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This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including new polling on the Build Back Better plan, the economic risks of climate change, corporate accountability measures, environmental justice, and voters’ relative trust in the two parties to handle climate change.

Environmental justice activists that work across a diverse set of issues rank climate justice among their highest priority issues. They overwhelmingly rely on base building, coalitions, and organizing strategies to do their work. In reflecting on the movement’s contemporary approaches, activists articulate the importance of shared frameworks such as climate justice to shift popular narratives and action on climate change. The climate justice frame reflects a critical, intersectional, and reconstructive conceptualization of the climate crisis that requires disrupting the status quo approaches to climate change. This study points to some of the challenges and opportunities ahead for realizing such a contentious and transformative climate justice vision led by EJ activists in a moment of expanding political opportunity and risk.

When I joined the climate movement in 2013, fossil fuel divestment campaigns were surging across the country on college and university campuses. At the time, I was a student and compelled by the narrative of stigmatizing the fossil fuel industry and taking away its social license to operate. The vision that captured my imagination of what is possible centered on people and building a world where everyone can live a dignified life.
The foundation of this vision embodies roots from the environmental justice movement. From Native people’s resistance of colonization to Latinx farmworkers’ determination for safe workplace conditions to Black and brown communities demands for basic human rights: clean air and water; organizing for what people deserve has always been the pathway for how we win.
So what does it take to do the necessary and bold work of multiracial, cross-class organizing in the climate movement?
The Lab recently engaged in dialogue on this question at Celebrating Our Community Power. Over 80 members joined in and learned from one another. Below, we highlight the most relevant insights that came out of the discussion and recommendations for how you can apply them to your work.

Learning to attune to the cycles of our own leadership can help movements know when to do the right thing at the right time. Winters are a time to be internally focused and are defined as periods of time for regeneration and re-evaluation. Spring is about opening up, taking on new personal responsibilities and experimenting. The summer is externally focused and is primarily about giving as much as we can to fulfill our different missions. Lastly there is fall, which is the season of harvesting the fruits from work during the summer and also starting to slow and break down certain elements to prepare for the winter. This metaphor framework can help give language to experiences that we know leaders face as they develop and traverse through many cycles in social change work.