Originally published by Yes! magazine
You don’t have to leave America to go to the Third World. I, for example, live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and here, as in all northern megacities, crushing poverty surrounds the comfortable precincts. I can’t call it “extreme” poverty, for of course it cannot compete with the despair endemic to, say, the north African drought zones. But when an organization like Remote Area Medical feels compelled to bring its traveling free clinic to The Oakland Coliseum (now, officially, the Oracle Arena), and when thousands stand for long hours to receive basic care they could not hope to afford, the problem is nonetheless clear. This last April, when the good folks at RAM pulled up stakes and left Oakland for their next stop, it was Haiti. The America they were leaving was not the “exceptional” America of the official dream.
Obviously, there’s lots to say about this. And much from which to avert our eyes. But what else is new? The apologists say that the poor will be with us always, so how is poverty in Oakland California in any way “news?” Or poverty more generally, given the now routine brutalities of the new economy? Or insecurity and suffering more generally still, given the precarious state of the whole global system? And what, finally, has any of this got to do with climate? The answer, simply put, is “everything.” Which is to say that while most economic-justice activists don’t spend much time thinking about the climate crisis, it’s become ridiculously easy to argue that the deficit / budget / tax battle that’s now raging across the wealthy lands of America and Europe is going to have outsized impacts on climate politics both domestic and international. That in fact it already has.
