Our Response to the 2024 U.S. Election Results: Still Telling the Truth About Climate Change
Community members walk through a street in a demonstration, holding signs, Palestinian flags, and wearling keffiyehs. Photo by Neeka Salmasi.
Following last week's election results, the Critical Ecology Lab took time to process the emotional impacts and downstream implications for our work on justice-focused environmental science, education, and social organizing. I and my team felt despondent about the results. We initially questioned what we could have done differently to help drive the election in a different direction, while being angry that none of our choices reflected our values. We wondered whether we placed our limited time, efforts, and talents in the right places. After that first wave of emotions-- fear about the policies that will impact our lives and our loved ones as people who are women, queer, trans, Black, brown, immigrants, committed to a just democracy-- we stood back and reflected.
“We will continue to build vibrant, equitable centers for power and knowledge where wealth and influence have historically centered in colonial, patriarchal, and exploitative structures and institutions. ”
The Critical Ecology Lab is doing the kind of work that the next administration absolutely wants to shut down. The factual, historical information that is being stripped from textbooks and libraries is what drives our ecological science research. Using science to expose the detrimental impacts of industries and governments- and the systems of power that structure their activities- on communities and the planet is precisely what the Trump administration wants to defund. Educating and organizing communities to generate just, sustainable solutions to this crisis threatens the administration's stance that there is no crisis, and we need business as usual.
So with that reflection in mind, our commitment to this work in the next four years and beyond needs to be strengthened, focused, and courageous. That is exactly what we plan to do. We will push back against actions that disenfranchise racial and gender minorities through our programs and our practices. We will continue to build vibrant, equitable centers for power and knowledge where wealth and influence have historically been centered in colonial, patriarchal, and exploitative structures and institutions. We will dispel the notion that science is inherently neutral and objective, and we will elevate the ideas and leadership of Black, brown, and indigenous people whose oppression is the lifeblood of racial capitalism. We will continue to call one another in when proximity to whiteness, patriarchy, and wealth cause us to drift from truly radical solutions that will create the world where all humans, all living beings, and Earth's systems thrive. We believe that community care is so important to the durability of our work. We will strive to be in coalition with with individuals and organizations to resist the whitewashing of human and ecological history through rigorous, values-oriented science, storytelling, and power building.
In solidarity,
Suzanne Pierre, Ph.D.
and the Critical Ecology Lab