Youth leading the way for environmental justice by championing native and rural voices

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation held a panel for their thirty-first annual council session following the theme Strengthening Environmental Justice through Community Empowerment on June 25.

The youth panel had several guest speakers from North Carolina, Texas, Mexico, and Canada on the topic titled “A Conversation on the Generational Fight for Environmental Justice.”

This student and youth-led discussion gave voice to various young adult leaders who work between the engagement and intersectionality of environmentalism. The talk expressed the fragility and sacredness of life for people and the planet.

Activist Dr. Benjamin Chavis introduced the panel by sharing a message of hope in the next generation. “We have to choose life over the deathly destruction of those people or those companies and even some governments that don’t care about the lives of people,” said Dr. Chavis.

Cameron E. Oglesby is a Duke University graduate and a descendant of land stewards in Maryland. “My family owns a farm. It has been in our family for almost one hundred years.” Oglesby shared her ancestral connection to land in rural areas as a young black woman as a motivator for her organizing and oral history work in environmental justice communities.

Oglesby informs the crowd that for change to occur to make our environment sustainable, we need to look further or invest locally into the community by taking action in small everyday settings and in the voting polls.

“We’re not really covering the corporate nature of it. We’re not covering the inequities in terms of human exposure to chemicals to swine waste, poultry waste to the poor air quality associated with the processing of those things.”

“It is a direct result of the North Carolina legislature’s failure to really think about policy from an environmental justice lens,” said Oglesby.

Democracy Green Co-Founder and President La’Meshia Whittington shared her experience as an Afro-Indigenous woman and royal descendant of the Kingdom of the Happy Land. She shared the phrase “plantation to corporation system,” examining the ways that unethical tactics have continued in environmental issues with corporations and the obstruction to natural resources.

“There is no coincidence that over 56% of all people of color in the United States are living only three miles within a toxic hazardous waste area,” said Whittington.

The research on the injustice analyzed the disparity in both racial and environmental issues that leave many people behind and in hazardous situations.

When it comes to accessibility and clean environments, we need to set up sustainable living especially in more rural areas.

Chief Executive Officer of the National Association of Resource Conservation and Development Councils Colton Buckley shared the concern of access to technologies, electricity, and clean water for communities that are affected by natural disasters and climate crisis. “In rural America, when an environmental issue takes place, you have wiped out that economy and you can’t flip a switch and reverse it so we’ve got to put our dollars where our mouth is and focus on fixing those environmental issues and mitigating them now,” he said.

Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Michael Regan shared while highlighting the panelists’ contributions that “we need to understand how to own our power, we need to understand how to capture power. Power and resources can lead to actions that are preferable for our choices.”

“We are our ancestor’s wildest dreams and environmental justice is just that because it is just us,” said Whittington.