Winning Climate Justice: what will it truly take?

Thursday, March 11, 2021

11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. PT

ZOOM

gautam@sfsu.edu

Overview

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. She is Senior Correspondent for The Intercept, a Puffin Writing Fellow at Type Media Center and is the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. Her groundbreaking books include How To Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Earth and Each Other (2021), On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019), No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (2017), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and No Logo (2000). In 2018, she published The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists (2018) reprinted from her feature article for The Intercept with all royalties donated to Puerto Rican organization juntegente.org.

After This Changes Everything was published, Klein’s focus was putting its ideas into action. She is one of the organizers and authors of Canada’s Leap Manifesto, a blueprint for a rapid and justice-based transition off fossil fuels endorsed by over 200 organizations, tens of thousands of individuals, which inspired similar climate justice initiatives around the world. She is now a co-founder and advisory board chair of The Leap, a climate justice organization developed from the Manifesto that exists to inject new urgency and bold ideas into confronting the intersecting crises of our time: climate change, racism and inequality.

Miya Yoshitani

Miya Yoshitani has been the Executive Director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network since 2013. Starting at APEN as a youth organizer in the 1990’s, Miya has an extensive background in community organizing, and a long history of working in the environmental justice movement. APEN has been fighting – and winning – environmental justice struggles for nearly three decades and remains one of the most unique organizations in the country explicitly developing the leadership and power of poor and working class Asian American immigrant and refugee communities. Through many years of leadership, Miya has supported APEN’s growth and expansion from a powerful local organization in the Bay Area, to having a statewide impact through an integrated voter engagement strategy and winning transformational state policy for equitable climate solutions for all Californians. A movement leader in many key local, state, and national alliances, APEN is helping to shift the center of gravity of what is possible when the health and economic well being of working families, immigrant and communities of color are put at the center of solutions to the economic and climate crises. APEN is one of the co-founders of the Climate Justice Alliance, and Miya has served as Co-Chair of the Climate Justice Alliance steering committee.

Miya also serves on the boards of Center for Environmental Health and Center for Story-based Strategy.

Join Naomi Klein and Miya Yoshitani, two renowned leaders in the movement for Climate Justice as they discuss what it will truly take to win the necessary cultural, economic and political shifts to address the climate crisis at the scale and pace and with the urgency, equity and justice required to avoid continued collapse.

Gopal Dayaneni (facilitator)

Gopal has been involved in fighting for social, economic, environmental and racial justice through organizing & campaigning, teaching, writing, speaking and direct action since the late 1980’s. Gopal did his undergraduate studies at UC Davis, graduate studies in education at UC Berkeley and was the first Climate Justice Fellow in the Urban Sustainability Masters of Arts program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where he continues to teach in graduate and undergraduate programs.

Link to Video Here:

Recording

Access Passcode: 7Cwt#d*%

Prompt #1

Based on what you have heard from both Miya and Naomi, and from your own experience, what do you think is most important for achieving Climate Justice and what role could you see yourself playing to advance Climate Justice.

Prompt #2

There are many barriers to achieving Climate Justice, what are some of the barriers or “false solutions” to the climate crisis that concern you the most? You can draw on what you have heard or your own study and experience.