One Question: “What Should Be Done to Address Climate Change?”

CHRIS HILL

Senior director of the Sierra Club’s “Our Wild America” Campaign

We must protect our natural spaces. From wilderness to local parks, preserving more green space and water will help us fight the climate crisis—and bring health benefits to communities, conserve vulnerable wildlife and plant species, diversify and grow local economies, and provide more people access to nature.

However, in seeking to conserve more nature, we must center and follow the voices of communities on the ground. This includes promoting Indigenous rights and supporting frontline communities who have been historically and disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change. Everyone should have clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, green spaces to recreate, and healthy communities, no matter our race, age, identity, income, or zip code.

TINA GERHARDT

Journalist and visiting professor at Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute

Climate change is a lens, not a frame. It touches all other issues: food, housing, health care, education, labor, and transportation. All politics, in other words, is climate politics.

And so we must work to fight environmental injustice—a systemic problem that disproportionately impacts people of color, the poor, and women. It requires systemic change to ensure equity across the board.

Each of us can learn about environmental justice issues. If you have time to support organizations that do this type of work, get involved. If you are able to contribute, do so. Some examples of such organizations: UPROSE in Brooklyn, New York; the Asian Pacific Environmental Network in the Bay Area; and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans.

MARION GEE

Co-executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance

We must listen to those on the frontlines of the climate crisis, heed their calls to action, and invest in community-controlled renewable solutions. President Joe Biden must deliver on his promise to center environmental justice and stop promoting quick techno-fixes like carbon capture and storage.

These projects do not reduce emissions at the rate needed and only continue harming environmental justice communities. That’s why Climate Justice Alliance, along with many other frontline, Black, brown, Indigenous, and rural climate organizations, have joined together in the Build Back Fossil Free coalition. We are calling on the Biden Administration to immediately ban all new oil and gas contracts on federal lands, stop approving fossil fuel projects, and declare a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act.