Activists call for an end to environmental racism
Rally at Bushnell Park calls on state to ‘be a leader’ in solving crisis
Environmental activists decried environmental racism and called on the state government to take more meaningful action against climate change before a crowd of about 100 in Hartford’s Bushnell Park on Saturday afternoon.
Speaking from the park’s band shell, in front of signs that read “Fossil fuels make us sick” and “End environmental racism,” Angel Serrano, an organizer for the CT Citizen Action group, called on Connecticut to “be a leader when it comes to solving the climate crisis” and increase investments in solar and wind technologies.
“Climate change disproportionately affects low-income people, Black and brown and Indigenous people,” he told the crowd. “The health problems for polluted air alone should be enough for the governor to do something, but our residents are still suffering from asthma and other respiratory illnesses.”
Near the park, a few hundred people crowded the steps of the state Capitol, protesting mask mandates and COVID-19 vaccine requirements. For Leticia Colon de Mejias, the founder and CEO of Energy Efficiencies Solutions, an energy conservation company, the contrast between the two events was stark.
“I’m upset,” she said from the band shell. “I’m mad that there’s
a lot of people up the hill mad about masks and vaccines when at the end of the day, that’s a passing thing and climate change is going to kill us all. What is going on? Why are there not more people here fighting this fight? Why do we not have this place filled with humans who are concerned about their children and the future of the planet we live on?”
Alex Rodriguez, a climate advocate for Save the Sound, noted that two reports released in recent weeks have made clear the immediate, dire threat that climate change poses to the state and to the world. Earlier this month, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection reported that Connecticut is not on track to meet its own goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warned that intensifying global warming is essentially locked in over the next 30 years, driven by global fossil-fuel emissions.
“This state has an unhealthy relationship with the fossil fuel industry,” he said. “It’s unhealthy for us, but it’s great for them. We’re here to put a stop to that.”
The anti-environmental racism event included a two-hour lineup of speeches, poetry and music, including a performance by Nekita Waller, the state troubadour, who sang “Waiting On the World to Change.” A number of attendees denounced the Killingly
Energy Center, a controversial natural gas plant proposed in northeastern Connecticut.
Rhonda Watson Wishart, a member of the Windham-Willimantic chapter of the NAACP, emphasized that “we all deserve the right to breathe clean air.”
“Killingly, a place that is known for its clean air and its beauty and your ability to go and just breathe is being threatened for greed by a plant that we don’t need, something that is not necessary,” she said.
Talia Lanckton, 21 and Maren Westgard, 20, members of Wesleyan University’s chapter of the Sunrise Movement, had helped organize a group of more than a dozen Wesleyan students who attended the event.
“It’s always been a fight,” Westgard said of climate activism in Connecticut. “We just have to keep pushing. That’s why it’s so empowering to come to an event like this, to see we’re not alone, we’re all working on this together.”
In mellifluous remarks, Deacon Art Miler of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Simsbury, called on attendees to unite behind the “sacred goal” of protecting the Earth.
“I do believe this one thing,” he said. “If God were to reach His mighty hand or Her mighty voice to teach to every single one of us one last commandment, I believe that commandment would be: ‘Thou shalt not be a bystander.’ ”