Graphic by Trinity Kendrick ‘21
By Siona Ahuja ’24
Staff Writer
Over the past year, widespread connections between racism, poverty and environmental inequality have been made clear. The life and work of the following Black environmentalists acknowledge these connections and advocate for an inclusive climate movement while simultaneously protesting the racism in its roots.
Angelou Ezeilo
Angelou Ezeilo is the founder of the Greening Youth Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps underrepresented youth and young adults experience the environment and access careers in conservation.
Ezeilo studied public interest and environmental law at Spelman College before moving to New Jersey, where she worked on protecting farmland from major developments and keeping small farmers solvent. She was also the project manager for the Trust for Public Land, where she worked on various land acquisitions for preservation projects. Throughout her career, she was often the only Black woman present. From the experience, she formed a new goal: helping people from underrepresented communities find service opportunities. The Greening Youth Foundation incorporates Ezeilo’s goals in their work with land management agencies and guide people into conservation work.
Wangari Maathai
Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Hailing from Kenya, she completed her education in the United States and went on to teach veterinary anatomy at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. In 1976, as an active member of the National Council for Women in Kenya, Maathai developed a grassroots organization led by women groups that planted trees for environmental conservation and the improvement of her country’s quality of life.
Through the Green Belt Movement, she helped women plant more than 20 million trees in farms, schools and church compounds. Just a decade later, the movement widened to establish a Pan African Green Belt Network with successful initiatives in places like Tanzania, Malawi, Uganda, Ethiopia and other countries.
Maathai co-chaired the Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign, which seeks the cancellation of unpayable backlog debts from low-income African countries. Some of her other campaigns include advocating against land-grabbing and the indiscriminate allocation of forest lands. Maathai was named the Messenger of Peace in 2009 by the United Nations.
Sam Grant
Sam Grant is the executive director of MN350, a climate-driven nonprofit based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Grant spent his early life living across from a pollution-emitting plant in Pennsylvania. At the age of two, he was diagnosed with severe asthma. “I spent a lot of time in my young childhood under oxygen tents. It’s still impacting me today. So the environmental justice struggle is something that has impacted my life directly,” Grant said in a news release for MN350.
Grant continued his journey as an ardent advocate for the environment as an educator at Metropolitan State University, where he continues to train social justice facilitators. He also helped establish a self-sustaining, environmentally responsive village in Sierra Leone in collaboration with the Sierra Leone Foundation for New Democracy.
At MN350 and its political arm, MN350 Action, Grant is responsible for managing campaigns based in the Twin Cities, such as electrifying transportation lines and pressuring political candidates to enact climate-friendly policies. “Those politicians who oppose doing the right thing for the climate are relying on the tired strategy of dividing us in order to hold onto their power. But we won’t fall for it. We know we can do more when we act together. The climate justice movement requires all hands on deck,” Grant said in an article for MN350.
Kari Fulton
Kari Fulton is an award-winning advocate for environmental justice and climate action. She was recently appointed the frontline policy coordinator for Climate Justice Alliance, a non-governmental coalition of over 70 local rural and urban frontline communities and groups. Fulton co-founded the Loving Our City, Loving Ourselves campaign, a campus and community initiative to raise solidarity on issues in the Washington, D.C. area. She has been a core voice in the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, where she has trained hundreds of university students to participate in the environmental movement with a special focus on people of color studying at historically Black colleges and universities. “My hope was for people of color and low-income individuals to get information that will help them take advantage of the growing green movement so that they are not left behind economically or environmentally,” Fulton said on the New Leaders Initiative Program website.
Quentin James
Quentin James is the founder and president of The Collective, a political action committee dedicated to fixing the underrepresentation of the Black community in elected seats of power. His organization aims for political equity in the foreseeable future, with Black people holding at least 13 percent of all elected offices in the United States.
Previously, James was the Black Americans Director for the Ready for Hillary PAC. With the help of his outreach, the PAC managed to recruit 50,000 African American grassroots donors and over 3 million grassroots supporters. He formerly served as the national director of the Sierra Club’s Student Coalition, where he organized and trained hundreds of thousands of students to campaign for environmental justice causes, resulting in multiple tangible victories. James is also the founder of Inclusv, a hiring platform directed toward people of color. In 2018, he was named one of The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans.
Jacqueline Patterson
Jacqueline Patterson is the director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program. She helped the organization achieve its primary objectives of reducing harmful emissions, advancing clean and efficient energy use and strengthening community resilience. She has worked as a researcher and published several articles on the intersection of climate change and civil change.
Patterson has served as the co-founder and coordinator of Women of Color United and joined the U.S. Peace Corps as a volunteer in Jamaica. “We need to rethink how inclusive we’re being. It’s hard to be that voice, but it’s important to make people conscious and provide suggestions to have more inclusive conversations,” she said at the Environmental Justice is Racial Justice is Gender Justice event at the University of Pittsburgh.