It’s not just Rome who sees a short-sightedness in the way we mark Earth Day today. For Elizabeth Yeampierre, a Puerto Rican attorney and the executive director of Brooklyn-based community organization
UPROSE, Earth Day is merely one marker in a long global history of environmental injustice.
Nyiesha Mallet, an 18-year-old artist and activist from the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, boils down the frontline youth fight to this axiom: Climate justice entails an economic shift that swaps an economy focused on the individual for one focused on people. Beyond clean energy, that involves a just transition, which means helping phase out environmentally harmful industrial practices for better pathways, while also making sure workers from those industries aren’t left out in the cold. And she believes people of color know just how to do it.