there are bad people in this world, but mostly, there are just people who don’t know. - Colette Pichon Battle

TV didn’t show the places around New Orleans. So driving across the bridge on Lake Pontchartrain, you have to go through a swamp, and everything that was so green all of my life was brown and stinky. And it was just death. I’d never smelled death like that. Everything died. The salt water intrusion killed all the vegetation in the swamp that you have to drive through.

Here in the Gulf South, we know climate disaster. Hurricane Katrina changed my life. I moved back home, to Slidell, Louisiana, in 2006. I realized my community needed lawyers-someone to read all the papers a disaster creates. They were being asked, in the middle of trauma, to sign away their rights. I'm only the third lawyer to come from my community. So I read the papers, and I decided to stay.

We must reframe our understanding of the problem. Climate change is not the problem; climate change is the most horrible symptom of an economic system that has been built for a few to extract every precious value out of this planet and its people. To survive this next phase of our human existence, we will need to restructure our social and economic systems to develop our collective resilience. We must transform from a disposable, individual society into one that sees our collective long-term humanity, or else we will not make it. We must acknowledge that the only way you're going to survive is for us to figure out how to reach a shared liberation together.