Cornell on Fire Weekly 4/17

Dear Cornell on Fire,

Five days until we Reclaim Earth Day for climate justice! Our most provocative and primary demand is decolonization. This calls for a longer-than-usual reading experience. It’s worth it, we promise.

We know that the climate crisis will not be solved with the same mindsets that created it. Yet where do we find new ones? By turning to climate justice communities on the ecological frontlines.

Climate-minded discourse often talks about protecting vulnerable frontline communities. We must ask: what are we protecting them from? We are not protecting them from earth, the web of life. We are protecting them from us: our colonial system and our colonized mindsets. Victimization discourse about vulnerable communities deflects a core issue: climate justice communities are the essential power for climate action because they offer a way of being that is decolonized.

Here is what they say: Your society has lied to you. Our modern capitalist system is constructed on the myth of unbounded consumption and exponential growth on a finite planet. Life-savingly, not all societies believe this. There are societies founded on a morality of reciprocal relationship with earth, with exquisite sensitivity to earth’s feedback. For them, the earth is not a resource to be exploited, but a relation to be honored and tended. They teach us how to free ourselves from a self-destructive system.

With trepidation and humility, we pass along some instructions as best we can from Indigenous teachers, giving grateful center stage to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words from Braiding Sweetgrass:  

Decolonize #1: Disown the fixation with “impact” and the attendant dichotomy between “individual” versus “systemic” change. Western climate activists and fossil fuel companies alike expend great energy debating whether individual or systemic change is more impactful.* The answer is both. Indigenous teachers tell us: our relationship with earth is social. Just as social movements like feminism or anti-racism must happen on both personal and systemic levels, so too the climate movement. We are not only members of human society. We are also members of the community of nonhuman beings, or earth. The true framework for climate action is relationship, not calculation, and the true measure of action is love more than impact. “It can be too easy to shift the burden of responsibility to the coal company or the land developers. What about me, the one who buys what they sell, who is complicit in the dishonorable harvest?” (p. 195)

Decolonize #2: Recognize that being alive entails a constant moral negotiation of give and take with other beings. It is not a psychological imposition to grapple with the harm caused by one’s pollution, consumption, or lifestyle: it is key to being human. This dance of moral attunement is intrinsic to being alive in an ecological community of equally worthy lives. Indigenous teachers tell us: We must ask permission of other beings to support our life. Sometimes they say no. It is possible to take too much, and we are taking far too much. We must finally take responsibility for our role in this web, rather than reacting with the kneejerk denial our society encourages and requires of its consumers. “We have constructed an artifice…of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa’s sleigh, not been ripped from the earth.” (p. 199)

Decolonize #3: Acknowledge that with rights come responsibilities to the community of life. Our society tells us we are entitled to consume, pollute, and profit in perfect mental comfort, constrained only by our purchasing power and laws, freed from “judgments” or “shoulds,” with no responsibility for the consequences. This lie serves only profit to the disservice to life. From Indigenous teachers: Everyone lives downstream, and what we do matters. There are no rights without responsibilities. Please own yours, and call on your institutions and governments to own theirs.

Decolonize #4: Judgments are signals. Next time you or yours or your institution feel judged or shamed because a climate analysis calls into question the carbon pollution, privileges, or comfortable inaction that our society condones, please do two things. 1) Know that it is not about you. It is about a society that has lied to you. 2) Listen to the signal coming from earth. Ask: How can I adaptively respond to earth’s feedback and challenge the feedback from a society premised on lies? Sometimes, the answer will be within reach and you can act on it. Many times it won’t be, because our system is so acutely misaligned with earth’s values: then you engage in activism. “We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of earth’s beings.” (p. 195)

Decolonize #5: Next time you’re anxious about how climate action might challenge your “individual” privileges, remember: this is not about you. The thought that you are an individual is a critical fiction of modern society. You only become an individual when you die: until then, your life status is vitally dependent upon being an interconnected member of the community of breathing, growing, living beings. To be alive is to be in relationship. “What we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.” (p. 15) And the flourishing of life is exactly what is being destroyed – possibly forever – by the colonizer mindset.

Decolonize #6: Honor earth-based risk assessment. Our society depends upon us believing that it is more dangerous to risk our comfort, consumption, privileges, promotions, or lifestyles than it is to risk losing our only earth. Earth is providing increasingly powerful evidence that this lie is definitely a lie of “Windigo” society. “Born of our fears and our failings, Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than for anything else.” (p. 305)

The climate crisis holds out the possibility and necessity of decolonization. When society and earth give you conflicting feedback, decolonization means honoring earth’s feedback above all. As Robin Wall Kimmerer notes: “You don’t have to be complicit in our culture of destruction.” What if our collective and institutional consciences were attuned to earth's responsiveness, and used this vital feedback to restore right relationship with the whole community of life?

In full awareness of our membership in earth’s community, we call on Cornell and Ithaca to restore right relationship by Declaring a Climate Emergency and divesting, dissociating, and decarbonizing. All of this follows from decolonizing. RECLAIM EARTH DAY for climate justice this Monday, April 22. Join the actions:

Wear all BLACK with some RED.

2pm: If you're at Cornell, join us at Ho Plaza for a RED action moving to the Arts Quad (theme: decolonization). (Or join another site-specific action.)

3pm: Join a march to the Commons. Cornell’s march starts from Ho Plaza at 3pm.

4pm: Be at the Ithaca Commons for a Call to Action with luminaries of justice and song.

As always, you are welcome to join our Cornell on Fire Weekly meeting this Thursday, 6:30-8:00pm, or drop by Ho Plaza from 11-12:30 on Friday.

We are not so far from where we need to be, if we can only come home. In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words: Climate action is not so much about awakening as it is about remembering (p. 57).

In relationship,

Cornell on Fire

*Footnote: Here is what we have seen play out with debates around the “individual/system” dichotomy for climate impact: "Individuals" blame corporations. Corporations blame "individuals." The government blames no one. The collective is rendered invisible on this dichotomy of blame, and our moral and social relationship with earth is excluded from the equation. So the situation devolves.

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Plurivocality: Starting next week, CoF Weeklies will be written by a revolving team of writers. Our movement is diverse, so are our thoughts, and so will be our Weeklies. If you receive a CoF Weekly that you think this is wrong headed, can we still walk together? (We, like you, often write things we later laugh at!) Indeed, our hearts and minds are conflicted, which is why we are having this conversation.

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