The Chicken-Little environmentalism movement is built upon the supposition that humans are destroying the environment and, if something drastic isn’t done to save the earth, the entire planet will die in some kind of horrible apocalyptic scenario. This doomsday belief would require, one would think, broad participation from people of every ethnic group in a worldwide movement to Make the Earth Great Again.
Think again.
Karin Louise Hermes is a former climate activist who regularly protested capitalism as the supposed cause of all harm to the planet and warned of impending wrath of Mother Nature. Hermes has now made international headlines, however, for leaving the environmental movement because too many white people are involved.
Vice Magazine published an article from Hermes, who said environmentalism isn’t ethnically diverse enough for her participation.
Hermes, who began her article by blaming a 2013 typhoon on climate change, claimed that she became disinterested in the movement (which she was active in for several years) by seeing the “whiteness” of the “spaces” devoted to climate activism.
She writes, “I realized I would only be called upon when climate organizations needed an inspiring story or a ‘diverse’ voice, contacts for a campaign, or to participate in a workshop for ‘fun’ when everyone else on the (all-white) project was getting paid.”
Hermes continued, “Whenever I would question the whiteness of these spaces and how strategies didn’t take race into account, I would be met with uncomfortable silences.”
Hermes, who was routinely invited to speak on climate change, was apparently upset that the audiences were white, even though as a minority, she was valued as a speaker, which she later called “tokenism.”
The activist blames “whiteness” for climate change and writes, “Anti-racism and anti-capitalism need to be made part of organizing. If ‘Green’ policies fail to consider anti-racism and migrant rights, how is any person of colour supposed to feel voting for them or organizing in the same spaces?”
For Hermes, the solution to the disparity between minority speakers and white audiences is to take her ball and go home, the Earth be damned.
One doesn’t have to look far to see that climate activists aren’t really concerned about the climate. After all, the Earth gives no signs of fragility and doomsday prophecies are always astoundingly wrong. The planet is a stable, healthy, and self-repairing ecosystem crafted by God to withstand changes in human need. Climate activists seem really to care about secondary issues – in this case, ethnicity or Communism – that only use climate change as a means to promote their agenda.
If the planet were truly in peril and crisis, one would probably not start calculating the proportion of people on a scale of brownness in the crowd to help.
