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The environmental movement will never save the planet unless it actively focusses its ire clearly on those who are most to blame for the crisis - the powerful.
There is no such thing as neutrality. If you are neutral in situations of oppression, you have chosen to side with the powerful. Desmond Tutu's mantra is a key tenet of my recently adopted trade - journalism. It is often uttered by activists in movements against injustice - a cry of those attempting to shake people out of passivity. In the world I live in at least, it has become a platitude.
Like all platitudes, it's easy to ignore. But to do so is risky. Whether it's class or gender or race or sexuality or disability or nationality or religion or age, our civilization is built on pyramids of oppression. If politics is the art of living together, then any conversation about politics, including environmental politics, is in part a conversation about people of unequal power living together, and so a conversation about injustice.
This doesn't mean that the injustice is always mentioned. Just as you can talk about the weather without referring to the climate, it's possible to discuss politics without talking about power. When detailing the intricacies of a technical issue, it's often easy to lay to one side the various pertinent inequalities. In individual conversations this can be fine. You can't be expected to always mention everything about an issue all at once.
But as rain becomes rivers, conversations become narratives. And as rivers shape the land, narratives shape our politics. If a national political conversation takes place without discussing power, then we are being silent in the face of injustice. We are siding with the powerful. For most of the environmental movement, the main influence we have is our contribution to the flow of public debate, so how we use it has to matter.
Talking about power in general isn't sufficient either. Because power is complex. Injustices are manifold. There is a word, coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw which explains this: 'intersectionality'. "My feminism will be intersectional" Flavia Dzodan famously wrote "or it will be bullshit". The point is that if you seek to attack one power structure but do so by...