There Will Be No Environmental Justice Without Racial Justice

Ecology Action Centre stands in solidarity with Black and Indigenous communities, here in Mi’kma’ki and across the world, who are fighting for justice, accountability, and an end to racial violence and police brutality.

We all have a responsibility to end systemic racism in all its forms. We say this with humility, because we know that the Ecology Action Centre has a long way to go in fulfilling our piece of this responsibility.

Our struggles are connected. There will be no environmental justice without racial justice. 

The system which destabilizes our climate and devastates our ecosystems is the same system which dispossesses Indigenous peoples of their land and brutalizes and disappears Black and Indigenous bodies. Indigenous, Black, and other oppressed communities stand to suffer most from the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss, from lack of clean water, from inadequate housing, from air pollution, and from food insecurity. 

To quote Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, “our racial inequality crisis is intertwined with our climate crisis. If we don’t work on both, we will succeed at neither.” What’s more, when we work on environmental issues as though they were disconnected from issues of racism and colonialism, we become part of the problem. 

Ecology Action Centre is deeply indebted to the many Indigenous and Black organizers, activists, and scholars who have patiently and repeatedly taught us these things. We acknowledge that we have a great deal of work to do, both as an organization and as part of the mainstream environmental movement. We vow to take these lessons to heart and to do much better. 

To that end, we commit to:
Listening to Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian communities when they tell us what they need from us.
Strengthening recruitment, hiring and mentorship practises to ensure better representation of the communities we serve among our board members, staff and volunteers. 
Centering the voices, wisdom and well-being of oppressed communities in our decision making.
Challenging our conceptions of environmental work to see where we are excluding Black and Indigenous perspectives, and reevaluating our role in the broader struggle against colonialism and systemic racism.
Challenging ourselves to become an actively anti-racist organization.
Continuing to share our journey as an organization publicly, with transparency and humility, in the hope that it may be useful to our community and partners.
In solidarity,
The team at EAC