Black History Month: Past, Present & Future (Leah Thomas)
Leah Thomas (? - Present)
‘I can’t breathe’: Climate activist Leah Thomas on how the pandemic, systemic racism and environmental racism are affecting Black communities. After coining the term “intersectional environmentalism,” Leah is building an inclusive climate movement.
After a police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, Thomas considered how her identity as a Black woman and her environmental science degree connected. “I was thinking about how my identity and my Blackness were so enmeshed in my studies even though it wasn’t often discussed. I feel like in a lot of my classes we would learn that a lot of environmental injustices have more harmful effects on Black and Brown communities, but then they’d brush over it and go back to talking about saving the salmon,” Leah shares. “I was so traumatized from everything that had happened, so I began thinking that this can’t be a coincidence and that the same systems of oppression are at play in both environmental and racial justice spheres.”
With help from friends, she founded the platform “Intersectional Environmentalist” to work towards both climate and racial justice without erasing the contributions and perspectives of minority groups.
Learn more about Leah below:
