Voting booths. Photo credit: WisPolitics.com [wikimedia commons]

The US presidential elections loom large in the minds of the environmental justice movement and the communities we are accountable to. We face a real risk of a reversal of our movement’s recent and historic victories. Also at stake is the U.S. falling further into authoritarianism. Our movement faces an important question: what is to be done at this historic juncture? Many of us agree that we must continue to escalate our fight in the streets and the ballot box.

Elections are one of the important spaces where environmental justice must insert itself. The failure to take up space in the electoral arena makes the path to destroying our communities and livelihood much easier for the governments and corporations that harm us. Fewer than 45,000 votes determined the fate of the 2020 presidential election in key battleground states. That is how close we were to a second Trump term. This close margin also shows that our movements have the power to shape who wins the elections. The current balance of social forces is such that our movement can have a role in advancing system change.

No political party is deserving of the environmental justice movement’s uncritical support. When environmental justice groups choose to support candidacies, they do so to create more favorable conditions to advance justice for our communities. Even when our movements help people get elected, we know that there are no guarantees and that our fight must continue because the US two-party system is undemocratic and authoritarian, allowing those pushing for false solutions to poison environmental policies. The strength of the movement’s electoral and non-electoral organizing lets politicians know they cannot afford to ignore, neglect, and harm our communities.

Our movement must show strength on the streets and in the ballot box. When we invest ourselves in both, we build greater power to achieve the policy changes we need. We show that our communities cannot be taken for granted. Our movement builds on legacies of struggle with a rich history of using multiple strategies to advance environmental justice. Adopting a diversity of tactics is known to help movements achieve social change.

Showing our strength at the ballot box should be a collective effort and focus on building local, state, federal, and transnational power. Voting for the next president is important, but it’s the least we can do. Many of the most harmful policies against our communities are passed at the state and local levels. These policies almost never emerge as local-level demands, but instead tend to be carbon copies of each other that right-wing interest groups that have captured state legislatures use to diffuse harmful policies throughout the US. Some of the most serious threats to democracy are state-level threats due to the federalist nature of the US political system. These right-wing coordinated state-level attacks on democratic policymaking allow states and corporations to cause environmental harm to communities of color, obstruct the local implementation of federal environmental regulation, and block local governments from adopting environmental and economic justice policies, like minimum wage increases or common-sense public health measures.

We must also mobilize to stand in solidarity with those who have been historically excluded from participating in politics and whose political power has been intentionally diminished. Right-wing politicians are making it really hard for communities of color to vote and dilute their vote through racial gerrymandering, the practice of redrawing the lines of electoral districts in ways that split communities of color. Everyone should be clear: there are widespread, ongoing attacks against our communities’ right to vote. If we don’t organize to fight back, the right will be able to seize power despite being the minority. 

People in communities of color often can’t vote because of the many barriers laid in their path. Communities of color are disproportionately affected by the closure of nearby polling locations, the rejection of ballots, and restrictive voter ID laws, among other obstructions designed to keep our communities from voting. These blockages to exercise our right to vote are part of organized right-wing efforts to make voting harder and inconvenient.

Electoral organizing isn’t just about getting people out to vote. It is also about fighting back against these attacks on people’s right to vote and making sure that politicians know that they will be held accountable for undermining our communities’ rights to participate in the political system that governs them.

Electoral organizing is also about going on offense, not just defense. It is about putting ballot measures up for a vote for policies that advance justice and are widely popular, and yet, elected officials choose to ignore our communities’ desires and political will. If they don’t legislate to meet the needs of our communities, we can use other electoral means to achieve social change.

If the right can recapture the Federal government, our communities will be facing divestment, neglect, and attacks on science. This isn’t based on speculation. While we organized mutual aid to support communities at the frontline of climate change, the Trump administration slowed down disaster recovery aid after Hurricane María in Puerto Rico. Our movements will be more violently repressed and surveilled. Our hard-fought efforts pushing for policies like Justice 40 and federal spending in environmental justice communities will be reversed as they have before. The right is already trying to do so. One of Donald Trump’s first actions after coming into office was to issue Executive Orders to advance the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline. Our movements will face much harder odds to keep fossil fuels in the ground if the right comes back to power.

Political crises like the one we are experiencing now are openings for us but also for those who seek to entrench themselves in power and drive this flawed democracy further into totalitarianism. We must rush into this opening before those who benefit from the policies that harm our communities.

We have been told that we’re in a political crisis where taking the wrong turn could be irreversible for our communities and the political system’s health. It is undeniable that there is a lot at stake. We must also remember that this crisis is not unprecedented, and it predates Donald Trump’s presidency. Indigenous Peoples know first-hand the origins and consequences of the racist and colonial systems that have kept communities of color in permanent crisis and dismantled Indigenous systems of governance in the name of a so-called democracy that we’re now asked to help sustain. For Indigenous Peoples, the apocalypse that we are now told to fear already happened. Our intervention in this historic juncture must be focused on repairing those harms and advancing a just transition away from the systems that enabled them. 

We know that the future is not pre-determined and that we can stop the right from increasing its power. Our movement has developed pathways and principles for building solidarity to advance our struggles. When our communities and workers join, we form a strong front to advance environmental and economic justice for all. Now is the time to seize opportunities to advance a just transition.