shoreline of Long Island? And now where I currently live, how do I protect my new home of the Great Lakes?

Aurora: You know, I think one of the connections that may get lost for many of us is – you know, I always think that what percentage of our of our being, our bodies are made of water? You know, 70 percent of our brain is is water. And then the other flipside of that externally is the concern that we have about our water and our water bodies and what they represent not only in the sustenance of our planet, but what they represent and the sustenance of us as human beings. You know, there’s this big concern that by 2030, you know, seven hundred million people will be displaced worldwide due to water scarcity. And it’s hard to sort of conceptualize that and understand it in this definition that you’ve given us that is multi-dimensional, right?

Kelsey Leonard: Yes.

Aurora: And I don’t know if you can sort of offer anything within that construct for us to understand the global implication of it, understand the ecological local implication of that, and then the implication to us as humans as individuals.

Kelsey Leonard: Yes, definitely. And I think the first place to start with that is for your audience, for for listeners today to think about how you relate to water. Do you find that you relate to water in such a way that you see it as an infinite resource? Something that’s: Oh, it’s always gonna be there. There’s there’s no problems with my water. I turn on a tap and it comes out. That level of convenience is not something that is experienced by everyone around the world on a daily basis. So when we talk about water, justice or water injustice, it’s getting everyday folks to question what is my level of convenience or my level of of expectation and entitlement when it comes to water, because it’s going to be different for every single one of us. Now, I didn’t always have this level of of awareness – I think I had a level of awareness, but it wasn’t as pronounced in terms of me understanding that other folks around the world. I didn’t realize that there was a water problem, that water was a finite resource and that we were going to face these scarcity issues. That had always been something that I had grown up with because I’m an indigenous woman. But getting to a point in my scholarly and professional career to realize that other people – that’s not their existence. Other people don’t have that frame of reference, maybe even for a portion of their life, let alone their whole life. And there was one moment in my journey where it was so pronounced. I was at a conference, an indigenous conference, and we had, you know, indigenous people from all over the world that were there. And it was actually a conference on water. So it was really beautiful. And we were in South Dakota, in a really beautiful part of the world. And we had indigenous peoples from out here in New Zealand and indigenous peoples from all over the United States and Canada that that were there and talking about our experiences with water. And someone asked a question where we pulled the audience and said, how many of us have had to drink bottled water at some point in our life as our only main source of water? And every hand in the room went up. And that was so profound for me, because in our communities, we’re not born into this existence of being able to turn on the tap. That wasn’t something that I trusted until I became a water scientist and I understood, you know, living in different places. But I never drank in my households, in my family on Long Island and then when we lived other places around the world, we never drink out of the tap. It was always bottled water. And it wasn’t even just our reservation territory, you know, on Long Island, it’s, you know, has massive water concerns across the board and all different types of communities. And now that you asked me that question about that, my journey and where this sort of level of advocacy and understanding and awareness for water insecurity and water being a finite resource came from, that was a very, very pronounced moment in my journey. And it I think back I was about 16 years old and I was at a another native youth conference in San Diego, California, by an organization that I then went on to become a female co president for called United National Indian Tribal Youth. But in this youth conference of 3000, the keynote speaker said, How many of you have a family member or you yourself that is afflicted with diabetes? And every hand in the room went up.

Aurora: Oh, gosh.

Kelsey Leonard: So when we think about water injustice, it’s directly related to our well-being and the well-being of our communities. And that’s now even more pronounced when we see – when we think about the impacts that COVID-19 has on our communities, are existing health conditions like being prone to diabetes, being prone to high blood pressure, being, you know, having poor life expectancies are already preexisting conditions, putting our communities at a higher risk for COVID-19. And then you add on the, you know, the audacious impact of not having access to clean water or one of the key preventative measures against COVID-19 is washing your hands, you really start to see the connection. You start to see that if we can advocate for water justice, if we can advocate for the health of our planet, we start to really advocate for our health as individuals and human beings. And it has to start somewhere. So for me, it starts with water.

Kelly: How does my water entitlement cause harm? Dr. Kelsey.

Kelsey Leonard: I think the greatest harm is the unconsciousness. Right, entitlements aren’t necessarily malicious. They don’t necessarily come with a malicious intent. They’re often they’re often the most damaging and most harmful. When they’re unconscious, when they’re implicit. When we just do them without thinking about it. And then when we do it so frequently and we have so many aspects of our lives that are prone to those water entitlements and water complicity, it becomes from a molehill to a mountain. And it’s almost it feels almost insurmountable, the way in which we take for granted freshwater on our planet. Generally folks can say, oh, I’m leaving the tap on too long or I mean, I’m spending too much time brushing my teeth or taking a shower. And yes, if we can if we can shorten those things, that definitely will help. But the big things that are cutting into our water resources on the planet are agriculture are the clothes that we wear and consume. It’s also technology. You know, I think we’re gonna see data in the next 10 years coming out of COVID-19 and its impacts with people needing so many individual technological devices like iPads and iPhones and laptops. And all of these devices that we’re going to need right now. And we do need right now to adjust to this new normal of COVID-19. Those natural resources that make those things come from indigenous lands, come from the earth, takes a massive amount of water to cultivate those and extract those natural resources to then make your laptop and make the lithium batteries that support everything that they do. So to answer your question, to really address our entitlements, it’s to say have them not be so unconscious. At least if we’re conscious, complicit, that’s shifting the paradigm. I’d rather have us be consciously complicit in the destruction of the planet than unconsciously, because to me that’s a bit of understanding, truth and reconciliation. And you can’t move forward. You can’t get to a newer level of understanding and innovation in our world and as a society, if we aren’t telling the truth and we can’t tell the truth until we are conscious in every action that we undertake in our daily lives.

Aurora: You know, you talk about the consciousness, right? The consciousness of whether, as Kelly said, the entitled entitlement of me to use or not use. There’s something that comes up for me with regard to the consciousness of all of us having the right to clean water. You know, when you talk about bottled water and some some members of our human community actually spending their entire lives drinking water out of a bottle. There’s also this notion for me of honoring the fact that water and clean water is part of a mother Earth’s offering to us but it’s also is an opportunity for all of us to have it in its purest and cleanest form and a responsibility that we have towards that. And I don’t feel that we all consciously even have that awareness. And I know that’s a that’s a bigger awareness of just even a consciousness of the tap overflowing when I’m brushing my teeth.

Kelsey Leonard: In my TED talk, I talk about granting legal personhood to water, which is definitely a strong legal mechanism, an instrument that that folks should look into and explore. But the other aspect that isn’t really presented in my TED talk is around the human right to water. And this has been something that’s been advocated for for over 10 years. There’s a General Assembly resolution from the United Nations that has recognized that there is an international human right to water. Now, it’s a non-binding resolution, which is for a lot of things that come out of the United Nations can be very difficult to implement because it’s non-binding. But it points to a historical moment in our global society where we are consciously saying that every human on this planet has a right to water. For them to meet their basic livelihood and daily needs. Right. So we’re not saying that you have a you know, you have an inherent right to use all of the water you want, you know, run your business and and pollute the planet. No. But what we are saying is that that humans should be able to have that level of of dignity and that non access to water should not be a reason to strip someone of their dignity. I really am a strong advocate for the human right to water for these very reasons that that people should not have to live their whole existence on bottled water and the economic costs that are associated with that, when other folks around the world don’t have to potentially even pay for water. AAnd so there’s a lot that has to change both in the policy realm, in the legal realm, in our engineering realm. We have dilapidated infrastructure across the United States and Canada. Some of our pipes were built over 100 years ago, if not more. And they’re they’re falling apart. And so when we think about, you know, politicians, legislators, everyday citizens that are out there advocating for the Green New Deal in in our country and in the United States, and that’s a big part of it. You know, we can green our economy even in the water sector by investing, you know, a whole lot of infrastructure dollars into our piped water systems and making them on par for 2021, which will it soon will be.

Kelly: =When you say legal personhood, can you just define that for me?

Kelsey Leonard: I hesitate and I cringe a little bit because it is a legal mechanism and a legal philosophy that is very much commonly understood through a lens of Western law. And and so what what do I mean by that? From a Shinnecock legal perspective there are rights of being of existing, of having a consciousness, of being a person that are the same for me as a human or being a part of the human species as there are for our whale relatives or as there there is for water. That’s very different from the Western understanding of legal personhood, which is the granting of personality understandings, something that is not of the human species being entitled to rights of of a human being. So legal personhood, if we put it into layman’s terms or more simplistic terms, it’s the idea of saying that right now, generally the average American does not see water as being alive.

Kelly: Hmm.

Kelsey Leonard: The average American understands their dog to be property and not necessarily a family member. The rights of nature and granting legal personhood to water or to your dog is an affirmation that says that that living being is entitled to certain rights and protections under the law. So for granting legal personhood to water, it particularly frames it as an understanding that a water body has the right to exist, flourish and naturally evolve.

Kelly: Mm hmm.

Kelsey Leonard: And you might say, well, that doesn’t all water have that right? Isn’t it already doing that? Well, not if you put a dam on the river, not if you put levees in. Not if you have any type of human manmade infrastructure that is put in to confine about water body and manipulate it. And so when we think about what has been the legacy of the United States in comparison to other countries, we now see other countries like China, like India and others around the world that are also seeing an increased proliferation of hydro projects – so sort of the damming of nations. But the United States was the leading country in the proliferation of hydro projects and dams and in many ways still is because we’re exporting that knowledge of how we played God. And that was really the terminology of the Army Corps of Engineers for much of the 20th century. And we’re exporting that that ideology, that philosophy of man can conquer nature to other parts of the world for the proliferation of these hydro projects. So that is a threat to the legal personhood of water, to the ability for water and water bodies, rivers, creeks, streams, lakes to be able to exist, flourish and naturally evolve without our human manipulation.

Kelly: Wow. Dr. Kelcy, that’s blowing my mind.

Aurora: And I think it’s actually connected. Right. And to me, it’s connected to how you talked about the injustice of humans having access to water and the loss of dignity to the being. Well, it’s the same thing with water. We’re doing the same thing to water. We are manhandling it.

Kelly: We are extracting.

Aurora: We are extracting it. We are damaging it. We are Manipulating it and then to serve out our selves.

Kelly: I would say terrorizing it. But yeah.

Kelsey Leonard: And I think that’s so interesting, the the modality of language that we that we use in understanding the injustice of indigenous peoples that are often on the front lines of water protection, defending their water relations, that that kinship connection that they have to water are often labeled as terrorists. I think, you know, you really hit it on the head. There is. Are we terrorists for wanting to protect the water? Or is the rest of the world terrorists because they want to pollute it?

Aurora: Yeah, I mean, that literally that just brought – I mean, that actually just brought me to tears. Right. This is where it’s so messed up. It’s sort of this Westernized notion that actually is -.

Kelly: I would say, white supremacist cultural conditioning.

Aurora: That says I have ownership.

Kelsey Leonard: Well, and there there definitely is a racial-racialization of the term terrorist. When we think about land defenders, water protectors around the world, not just in the United States, but they are being murdered at exponential rates. Land defenders, water protectors in in Honduras, in in Ecuador and in Mexico have been targeted for just wanting clean water, labeled terrorists for wanting clean water. It threatens big business, it threatens corporations, it threatens the autonomy and the authority of the state of the colonial state. When we think about shifting these water paradigms to recognize legal personhood of water, to recognize the human right of water, that is a massive threat to the colonial state and the colonial mindset.

Kelly: Yes. What do you mean by Colonial State?

Kelsey Leonard: So the Colonial State is any government that still is colonizing a territory that is not their indigenous land and is colonizing communities of marginalized populations that have existed on that land prior to the formation of their new state. Embedded within the colonial state, as you mentioned, is the hierarchy of ideology that is based within white supremacy. And when we’re seeing the injustices around our world today that’s calling out systemic racism, embedded within systemic racism is the colonial state and the the ideology of the protection of the colonial state. And so I think what we’re seeing now, too, with calls for Black liberation is also calls for recognizing indigenous sovereignty. They go hand in hand. You can’t dismantle systemic racism within our world without decolonizing. And so that’s where you’re seeing a lot of allyship of of community co-learning and sharing about our experiences. Because for a lot of folks, you know, even other persons of color, they may be unfamiliar with the indigenous experience, particularly as it pertains to water. And my hope is that by shining a light on some of the water injustices facing indigenous peoples, we often start to see some some similarities of shared experience, of how racial oppression as well as white supremacy is linked to our colonized experiences as indigenous peoples.

Aurora: And in appreciating at two to pull on that thread, Doctor, Dr. Kelsey, is that our experience and sort of the impact? Right. That experience being one impact and that this the the the challenges or the impact of water, justice or injustice disproportionately impacts BIPOC.

Kelsey Leonard: Exactly. And I think even going a step further, right? So we’ve laid the foundation of systemic racism, white supremacy and colonization being interwoven and interlinked and being ongoing processes within, you know, our current nation states. We have to go a step further and then also identify the misogyny and the hetero patriarchy that’s also linked to that. So in the work that I do and in our understandings as indigenous peoples, we do not separate the violation or the inherent understanding of viability of Mother Earth from the violence against women that exists within our world in society today.As a global society, if we are OK with violating Mother Earth, We are also unconsciously or consciously saying it’s OK to violate women. There is a innate female connection between the land and water and and us as women, as female bodies on this planet. The sickness we see in the planet is the sickness that we then enact on other bodies across this planet. I do not believe that we can end violence against women until we end violence against the Earth and vice versa. There’s so much within indigenous epistemology is that share that way of understanding from our birth to our death. Well, we really want to take a good look at the violence present on our planet. It’s interlinked to interwoven to the oppression of women.

Kelly: That just clicked something in me that’s like I may have known it all along, but not until you said it is it so clear and rings so true. How do we become more connected to the water, to the earth, to our to myself as a woman. What are your thoughts?

Kelsey Leonard: Well, I would say first, it’s really about understanding the water and the environment that you exist in. We all exist on this planet, but do we know about the land that we’re currently occupying? Right. Who lived here? Who made it so that my home could now exist where it does? Over millennia, someone had to cultivate that environment, that land, so that it could give birth to a new home and a new family and a new society that currently lives on it. So when you hear about land acknowledgments or understanding the land that you currently occupy from an indigenous perspective, particularly within the United States and Canada and other colonial states, it’s about a recognition that there were and are people here that existed before your ancestors arrived and they made it so that you have these beautiful homes and these beautiful communities to live in and these beautiful rivers and streams. And I think that’s a really powerful place to start building a connection, to start understanding. How did you come to exist on this land? And where is the land that you come from? There’s probably a really rich connection to to that place that your ancestors were born out of. So that’s a step one. Then the step two that, I say to folks is, OK, now you know about the people who were here before you. What about the land and the water itself? How have you built a connection in your present existence? Right, so the first step was kind of going back. Understanding your past and the collective past of the place that, you know, occupy, the second step is understanding your current existence as it connects to other aspects of your life and the environment around you. And a way to do that is to find the water body closest to you. Maybe you live in a desert and that might be a rain barrel. Maybe you live near a river. Maybe you live near the ocean. Go and actually visit. Be in nature. I think if anything, there are. Some unique opportunities that COVID-19 has presented us with an ability to physically distance and connect with nature. You have to socially distance because you get to be very social with the water. You get to go and visit and talk to the water. Talk to the trees. Yeah, you might feel like a crazy person because you’re not used to this type of socialization. So that would be, you know, step two is to understand your your natural environment, even if you live in an urban location. There is a way to connect to nature. There are places to connect. And so that’s where I would go next. And then once you do those first two steps, it’s about then going to that third step. Past, present. Future action. What are you going to do to ensure in the same way that those ancestors did, that you’re cultivating a planet that future generations can live and thrive and flourish? And it’s not just future generations of humans. It’s future generations of all beings on this planet. And that might seem insurmountable when you take it in its totality, but just start with something small. Maybe you have a beautiful lake near your home and you say that in three generations of my grandchildren. I want them to be able to enjoy that lake in the same way that I have. So you go out and you do what you need to do to figure out how to protect that lake. There probably are some threats to that lake. There probably are maybe folks that are doing really great things to protect that lake. Donate to them, have a conversation with them. And even if it’s just committing to yourself that every day you’re going to go and visit with the lake and check in and say, hey, how are you doing? I know that that conversation might seem strange to folks. But our planet and our world is really strange right now. So one more strange thing probably isn’t going to push us out of the atmosphere.

Kelly: It may even make us feel good.

Kelsey Leonard: Yeah. And I think that I really want your listeners to to know that as well. When we think about what types of water makes us feel good. I really hope people also think about what types of water makes us feel bad. And what are you doing to change the bad water in our world? People love going to the ocean. I live on a first nation indigenous community surrounded by the Hamptons. We are the playground of the rich and famous of New York City. And we have been for at least two centuries, if not longer. But they come because they want to embrace that quote unquote, beautiful, imaginative, speculative space of ocean and pristine and an untouched nature. Yet they don’t want to do anything to fix the effluent that’s being dumped into the ocean from paper mills. They don’t want to do anything to fix the polluted stream that’s right behind their house. They’d rather take a vacation somewhere pretty. Because the bad water that’s that’s that’s too difficult to deal with or to address. It’s easier to look away. How do you think the water feels? The water doesn’t get to take a vaction in the Hamptons.

Kelly: You said so much and our theme for this season is community. And me as a white person, I see a lot of in myself and others around me that community is a forced, constructed, sometimes paid for thing. And and I look to Aurora and people in my life to to create and be a part of re humanizing myself as part of a greater community. So I just wanted to ask you what community meant for you. Knowing that. All of this is just so you’re so deeply connected to it.

Kelsey Leonard: For me, I love this question. Thank you so much for asking it, because there is a word that is just kind of plastered everywhere in our in our community for the Shinnecock nation. And we’re also a community that, because of colonization, is in a process of reclamation and idolization for our language. So over the years, you know, we’ve been growing. But there’s always been a word, at least in my lifetime, that’s that’s been plastered everywhere, you know, on our newsletters, on our buildings. And it’s called the word is: Mamoweenee. And it means that we move together. I don’t even know if we have a word for community in in our language, but I feel like that would be the word. And I feel like in the water work that I do, that’s a part of it. The waters are part of a community. And when we think about, you know, how water moves and flows, it moves together. Everything’s connected. And that’s my vision for a global community that is thriving.

Aurora: That’s absolutely beautiful. As our listeners hear this and sort of get their heads wrapped around this notion, what would your what would your ass be? What would you want them to opt into, Dr. Kelsey?

Kelsey Leonard: I think I’d have to go back to where we started this this conversation. Everyday being conscious enough to wake up and say, what am I going to do for the water today? Or making it your bedtime mantra. If the water is a part of our community, then that means that every day you did something to move us forward together. That’s what I hope people opt in for.

Aurora: This has been beautiful. Thank you so very much for your wisdom, for your guidance and for all the work that you continue to do to evolve our consciousness.

Kelsey Leonard: [Shinnecock language] Thank you both so much. It really was a pleasure to speak with you. 

Aurora: Can I just say how moved I was by the conversation?

Kelly: Yes! Not only moved, completely activated to start thinking about our waters.

Kelly: Thank you all for listening. Find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @the opt in.

Aurora: Music for this episode is by Jordan McCree. And the Opt-In is produced by Rachel Ishikawa.

Kelly: See you next week.

Aurora: Bye