Climate justice is a relevant issue to be featured at Focus the Nation

Dear Ron Assa,

The ideas were indeed relevant to the audience (unless you lived in a bio-dome, in which case this issue probably would not affect you), and to solutions regarding climate justice.

Here’s a breakdown of the ones addressing the issue of climate justice: (1) U.S. areas were shown where people will be affected the most, interestingly enough these are the areas where mostly minority groups can be found and that (2) environmentalism can be found in African American literature, breaking the myth that environmentalism does not pertain to minority groups.

Here are some solutions the speakers came up with on how to approach climate justice: (1) Van Jones’ proposal to solve the pollution of our environment and our economy, and the idea to (2) create all-inclusive decision-making groups.

The tides are changing now, and we need to re-evalute the way we do things, and one of them is to include the people who will be affected, either positively or negatively, whenever we are addressing any issue in order to create a fair and just society. This is basically what the main message was from the presentation.

For example, if you want to solve the world’s poverty and hunger, you might want to talk to the farmers in developing countries about ways to fix this, don’t just assume that draught-tolerant, Roundup Ready GMOs will fix everything; there are a lot of terrible consequences that these little babies bring along.

Hope this helps.

Jorge Montezuma

environmental engineering senior