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 goi… - Colette Pichon Battle

This is not about greenhouse gas reduction. This is about do we value people equally? And if we do, we’ve got some recalibrating to do, as a planet.

It’s hard, living in this country and even the response to disaster or harm is to go purchase something. You know? That’s — we don’t even know what we’re doing. We’re so unconscious — we just do it unconsciously. We’re so wealthy — just go buy it. Just go take it. It’s yours to take. It takes a lot of courage to examine that, right, because we would have to examine our comfort. We would have to examine the things we worked all our lives to get — the standards. We have really harmful standards that are harming the planet — our standards. We are — as a country, as a nation, as a people who love comfort and love what we love and love our freedom — we are at the tip of the blame knife. And we are causing a lot of harm, and we’re not paying attention. We’re thinking about climate impacts as something that’s harming those poor people over there because they’re poor, or because they have a bad leader, or, you know — but that’s not what’s happening. Our consumption is causing this problem.

We are not a people who are energized by hatred. I come from people who are energized by joy.