Fort Worth Climate Strike

Nov 20

Nov 20 Fort Worth Climate Strike

Howdy, Scouts! I’ve been in touch with community leaders across Texas to bring you an interview series! This week we’re kicking off with an interview with John MacFarlane from the Global Climate Strike - Fort Worth. This is a grassroots group in Fort Worth, Texas that organizes climate strikes in the city. The group is currently working to join forces with 350.org, so watch their facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/globalclimatestrikefortworth/ for the latest updates and to watch the group grow!

This group has organized a strike that will take place on Friday, November 29 in Trinity Park. Invite your friends, fuel up with leftover dressing, and head out to strike for what you believe in!

The group’s first climate strike was on September 20th of this year so Fort Worthians could participate in the Global Climate Strike. Roughly 225 people attended to march peacefully at City Hall, and joined their voices with the 7.6 MILLION people striking around the globe. Considering that Fort Worth is a conservative city, John considers this to be an amazing turnout for their first event! Perhaps not surprisingly, most attendees were young white students, aged roughly 18-30. Granted, the September 20th Global Climate Strike is a student-led initiative. I asked John if there’s a particular demographic who they’ve struggled to gain traction with, and he expressed that he’d most like to connect with the Latinx and African American communities in Fort Worth. “We know that climate change affects low-income and minority people the most, and disproportionately… We want to get people of color involved because we believe in environmental justice. That’s what’s missing from this, I think, and what we’re trying to fix.”

Climate justice is an important topic that we haven’t yet covered at Troop7B, and I’m so glad John brought it center-stage. Climate justice is a term that reframes the climate change discussion as an ethical issue regarding social inequalities. Study after study shows that climate change affects people with low socioeconomic status the fastest and hardest. Poorer neighborhoods tend to have fewer trees and more concrete, which increases temperatures. Couple this with the fact that these same communities tend to have less access to affordable healthcare, and it’s not difficult to see how climate change is also a problem of social inequality. This is why John, and many other climate activists, are reaching out to minority and low socioeconomic communities to join the fight for climate justice.

The two main goals of the strike are educating the public about the realities of climate change and gathering people to sign petitions to local and state government. Fort Worth has installed solar panels on some city buildings and even has a few LEED-certified buildings, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. John’s dream measures for mayor Betsy Price and city council to implement look a little something like this:

Buy all of Fort Worth’s electricity from renewable sources instead of fossil fuel-burning power plants
Change building codes to require that all new construction in Fort Worth is LEED-certified
Transition the city’s fleet of thousands of cars and trucks to electric vehicles and install charging stations around town
Create stricter regulation of water use by citizens

His elevator pitch is a little more modest and offers a pragmatic starting point: hire a Director of Sustainability for the city. Other major Texas cities like Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston all have city climate or sustainability plans, and it’s time for Fort Worth to get with the program. At a minimum, John would like to see us follow suit and open an Office of Sustainability to “lead, align, and unify all the city departments.” The group will be attending future city council meetings and using their speaking time to discuss this need.

Fort Worth has a long history of being tied to the energy sector through oil and gas. This sometimes makes it difficult to get Fort Worthians on board with greener energy. I personally don’t like to talk about climate change in terms of “believing” it or not, because it’s a scientific fact that our climate is changing due to human activity, and facts are fundamentally not matters of belief. That being said, there are many people in Fort Worth (and throughout the country), who just don’t believe in climate change. John says that he tries to educate these people when he comes across them, and sticks to a human-level style of argumentation rather than diving into too many facts and figures. (If you want to make a game-plan for addressing climate deniers, check out this article on spotting bad science). Sometimes you’re just not going to be able to convince someone that climate change is happening unless they see it with their own eyes, and it’s hard to point to a dramatic display in Fort Worth, Texas. But you never know what impact you’ll have on changing someone’s mind, so John and I both encourage you to continue educating those around you, kindly.

To join in and speak out against climate change, join the protest on Friday the 29th. All details for the event can be found in the Facebook page at the top of this article. Happy striking, Scouts!

To read more about climate justice, check out these links.