Environmental Justice Organizing Initiative

The Environmental Justice Organizing Initiative (EnJOI) aims to build a movement for climate justice that is broad and ambitious, and rooted in a class, race, gender, and anti-colonial analysis. The following observations motivated the people who have come together to form EnJOI:

• Climate change is a growing, vitally urgent problem that isn't going away. Science tells us that the time we have left to take action to avoid devastating, catastrophic global warming that could eliminate most life on the planet is very short. The change required in Canada, for example, is reducing carbon emissions by 94% per capita. This means a radical restructuring of our economy, transportation, food production, urban infrastructure, and how we live, work, and play.
• The impacts of climate change and the fossil fuel and energy production cycles are very uneven, with Indigenous people, people of colour, poor and working class people, women, youth, and the global South disproportionately affected, yet receiving much less of the benefit from the fossil fuel economy. As climate change accelerates, disproportionately affected communities face intensified crises like famine, droughts, flooding, heat waves and violent storms, mass migration, and resource wars.
• The "mainstream" environmental organizations are heavily middle and upper class and white in character, with almost no power analysis in their framing of the issues or their style of organizing, which favours policy, media, and lobbying work, as opposed to community organizing.
• If the systemic change that is needed is going to take place, it has to be led by the people most affected by climate change and the fossil fuel and energy economies, who are also the people most excluded from the benefits of this economy. Many proposed "solutions" to climate change unfairly penalize Indigenous peoples and the poor. Those most affected need to have an equal say in designing the solutions, which have to include equal access to energy and conservation, and the right to a clean and healthy living environment. Only when they have been brought into the leadership of the environmental movement in a position of equality will a real historical movement be possible.

The first job of EnJOI is to facilitate and foster this participation through a series of five five-day educationals across Canada. There will be trainings in BC, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba, and a four day training for grassroots Indigenous activists from the seven Indigenous communities in the tar sands impact zone in northern Alberta. . The five educationals will be followed up by a national gathering for evaluation and planning for action in the next year. Already underway is an Indigenous-led campaign to stop the tar sands, developed by one of EnJOI's organizers, Clayton Thomas Muller. We hope that further campaigns develop out of the educationals.