Angely Mercado
The post Meet the Climate Kids Who Are Mobilizing a Generation of Parents appeared first on The Nation.
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You would know it to see it. Anyone who has sought escape in the endless feeds of TikTok or Instagram knows a certain light-filled, pastoral aesthetic. Slim blondes in thrifted prairie dresses frolic in gardens and fields. You are convinced that you, too, can enjoy a whimsical picnic brunch under an oak tree with homemade scones and clotted cream. You can make your own mushroom earrings, or you can sew your own milkmaid cosplay and wear it as you sip tea. This is cottagecore.
I liked the look of it, and I am hardly alone — the “cottagecore” hashtag has been used more than 4 billion times on TikTok. But when I tried to look up the definition of this particular aesthetic trend, I was confused. It presented nature, and the experience of existing in it, as soft and leisurely. Life in the countryside isn’t about picnic lunches, straw hats, and muslin dresses — it’s farming from sunup to sundown, and never knowing if it will be enough.
Online commentators point out that cottagecore is far from a “natural” aesthetic; it’s often showcased as a vision of a settled wilderness, a legacy of European agriculture and expansion.
“Despite a number of its followers taking an often progressive and subversive outlook on life, Cottagecore has been also criticized for its romanticism of a Eurocentric farming life, and in the context of North American and Australian settings, an inadvertent celebration of the aesthetics of colonialism, as well as the ways it often simplifies and underestimates the labour of farmers,” a fandom website explained.
People of all racial backgrounds have shaped the American landscape, but a history of violence and displacement caused many communities of color to leave behind the land that they worked and lived on. The dual “classic” American traditions of farming and frolicking in nature reflect that history of settler colonialism. They exist based on the displacement of Indigenous people, and labor from indentured servants and enslaved people. And despite the fact that cottagecore is such a dreamy form of escapism, it still reflects that very whitewashed reality.
TikTok videos like the one below highlight the importance of remembering how people of color, especially Black communities, helped shape American agriculture. There were about a million Black farmers in the United States at the beginning of 1920s, but that number declined as violence perpetrated by their white neighbors escalated. During the Great Migration, millions of African Americans left the rural south for cities and towns across the Northeast and Midwest to escape segregation, violence, and poverty. It’s perhaps not surprising that Black faces are notably absent from the sort of pastoral dream espoused by cottagecore.
@enchanted_noir #greenscreen Next video on Saturday
#cottagecore #blackcottagecore #history #educational #farmcore #farming #cottagecoreaesthetic
But cottagecore is more than napping in a barn and fresh-from-the-cow milk; it’s also about enjoying a Disney-fied version of nature. And there, its whiteness is hardly new either. Advertisements for equipment for activities like hiking, skiing, and kayaking tend to exclusively portray white people. Those images selling expensive tents and oars and hiking boots reinforce the stereotype of outdoor activities as white and wealthy again and again — even while many of these activities, like kayaking, have indigenous origins.
Racist policies also played a role in keeping communities of color away from outdoor activities, namely in the formation of national parks. Renowned American naturalist John Muir, whose work helped establish the national park system, expressed racist beliefs about both Black Americans and Indigneous people. Gifford Pinchot, the inaugural head of the Forest Service that oversees national parks, was a eugenicist. The canon of celebrated American conservationists that shaped the country’s wilderness today are filled with descriptions of white men and their achievements, regardless of their attitudes towards marginalized communities.
The legacy of displacement, erasure, and segregation of Black and brown people in outdoor activities continues to push those very same demographics out of enjoying nature today. Charles Thomas, the executive director of Outward Bound Adventures, identifies as African-American, and he grew up camping through the organization. He wasn’t surprised when I explained the lack of diversity in cottagecore and agreed that people of color are often threatened when accessing green spaces.
As the pandemic has slowed down international travel, people of color looking to escape their homes in national parks have been accused of making regular visitors feel “unsafe.” Thomas remembers how on one outing to a campground, a group of campers urinated on his group’s tents. And just a few years ago, a group of mainly Black and brown young campers with OBA were on a trip to a hiking trail in California and were told to leave the area.
“They said, ‘What are you doing here? This is Trump country,’” Thomas recalled.
“It’s not easy to show up [at a hiking trail] when no one looks like you … we [people of color] still don’t have equal influence over outdoor programming,” he added. “How are they going to be in the videos about the outdoors if they’re not out there for real?”
The more Varis Zima, a Korean-American from the Bay Area, learned about cottagecore, the more they noticed how little non-white representation there was. “Don’t get me wrong, I love the aesthetic with all my heart, but I don’t see enough POC on here,” they said under their handle @crowpunkin, dressed up in a costume that had a hanbok-like tie at the front, which is often seen in traditional Korean outfits. “Nor does cottagecore have to be based exclusively on ‘Western’ style clothing.”
@crowpunkin #cottagecore #goblincore #lgbt #hanbok #fae #theythem #duetwithme #traditionalclothes #alttiktok
Zima’s video was what made me start thinking more critically about the genre. “I’ve noticed that a vast majority of cottagecore-tagged content was very white and Eurocentric in choices of fashion and houses,” Zima said in an email. “I thought if cottagecore is a safe place to escape from the pressures of hegemony, why do we automatically see [Eurocentric culture] as the default?”
“I think outdoor activities are so heavily white-coded for some reason … even my family automatically thinks of those things as ‘white people things’ and we never participated much in them from the start,” they said. “I think it would be nice if outdoor activity culture was more inclusive and respectful,” especially of Indigenous communities.
Zima heard from people who said they weren’t comfortable cosplaying or making videos about cottagecore and their love for nature until they saw Zima’s video encouraging more people of color to put their own spin on the trend. They especially wanted to see outfits, architecture, and accessories from different cultures incorporated into the aesthetic online.
Aniyag Fargas, a teen from North Carolina, began to post cottagecore content on her account recently. In one of her videos, she pointed out that she was a Black woman in the genre and immediately received comments from viewers asking what race had to do with cottagecore.
“When you see these aesthetics, you see white people,” she said in a video response. “But when people of color, especially Black people do it, it’s ‘You’re trying to act white’ … it’s so annoying — it helps seeing people of your race doing it.”
@cottage.cosmetics Reply to @lalaloopsiestoilets I’m not the best at explaining, but representation, that’s all #fyp #foryou
Fargas always liked being in nature, she said, and began to question why she didn’t see many Black people participating in outdoor activities when she went camping for the first time with some friends a few years ago. That trip encouraged her to consider different ways to show how much she liked being outdoors. Now, she makes videos of herself in cottagecore attire, usually in flowy dresses against flowers and trees. She also started a small business on the side that uses nature themes as its inspiration.
Fargas thinks creators of color will continue to make a space for themselves both in the virtual world of cottagecore and in the real world of outdoor activities. Over the past year, she has found more and more creators that look like her and that are pointing out the need for different cultures and ideas into the online aesthetic.
“For all my non-white women who wants to get into cottagecore … just do it. Make this aesthetic into your own and have fun with it,” she said.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The holidays in New York City can be pretty magical, if you don’t mind the cold. The main avenues all over the city, including two near where I live, are decorated with lights and tinsel to commemorate the season. There’s even a local Santa in the Ridgewood Glendale area who drives around in a decked-out convertible blasting “O Christmas Tree” and “Jingle Bell Rock.”
American holiday music is a lot of fun, filled with bells and “tra-la-las.” “Deck the Halls” will always be one of the best holiday bops of all time. But nothing hits me in the holiday feels like the Caribbean music that my parents would play for me and my siblings around this time of year. Just like some English radio stations would start blaring “Jingle Bells” every hour on the hour, stations like 97.9 La Mega would play Christmas merengues alongside holiday remixes and more traditional medleys. I have memories of Christmas celebrations where my dad would find his wooden güiro, my aunt would take out a guitar, and I’d sit nearby shaking maracas to some of those songs.
American holiday songs tend to fall into a few categories: love songs like “Last Christmas” by WHAM, holiday decoration–themed tunes like “Silver Bells,” and of course, religious carols about Jesus’ birth. The holiday music my parents listen to falls into some of those same categories, but with a distinctly Caribbean/Latin American flair. There are songs about having too many relatives, ones about drinking too much rum, and even medleys that mention death and demons. And some songs are about the weather — not about quiet, beautiful snow, but about relentless floods and roaring hurricanes.
The medleys I listened to growing up often included a song, “Yo Me Tomo El Ron,” about torrential rain in Bayamon, a municipality in Puerto Rico. The rhyme-filled song is kind of a big joke — it’s about how it rains so much that the clothing hung outside won’t dry and the nearby rivers are always swelling. It’s also technically about rum and beer, which is to be expected for this genre.
“Yo me tomo el ron, la cerveza fría, porque en Bayamón, mon, llueve to´ los días,” the lyrics go. “I drink rum, and cold beer, because in Bayamón, mon, it rains every day.”
The song reminds me of a few months I spent with family in the Caribbean as a preteen during the rainy season, which spans most of the summer and fall. It poured every day, and sometimes twice a day, in my mom’s hometown in the Dominican Republic. And the song was right: Some of the streets looked like small streams, and my clothes never dried.
The song “Temporal,” which is in some of the holiday medleys, describes what it’s like for a town to prepare for an incoming hurricane. (Temporal means seasonal, but also refers to the hurricane season, which lasts from June to early December.) It mentions a dark ominous sky and laments the crops that will be lost once the storm hits. The song also describes how the people of the town have gathered together in a secure place, full of anxiety as they wait out the storm.
“Todo anuncia la tormenta, todo es ansiedad, el instinto va avisando, viene un temporal,” the song says. “Everything announces the storm, everything feels anxious, the instinct tells us that a storm is coming.”
I started listening to the song again late this summer, when it became clear that the Atlantic was having an extremely active hurricane season — in fact, this season broke several records. Over the years, I’ve seen several mentions of it on social media when major hurricanes struck the Caribbean, especially after Hurricane Maria in 2017.
I asked my mom why death and catastrophic weather show up so often in the holiday tunes my family loves. “Death happens, and hurricanes happen,” she told me. “You could die at any time — even after Christmas, or even right before Christmas. So why not celebrate while remembering that everything ends?”
She doesn’t see that as morbid, but as realistic: Deadly hurricanes are a fact of life in the Caribbean. My mom isn’t afraid of storms or mortality, and she thinks talking and singing about them — yes, even during the holidays — is better then pretending that things are OK. Not everything is perfect during “the most wonderful time of year,” especially during a global pandemic. The holidays are a time to joyfully sing along to the songs you grew up with, while recognizing that there are real problems to consider, both now and once the new year begins. The holiday music of my childhood taught me as much.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Forget ‘White Christmas’: Caribbean carols are dark and stormy on Dec 24, 2020.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
President-elect Joe Biden took the stage Saturday afternoon at The Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, to unveil a slate of diverse nominees for key energy and climate positions, including the prospective heads of the Department of the Interior, Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA.
“We’re in a crisis,” Biden said before announcing his climate team. “Just like we need to be a unified nation in response to COVID-19, we need a unified national response to climate change.”
Biden said his team is “brilliant”, “qualified,” and “barrier-busting.” The former vice president described them as the right people to take on his ambitious climate plan, which includes returning the U.S. to the Paris climate agreement and investing trillions of dollars in green infrastructure in the hopes of pushing the country to go carbon neutral by 2050. Biden promised that the policies espoused by his incoming Cabinet will be a sharp change from a Trump administration that rolled back pollution standards, denied science, and dismantled the regulatory state.Among other efforts, the president-elect pledged to restore Obama-era fuel efficiency standards and prioritize workers over large corporations.
“We’ll do another big thing: Put us on the path of achieving a carbon, pollution-free electric sector by the year 2035 that no future president can turn back,” Biden proclaimed.
Biden’s choice to lead Interior is New Mexico Representative Deb Haaland, who is an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna and has Jemez Pueblo heritage, Haaland will be the first Native American to occupy a position in a presidential Cabinet, if she is confirmed by the Senate.
After being introduced by Biden, a tearful Haaland accepted his nomination, and reminded viewers of the Interior’s past actions of trying to stamp out tribal nations, Native languages, and Native cultures throughout the country. “This moment is profound when we consider the fact that a former secretary of the Interior once proclaimed his goal to ‘civilize or exterminate’ us — I’m living testament to the failure of that horrific ideology,” Haaland said. “I also stand on the shoulders of my ancestors and all the people who have sacrificed so I can be here.”
If confirmed, Haaland will oversee the management and conservation of more than 500 million acres of federal lands and natural resources. She promised that under her tenure, decisions made by her department to tackle the climate crisis will be “once again driven by science” and guided by environmental justice for marginalized communities.
Biden has nominated Michael Regan, the secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, to lead the EPA. If confirmed, Regan will be the first Black man to head the agency responsible for protecting the country’s environment and its citizens’ health.
On Saturday, Regan spoke about his childhood spending time outdoors with family and friends, and recalled that his curiosity about how health was connected to the environment stemmed from his own experiences suffering from asthma. Regan, a former EPA intern, said he wanted to restore the trust between state environmental departments and the federal agency, so the EPA could once again become a “strong partner of the states, not a roadblock.”
“We will be driven by our convictions that every person in our great country has the right to clean air, clean water, and a healthier life no matter how much money they have in their pockets, the color of their skin, or the community that they live in,” Regan pledged. “We will move with a sense of urgency on climate change.”
Gina McCarthy, an environmental health and air-quality expert who previously served as EPA administrator under President Obama, is the pick to become the first-ever national climate advisor. Like many of the other nominees, McCarthy connected her work to a formative childhood experience, in her case growing up in a community burdened by air pollution in Massachusetts. Her background led her to a career in public service, where McCarthy worked to help communities like hers so that they could overcome the “legacies of environmental harm” that have endangered their health and livelihoods.
“Back when I was in grammar school, and the nuns used to jump up and say, ‘Run, close the windows in your classrooms,’ because when the rubber factory across the street started to spew chemical stenches into the air, it would come wafting into our classroom,” she recalled. “That smell kept us from recess more days than I or my teacher ever cared to remember.”
As the domestic “climate czar,” McCarthy will be responsible for coordinating climate action across Congress and multiple federal agencies, pushing for policies that address myriad issues caused by the climate crisis.
Biden has not only promised put environmental justice at the forefront of his climate policies, he has also pledged to mobilize infrastructure investments to create millions of jobs for American workers. Enter Jennifer Granholm, his nominee to lead the Department of Energy.
Granholm was the first woman to serve as Michigan’s governor. She said that her commitment to clean energy was “forged by fire” when the Great Recession of 2008 pushed the automotive industry in her state to nearly collapse. She has promised to help create jobs that would sustainably employ American workers, invoking Biden’s presidential campaign tagline “Build Back Better.”
“The path to building back better starts with building and manufacturing and deploying those products here — stamping them, made in America,” Granholm said. “I know what those jobs will mean for both the planet and for those workers and families.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The first words from the ‘barrier-busting’ nominees for Biden’s climate team on Dec 21, 2020.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Note to readers: This week’s question was answered by Grist justice fellow Angely Mercado.
Q. Dear Umbra,
Politicians made a lot of environmental justice promises in 2020. How do we make sure they keep them?
— Biden’s Elected, Radicals Need to Increase Energy
A. Dear BERNIE,
During this past election cycle, many top politicians promised something akin to a complete overhaul of the country’s environmental and racial legacy. And, to some extent, it feels … achievable? The bar has been lowered so much due to these past few years of the Trump administration undermining and even burying climate research! I actually teared up hearing Biden reference “science” and “climate,” alongside not just a call to root out racism, but “systemic racism” in his victory speech.
But there’s a lot more to environmental justice than using the right lingo. Politicians, especially at the federal level, can talk a lot of game when it comes to progressive change and never carry through. As a nascent environmental justice reporter, I have to balance hope with wariness, asking who specifically will benefit from any proposed environmental policy.
For anyone who’s new here, let’s quickly go over how racial and environmental justice are connected. You can find elements of racism baked into any number of laws and institutions; redlining has resulted in lower rates of home ownership for both Black and brown communities, pushing them closer to pollution-filled industrial zones, freeways, and urban heat islands. According to Jacqueline Patterson, director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program, more than 70 percent of Black Americans “are living in counties in violation of federal air pollution standards.”
Not only are those communities of color more vulnerable to health risks such as COVID-19 (partially as a result of those conditions), they are disproportionately affected by environmental rollbacks such as the Trump administration’s relaxation of environmental enforcement during the pandemic.
Looking at these disparities head-on can be personally upsetting. A big part of my environmental justice education was understanding how racist policies have affected neighborhoods and people that I care about. I’m from New York, where many majority Black and Latino communities have more freeways and higher rates of pollution compared to whiter, more affluent neighborhoods. I know more people who have been hospitalized for asthma attacks than I can count — when I was in elementary school, a schoolmate died after a severe attack. I don’t remember what she looked like but I remember how her classmates turned the classroom door into a shrine for her, covered in flowers and cards where her friends could leave notes about how much they missed her. And my school wasn’t the only one with a shrine to a young asthma victim.
That is to say, BERNIE, I hear you. When I hear promises like the ones made by the incoming Biden-Harris administration to build clean energy to lower emissions and keep sustainable jobs in the country, I ask myself how it could benefit a lot of the working-class immigrant neighborhoods I grew up around. I think of the different people that these promises should focus on and I ask myself if there’s a risk of anyone falling through the cracks of the proposed policies.
And I have to ask myself if it’s even right to feel hopeful at all. Over the last few years, agencies that enforce environmental accountability, like the Environmental Protection Agency, have been defunded and gutted,and Obama-era protections have been rolled back to the detriment of poor communities and communities of color. I want to hold on to my optimism, but as a journalist, I know I need to be objective. If I don’t see policies that will improve the lives of all the bodega owners, nannies, cab drivers, delivery people, and servers in my neighborhood, I don’t consider them to be good policies.
I reached out to Sonal Jessel, the director of policy at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a New York City-based organization, and she backed up my half-hopeful, half-wary approach.
“Being cautiously optimistic is what helps you hold people accountable — if you think it’s totally not going to work then why would you even try?” she explained. “Something that I think is making a lot of people in our field feel hopeful is that [Biden’s] platform was informed by environmental justice organizations and communities.”
Jessel said that some of her excitement also came from hearing the kinds of conversations usually reserved for environmental justice circles show up in actual policy discussions. She credited this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests for newfound awareness of the environmental racism that Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color live with in this country.
I’ve seen other environmental advocates take a similar excited but guarded approach. A few days after the Associated Press officially called the presidential victory for Joe Biden, my colleague Yvette Carbrara and I spoke to a number of environmental justice leaders about their reactions. They were excited for the new administration, but wanted to temper their enthusiasm until they saw proof of change.
For example, Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator and current visiting professor at Bennington College in Vermont, told me that she wanted to see how proposed policies and laws will directly benefit frontline communities.“Every environmental enforcement case that is filed needs to be decided in a way that answers the fundamental question: What will this decision mean for the health and safety of people living in low-income communities and communities of color?” she said.
But you don’t need a crystal ball to start to answer that question. You can look closely at Biden’s choice of advisors. For example, he recently selected Xavier Becerra, the first Latino attorney general of California (who notably challenged the Trump administration healthcare, immigration, and rollbacks on environmental regulations) to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Environmental justice advocates have already been eyeing Biden’s picks for secretary of agriculture (who will oversee both the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the U.S. Forest Service) and the secretary of housing and urban development.
But accountability is not just a national issue. Rather than looking straight to the White House, you may find that the roots of many environmental injustices hit much closer to home. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: Some of your demands are more likely to be heard by a city councilperson than by the president.
You can also look for local stakeholders to help you with your desire for accountability. I suggest searching around your own neighborhood and looking up local racial/environmental justice organizations to help you create a map of the resources available to your community. If you can’t find any right away, look throughout your city, county, or state for organizations that may hold educational events, local press conferences, and online teach-ins about racial and environmental issues.
Christopher Casey, the director of voter engagement at WE ACT, emphasized that community groups have an existing infrastructure and network for setting up events, forums, and contacts for elected officials make it easier to get a response from politicians. “Many of these groups have their own coalitions … and these groups have platforms that allow you to reach more people and to engage more people, like through social media,” he said. “Become associated with any group that has an active online presence, particularly if that [presence] happened during the resistance [after Trump was elected in 2016].”
Once you’re in contact with those groups and have access to their networks, Jessel suggests holding public forums and using them to tell stories that humanize the issues. Advocates and politicians are all aware of statistics and laws behind an environmental issue, but a human story is what helps get the urgency across to voters and leaders alike.
Jessel recounted a story of a New Yorker who lived in public housing through the New York City Housing Authority, testified during a New York City Council meeting on the impact that decades of exposure to mold has had on her health and her kids’ health. “It was emotional for her. We saw that the chair of the public housing committee was very moved by what she said.”
Finally, you’ll want to keep an eye out for regressive legislation. Get familiar with the docket for your local legislators. What public hearings and proposed local council acts offer the opportunity to address structural racism? Which of your local politicians are actually showing up to those hearings and voting on those acts and pieces of legislation?
I know it’s been a very dark year, but one bright spot is how it’s demonstrated the power of effective storytelling and grassroots organizing. There’s enormous work left to be done towards environmental and racial justice, but this past year has shown that everyday people are invested in fighting for a more equitable society. The sustained protests against police brutality throughout this summer, the surge of support for frontline workers, and the efforts to keep at-risk people housed and fed during this pandemic are sources of hope.
Just know that you’re capable of rising to the occasion.
Watchfully,
Umbra
This post was originally published on Radio Free.