I work at the community level to make sure that Black folks and poor folks and Native folks are part of this climate movement. - Colette Pichon Battle

The real moment of noticing that change was Katrina...our vye, our old people...the first words out of their mouths were, the water has never been this high...And that is when I started learning about the loss of our barrier islands due to oil and gas drilling.

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.

Without fundamental economic rebalancing in response to historic harm, the rights and dignity of black southerners will forever be unrealized. That's why the GND must be understood as a program of reparations for black people, including through land reform. Gulf South for a Green New Deal calls for the codification of the standards for reparations provided in the Vision for Black Lives platform, and we understand the need to draw connections between reparations in the US and climate reparations around the globe.