These remarks were delivered by Kairos co-director Larry Cox at the Religions for the Earth conference on September 20th, 2014.
I want to just make a brief and simple but I hope important point about climate change and human rights.
It took a while because of the way we lock our approaches and issues into silos, but there is a growing consensus that climate change represents not only an ecological but a human rights disaster. And not just any human rights disaster but as Mary Robinson, the former High Commissioner for Human Rights, puts it the biggest one of the 21st century. Climate change is a direct and massive assault on the right to life, on the conditions that make life and therefore any rights possible. In other words, climate change violates or threatens virtually every human right we have.
So this is a violation that affects us all but it does not – and this is the important point – affect us all equally. This is not unique. It is true of all violations of human rights. If human rights violations came down on all people equally they would never be tolerated. They would be stopped. It is essential for those who benefit from the violations of human rights that they fall most severely and disproportionately on those who are seen as least able to fight back.
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So it is, as we all know, with climate change. It harms most severely and most immediately those who have in no way made it happen- the poor, the majority of whom are, not accidentally, women. These are people and communities who already suffer from other severe violations of their human rights- poverty, discrimination and repression. These are the people and communities least able to escape the worse effects of climate change: the not-so-natural natural disasters like typhoons and hurricanes, rising food prices, and loss of land and livelihoods. They do not have to wait for the disasters that climate change will bring. They are already living and fighting that disaster every day. As this conference began, we got the news from one of our partners in the Philippines that numerous communities have just been just been submerged in water from new extreme flooding- hundreds of thousands of people whose rights are literally being washed away.
For all these reasons these are the people one would expect to be at the forefront of any mass movement to stop the human rights violation that is climate change and to change the economic and value systems that cause it. Perhaps this is changing but for now we know this is not the case. The environmental movement is still seen largely as an elite movement.
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We can’t win like this. The powerful social movements that have brought change – the movements for women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, and the anti-colonial movement – have always done so by mobilizing and drawing on the leadership of those most directly and severely affected.
There are no more powerful and knowledgeable voices that can analyze and speak of the violence and destruction that climate change is causing to their freedom, dignity, lives and to their most sacred values. There are no more powerful and knowledgeable people who can make clear that the forces causing climate change are not new but are the same ones they have been fighting for years: the same ones, the same systems, responsible for other massive human rights violations.
There are no more important voices to ensure that the proposed solutions to climate change do not leave in place or worsen those human rights violations of poverty and inequality, that the solutions to climate change will benefit all equally and will change the systems responsible for all human rights violations.
Most importantly, these are the voices of people who, because they have literally no other choice, are fighting back and have been fighting back for a long time. They have learned a lot in that fight. We all need to learn from them.
The task is not to get the poor to understand and join the fight against climate change. We have to understand and communicate to the movement against climate change that the fight can only be won if it’s a part of the struggle the poor are already waging for a very different society. We have to understand that the fight is not to prevent future disasters, but to end the already existing disasters of poverty and discrimination, hold accountable those people and institutions responsible for them, and create systems where those conditions can never return.