A call to merge the climate and immigration movements
On Hurricane Katrina's 20th anniversary, a Louisiana native makes the case for solidarity.
Hurricane Katrina is widely remembered as the most expensive hurricane in U.S. history. But it was also the country’s largest-ever climate migration.
More than 1.5 million people were forced from their homes after Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, leaving 80 percent of New Orleans underwater and demolishing Mississippi’s coastline—and at least 40 percent were not able to return home.
Widely and controversially called “Katrina refugees” by the media, these displaced Americans faced widespread ostracism and discrimination as they attempted to enter new communities, similar to what international migrants face today.
As Katrina’s 20th anniversary approaches on August 29, Colette Pichon Battle—a generational native of southern Louisiana and co-founder of the climate justice group Taproot Earth—wants people to be reminded of the inseparable connection between climate justice and migrant rights.
”Millions of people will be, and already are, migrating because of climate impacts,” she said in a May speech reflecting on Katrina’s upcoming anniversary. “It’s not just hurricanes, it’s wildfires, it’s drought. It’s happening, it’s here, it’s time for us to work together.”
As the Trump administration decimates programs to allow people fleeing from disasters of all kinds to safely cross America’s borders, Pichon Battle argues that it’s essential for climate activists to join the fight against those policies.
Pichon Battle’s work today is “to make sure that Black folks and poor folks and Native folks are part of this climate movement.” But to do that in this political climate, she argues in an interview with HEATED, the entire climate movement needs to embrace a broader, borderless vision.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Emily Atkin: What would you say to people who believe that climate activism and immigration activism should be kept separate?
Colette Pichon Battle: I understand why people think that. We've been told that all of these things exist in silos.
But this is all connected by an economy rooted in extraction. Climate is not a topic, it’s a context. The rights of immigrants to move out of harm's way is connected to extreme weather, and extreme weather is connected to an economy fueled by the continued extraction of fossil fuels.
We've got to understand that fighting for one group or issue is not gonna win this. If you're on a particular issue, it's time for us to network and really figure out a strategy to move them all at one time. There's a saying down here from Fannie Lou Hamer, an activist from Mississippi, and it says: “Nobody’s free until everybody's free.”
EA: I’ve heard you say before that climate change is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the extractive system of capitalism, which has then led to manufactured migrant crises, et cetera.
CPB: Yes, and I think the problem is that there's been a professionalization of these issues, and now what we have is competition. We’re fighting for resources to be able to do this work.
But I think we should take this moment to be reminded of movements that have come before, where folks weren't getting paid to fight for their liberation, and they were having to do it anyway. This is when you see very interesting bedfellows come together, because they realize the same oppressor is holding all of them back.
This is where Martin Luther King became dangerous. He wasn't dangerous when he was organizing Black people. He was dangerous when he started organizing poor people of all races.
The danger to the system comes in when we all realize that there is a common oppressor at play. If we put our egos and fears to the side, and do a little bit of work, there's the ability for us to come together. Then the current system gets very nervous about what we can do.
EA: You’ve called for abolishing borders altogether. Can you explain how that’s a climate policy, and how that relates to Hurricane Katrina?
CPB: Katrina was one of the largest climate migrations in the U.S. ever seen. Folks were displaced to all 50 states and several countries.
As someone who worked in immigration law, I watched that whole process of people being displaced, the title of “refugee” being put on citizens, and recognized that the conversation around climate migration is broader than immigration into the United States. This is going to be about people having to move out of harm's way either for a short time, or for a long time. So we're going to have to figure out dignity in movement when it comes to people being able to move across borders.
Borders are political. This is a question around your human right to traverse a political border to get out of harm's way. When we talk about the movement of money, borders don't seem to be a problem. Dollars don't getting held up crossing the border, but people do. If there's a free flow of money, why can't there be a free-flow of people?
These are the kinds of philosophies and thought leadership that we're trying to put in play, and it's all part of a reparative approach to the climate reality. Because a lot of people are in a vulnerable situation, not of their own making, but because of a very long history of colonization, domination and extraction. They deserve their human right to migrate. They deserve their human right to remain in their home. They deserve the human right to return to their home. This is what we're asserting at Taproot.
EA: I imagine the idea of border abolition can be scary to some people, because they've never known a life without borders. Why push border abolition, versus maybe a more broadly palatable idea of just loosening border restrictions?
CPB: This gets to structural domination, right? This is the difference between people who believe in sort of reforming a policy, versus people who believe shifting a system.
EA: Like abolishing the police, versus “just make the police better.”
CPB: Right. And I am not saying there won't have to be steps to get to a certain vision. But I think the opportunity of this moment is to put out a vision for folks to move toward.
I think It's time for organizations and leaders to start putting big ideas out there. We are a visionless people. We are sort of floating around without a direction. And I think thinking about a place where people have human dignity, no political borders, freedom to move, and freedom to create and build the solutions that they want for a new climate reality is something that we have to put on the table.
Sure, it's scary. Change is scary. But really examine what your fears are. Why are you scared of borders being eliminated? Who do you think is coming to get you? What do you think they're coming to take, and why? This is rooted in some deep-seated learning that you need to maybe go unlearn. Your fear of me is not my problem. It is your responsibility to go and deal with.
What most of us, especially Americans, haven't had to really think about is: What’s going to happen when you need to get out of harm's way for a climate reality that you hadn't contemplated?
EA: I think a lot of people believe that, if they need to move due to a climate disaster, they will just do it legally within the limits of the current system, and they will be OK. And it's very obvious, especially from the Trump administration, that you can do everything right and still wind up getting thrown into Alligator Alcatraz.
CPB: Yeah, you could be a U.S. citizen and still get thrown in there.
EA: The other thing is, we already know what would happen if the status quo continues. Researchers have already mapped that out, and it’s also very scary. So I do understand the importance of an alternative vision. What does your vision for the future look like?
CPB: Taproot has put it in very simple terms. We envision a world where we can live, rest and thrive in the places that we love. That's a simple sentence in a very complicated reality. I live in a place where I love, but it's going to be lost to sea level rise, no matter what happens. There's nothing we can do to save the ancestral lands that I come from.
We could, right now, make the change at the American consumer level to literally shift the climate reality of the globe. We could collectivize and choose to have a vision of leadership that comes from the people, not necessarily from the people who choose to dominate.
We have more than enough for us all to thrive. This is a very wealthy, beautiful, well-resourced nation. No one needs to be houseless, and they certainly don't need to be criminalized for it. No one need to not have access to education, and they certainly don't need to go in debt for it.
The current economic system is only meant to benefit very few, and it's pushing us into a mentality of scarcity, when what we really live in is a world of abundance. From that world of abundance, we could envision so much. It's not one vision, I think it might be many. I’m looking forward to folks who will have the courage to put some beautiful visions out there.
EA: What is your organization doing for Katrina’s 20th anniversary? How can people who want to learn more support your work?
CPB: For the 20th year, what we're really focusing on is that we have survived and that we plan to fight. We want folks to understand that the storm did not take us out. The storm made us stronger, and we're still here.
On Katrina’s 19th anniversary, we launched the Katrina 20 Local Planning Committee. It has now over 300 local residents from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama who have all declared that they want to be in control of how the 20th year since that storm is commemorated.
It has been a long journey of folks meeting once a month for the last 12 months. There are now over 94 workshops, performances, activities, gatherings happening across three states over the course of seven days. They're calling it the Katrina 20 Week of Action. You can look at the all of the events that are happening at the Katrina20.org website.
Taproot Earth is also hosting the Monarch Forum at the Mahalia Jackson Theater in New Orleans on August 25 and August 26. We're really going to talk about climate migration, both the U.S. and the global context.
We would also ask folks to support the community-controlled fund, where the community makes collective decisions about how to distribute those dollars.
To top it off, we're also hosting an impact ride. We’re asking for folks to remember Katrina by walking, biking, running, or rolling seven miles, seven blocks, or seven minutes. We came up with that number because Katrina was 144 miles wide, and when you divide that by 20, you get 7.2. So we're asking folks to be in solidarity with us, and post on their social media that they remember, with the hashtag #WeAreTheStorm.
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"We've been told that all of these things exist in silos. But this is all connected by an economy rooted in extraction. Climate is not a topic, it’s a context."
I really like this conception of the inherent intersectionality of human rights advocacy. There's so much suffering in our world, and it's clear by now that not only is late-stage capitalism not fixing our societal ills, it's actively fueling them.
As always, it's easier to talk about cooperation than put it into practice, and there's a lot of work to be done. Still, initiatives like the ones outlined in the interview are part of the solution.
Brilliant. Many thanks for highlighting this critical movement and this amazing justice warrior.