Black Americans (and Faith Communities) Are Key to the Climate Movement

WHEN I WAS 8 years old, I fried an egg on the street. Well, I tried to fry an egg on the street. It had been a particularly brutal summer in Florida. On the days when the playground slides were too hot to go down, my mom would say, “It’s hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk!” I kept my eyes glued to that splattered yolk for two hours until a car tire brought the grand breakfast experiment to an end. Frying eggs on sidewalks was how I learned to conceptualize extreme heat.

When it comes to describing climate change urgency in Black communities, Heather McTeer Toney taps into something simple: streetlights. In Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America’s Urgent Call for Climate Solutions, she writes that when she was growing up, kids could play all day outdoors, but they had to be home “before the streetlights came on.” As twilight settled in and streetlights started to flicker, kids would call out, “Hurry up, we ain’t got all day!”

“Right now, that same call to action is carried in the waves of massive hurricanes, on the winds of devastating firestorms, and in the uncharacteristic heat of winter,” McTeer Toney writes. Using a familiar metaphor, she issues a call to action of her own.

Climate change and environmental justice is not foreign to McTeer Toney or the communities she writes about. At age 27, she was the first female and youngest person to serve as mayor of Greenville, Miss., where she was born and raised. As mayor, she brought the city out of debt and established sustainable infrastructure repair. For three years, she led the Environmental Protection Agency for the southeastern United States. While at the global nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, she addressed environmental policy and community organizing within and beyond the U.S. This spring, McTeer Toney became executive director of Beyond Petrochemicals, a campaign to stop the rapid expansion of petrochemical and plastic pollution, particularly in the Ohio River valley and along the Gulf Coast.

McTeer Toney and her family attend Oxford University United Methodist Church in Oxford, Miss. I spoke with her by phone about her work, her book, and the hope her faith demands. — Christina Colón

Christina Colón: Why is it important that Black Christians see themselves as central to the environmental movement in the United States?

Heather McTeer Toney: The Black faith community has been the electricity, the power behind any social justice movement. The Civil Rights Movement started in the church. Many of our civil rights leaders have “reverend” in front of their name because of this amazing, galvanizing power of Black people of faith to not only believe in freedom but to have the ability to work together and assure that freedom for everyone, including ourselves, and being completely dedicated to that through faith.

That is so much of what it means to be part of climate change [work] that it would be a little crazy not to include the faith community. The Civil Rights Movement was steeped in climate and the environment — everybody from Ella Baker to when Dr. King was assassinated. He was assassinated at a sanitation workers strike, [organizing around] the idea that Black people should not be treated as trash, that Black men have the right to be in a clean working environment. That’s how he died. There are some deep-seated connections between our history of civil rights and faith that we haven’t brought to the forefront yet for the climate movement.

Why do you think the mainstream environmental movement has been seen as mostly white and nonreligious?

Well, nobody has a copyright on Jesus. We have tended to give away our power to a more conservative space that has wrapped themselves in the Bible and the flag. We’ve just let it go, even though the very tenets of our faith are what move us to act. Growing up, I cannot remember a time of not thinking about scripture verses that incorporated positive descriptions of the environment (unless it was for something bad that we had done, and then the flood was thrown in). But when it comes to social and political movements, we tend to let the other side have that.

But it is coming to the forefront. I think about leaders with Green the Church, or Interfaith Power and Light, or the Harambee House in Savannah, Ga. There is no stronger advocacy than people’s faith and hope, which is what we desperately need right now when it comes to climate and the environment.

Your book has a memorable story about a white church in Atlanta that wants to plant a community garden at a Black church to teach that community about growing healthy food — something the Black congregants already knew how to do. Obtaining land and healthy soil was the true challenge. How should white churches concerned about environmental racism approach partnerships with Black churches and community leaders?

By deeply listening and spending time with and in these communities in a way that shows up authentically — not coming in with a savior complex to “save” the community, save the world, or push salvation. From a Christian perspective, the greatest commandment is to love. What does love say to do in these spaces? Does love say, “I’m going to put my hand with yours to together find out who owns the dilapidated properties you see, so that we can transfer land and property to the community, clean up the soil, get rid of some of these absentee landlords”?

That might not sound like something that is specifically environmentally connected. But when people have an opportunity to have space in their community, to clean the soil themselves, to identify the problems with the water, the land, and the air, and to be a part of the solution — that’s generational [change]. That’s not just going to plant a garden — that’s creating land and space and opportunity and connection. Those are the types of things that can happen when people genuinely sit down and listen and enter a space not to save everybody in the room, but to simply operate in love, which is what we’re commanded to do.

You include a 50-item “streetlight action plan” at the book’s end and key terms and action steps after each chapter. Why?

It’s important to constantly remind and define. Many times I’ve heard, “Is climate change something the Black community is connected to?” I thought, why not define and showcase where we are connected and, more important, give us something to do, because it’s critical that we act — that we not just read, that we not just talk about it, but that we do something. It’s the same sort of response as when the streetlights are coming on. It means it’s time to wrap up, get in the house with something to do. Creating a plan connects people with what they do when they put the book down, because that’s the important part.

Another action you encourage is voting. Why?

Voting is by far the most powerful way that we transform policy in this country. As a people who fought to be part of this democracy, it is like leaving money on the table if you don’t engage in this process. I don’t think we can say “vote” enough. It has to be passed down from generation to generation, reminding us that we have this duty, this obligation to vote. And not just for ourselves: We’re voting for generations of people who have gone before us who fought and died to vote, but also for our children who can’t vote — we’re voting for their interests. Throughout the book, I weave climate change into every social aspect that the Black community deals with. In each of those places, voting is critical — from voting rights and education to health care, police brutality, and food security.

You write that Black Americans are in their “Esther moment.” What does that mean?

[The biblical book of Esther] is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. This Jewish girl, who is absolutely at home in her own space, with her own community and her own people, is taken into another setting, where she’s able to assimilate. But when a time comes to save her people, she has to make a choice and a decision. The decision she makes is to identify with who she is, genuinely, with the understanding that whether she does anything or not, she’s still going to suffer the same fate. It resonates with me because Black folks have a lot of different social issues to deal with. As a Black environmentalist, I too grapple with issues of safety, of racism, of health disparities. But I’m in this space “for such a time as this” [Esther 4:14]. Regardless of whether I identify with those other social issues or not, I will still be impacted.

As a community, we are at a crossroads. We could say we don’t care about the climate, the environment. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to suffer the impacts of extreme heat. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to suffer the impacts of extreme weather changes. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be polluted more.

Or we can step up and talk about the solutions that have been in our communities and in our families, in the ways that we think and talk about the intersection of climate and the environment, of land and nature, of growth and safety to the benefit of the world — and we all survive together. Hopefully, that’s the place we’re moving to.

How has your own faith fed your spirit and moral imagination for the uphill battle that we’re facing on climate issues?

My faith says there is nothing under the sun that has not been seen. It says to speak in words of creation, in words of life. I know that God takes care of me and has done so even when I didn’t deserve it. How much more do I honor God by taking care of all that [God’s] given me charge over and at the same time speaking life into it?

I feel my charge is to speak life into this climate movement, to speak life into our children, to speak life into the existence of a healthy and clean environment that the Bible tells me exists. The book of Romans [8:22] speaks about how the earth groans, waiting for humanity to speak life into it. I believe that’s what we should be doing. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to speak life into it. We’re going to create this energy that says we can innovate, we can change, we can shift. I know we can.