Week 4 Rising Waters, Rising Heat: The Earth is Speaking.
The communities losing their water, their coastlines, their harvests, and their homes first are not the ones who created this crisis. Indigenous nations, Pacific Islander peoples, Black and Brown communities, and the Global South are bearing the heaviest weight of a disaster built by the wealthiest and most extractive economies on Earth. Climate disruption is not arriving equally. It never has. This week we center the communities navigating survival and resistance, and the leaders rising from within them.
When the Levee Breaks
The crisis is not arriving equally and Leah Thomas knows exactly who is bearing the heaviest weight. Known as Green Girl Leah, she coined the term intersectional environmentalism to name the truth that environmental destruction and social injustice are the same crisis. When California burns, when Hawaii floods, when Colorado and Utah face winters without snow and summers without water, it is Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low income communities who lose the most and recover the slowest. Her platform Intersectional Environmentalist is a leading resource hub connecting environmental justice with racial equity, accessibility, and community power. Read her book, follow her work, and bring intersectional environmentalism into your congregation’s earth care conversations.
We meet the faces of climate displacement in the work of Salote Soqo, an Indigenous Fijian and Director of Advocacy for Global Displacement at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. In her home country of Fiji, more than 40 communities have already been identified for relocation as rising seas swallow the land beneath them. She calls them climate displaced persons, people who did not choose this identity but had it imposed on them by a crisis they did not create. Her work builds transnational solidarity between frontline communities from Alaska to Louisiana to the South Pacific, centering those most impacted in the decisions that will shape their futures. Support this work directly at Earth Justice in Conversation with UUSC.
We Are Each Other’s Climate
We close this week and this month by bringing it all to the ground. Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is a grassroots network of eco-activists, social justice activists, global justice activists, street medics, herbalists, permaculturalists, Black liberation organizers, and community organizers actively supporting disaster survivors in a spirit of solidarity rather than charity. When governments fail and the water rises, this is what care looks like in action. Learn about their principles and get involved at Mutual Aid Disaster Relief.
“Environmentalism without social justice is just landscape preservation.” – Leah Thomas
Reflection: The Earth is not waiting. Neither should we. Let us know how you are showing up for the Earth and for each other.
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