Impact
We are the political home of the Environmental Liberation (EL) Movement
We are the political home of the Environmental Liberation (EL) Movement
Generation Green's founding team dreamed and evolved “Environmental Liberation”, a term coined by Ayana Albertini-Fleurant, into a framework and movement.
Environmental Liberation is the antithesis to global racial capitalism, the cause of climate change and the marginalization of African descendants worldwide. Environmental Liberation (EL) is Generation Green's foundational ideological framework designed to build a decolonized, regenerative, and autonomous future. EL critically analyzes the injustices in the environment(s) of the Black experience that stem from colonialism, global racial capitalism and white supremacy. This framework seeks to honor and be a conduit for Black people around the world stewarding their ancestral connection and relationship to the Earth. Environmental Liberation goes beyond environmental justice.
On October 24, 1991, nearly 300 Black, Native, Latino, Pacific Islander, and Asian American activists gathered in Washington, D.C. to create the Principles of Environmental Justice. These 17 principles were created as tenants for a national and international movement of all people of color to fight the destruction of land and communities. Decades later the fight continues and we honor our elders who were pioneers for justice. Generation Green is working to imagine a world that goes beyond justice for the oppressed and instead builds a reality that is not based in exploitation. While the State bears a responsibility to repair and dismantle the harm it has inflicted on marginalized people (i.e. reparations), we strive for an existence where capitalism can no longer sacrifice communities. We understand that capitalism and environmental liberation cannot exist together and know that no one can be free when those at the bottom of global racial capitalism are still oppressed. We are focusing our efforts on the most marginalized people, because we understand that if Black people are liberated, all people are.
The EL framework guides us to secure the demands listed in our EL Manifesto, which furthers Black liberation especially where it intersects with land, environment, climate, and place. In order to secure and support the components of the Manifesto and achieve EL, Black people need assets, new infrastructure, systems change, and sovereignty. This manifesto was released in May 2021.
As the Generation Green team was revising and refining the EL Manifesto, we joined the Black Hive @ Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and helped create the Black Climate Mandate to launch in 2022. This mandate embodies the sentiments of the EL Manifesto, as it outlines an analysis and demands to protect Black communities in the U.S. and worldwide. The policies and actions outlined in the Black Climate Mandate are a blueprint for achieving Environmental Liberation.
The capitalist exploitation of both resources and human labor is based on Global Racial Capitalism. Racism and capitalism developed hand in hand to uphold and evolve one another through racial violence, environmental degradation, and the theft of labor. Since the Trans-Atlantic slave trade began, people of African descent have been at the bottom of global racial capitalism’s caste system. Entire nations have been built off of the stolen labor of enslaved Africans, and centuries later, their descendants still face a world that holds them at the base of an economic racial hierarchy of exploitation. From the colonized continent of Africa, to the continued racial injustices perpetrated on African descendants in the diaspora, oppressed people anywhere cannot be fully free until the most oppressed people are free everywhere. Racism has been used as a tool of capitalism to justify the complete exploitation of both natural resources and humans. Capitalism leads to the consumption and depletion of the environment. Centuries of monetizing anything for profit–public health, the environment, and even stolen people–has led to a world so ecologically damaged that scientists have stated the earth is currently going through the sixth mass extinction.
The Climate Crisis is the result of settler colonialism (legalized white violence) and capitalism. Environmental racism is a strategy to continue this system of exploitation. Global racial capitalism did not stop once the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended. It simply evolved into a modern system of environmental racism. Environmental racism is capitalism at work–planting a system of hazards on the land, extracting resources like food and minerals from the soil and labor from land stewards. Globally, communities are sacrificed for the profits of the wealthy who degrade natural systems to the point of their ecological collapse. Though everyone is bearing the impact of pollution and climate change, Black communities in both the United States and around the world have long faced the brunt of toxic levels of air, soil, and water pollution. The only way to put an end to global racial capitalism is through environmental liberation.
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Generation Green is working towards Environmental Liberation, by using the power of Diasporic Organizing. Diasporic organizing consists of connecting strategies, problems, solutions, actors and actions to build collective power between Black/African people in their respective geographies (the diaspora). It is a mix between cultural organizing, grassroots organizing, and digital organizing. Generation Green defines the diaspora as a worldwide collection of communities and/or people who are descendants of those native to the African Continent and racialized in society as Black. We include the Continent in our definition because displacement has occurred on the Continent as well due to colonization and imperialism.
Generation Green is working to unite the Global Black/African Diaspora to work towards environmental liberation. There is a deep need for Black diasporic organizing and spaces. Black people need to be able to work together to end global racial capitalism while not being subjected to the white gaze. The racial trauma and enduring consequences of colonialism and slavery, are often amplified for members of the Black diaspora when subjected to the observation and presence of white participants.
When Black environmental activists take part in majority white spaces, organizations and coalitions, there can be inequitable racial power dynamics. The global racial caste system that was created during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, still dictates much of the daily lives of Black people. The marginalization and discrimination that Black people have been subjected to for hundreds of years, is not diminished because it is an environmental space.
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