It’s Time to Acknowledge White-Washed Environmentalism

In the UK, the environmental sector is the second ‘most-white’. In recent years, the environmental movement has emerged as a white middle-class movement, despite the biggest contributors to climate change being Western society.

Over the last few decades, people in the global south have been fighting for their voices to be heard in this movement, because even though the global south contributes the least to the destruction of our planet, it is this part of the world that is disproportionately affected.

Colonialism relied on the stealing of natural resources of colonised countries and the removal of peoples from vast areas of land to conquest landscapes for colonial powers to use as their own. Damaging the environment was a key tool in the ‘conquering of the third world’ game that Western Superpowers played for centuries. The legacies of colonialism still live on today in how our environment is lived in, managed and protected, particularly in former colonised states.

In an unconscious attempt to exempt ourselves from the actions of our ancestors, as Western societies we have taken the term ‘climate justice’ and ran with it. We have banned plastic straws to save the turtles and we have sat in the middle of London and camped out to get the government to listen so we ‘can have a world for our children.’ But the fact is, real people are being affected by climate change across the world right now.  For example, millions of indigenous people in India that lived in their tribes’ homes in forestlands are being displaced because of the ‘competition’ to obtain the land that the world’s poorest people live in in order to find a quick and cheap solution to climate change where natural resources are being burnt by fossil fuel companies and investors want to use in order to seek profit.

As a society, we have been championing Extinction Rebellion in recent months. We saw protests on the tube; an environmentally friendly way to travel in a working-class area of London. This is a perfect example of middle-class white saviourism is practice. It is vital that we remember that inhabitants of the global south don’t need us to save them, but we need to give them their autonomy and voice, and we need to stop destroying land that is not ours.

We need to be fighting for this movement to include the voices and needs of people in the former colonised lands. They don’t need us to vilify everyone who decides to buy bottled water, they need us to stop burning, cutting down and destroying their lands, they need us to acknowledge our colonial past and to platform indigenous voices in the climate movement such as Helena Gualinga from the Ecuadorian Amazon or Lamboginny from Nigeria, or Tekanang from Tuvalu.

It is time that we listen to the people that are going to be disproportionately affected by climate change and decolonise our movement from the white savourist ideals that are the current foundations of climate justice.

Hatty Ruddick

University of Manchester MA Humanitarianism and Conflict Response Student

Campaigns Coordinator for Student for Trees Council

NUS Disabled Students Representative for the Womens' Campaign