feminist tree hugger

Moss Point teacher’s Black History Month door went viral. Now she needs your help.

“Last week, Moss Point teacher Jovan Bradshaw posted a photo to Facebook that went viral. Now she’s using that momentum in hopes of raising money to teach her students more about Black History Month. …”

Planting trees is considered to be one of the strongest ways in which people are trying to combat climate change. Trees such up carbon dioxide and hold it in their wood, so planting a lot of them is bound to reduce total carbon emissions, right? What can be bad ebout planting trees?

Well… it’s complicated.

The benefits of tree-planting inititives

Nobody is going to argue with the idea that planting trees is ultimately a good thing. Especially due to the fact that we have chopped down 46% of the world’s forests from the time we started chopping til 2016, according to National Geographic.

Planting more trees takes excess carbon out of the air, increases clean air in the atmosphere, gives wild animals a place to live and call home, prevent species from being extinct, and if done right, increases biodiversity and ultimately benefits the world as a whole.

While planting trees is not by itself wrong, why would it be seen as a bad thing? Well, it depends a lot on the context of the tree plantings.

Trees as an excuse

A lot of people, but especially corperations and large companies, use tree planting as a way to wave away blame for other bad behavior. For instance, companies may refuse to reduce emissions, or even actively fight against emissions standards in law, while also trying to make themselves look more “green“ in the eyes of consumers.

in June of 2020, InsideClimate News released an article talking about the numerous pledges given by large oil companies to “reach net zero emissions.“ In this article, they mention:

“Most glaring is that none of the companies has committed to cut its oil and gas output over the next decade, the simplest and most reliable way—one might say the only way—to cut emissions, and a must if the world is to avoid dangerous warming. In fact, the stated net-zero “ambitions,” as the companies generally call them, do not require that greenhouse gas emissions fall to zero at all. They rely instead either partly or largely on capturing or canceling out these emissions with unproven technologies and reforestation at a questionable scale.“

Pumping pure carbon into the air, and then turning around and spending a few million on tree planting and carbon sequestration is not going to cut it. If we are going to reach real net zero emissions, we need to eliminate the oil and gas industries as a whole, literally uprooting them and making them obsolete. There is not enough land on this planet to plant a tree for every gallon of gas or pound of coal we burn.

You can learn a little bit more about this from this video from the YouTube channel Just Have a Think.

The misuse of forestry

Trees that are being planted make up only a small amount of the trees that are ripped out of the earth at an alarming rate. Often for little good reason. For one, wild fires are increasing around the world, destroying millions of acres of trees right then and there.

Hundreds of trees can exist per acre, which means that hundreds of millions of trees are lost to wildfires every year.

When it comes to the use of paper products in America alone, we use 7 trees per American per year. This equates to about 2 billion trees being used annually, often for paper products such as toilet paper and paper towels.

And this isn’t even getting into the slash and burn impacts of the Amazon by the president of Brazil. Nor does it count the hundreds of millions of trees chopped down specifically for European power grids.

According to Time Magazine in 2015, 15 billion trees are chopped down across the world annually. So in order for our tree planting behaviors to matter in the long term, we need to focus on reducing the number of trees that are cut down altogether. That includes focusing on recycling all of the paper currently in production, increasing the use of the bidet, using paper towels, and using more recycled and bamboo products when you can.

Planting trees is a good mindset, but there is more you can do

The last thing that we all want is for someone to think that planting trees is all that they have to do. While corperations are the ones mainly on the hook, you also should not become complacent just because you bought some carbon credits.

You should still:

* Vote for politicians that will fight for greener laws

* Write your representative and ask them to vote for greener laws

* Contact companies and request more eco friendly and sustainable packaging and goods.

* Reduce meat consumption

* Switch to renewable energy if you can

* Buy secondhand whenever possible

* Buying things sustainable, and closer to you if you can

* Reducing or eliminating flying if you can

* Using public transportation if able

We should not hold the weight of the world, but we should at the very least help to do our part.

***

If you like what I have written and want to help me out:

I run a small business as a solo craftsperson who focuses on eco-friendly and sustainable creations of goods. I use natural fabrics fished from the trash and other secondhand locations like thrift shops.

You can find my Etsy store HERE.

I also have a Mercari shop for cheaper clothes

Everyone deserves a livable wage, because there is no such thing as unskilled labor.

This is Eugene Ejike Obiora, he was strangled to death by a Norwegian police officer in 2006. The officer who killed him was acquitted, and has since been promoted to operation leader. 

In the police logs Obiora is always referred to by the n-word. 

Two of the policemen who were involved in the arrest had previously been reported for violence on 14 different occasions. The police officer who killed Obiora had been reported three times. 

The same officer was also involved in the arrest of Sophia Baidoo, a Ghanaian woman who worked as cleaner at a bank. She was arrested at her own workplace after a colleague had activated the safety alarm on her, refusing to believe that she was supposed to be cleaning there that night. She could prove that she worked there, and knew the codes to the security system, yet the police would not believe her. During the arrest, Baidoo was subjected to racist verbal abuse, and put in the same kind of chokehold that killed Obiora.

While lethal force is thankfully rare within the Norwegian police force, racism is still a massive problem. A recent study showed that among a group of 120 Norwegian teenagers, almost all of the young minority boys had at some point been subjected to racial profiling. These “random” stops are often deliberately made to be humiliating, with the police asking minorities how they are able to afford [expensive thing], or detaining them in public spaces (there was a recent episode from a McDonald’s where police lined up two minority boys—who were not accused of anything—and took pictures of them in front of the costumers). 

no one thinks it’s a racial issue against white people. that’s not why people say to stop that shit. it’s an issue of classism. because the truth is that the majority of y’all who think you’re amazing activists just REALLY fucking hate appalachian people, and i know that because y’all think it’s funny to say “karma’s a bitch!” when something bad happens to an appalachian state.

you don’t care about the poverty in the appalachia and you don’t care about queer people and/or people of color who live in the appalachia. you don’t care about education in the appalachia and you don’t care that these low rates of education mean higher rates of poverty and child poverty, which persist over the years. rural children are twice as likely to live in areas with persistent poverty. you care that poverty stricken children are statistically less likely to not have timely immunizations, have higher delinquency rates, and have lower academic achievement — but only when we’re talking about urban areas outside of the appalachia.

people in our region die earlier than most. mortality rates are higher in the appalachia, and they’re even higher for people of color that live in the appalachia. suicide rates are higher than anywhere else in the country by 17% — it’s 31% higher in central appalachia, and in rural areas within the appalachia, it’s 27% higher than metro appalachia. cancer morality rate is 10% higher, and it’s 15% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. COPD mortality rate is 27% higher, and 55% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. injury mortality rate is 33% higher, and it’s 47% higher in rural appalachia than in metro appalachia. stroke mortality rate is 14% higher — and you guessed it’s, these rates are higher in rural areas vs metro areas by 8%. the rate of Years of Potential Life Lost, which measures premmature mortality from all causes of death, is 25% higher in appalachia, and 40% higher in rural vs metro areas.

the appalachia has an opioid epidemic. in 2015, our rate of death with drugs was 65% higher than the national average. 69% of those drug deaths were from opioids. these deaths have a connection to our poverty and education rates. the poorer you are, and the less educated you are, the more likely you are to die from an opioid death.

when i say “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies”, that doesn’t mean i think you’re being racist against white people (and again — the majority of people who claim this also happen to be white 🙄). i say that because you are perpetuating extremely toxic rhetoric about our region, you are promoting stigma, you are encouraging blatant classism, and you are furthering the idea that we somehow “deserve” it because our elected officials vote republican. it’s not cute. stop acting like none of us have the right to call you out on your classist bullshit. like i’m sorry if this comes off as too aggressive but i am sooooo sick of y’all thinking it’s funny that our region is suffering.

and before anyone asks me for resources and links: google exists. i did my research and you can do it too.

EDIT: https://www.arc.gov/assets/research_reports/Health_Disparities_in_Appalachia_Trends_in_Appalachian_Health.pdf here, since y’all are too fucking obnoxiously incapable of taking 2.3 seconds google and instead want to claim I pulled random numbers from my asshole

people also act like it’s only appalachian and southern whites that voted for trump and that vote republican and it’s not true - half of all white women voted for trump. the rich ones and the poor ones. it’s not a problem that’s tied specifically to southern and appalachian white people but it’s an easy scapegoat and allows people to not think about what they’re actually saying.

I recognize that a lot of racists have a tendency to derail discussions about racism by screeching WHY DO WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT RACE JUST TREAT EVERYONE EQUALLY, and that as a result there may be no way for me to say this without setting people’s racism spidey-senses prickling. I don’t fault anybody for that reflexive flinch. But after a while it gets realllll hard not to be frustrated by takes that imply (intentionally or not) that shitting on poor people is only bad because poor people of color get caught in the crossfire. 

We should not have to justify concern about structural oppression.

Yes, it adds irony to injury that your performative wokeness harms the people you claim to be supporting. But even if it didn’t, it would still be wildly hypocritical, and inconsistent with the leftist political views you supposedly hold, and thus damaging to the credibility of your cause, and frankly? A dick move, because punching down is always a dick move.