Colette Pichon Battle Quotes

our coastal location and low-lying land also makes the Gulf South ground zero for this nation's climate disasters.

Love leads to joy...The joy comes from love. To combat this thing, to combat the oil industry’s fear of losing profit, I have got to help to bring joy of the community’s love of everything that they are.

I think that’s the part that scares me the most. We’re losing generations of people who know the anatomy of these things. And we’re getting new people into our space who have no clue what a hurricane is, and the hurricanes that we know to describe are not the ones we’re facing now.

now the land is perpetually saturated, because the water is rising, the water table is rising, the lake is rising

the FEMA regulations aren't meant for the most vulnerable communities. The disaster process of this country are meant for the middle class...it sounds strange, right?...except the truth of it is that all of the laws in this country are meant for the middle class at best. There is a large swath of people who are never included.

Climate gentrification often happens in the aftermath of vlimate disaster...Rather than seeing displacement and migration as an opportunity for private sector profiteering, what if we saw it as an opportunity to rebuild a social infrastructure, rooted in justice and fairness? We could actually put money into schools and public hospitals and help these institutions prepare for what is to come through climate migration, including the trauma that comes with loss and relocation. We could combat climate gentrification by affirmatively furthering fair, affordable, and equitable housing linked to reliable public transportation. We could protect homeownership by providing material resources to families-especially in communities of color and among others who are vulnerable-for elevating and flood-proofing homes.

I don’t have this law degree for nothing. And the laws as they are written right now are not meant for me, and they’re not meant for my community, and they’re not meant to help people, and they’re not meant to save people, and they’re not meant to do those things with the utmost humanity and dignity. They are meant to preserve a middle-class tax base, period, almost every law that we have. How does this affect the taxpayer? is the analysis that is used.

there are all of these researchers who were looking at South Louisiana before Katrina, many people concerned about sea level rise and all of these things for a very long time, but it wasn’t common knowledge. It wasn’t information brought to the communities. The universities knew it, but the communities didn’t know.

Climate gentrification that happens in anticipation of sea-level rise is what we're seeing in places like Miami, where communities that were kept from the waterfront are now being priced out of the high ground, where they were placed originally, as people move away from the Coasts. And climate migration is just one small part, but it's going to have ripple effects in both coastal cities and cities in the interior.

The ocean commons belong to us all. A Blue New Deal must end attempts to industrialize the ocean through factory fish farms and large-scale aquaculture.

the structures and the laws of our country do not work for the least of us. In fact, they create and marginalize people. They create vulnerability, and then we blame people for that vulnerability by saying something about their own individual acts. What we witnessed in Katrina was not a series of poor choices by individuals. We witnessed the breakdown of a system, or: we witnessed a system working the way it was designed to work.

it was a moment for me that I understood, well, I have a purpose here. We’ve got to change these laws. We’ve got to change the society. It is the structures that we are living in that is the problem. I am not talking about you liking me, or me liking you, anymore. We’re now going to talk about, does this work for the least of us, which goes back to that very Catholic upbringing...That’s what I learned. That’s who we’re supposed to care about. That’s who we’re supposed to take the time to make things work for.

people ask me all the time, if you know your land is going to go, why are you still fighting?...I don’t know what they’re expecting, you know? We going down swinging if we going.

Our firsthand experiences in the Gulf South-Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida-affirm the call of scientists to rapidly address climate change and make frontline communities more resilient in the process.

a constant reality of Gulf South life that may be invisible to many outsiders is the centrality of the military to our economy and culture. We must honor the historic significance of the military in Gulf South communities while transitioning investment away from the military and toward job creation in regenerative local economies.