Audience: African Americans

This Insight explores the linkages between environmental injustice, policing, and prisons. By now, many folks in our movement are familiar with the pitfalls of the current policing and prison systems, but how do we, as climate activists, understand the call for police reform, or even abolition, within our own work?

Gillion’s research examines whether a protest can make a real change – and the short answer is that it does. Looking at the effect of civil rights protests from the 1960’s–1990’s on Congress, he found that protest had a small but detectable effect on legislators. And he identified factors that increased the salience of a protest to politicians.

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including lots of new polling on climate change and the environment as issues in the midterm elections.