The fossil fuel divestment movement has been building
momentum for years. The dialogue and narrative regarding the necessity of
divestment has largely focused on the numbers: how many parts per million of
CO2 can be released into the atmosphere? What quantity of coal, oil and gas do
companies have in their reserves? And how many degrees can the planet warm
before human society collapses and the planet experiences mass species
extinction?
Though the movement has emphasized, and provided strong
answers to these questions backed by hundreds of climate scientists, fossil
fuel divestment didn’t start with the numbers or the science. And it won’t end
there, either.
In 2014, Tim DeChristopher visited UVM and spoke about the
climate crisis and the challenges we face as a movement working towards a just
and sustainable future. I was in the audience of a filled lecture hall at the
University of Vermont, and DeChristopher hailed the LGBTQA-rights movement’s
strength at making their movement fun, about making it solutionary and
accepting and intersectional. And though sectors of the LGBTQA movement have
some work to do regarding anti-trans and racist violence within the queer
community, I do think DeChristopher had a point: the climate justice movement,
as it stands, is not the all-encompassing, broad, intersectional and accessible
movement that will bring transformative and liberating social change. Rather,
the environmental movement must adopt the values, goals, and principles of a
movement centered on climate justice, and highlight not only environmental
degradation and the extractive oil economy, but the extractive human economy;
the economy that is built and sustained on the oppression and domination of
poor and working class people, queer people, people of color, transgender
people, differently abled people, and indigenous people.
It is in this vein that Student Climate Culture, a UVM
student group running UVM’s divestment campaign, is reframing and refocusing
our messaging and our goals. In conjunction with divestment campaigns across
the country, UVM students are not only demanding that our university cease its
investments in the fossil fuel industry; rather, we demand the money currently
invested in fossil fuels be re-invested in the liberated future we seek: one
that does not tolerate police brutality and the imprisonment of people of color
in the new Jim Crow; one that does not tolerate the subjugation and servitude
of the working class for the good of the 1%; one that abhors the violence and
brutality queer and transgender people face; and one that survives with
ecologically sound and sustainable principles, refutes US imperialism and
capitalism, and values local, democratically controlled and participatory
communities over corporate and US hegemony, domestically and globally.
Student Climate Culture as an organization has much work to
do to truly live out the values of collective liberation, anti-racism,
anti-sexism and anti-ableism. We see reinvestment
as a step towards aligning our actions with our words, and are prepared to
engage in the work of building allyship and solidarity, as well as education
within our organization, with the vision of building the comprehensive,
intersectional and just movement necessary for change.
We invite all interested and passionate people to join us on
Friday, February 6th, 2015 to pressure the UVM Board of Trustees to
commit to Fossil Fuel Divestment and Just Reinvestment, at 11:30 am in the UVM
Davis Center.
