Kim Stoner is a member of the Yearly Meeting Earthcare Ministry Committee. She wrote the following letter to that committee while they were writing the Call to Action that they brought to Annual Sessions in August 2020.
In order to make progress with peace, racial justice, environmental justice, and the climate crisis, we need to get to the intertwined roots of these problems. The roots run deep in our minds and hearts, and in the communities and culture in which we live. One of those roots is the belief that certain groups of people, determined by race or nationality or religion or income, have the right to hoard wealth and resources at the expense of the health, safety, and even the survival of all the others. This root goes back thousands of years—it was denounced by the Hebrew prophets and by Jesus in their own times—but it still lives in us today. It runs very deep and strong in American culture.
The first step in changing it is to acknowledge it. As James Baldwin said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." As Quakers in New England are mostly white Americans, we need to acknowledge that we have benefitted from the power exerted by the American military over the people and resources, first of the Native Americans and the enslaved African Americans, and then of much of the rest of the world, and that American power came through tremendous violence and threats of even greater violence exemplified today by our arsenal of nuclear weapons.
We need to acknowledge that our relatively comfortable lives as Americans have come, in large part, from our control of material resources including fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and gas have literally fueled our economic growth for over 100 years. We have done enormous damage in order to keep that fuel supply going—oil spills in the oceans of the world and the Niger delta of Nigeria, refineries in the poor communities of Cancer Alley [an area of industrial plants along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans], strip-mining and removal of mountaintops to mine coal, and wars in the Middle East. We know—and have known for nearly 40 years now—that we have also damaged the atmosphere to the point where large areas of the planet are becoming unlivable due to heat, drought, sea-level rise, wildfires, storms, and other disasters. We need to face that a large portion of this responsibility is ours, as Americans. We need to change not only the resources we use in our personal lives, but the structures in our society and the denial of responsibility in our hearts that have let us remain comfortable and resistant to change for so very long.
Peace and Light,
Kim Stoner, New Haven Meeting (and clerk of CT Valley Quarterly Meeting)