One Year Older. One Year Closer to Catastrophe.
In a time of crisis, Black Radical Environmentalism is my gift to the World.
Happy Birthday to me.
Today marks a quarter-century spent discovering the man I’m meant to be. 25 years chiseling at the stone of my soul has begun to uncover the art underneath, the statuesque marvel of man that will one day serve society as a great leader. You may conceive of that statement as egotism or narcissism; I call it recognizing my gift, my responsibility, my destiny, and unabashedly declaring it to the world.
I am a light in the dark, and it is my mission to join with the other lights of the world to shine on and expose our path forward through the turmoil, the trials and tribulations, that we now face and will endure in the years ahead. I intend to use the knowledge that I have amassed over the years, and continue to accrue daily, to show the world the alternative ways of being and knowing that we need if we are to survive, if human civilization is to persist, past the end of the millennium.
The actions we take today and through 2030 will determine the fate of the planet for millions of years to come and thus the course of human history will be charted for just as long — assuming humanity is around to bear witness. If we do not act now to rapidly and radically reimagine our relationships to the Earth and each other over the next decade, then our global environment will be irrevocably altered in the most disastrous of ways. Much of the Earth will already be uninhabitable for humans by the second half of the 21st century, including former “bread baskets”, unless we acknowledge the scale of this crisis and begin to implement solutions equally as grand of scale.
We have to lay witness to the devastation, acknowledging our role in it, if we are going to stop it.
So.
Lift your eyes.
Behold the beautiful blue marble before you.
See how we have defiled it,
Destroyed this most blessed of creation,
Given to us as a gift.
See how we have forsaken it.
Witness the damage we allow to persist
As we insist on our own impotence.
Our veins, Earth’s waterways, are polluted with plastic and petroleum, and our lungs, Earth’s forests, are burning. Earth’s ancient treasures, old growth forests, home to whole hosts of complex connections, million year old bonds of ecological balance and harmony, are surrendered to the chaos of capital accumulation: quickly becoming destinations for devastation and despair. Our home is being torn down from the inside out. Racial capitalism has become a planetary cancer that is attacking the vital organs of our Mother Earth.
Her ice caps are melting at alarming rates, and, instead of strategizing to stop it, states are scheming to see which team can win the rights to search for oil in the newly exposed areas of the Arctic Sea. In the areas surrounding the Arctic Circle, Siberian forests — forests typically trapped in permafrost, even in the heights of summer — are experiencing scorching heat waves, with temperatures reaching 100°F (38°C); meanwhile, wildfires, ignorant of the irony, rip through the ice-free Arctic forests. Worse still, on the other side of the World, the lush tropical wetlands of the Amazon rainforest are experiencing horrific fires and nearly unprecedented levels of destruction and devastation, all to clear space for the expansion of capital in the form cattle pastures.
Brazil’s national capitalism, driven by an international taste for beef cultivated by American imperialism, has become one of the most dangerous forces on the planet. Bolstered by Bolsonaro, cattle ranchers and oil companies have taken to actively destroying the Amazon rainforest, effectively declaring war on the planet by further destabilizing one of Earth’s most vital ecosystems.
And no one’s stopping them.
The government’s of the world are effectively impotent to intervene since the interests of imperialism stand opposed to the implementation of international economic embargoes. Economic embargoes or sanctions could be imposed until Brazil stops the burning and Bolsonaro commits to protecting Brazil’s Amazon, but the geopolitical community is silent on such affairs. America and Europe see nothing wrong with imposing sanctions and embargoes on Iran or North Korea to curb the development of their nuclear programs, and they do so purportedly to preserve the peace and stability of the world. Yet the destruction of the Amazon, a threat to global peace and stability equally as grave as nuclear proliferation, is met with relative silence and a lack of concrete action from the international political community.
So it falls on the international, environmental and human rights community to join in solidarity to stop the fires, to advocate for the protection of the Amazon, and to support the efforts of the Amazon’s indigenous people and protectors. In the same way that the anti-apartheid movement acted against South Africa and the international Palestinian community mobilizes against Israeli occupation, the environmental movement must Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Brazilian businesses and any organizations working with Brazil and benefiting from the destruction of our Amazon. A BDS Brazil campaign would give us all a chance to Act for the Amazon.
The Amazon belongs to the Earth, despite what Bolsonaro believes. It is the shared possession of all life on Earth, and we all owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Rainforest for all it has given to us. For the millions of years our ancient ancestors spent slowly evolving, harnessing fire, learning the lessons of nature, and crawling their way toward an enlightened consciousness and civilization, the Rainforest, and other essential ecosystems, provided the Earth and humanity with the balanced, stable climate necessary for our survival and evolution.
Yet, instead of recognizing this debt and working to repay it, our morally corrupt culture has returned the favor by the turning fire, given to us by the gods, against the other gifts of gods’ grace. We use our technology to terrorize the natural environment so we can enrich our artificial ones. Capitalism has taught us to forsake the sacred. But we still have time to remember all we owe to the life around us and turn down a path of healing and harmony.
By committing to service that prioritizes planet and people, we can work to regain and restore a relationship of reciprocity with the systems and structures of the planet, systems which, as yet, stretch beyond the bounds of human understanding. This relationship, a loving communion with the planet and all the life thereon, is foundational to any earnest environmental effort.
This relationship is among the many things that I believe are missing from the mainstream movement. The climate movement lacks the spiritual narrative necessary to restore our relationship to people and the planet. Such a loving relationship is crucial to respecting the planet and committing to restoring it, especially when and where we will be pushed outside of the comfort zones constructed for us by capitalism. The movement also lacks thorough critiques of the inherently unsustainable nature of racial capitalism, and it fails to expose how the sociopolitical structures of today, built on the foundation of capitalist imperialism, cannot and will not provide pathways for planetary regeneration.
The mainstream environmental movement, even in its most radical and critical voices, fails to provide the theoretical and ideological basis needed to turn the climate movement into the international, anti-imperial revolution needed to prevent climate catastrophe. Only by demolishing capitalism can we curtail the climate crisis, and the eurocentric environmental movement will never be capable of making that change without deferring to the leadership of those who know capitalism’s flaws and failures most intimately: Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth,” the “Third World masses”, the subjects of colonialism and imperialism.
The leadership of Black, African, and Indigenous peoples will be essential to the success of the climate movement. In particular, the spiritual practices of indigenous people, whether from Turtle Island, Africa, or Asia, are centered around a respect for land and life, and their spiritual leadership and guidance would provide the basis for a return to the loving, communal relationship with nature that I mentioned above. Even beyond spirituality, Black, African, and Indigenous people have been leading international, anti-capitalist and anti-imperial movements for half a millennia, and we have developed a deep culture of resistance as a result.
The Black Radical Tradition, in particular, has a wide base of knowledge and wisdom available to an activist and advocate of antiracism, anticapitalism, and anti-imperialism. Tapping into the Black Radical Tradition is essential to the success of the climate justice movement; it contains cultures of spiritual resistance, strategies for international action and solidarity, tactics for effective decentralized organizing, and approaches to applying international political pressure, like the B.D.S. campaign mentioned before. The Black Radical Tradition and its indigenous equivalent will provide the environmental movement with much of what it’s missing.
This is what the climate movement needs if we are going to succeed. We need leaders from the radical traditions of Black, African, and Indigenous peoples to show us how to combat climate change by attacking and undermining the capitalist and imperialist forces, which profit off the destruction of our planet, while bringing into being a new form of global government that can allow us to live harmoniously with all the life around us. We need them to show us new ways of being that draw on old forms of knowing.
On this day, my 25th birthday, I, Tyler James Valentine, am fully and wholeheartedly committing myself to being one of those leaders. I am part and parcel of the new generation of Black Radical Environmentalists who will lead the international, anti-imperial, climate justice revolution. I intend to see an end to the cancer of racial capitalism and the rise of an era of climate, economic, racial, and gender justice or die trying.
However, to accomplish this, the movement must change.
Every year the eurocentric environmental movement has grown older is another year that we’ve been drawn closer to climate catastrophe. As such, there is an enormous need to defer to the leadership of Indigenous peoples and tap into the Black Radical tradition and its followers. These communities will provide the movement with the ways of organizing and mobilizing that are needed to truly prevent climate catastrophe. I hope, if you are not already part and parcel of those communities, that you will join with us as we work to restore humanity, the Earth, and our connection to it: by bringing an end to the era of racial capitalism.
