Just so we’re clear, the reason a lot of people protest climate change isn’t because they like trees and hiking. It’s because we’re making the Earth unlivable for all humans, and that humans in the poorest countries are the ones worst hit.
Protesting climate change ain’t a white privilege thing. The people protesting climate change the hardest are Indigenous people, Island nation people, and poor people in hot countries. They’re terrified.
People are dying because of climate change. Climate change isn’t just killing our planet, it’s killing people, and it’s those who live in poverty stricken areas that are dying first. More than 2,300 people died in India during their heatwave last year, and it’s only getting worse.
Temperatures in some areas in North Africa and the Middle East are reaching as high as 140 F/ 60 C during the summer. Scientists are projecting that by the end of the century, unless we take drastic measures, these parts of the world will be entirely uninhabitable. We will actually have refugees from these areas fleeing their homes because they physically cannot survive in that environment.
that’s not even getting into the amount of damage caused by natural disasters–and natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, forest fires, droughts and blizzards all become more frequent and more severe the worse climate change becomes. Those can hit anywhere (if it’s not a tornado in your area, it’s a hurricane, or a forest fire, or a blizzard), and do damage to both agricultural areas and densely-populated cities.
People protesting for ecological protection— often indigenous people btw— are also being killed in assassinations & mass slaughters all over Latin America, and have been for well over a decade now, often in the interests of local governments making deals with international big agribusinesses (globalization = outsourcing the most toxic slave labor / sweatshop labor to the cheapest bidder, because imperialismis just keen like that).
The areas most affected by slash and burn deforestation + the subsequent land development are often in what is (theoretically) legally protected indigenous territory, and the people affected most by it are poor & rural indigenous people, on top of the “bigger picture” global ecological effects of those moves.
It’s literally bad ecological action as a combined front for imperialist exploitation and a continued deliberate genocide of Native people in these nations, but Greenpeace only takes the carbon emissions angle to run with.
People aren’t just dying because of climate change, people are being mob executed and merced by SWAT teams in protest of human-created ecological and climate change that in advance of ever getting underway writes round 2 of its victims off as collateral damage.
Go Vegan.
For the animals.
For the environment.
For humans.
#savehumanityOhhhhh, no no no.
Not when year round agribusiness for the produce people are eating instead is still having land cleared with slash & burn and murder in the Amazon. It’s not just beef farms that have a body count when the price of quinoa (a poverty staple grain) has skyrocketed & left poor & indigenous peoples in Bolivia & in the Andes to starve, and as long as American vegans far north of the tropics love their petroleum-trucked açai bowls & bananas picked by child laborers. No, sir. That ain’t the move.
Don’t you dare take my words about my peoples & activists getting slaughtered in countries where I have family and make this shit about pleather over leather, faux over fur— when all of those are petroleum products— and mass market tofu nuggets & Coca Cola, when that’s JUST as toxic to support year round on a planetary basis, and JUST as deadly for the humans I’M talking about. Because it’s about (unfortunately literal) execution. It’s not about a single soybean passively hurting our helpless little atmosphere less than a greenhouse gas longhorn steer. It’s about the companies & brands that CREATED a “global” marketplace in the first place— including the access to produce year round that allows the modern vegan lifestyle— being toxic, deadly parasites, slaughtering their way to profit & leaving a fucked up ecosystem in their wake.
Unless you grew those rice & beans yourself, unless you grew the cotton on your ass right now, I don’t wanna hear shit about the ethics of animal vs. plant based diets and clothing. You don’t get it both ways.
Either you can take the critique on the chin like a grown up, cop a “no ethical choices under late market capitalism,” or you can mind your damn business & stay in your lane. You & any other tree-hugging geek who looks like you don’t get to feast on the mass graves of poor Indians’ land & labor and then say you’re saving the fucking planet because at least dead Natives don’t taste like chicken.