Who are you and why should I care?
Hello! I'm Charlotte, I'm a 19 year old college student at Rhode Island College. I'm a writer, organizer, and activist.
Of all those identities I have listed, I'm going to briefly explain each one, to further introduce myself. It took me forever to get around calling myself a writer. Actually, it wasn't until this summer I started calling myself a writer. I took a class that really focused on writing as an everyday practice--something we do naturally, sometimes even tacitly--that opened my eyes and redefined "writer." My writing consists of blogging, thought pieces in response to what is going on in today's culture, many many many school assignments, and poetry.
My organizing and activism stems from who I am: again, I'm a college student and a woman and a Black woman at that, so I know how it feels to be silenced and marginalized. My organizing and activism is about creating safe spaces where all people are heard, especially the marginalized, and how we can get our message across to those trying to push us farther in the margins. I'll be touching on that more throughout these blog posts.
Okay, but what has that got to do with sustainability?
Patience, my friend!
We all go through phases right? The sporty phase, the I want to be a doctor/lawyer/astronaut phase, the goth phase (I have buried all memory of my goth phase in a deep, deep crevice of my mind. I'm shuddering thinking about it.) Among all those phases, my longest phase was the environmentalist phase.
I know what you are thinking! How is that a phase and why have you stopped? I know, I'm awful now. But when I was younger, I was so into the environment. Picking up litter everywhere I would see it, urging my parents to get new light bulbs, showering in the dark (I know. I was a weird kid. Maybe that was a combination of my environmentalist phase and my goth phase?), being mindful of food waste and never, ever wasting food, pledging and becoming a NRDC (National Resources Defense Council) member, and so on and so on.
I know what you're thinking, again (I'm also a mind-reader): Why did I stop? I ask myself this question a lot. To be honest, I felt myself stop. I felt myself stop caring as much as I used to. I stopped caring and moved on to topics that affected me personally, in my face and community daily. So I moved on to social justice issues like combating racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, police brutality, and the those intersections.
Until I got to this class, Writing for Digital Media, until I was re-introduced to sustainability, I realized how stupid it was for me to abandon my passion for the environment when all of those things I fight for has got to do with the environment as well.
You talk too much, tell me what the blog is about.
This blog will be focusing on the intersection of social justice and the environment. I will be focusing on environmental racism and injustice and exclusion, and what those terms mean, where it happens, and the movements that go against them.
I'm doing this because a huge portion of my life is devoted to activism and organizing through a lens of social justice. My work, including my writing, strives to bring topics of inequality to light.
When I think about the environment, it's so much more than keeping parks clean and recycling; it's about taking care of our planet for something or someone else, and mostly, each other. If people's environments are being destroyed because they live below the poverty line, or they live in a place still suffering from colonization, or anything like that, I feel like as environmentalists, and even just as people, we need to care and speak up about it. Just because it may not be happening to us does not mean it doesn't matter.
I want to leave you with this video. It's from TedxProvidence 2012, and it Laura Brown-Lavoie, an urban farmer, activist, and poet in Providence. A lot of Laura's work is centered around the environment, particularly farming, and speaking up about the injustices and inequalities that surround urban farming.
She's also a dear friend of mine and I asked her to be one of the subscribers to this blog. Ooops. Hi Laura!
"Your history is growing on every salad leave."
