As Earth Day falls this week, Lucy Aphramor (Workplace Equity Coordinator for Quakers in Britain) explores why climate is a social justice issue, looking at how it is intertwined with issues about disability, racialisation, and more.

Launched in the US in 1970, Earth Day exists to broaden, educate and activate the environmental movement worldwide. Early initiatives raised public awareness about the inextricable links between pollution and public health and resulted in significant new legislation. Education and action on recycling, global warming, sustainable green economies, and carbon footprints followed.

Today environmental and climate justice work increasingly foregrounds the message that the impacts and drivers of earth desecration are inseparable from issues of social and racial justice and war. This is an important analysis: understanding climate justice and migrant rights as entwined, for example, can prevent us from contributing to unintended harm.

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