The climate crisis is an existential threat to all life on earth. Referred to as the Anthropocene Extinction, we are experiencing a series of events in which species extinction occurs at as much as 1,000 times the natural rate, driven by the modern apex predatorApex predators are the top of the food chain, but in the case of homo sapiens, "apex" refers to both consumption and destruction of habitats for other animals, humanity.

While everyone is negatively affected by the climate crisis, it affects people of color at a disproportionate rate. Climate justice, or environmental justice, is the fight against this. The only chance our civilization has to progress and thrive in the face of the ecological destruction our species has caused is to start a global cooperative and to stop competing over resources. We have to find ways to reverse the current course of ecological destruction and stop feedback loopsFeedback loops refer to the ways that different effects of climate change start impacting one another so that they become more difficult to stop from starting.

The way these effects play out is different in every region. In the Philadelphia area, for example:

• It’s becoming far hotter and wetter than it was throughout the 20th century.
• Some low-lying neighborhoods are already being impacted by flooding and rising floodwaters.
• A longer and more brutal hurricane season stresses an old system that combines stormwater runoff and sewage, threatening the area's waterways.
• The waste management firm, Covanta, targets Black communities in Camden, NJ and Chester, PA to build toxic waste incinerators, following the nation-wide pattern that race, more than class, indicates where polluters choose to dump and burn waste.
• Some city schools have worse lead levels than Flint, Michigan.
• A massive explosion at a Philadelphia Energy Solutions-owned refinery narrowly avoided releasing fatal levels of hydroflouric acid into a dense neighborhood in 2019.

Local and global environmental crises seem to be worsening by the second, perpetuated and accelerated by big business. However, wherever there is an industrial polluter, there are people organizing against them for a cleaner, safer planet. And although the fight for the earth’s future is humanity’s most urgent struggle, it’s one that—with organization and persistence—can be won.

Research how the climate crisis will be expressed in your region in the future. For instance, determine whether it’s expected that your location will get drier, more humid, deforested, flooded, or burned. These broad forecasts tend to be very accurate—they measure longer-term trends which often predate the modern understanding of the climate crisis by decades.

Find out what these effects mean. Can you expect more violent storms? Sea-level rise? Less access to clean water? Urban heat islands?

Examine the impact on people. In which neighborhoods do polluters choose to build noxious plants? Where are superfund sites located and how are they harming their neighbors? Which schools lack clean water, and which communities lack access to air conditioning in the summer?

Identify the offenders. Industries, institutions, and systems negatively impact the climate in ways that far outweigh individual contributions, even combined. For instance, the shipping industry pollutes far more than all of the automobiles in the world. Just 15 large container ships match the emissions of all cars. These polluting firms may be faceless, but the individual people on their boards have names. Find out who they are in your area. Even if they are not headquartered near where you live, their choices negatively impact your life.

Try to find others in your area who are already organizing for climate justice and join them. If a group exists whose mission and methods align with your own, your time and energy will be better spent contributing to their efforts than working solo or starting an organization from scratch.

If you can’t find a group that feels like the right fit, consider starting your own. Follow tried-and-true practices for grassroots organizing. Framing conversations with neighbors in what can be done to proactively address real quality-of-life issues for the whole community can attract even hardcore climate deniers. Try to dispel any “not in my backyard”“Not in my backyard” refers to the idea that sometimes even otherwise ethical, progressive people will support a social movement or mutual aid service project, but will not want it implemented near where they live notions, refocusing energy on striking at the root cause of key issues so that the problems aren’t merely saddled onto another community.

Get creative with your solutions! Organizing for adaptation or mitigation can be tempting. But digging deep for the long haul of actually replacing the harmful actors driving the Anthropocene Extinction Event with cleaner, safer alternatives will be the only way to reverse the climate crisis.

The ruling class expects tactics like climate strikesClimate strikes are work and school stoppages, protests, and other demonstrations to draw attention to and attempt to force action on climate change, advocating for a Green New Deal, individuals impersonating energy executives and claiming to reverse their policies in order to force statements from said corporations, and more guerrilla tactics like pipeline construction blockades, tree spiking (with warning), and tree sitting. Seek new strategies that incorporate 21st century ideas, centering intersectional feminismIntersectional feminism is a way of looking at gender equality through multiple factors: race, class, sexuality, religion, culture, ability, education, and others, racial justice, and LGBTQ+ liberation, ensuring that any new technology is not just as harmful to people and the planet as the old technology.

Create educational campaigns around resources by sharing information about the consequences of abusing them. Discover ways that a community organization could make certain precious resources public assets. If a large-scale organization nationalizesNationalization usually refers to a government seizing ownership of a private business, but in radical circles can refer to the people turning an asset into something that everyone has a stake in a resource under the people without the involvement of the state, treating the resource like a massive, worker-owned cooperative, it might be possible to avoid the problems commonly associated with assets controlled by the government. Monitor local superfund sites and organize a responsible cleanup by getting the Potentially Responsible Party to pay for them. Organize and raise funds in the community to retrofit local schools or community centers to harness solar power.

To promote environmental justice, we’ll need to reimagine how we fund and provide the labor to protect the earth. Rewilding areas and protecting woodlands will help us remember how we take trees for granted. We currently have 3 trillion trees (which is half of what the earth used to have), and have room for 1 trillion more. Trees provide the oxygen that we breathe and those 1 trillion more trees have the potential to reduce 25% of the global annual carbon emissions.

Organize to protect your local rivers and watersheds by blockading industries that pollute them. Create new opportunities for bicycle sharing programs, paint guerrilla bike lanes, or agitate to have new, more official bike lanes created in your community. Join or start a transit riders union and use your collective power to demand the construction or expansion of green public transit systems. Find ways to educate the community on food waste and to organize food-sharing programs in order to cut down on it at the neighborhood level.

In order to approach climate justice by striking at the root of the problem, take inspiration from Act Up in the eighties: when the science did not exist and the establishment would not help, they organized using citizen science to discover the right cocktail of drugs in order to help find a way to survive the AIDS epidemic. The same could be done to transfer the planet to clean, renewable energy from the ground up, rather than waiting for the fossil fuel industry to willingly give up billions in profits.

Start small with your organization. How might your neighborhood go “off the grid” while remaining an active part of society? If you work together, would you be able to create an affordable, alternative source of renewable energy originating from your local environment? Would you be able to invent new carbon capture technologies? Could you discover new, sustainable methods for clean transportation? Can you find a way to use food waste as an industrial material in an eco-friendly way? If you have any successes, teach them to others. Disrupt the fossil fuel industry by confronting their ability to profit, tearing down destructive systems and replacing them with peaceful and constructive ones.

Next: Create a commons council under People Power