Sophia Benrud: “How Can We Change This? What Do We Need?”
Izzy Ryde
Sophia Benrud is a person of action. When we met over video during a busy April week, she explained her work for the future of Black lives and the overwhelming number of white people in climate justice, all while driving and organizing her house. She brings that same drive (pun intended) to the numerous environmental justice issues that she fights for, especially Black Visions and intersectional climate justice, within the Twin Cities.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement formed in 2012 in response to the murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida. After Martin’s murder, BLM founders Opal Tometti, Patrisse Cullors, and Alicia Garza wrote a letter on Facebook. The letter detailed their desire for a world where Black people can be independent, powerful, and safe from the threat of violence. BLM has since grown into a multifaceted, multinational movement to improve the lives of Black people. BLM projects include advocating for police oversight, stopping gentrification, and investing more in Black communities, among many other efforts. Fighting to improve Black lives may not seem like an environmental issue. But as David Pellow pointed out in his book What Is Critical Environmental Justice? part of the violence committed against Black people is ecological in nature. When Black bodies have a higher rate of health issues correlated with a higher number of hazardous waste sites in their communities than, in white communities, their lives become threatened by the environment they live in. When the lived environment of Black people is threatening their survival, it becomes clear that they need justice for the circumstances within their physical environment.
The connection between environmental justice and BLM is clear in the case of the Flint Michigan water crisis, as explained by Sophia. Since the closing of two large GM car factories in the 1980s, Flint has lost most of its white and wealthier residents as they fled the economically depressed city. Flint is now majority Black, majority low income, and so deeply in debt that the city has been under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager since 2014. The emergency manager decided to switch Flint’s water source from the pristine Lake Huron to the heavily polluted Flint River to save the city money in 2014. The water switch caused the perfect storm of environmental injustice. Not only did the polluted water corrode lead out of the pipes and pollute residential water, but this water switch targeted Flint’s predominantly Black and low-income communities. Flint’s emergency manager decided that saving money on water was more important than the health and lives of the people who lived there. In switching the water source and then lying about where the lead came from, the emergency manager decided that the environment and lives of the citizens of Flint did not matter.
Similar to BLM, thinking about climate justice requires thinking about whose lives matter, or do not matter, in the fight against climate change. Scientists agree that climate change is on course to make the Earth as we know it uninhabitable to humans. In order to continue living on this planet, the global community must get serious about reducing greenhouse gas and fossil fuel burning. The concept of climate justice takes the concept of stopping climate change further. Climate justice argues that climate change cannot be stopped if the fossil fuel based, corporate, exploitative economy that caused the vast majority of climate change is not dismantled. The global corporate economy has too often treated people as if their lives do not matter, outside of creating consumer goods. Climate justice also acknowledges that the people who are already hit hardest by climate change are groups that have done the least to cause it, including the poor, Indigenous groups, and people from the “Global South” (Africa, Asia, and Central and South America). These groups deserve special focus and support because they are the most threatened and also the least likely to have the power to stop climate change. In short, they deserve justice for the harm that climate change has caused their already suffering communities.
But the issue is most groups fighting climate change are not climate justice focused. Climate advocacy groups tend to be white spaces focusing on top-down policy-making, rather than considering equity and the issues people are facing in their daily lives. What good is it to create policies around limiting climate change when your community can’t escape health issues from breathing polluted air? Can you trust policy to protect the environment when laws governing the use of police force so often do not protect the lives of people of color? Even Black activists who are passionate about fighting climate change face barriers in the mainstream climate movement. Sophia yearns for “more stories being told from a different background about what climate justice is.” She is not alone. A Green 2.0 report evaluating diversity within large American environmental nonprofits found that nearly three-quarters of staffers are white. Only 15 percent of these organization’s leaders are people of color. In addition, nearly 40 percent of these organizations have no diversity plan. Not only are these “Big Green” organizations not diverse, but they have no plan or process to make their organizations represent the broader American population.3 The Minnesota situation is not much better. Sophia explained that even with 30 different climate “tables” in Minnesota, all the same people sit on those tables, because they are the only people who have time, energy, and resources to devote to the tables. She found the predominantly white and wealthy Minnesota climate tables lacking a racial equity lens in their work.
Sophia got started in formal environmental justice activism about three years ago after police murdered Philando Castile in Falcon Height, Minnesota and worked on shutting down line 3. To her, environmental justice is anything that gives justice to people in their environment, from not putting polluting industries in low-income neighborhoods to culturally specific schooling. Sophia has been active in Black liberation and environmental justice informally throughout her life. Two years after the Castile shooting, a group of former BLM Minneapolis members joined with others to create the Black Visions Collective (BLVC). Their name reflects the commitment to fighting for the safety and dignity of all Black lives. The ever-wise Sophia had a go-to explanation ready for people who didn’t see the intersection between Black Lives Matter and environmental justice. “Environmental justice is about an environment, and Black people have an environment. We have a life to live and needs that are or aren’t being met in our environments. Currently, there are a lot of needs for Black people that are not being met in our environments, and the statistics reflect that.” “Environmental justice is about an environment, and Black people have an environment. We have a life to live and needs that are or aren’t being met in our environments. Currently, there are a lot of needs for Black people that are not being met in our environments, and the statistics reflect that.”
Sophia’s current environmental justice work is based within BLVC. At the organization, she is one of seven core team members, and also a BLVC staff member. Sophia has “made a commitment to be in the BLVC until it is built and sustainable.” With BLVC, she supports direct actions such as shutting down the light rail during Super Bowl weekend to protest income inequality and gentrification in the Twin Cities. Gentrification is part of residents’ lived environment within a city. Fighting to make sure everyone can access appropriate housing, not just those who are white or wealthy, is thus a form of environmental justice. One piece of Sophia’s work is a Black, Indigenous, Persons of Color (BIPOC) climate justice study group to counter the white-dominated climate tables. The BIPOC EJ study group’s job in regards to climate change is to ask themselves, “How can we change this? What do we need?” The study group currently has more than 100 BIPOC members, working to form a new climate table that elevates the voices of all.
Along with amplifying diverse opinions, Sophia seeks to elevate diverse work. She wishes that more people would see their work as part of environmental justice. In her view, anything that improves the lived environment of marginalized people— through housing, political representation, or education, — contributes to the fight to protect the environment. She emphasized that environmental justice is “not just white people fighting for their camping grounds.” When I asked about what she would add to environmental justice that is not traditionally considered environmental justice, she mentioned housing justice work— an issue close at heart to many of her BLVC colleagues. Working so that everyone can have safe, affordable, and nonpolluting housing solves the problem of lead-contaminated housing while also allowing primarily low-income people of color to focus on higher-level needs than housing.
Beyond her formal involvement with BLVC and diversifying the field of climate justice, Sophia spends her time doing other community work that fits under her broad definition of environmental justice. She works as a postpartum doula and Certified Lactation Consultant. Her work as a doula brings her into contact with people in the community facing issues ranging from physical inaccessibility to postpartum depression. Sophia does work with the “Big Green” organization Sierra Club through the Summer Program, or Sprog Collective. I was curious about why she was collaborating with Big Green, but it made more sense after she explained it. The Sprog Collective is a week-long training through the Sierra Student Coalition for young people aged 17 to 28 to get involved in environmental activism and diversify the environmental field.
Sophia muses that her jobs outside of BLVC, including Sprog, “fuel her in a deep way.” One of her most exciting projects is the new venture Divine Natural Ancestry (DNA). She co-founded the Collective with friends and fellow Black queer activists Marcellina and Sarah to counter a food system that puts BIPOC communities “under food apartheid.” DNA is a community food justice organization that grows and donates vegetables to local community members. In addition, Sophia employs her professional culinary skills to cook fresh veggies grown at DNA and delivers them to people. In this way, Sophia can help her local community reach self-sufficiency, an issue she is passionate about. Of self-sufficiency, Sophia explains, “I don’t believe in individual self-sufficiency, but I do believe in community self-sufficiency and sustainability. I ask, ‘How can communities become self-sufficient and sustainable outside of the current system?’” In addition to fighting for environmental justice, her work is also fighting for her broad definition of self-sufficiency.
With all of this excellent and necessary work, it’s easy to wonder how Sophia handles it all. So I asked her how she avoids burnout. At BLVC meetings, Sophia makes space for herself and other BLVC members to “center ourselves and take care of ourselves.” Since its founding, BLVC has put a lot of work into making the organization into a transformative and healing justice space. She also extolled the importance of knowing your own body and needs, as well as being transparent and communicating that to others. Sophia sees a somatic practitioner once a month, whose work helps ground Sophia in her body when the rest of the world is overwhelming. She confessed that even though it has become something of a joke in the activist community, she actually does enjoy taking hot baths for self care.
My final question for Sophia was asking if she had any advice for aspiring environmental justice activists. She did not disappoint. For budding environmental justice activists of color, she enthusiastically invites them, “Come hang out with me!” She also encourages them to find an activist niche that they are passionate about and then find other folks of color who are doing that thing. She could not speak highly enough of the importance of getting connected with one person in the movement who could then connect budding activists to more and more people.
Sophia was surprisingly optimistic about the role of white activists in environmental justice, despite the racism and tokenization she has experienced from white environmentalists in the past. She recalled “some very beautiful, grounded white folks in this city [Minneapolis] that I trust to be a good guide to what is happening” with climate justice. She named dropped Climate Equity, a BIPOC-focused and led climate table, as a great resource for white activists to look at. Finally, she exhorted white people to be wary of how they move, both inside and outside of environmental justice spaces. Sophia spelled it out simply— “If your climate movement is not led by BIPOC, it’s not that great. If there’s no BIPOC in the room, it’s not that great. If there are BIPOC in the room but they are being ignored” — she paused for effect— “it’s not that great.”
As Sophia continues fighting the good fight for people of color and the environment, she continues to ask questions and interrogate who has power. Environmentalists would do well to work towards Sophia’s goal of “power built within to shift and really change the environmental conversation.” From speaking with Sophia, I began to see the importance of inclusion and using big, diverse strategies to solve a big, diverse challenge like climate change. As Sophia sees it, “Climate change is not the problem, it’s a symptom of us not taking care of people.” We should follow her lead and take care of people. We just might solve climate change in the process.
References
- Pellow, David N. What Is Critical Environmental Justice? Polity Press, 2018. WorldCat.org.
- Hanna-Attisha, Mona. What the Eyes Don’t See : A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City. One World trade paperback edition., One World, 2019. WorldCat.org.
- “The Unsustainable Whiteness of Green.” Grist, 20 June 2017, https://grist.org/feature/the-unsustainable-whiteness-of-green/.
- “About.” MidWestMixed, https://www.midwestmixed.com/about. Accessed 9 May 2019.
