Jason Ward, host of the popular Internet series “Birds of North America,” is helping young people identify birds on a bird ride in Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Georgia. The controversy erupted after Rolling Stone aired his own show, “Birding with Charles,” last June, which seemed to mock Ward’s series.
PUBLISHED July 29, 2020
As coordinator of government affairs at the National Audubon Society, Tykee James says he is used to intervening in race and equity issues in conversations about the environment and conservation.
“Being the only black user in the room, everyone says to themselves: “Let’s give the word, Tykee has something to say about the race.” Everyone calms down,” said the 26-year-old Philadelphia native. And then I have to become Martin Luther King, just because I mean we deserve to care about other black people in our policies.”
But James welcomes the role. He is a member of a developing organization of various young environmental leaders who are examining how racism and white supremacy have long excluded black, brown, and indigenous peoples from environmental policy, conservation, and public fitness issues. His paintings come when environmental teams have begun to read publicly about their role in perpetuating systemic racist policies and practices. The Sierra Club, one of the leading conservation organizations in the United States, recently renounced the racist ideals and movements of its legendary founder, John Muir. Black scientists and researchers from organizations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have denounced decades of dismissive remedies and barriers to race-based advancement.
Tykee James, government affairs coordinator at the Audubon National Society, leads a bird walk on Capitol Hill with Congressional staff. James helped organize a week of Black Birders in reaction to the Central Park incident in May when a white man called police for a black ornithologist.
At a time when the world is grappling with an unprecedented public aptitude crisis that disproportionately affects other people of color, many observers say that excluding them from leadership is the recipe for failure. For example, many responses to herbal resource disorders are perceived as environmental gentrification for communities of color, according to James. Use motorcycle lanes, which are excavated in communities where parking is scarce and public transportation is minimal.
“When today’s environmental problems are not addressed fairly, the fundamental reasons for this inequality are perpetuated,” says James, who has also worked as a consultant and educator and as a legislative adviser to a Pennsylvania state senator. will be sacrificed to make those decisions.”
For Leah Thomas, the link between the environment and social justice arose in the summer of 2014. An unarmed 19-year-old black man, Michael Brown, was shot dead by police a few miles from his hometown of Florissant, Missouri. The protests and national discussion that followed remained with Thomas when he returned to Chapman University in Southern California, where he read science and environmental policy.
“I didn’t know Mike, but he’s probably only a few circles away from his friends,” recalls Thomas, 25. “The more I learned about the incident and when I started reading about environmental injustice, I began to think about intersectional theory and how intersectional theory, a term first used by lawyer and activist Kimberle Williams Crenshaw in 1989, postulates that oppression affects certain teams on various levels, adding race, class, gender, faith, and other facets of their identity.
Thomas made the decision that it was hypocritical to pontificate the interdependence of nature and humanity while turn a blind eye to racial and economic injustice, and she made the decision to do anything about it. He completed two internships with the National Park Service in his university studies and then worked with Patagonia’s communications and public relations team on corporate sustainability issues. (This is how national parks seek to become anti-racist.)
But after being fired in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Thomas wrote an article on Instagram explaining why environmentalists adopt the Black Lives Matter motion. His words went viral, as did his call for a motion by black and indigenous peoples of color (BIPOC) at the forefront of environmental activism.
“The more I protested about climate change or helped my colleagues report problems like endangered salmon, one thing became clearer,” Thomas says. “Not only was I the only black user in those events, however, I felt invisible. It seemed that they identified everything, but my darkness, or were kind of anything, race and culture. It was like, “Oh Leah, we’re doing so much for the planet, why do we have to communicate about racial problems? “”
When Leah Thomas was in college, a 19-year-old black boy named Michael Brown murdered through police a few miles from his hometown of Missouri. Six years later, after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, Thomas asked environmentalists to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement. Here, she’s being held at Douglas Family Preserve in Santa Barbara, California.
Now, Thomas is focusing on communicating his intersectional environmental message to a wider audience. It coordinates the creation of a diversity program for environmental companies and non-profit organizations and partners with LGBTQ teams and disability activists so that their contributions are also identified in conservation circles. In honor of Pride Month of Persons with Disabilities, she donates five according to the penny of proceeds from selling products to Queer Nature, an organization that advocates disability awareness and global protection.
“We are fighting for representation, popularity and duty in the environmental movement in a way that has never been thought of before,” Thomas says. “What the Sierra Club did was a step in the right direction, however, many organizations want to regain acceptance as true in their paintings that has eroded or never existed.”
And Thomas is waiting for permission from established environmental teams to take those steps.
“They can stand us if they need it,” he says. “If you don’t need to give me a seat at the table, I’m going to create mine, and I hope we can see more and more organizations appear. We have developed a network of more than 70,000 young people, and it is developing and developing. They can find a way to marry us. »
Many conservation activists of color were brought to wildlife and nature activities from an early age. But they are well aware that, historically, many young black and brown have not had the same opportunities to interact with nature as their white companions. Even those raised on farms or in rural areas have limited confidence in these environments due to incidents of violence and threats opposed to other people of color. (People of color are 3 times more likely to live in “private” American neighborhoods.”
Elise Tolbert, who grew up exploring the woods and navigating the local creeks and streams near her in Tuskegee, Alabama, is looking to replace that.
While examining the great-granddest of black men recruited for the notorious government-funded Tuskegee syphilis in which men with the disease were informed of the diagnosis or were being treated, the 29-year-old environmental aptitude scientist combines love of nature with an inherent wisdom of what fuels injustice and environmental inequity.
During a major school seminar on environmental degradation, Tolbert learned of the lifestyles of “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana, a domain along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where the largely low-income black population suffered unusually high cancer rates. Tolbert says he left the consultation with the feeling that “public fitness professionals were capeless superheroes.”
He then studied environmental science at Tuskegee University in some of the buildings where legendary African-American scientist George Washington Carver conducted his agricultural research. Her experience and the communities in which she grew up prepared her for a broader view of environmentalism.
Elise Tolbert, deputy director of spouse engagement for the climate action campaign, also founded a nonprofit organization in Tuskegee, Alabama, to guide the best school students.
“After an internship in Mongolia to examine water quality for 3 months, I began to see that the disorders that exist in emerging countries are very similar to those in very low-income black communities in the United States.
In her current role as Deputy Director of Partner Engagement for the Climate Action Campaign, Tolbert says her public fitness experience has been invaluable. “I learned more about how global warming exacerbated the risks to black and brown communities. Our environment is the context of our total life, and these negative exposures expose a person’s ability to pursue his or her own goals and dreams for life as it influences his or her aptitude.
Tolbert also founded Next Step Up, a Tuskegee-based nonprofit that advises and guides the best students in the schools. “There’s a difference between letting other people sit down at the table and not leave them a plate,” he says. “I need help preparing young people to know that they have this right to full access.”
Similarly, when Brianna Amingwa was six years old, she took a pony ride to a Detroit fair and fell in love with horses. But I had no option to drive in the domain of the center where he lived. His mother, despite everything, heard about an African-American lawyer who had a solid in Ann Arbor and invited the city’s youth to ride every Saturday. Amingwa spent many weekends running his best school years, and his love of horses gave him an attitude about nature that many of his peers did not have.
“A lot of my friends and cousins think it’s great that I like horses, yet it’s strange that I spend long walks and spend so much time in the woods,” says Amingwa, 27. This interest led to a beginning of Michigan State University’s Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources. She is now the Environmental Education Supervisor at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, based in Philadelphia, and helps more young people access and be informed to love nature as she did.
Through his paintings with the Philly Nature Kids program, Amingwa oversees the activities of 150 fourth graders in Philadelphia. Study science and environmentalism and read about myths and fears about nature before venturing outdoors at the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge for on-site hiking and learning. After six months of study, Elegance receives $500 to design a nature conservation project.
“It’s my passion, having young children who are like me and giving them this whole new experience,” says Amingwa. “It’s not that young blacks and browns aren’t interested in nature and herbal sciences. They may just not have to go to those spaces.”
A pony ride in her training years encouraged Brianna Amingwa to ride horses, spend time in the woods and pursue a career in environmentalism. Here, she’s pro-birding at Wissahickon Valley Park in Philadelphia.
By bringing more young people from other people of color into the wild, these activists hope to move away from the belief that other people of color have no position in nature, or that they are unbecoming interested or unwilling to contribute to conservation and exploration. And they’re taking advantage of opportunities to lessen threats to blacks and maroons in those spaces through activities that white people take for granted.
Tykee James believes that the May 25 incident in Central Park, where black birdwatcher Christian Cooper noted as a risk not only an unmasked white privilege, he also highlighted the radically other reports that other people of color possibly have in the conservation spaces.
“My first reaction to Christian Cooper’s case was the component of a mirror image he had on Ahmaud Arbery. Ahmaud Arbery may have observed the birds when he was killed,” James says of the February murder of a black runner in Georgia. Three white men, who claim to suspect Arbery is a thief, have been charged with his death. “What happened to Mr. Cooper was an opportunity to say that it doesn’t have to be the narrative. The delight of other black people is not a matter of trauma. It’s about strength and pride, style, humor and fun.”
In reaction to the Central Park incident, activists temporarily organized a week of Black Birders, building on the momentum of Black Lives Matter protests that spread across the country after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “Blackbird Week was a snowflake that I hope will be an avalanche for the environmental movement.” James said.
And at each and every one of the upcoming legislative meetings, collections or environmental conferences, James plans to embrace what it means to be one of the few, or unique, other people of color.
“When you’re in the policy room and you talk about problems like environmental justice, land theft, public health, you can remind those organizations that their methods didn’t get the effects they wanted, and that’s because of institutional blind spots perpetuating inequality,” he says. “This is one of the deepest conversations we want to have.”