By Maya Lewis

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

It’s safe to say that 2017 was a wild year for us all — but it was even worse for our planet.

In America alone, there were record-breaking weather events all year. 2017 was one of the hottest years on record, which intensified hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters to catastrophic proportions.

Add to that a president and administration who downplays the danger of climate change — removing any mention of the word from government websites — and has de-funded many of our federal environmental organizations, you get what looks like a pretty concerning year for the environment.

But like most things, a closer look will show a slightly different story.

Though 2017 may have felt particularly awful, environmental justice organizations all over the country did some amazing work, and most of them did so long before. Now, it’s up to us to uplift them this new year.

Many organizations are doing everything they can to fight for the environmental and climate justice in a time when we need it most. That didn’t change just because Trump got elected (though it gave them a pretty big common enemy).

They’ve launched new funds, projects and programs, empowered and educated the public. For this, they deserve our acknowledgment and thanks.

Here are 7 environmental justice projects and programs — some big, some small — doing everything they can to make 2018 a better year not just for the planet but all of us as well.

1. Run 4 Salmon

A 300-mile march along the waterways from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the Winnemem. That was the goal of organizers and participants of Run 4 Salmon, a “prayerful journey” that took place over 15 days this past September.

Lead by the Winnemem Wintu Chief Caleen Sisk, a collective of Indigenous women, along with activists and allies brought attention to the state of the waterways, fish and indigenous way of life in California.

Over 70 years ago, wild chinook salmon (Nur) roamed free in the water the Winnemem’s ancestral watershed, but when the Shasta Dam was built it cut them off from their home waters. Not only that, it directly affected the Winnemem Wintu Tribe who have deep connections to the water, river and salmon. The Run 4 Salmon hopes to change that.

2. Undocufund

They’re helping undocumented residents displaced by the devastating wildfires that have been sweeping through California. Many residents have lost all of their physical possessions, their homes, cars and, in some cases, jobs from being away from work.

In response to the record-breaking wildfires, there have been huge amounts of assistance given to those residents who have been most affected, though funds and aid organizations. But the founders of Undocufund sought to fill an all-too-often forgotten group of victims: undocumented residents.

Undocumented peoples are particularly vulnerable to natural disasters because they do not qualify for FEMA Aid and often speak little English.

“When there’s a crisis and there’s chaos, regardless of your documentation status, it’s disorienting,” said Mara Ventura, a co-founder of the fund and Lead Organizer with North Bay Jobs. “But if you already live in fear, in the shadows, and English is not your first language, there’s a fear of seeking resources.”

Undocufund is the only fund specifically dedicated to undocumented folks and mixed-status families and, through the support of thousands of donations, the mostly volunteer-run organization has been able to help over 400 people and more than 100 families get back on their feet.

3. Cooperation Jackson

Every city faces their own particular challenges in making sure residents have everything they need to succeed. In Jackson, Miss. (like many other cities) those challenges include income and racial inequality, healthcare access and a slew of other issues keeping the community from both environmental and communal stability. To fight back residents started Cooperation Jackson, both a movement and program, meant to combat these issues.

Through a network of local interconnected and interdependent institutions, the organization hosts programs and events to help educate their community on taking back their economic power and fight for equity in all of its forms. Last year saw a start in their journey to crafting a Just Transition for Jackson, Miss.

4. Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project

What does a just transition look like on the community level? To Oakland, Calif.’s Movement Generation, a just transition means healthy and resilient local economies and environments. It means a move away from pollution and profit, investment in our culture, labor and land; it means empowering low-income and people of color to lead.

Movement Generation is working to teach everyday residents how to play a more active role in the future of their communities. Small non-profit organizations like Movement Generation don’t have huge offices and enormous grants, but they manage to do a lot with a little and they need our support to help further that.

To Movement Generation, a just transition means healthy and resilient local economies and environments.

They’ve empowered activists, residents and participants to connect with their environment and the systems that impact them. In their Environmental Skills Training, the organization also helps Bay Area organizers and community members learn how to interact with, develop and restore the land around them. The organization also wrapped up 2017 with an extensive breakdown and framework for a Just Recovery, covering everything that impacted our environment this past year.

5. NY Renews

Made up of over 130 different New York community organizations, environmental activists, labor unions and more, NY Renews is using legislation to tackle climate change equity and reform through the “The Climate and Community Protection Act,” taking the climate change fight to senators’ doors.

The Act they hope to get passed in New York would not only push the state toward 100% renewable energy but also look to protect workers, create jobs and support those most impacted by climate change: low-income people and people of color.

We Can’t Talk Climate Change Without Talking Environmental Racism

“We aim to make New York State the nation’s leader in tackling the climate crisis while protecting workers and lifting up communities,” NY Renews said.

Whether or not the bill will achieve everything it hopes to still remains to be seen. Last year, the bill passed the New York State Assembly for the second year in a row. It has yet to pass the New York State Senate, but if it does it would be a groundbreaking change. Fingers crossed 2018 will be the year.

6. Trans Disaster Relief Fund

The Trans Disaster Relief Fund (TDRF) is giving much-needed support to trans, intersex, and genderqueer folks that have been impacted by the years many natural disasters.

Started by the Transgender Foundation for America, the fund was originally meant to help victims of Hurricane Harvey. But as the disasters kept coming, the fund was opened up to help as many in need as possible, whether they were impacted by wildfires in California, earthquakes in Mexico or hurricanes in Puerto Rico.

The trans community is often underserved and particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. Often emergency staff are trained in create inclusive and equality safe environments for everyone.

The trans community is often underserved and particularly vulnerable to natural disasters.

“Transgender people may not be able to access shelter appropriate to their affirmed gender identity or to receive culturally sensitive health care,” said National LGBT Health Education Center in their emergency preparedness resource.

7. Got Green

Climate Justice is about a lot more than climate change, and Got Green is proving it. It’s about those everyday issues that you may not realize are directly connected to your environment, such as your race, gender and economic status.

With a focus on food access, empowering young environmental leaders and battling climate injustice in all its forms, the organization is changing the narrative of the green movement, often thought to be white and wealthy.

Last year, Got Green hosted programs, panels and events on everything for tenant rights and climate resilience to food security. They successfully fought and won a battle to make Seattle the first city to use revenue from their Sugary Drink Tax to close the food security gap. They also launched the movement #DontDisplaceDove to support a local displaced resident and educate the community on how to fight displacement.

The organization has invested big time in its communities’ environmental education and power and it’s paying off.

I hope you’re as excited about all this amazing environmental work as I am.

Maybe you’d never heard of any of the organizations on this list, maybe you knew every one, or know even more (there are honestly so many!)

But just think about how wonderful that is. Despite our grim environmental status, there are so many great organizations doing important work. We need to remember that and support them in any way we can.

Last year was certainly rough, but just like the planet we live on, we’re resilient.

flickr/Agustin Ruiz

Structural racism is deadly, and not just because of police shootings of unarmed black youth. Environmental racism — disproportionate exposure to pollution and toxicity — is a slower, more insidious form of violence against low-income communities of color.

The term “environmental racism” was coined in the 1980s to highlight the placement of low-income or minority communities in proximity to environmentally hazardous or degraded environments, especially toxic waste sites. Race plays a major role in the location of polluting industries in the U.S. This is a pattern that stretches deep into U.S. history, and we’re watching it play out right now with the water crisis currently raging in Flint, Michigan.

It’s telling that last night, black stars like Ava DuVernay and Ryan Coogler ditched the #OscarsSoWhite Academy Awards to help raise money for this crisis at the #JusticeForFlint fundraiser. Racism played a key role in this crisis — and, moreover, it’s continuing to play a key role in the devastating progression of climate change across the globe.

The Toxic Situation In Flint

A series of structural inequalities combined to create the toxic catastrophe in Flint, most of which boil down to valuing money over human health and life. For decades prior to 2014, Flint — a majority-black city in which 41.5% of the population lives below the poverty line — relied on Detroit’s water system. Facing financial difficulties, a state-appointed official switched the source to the Flint River with the aim of saving the city $5 million in two years.

The Flint River has been contaminated for decades by industrial toxins created under the capitalist belief that more is better. For generations, motor city behemoths GM and Buick City dumped industrial waste directly into the river, polluting on the order of tens of billions of gallons of industrial waste per day. Buick City shut operations in 1999; GM continues to run.

After the city switched to using the Flint River for its water supply in 2014, Flint residents began complaining of horrible smells coming from the tap water. Children became sick with horrendous rashes. Others told stories of hair loss and mood changes that they believed were linked to their tap water, which flowed the color of rust.

It wasn’t until September 2015, after high levels of lead were found in the blood of children — almost 900 times the EPA limit for lead particles — that these stories of poisoning were taken seriously. After two years of toxicity, however, the irreversible and deadly damage has already been done to this low-income community of color. Children in Flint, among the most vulnerable members of the population, will have to cope with lifelong and irreversible brain damage caused by lead poisoning from the public water supply.

The Flint water crisis is both a class and a race issue. Companies nationwide dump toxic waste directly into poor communities’ air and water supply; this pattern is well-documented.

Affluent communities would leverage their privilege to prevent such an injustice from occurring in their homes and communities. The America we live in is one where the white and wealthy are healthy, while low-income communities of color are poisoned by the powerful, in the name of making a profit.

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Decisions about the environment are tied to political power, and political power is tied to race and class. Landfills, sewage treatment plants, smelters, incinerators, and other hazardous waste sites end up in the poor’s backyard. In this way, white and affluent communities are favored over black communities with regard to municipal services. People in low-income communities of color bear the burden of environmental degradation and industrial pollution. Even more egregiously, officials who are elected to protect these communities routinely ignore the voices of the poor and vulnerable.

The Flint water crisis could be considered a small-scale environmental injustice, in terms of the number of people it affects. But it’s mirrored in one of the largest threats that the global population currently faces: climate change.

Environmental Justice Writ Large

Climate change is environmental injustice writ large. As with other examples of environmental racism — the location of coal-fired power plants, the dumping of nuclear waste, the lack of adequate public transportation — it disproportionately harms indigenous communities and people of color. These communities also have the fewest resources to cope with climate change, as a direct result of institutionalized racism.

Just as the toxic water slowly but inevitably poisoned the Flint community, many feel immobilized by the slow-acting but irreversible impacts of climate change. Corporations and governments prioritize profits now over the life and health of future generations. Climate change is a result of business-as-normal policies. These actions amount to a slow poisoning of our collective future.

In January 2014, I spent a month living in Tuvalu, a tiny coral atoll nation in the South Pacific on the frontlines of climate change. In this Pacific island nation of around 11,000 citizens, the highest point is only 4.5 meters above sea level. The seas have been rising at a steady rate of 5 millimeters per year since the Australian government started monitoring the main wharf in Funafuti in 1993. In the event that Tuvalu disappears underwater, New Zealand has agreed to accept the country’s citizens. A number of Tuvaluans have already moved to New Zealand; not just immigrants, they are “climate refugees.”

A variation of this problem faces communities in the Arctic. According to the UN’s most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, the region is warming over twice as fast as the global average, and many changes are already visible. Weather patterns are increasingly unstable. Sea ice is declining. Pack ice that supports marine hunters is further from shore and often too thin to travel to safely. Storm surges erode coastal areas. Sunburns, never experienced before, are now common.

Global climate struggles are geographically unique, yet linked. One of those links is the great irony of climate change: Across the board, communities that contribute the least to causing climate change are the most severely affected.

On December 12, 2015, at the United Nations conference on climate change, 195 countries adopted the first universal climate agreement, which aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in order to reduce the risks and impacts of climate change. The climate justice movement, though, is by no means done. While this agreement marks a touchstone in the struggle, now, more than ever, is the time to keep momentum going on these critical issues — which is why events like #JusticeForFlint are so important.

White environmental activists must not ignore what activists of color already know: Environmental racism is real. The people who are disproportionately affected by climate change (and a whole host of other environmental issues linked to reckless capitalism) are black and brown, and that’s an injustice we all have to work to correct.

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