Whatever Happens, We’ll Still Be Here.

This is a momentous day for our country, our communities, and the climate. What’s at stake is everything we love, and so we’ve given everything we’ve got. But, like everyone who cares about the climate, I’ll be back on the front lines tomorrow, no matter who wins today. Of course, the outcome will influence the conditions for our movement and the strategies we deploy. But our work to address climate change has always been about protecting the people and homelands that we love. It’s never been about just one election, no matter how consequential.

Come what may, something has shifted. Whether the Democratic Party is in power or in opposition, it has heard our movement in this election cycle as never before — and this has created new space for us. I realized this at the Democratic National Convention in August when I heard Kamala Harris declare, as a fundamental right, “the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.”

This is the message that I and so many other frontline activists have been promoting for years. Our message of love and hope for our communities — that access to a clean environment is a basic human right — had just been shouted from one of the largest, most historic political stages of our time.

Sitting on the convention floor as a delegate, I felt that I was representing not only Tennessee, and I felt heard. The Democratic Party’s candidate was reinforcing our message that fighting global warming must be rooted in a grassroots battle for a clean environment, that what’s good for air and water and lungs is also good for our planet and our future. And fighting for these shared resources and shared future can bring people together rather than drive them apart.

As Vice President Harris spoke, I thought about my Black working-class community in Memphis standing up against the construction of the Byhalia pipeline. We were not fighting for some high and lofty climate ideal. Our cancer rate was already four times the national average, and we were demanding our right to breathe clean air and remain on our ancestral land. But Byhalia also threatened the water table for the entire Memphis Sand Aquifer, a truth that enabled us to forge a diverse coalition. Black and white, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, we understood our destinies were connected. We mobilized to stop the pipeline and we won, striking a blow not only for clean water and land ownership rights but also against global warming. This brought ordinary folk into the climate movement.

Also at the convention, representing her home state of Nebraska, was another frontline defender from our environmental justice movement: Jane Kleeb, one of the key organizers of the “Cowboy and Indian Alliance” that defeated the Keystone XL pipeline. Jane is a white woman from the Midwest, and I am a Black man from the South. We may not look like the archetypical environmentalists — she with her cowboy boots and I with my Afro — but we are climate activists to the core. We represent an unlikely national alliance that spans race, class, and region.

Jane and I have fought side by side with others in our movement against Line 3 in the forests of northern Minnesota, against the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia, against the build-out of LNG terminals along the Gulf of Mexico, and against the laying of CO2 pipelines across the Midwest. And, as with my trajectory, it was Jane’s pipeline fighting that paved the way for her political rise — in her case, all the way to the state chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party. It was Jane who inspired me to get involved in the Democratic Party and to attend the election as a convention delegate. Jane and I will always be grassroots environmental activists, but we are finding our power in a national political party that is pivoting toward the community-driven and people-centered strategies we have found to be effective. We are living proof that frontline movements like ours are growing in strength, range, power, and influence every day.

Representative Justin J. Pearson and Jane Kleeb embrace at the Democratic National Committee in Chicago. (Credit: Jane Kleeb)

The people from the front lines might not always speak the language of climate change. But that doesn’t matter if, through their determination to protect their fundamental freedoms to clean air and water and land, they are stopping the fossil fuel industries that want to expand their operations into our communities when the climate science is so clear that we need to be winding them down.

In this election campaign, I felt I was witnessing a crucial pivot in public discourse. Now, when we measure progress in our battle to cut fossil fuel emissions in half by 2030 to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, we can talk not just about greenhouse gases and parts per million but also about people and communities, their rights, and their well-being. And I believe the mainstream will then finally understand.

Healing our nation by healing our natural environment is not some mystical political proposition. Rather, it is a recognition of what is fundamental to our earthly experience: clean land, water, and air. And it is an alignment of the fundamental desires we all share — love of family and concern for our children’s futures. These basic truths provide the road map of what we will continue to work to achieve, to heal the divides, traverse rural and urban lines, and rise above “red” and “blue” political ideologies on the wings of shared vision and values. As Americans, these fundamental freedoms unite us, and when we unite to heal the natural resources that we all share, we heal our democracy, too. And this is the work that continues, regardless of who wins.

Onward!