Climate Change and Me

What is your relationship with climate change? To me, it triggers my eco-anxiety. Today I won't talk about this stressful mindset. Rather, I'll explain what lead me to it. As a young writer navigating through globalization, this is my relationship with the current environmental crisis.

As a European citizen born in 2000, I grew up in the recycling culture. I remember, as a kid, it became mandatory in my hometown to separate garbage by its composition. At home, my parents got five different buckets where we would classify our trash. The yellow one was for plastic, blue was for cartons, in the brown we threw all the organics, in the green one glass… but the grey one was a little bit different than the rest. Entitled to ‘rejection’ –rebuig in Catalan– in that bucket we would throw all the non-recyclable stuff like cigarette butts, period pads, dusting, or hairs.

During this recycling campaign, Catalonia's government broadcasted to the public TV techniques to recycle plastic, glass, carton, and organic trash. But nobody was speaking about the ‘rejection’ bucket. It seemed that what the grey pails contained, was something to be hidden, forgotten. The non-recyclable trash was something we could simply throw away and never think about again. But, if in there we threw the non-recyclable items, where did they end up going?

Later on, my family and I moved to Mexico City. The recycling culture was also there, but in Mexico’s particular way: two to three people would balance to stand at the back garbage trucks, separating at the same moment all trash they recollected. What happened to that trash after its recollection, was also a mystery.

Our first flat was in a neighborhood called Santa Fe, built on top of what used to be Mexico City’s largest trash landfill. Garbage pits are useful as building soils because they absorb the impact of earthquakes and so, prevent infrastructural damage. From our 13th-floor apartment, we could see some chimneys next to Parque La Mexicana, apparently there for the trash to ‘breathe’.

Santa Fe is a Colonia that was built with cars in mind, so walking is barely an option. For a part of the population, this rich and full of skyscrapers neighborhood is an expression of modernism, progression, and growth. For others, it is a poorly planned burgeois space that reflects Mexican class differences.

We arrived there when I was twelve, and never before I had been in touch with colonialism as a subject of study at school, or as a matter of discussion in a social gathering. I learned about Spain’s colonial invasion of México only while I was living in there, as this topic took a big part of the conversation during history classes. Like my teacher would, some of my classmates made comments about my Spanish origin, intended as jokes. And this didn’t offend me at all, on the contrary. It made me interested in studying colonialism and understanding today’s sequelaes of it. Especially after I moved back to Barcelona at seventeen years old.

When getting deep into topics like feminism or colonialism, the word intersection comes often to the table. This concept, coined by jurist Kimberlé Crenshaw, explains how, for example​, racism and sexism interact creating multiple levels of social injustice, meaning double discrimination. With this in mind, I started studying social and anthropological issues of climate change. I began to question whether environmental issues could be added to intersectionality. And indeed, they can. Understanding ecological issues involves understanding natural and social sciences together.

To illustrate that example, let's look at cross-continental ex-pat flights. I lived in Mexico for six years and visited Barcelona at least, twice a year. Even though my mum would even reach up to four travels, due to medical matters. That meant that, at least, my family and I were consuming around 20 flights per year. According to the online footprint calculator co2.myclimate.org, all México-Barcelona travels in one year for my family is equivalent to 260 tones of co2 to the atmosphere. It is obvious then, that the environmental implications of flying twice a year back home are huge.

However, the consequences of taking a plane aren’t just ecological. When talking to other Catalan migrants in México, I realized that anthropologically, taking a flight could be scrutinized too. Some of them didn’t see their families for more than twenty years, due to the high prices of those twelve-hour flights. So, in a very reduced and pragmatic way, those with enough economical power to consume two flights a year tend to be bigger participants in co2 emissions to the atmosphere.

Simultaneously though, I knew climate change effects were also often suffered, mostly, by those in precarious situations. For instance, Mexican's poorest states, Chiapas and Oaxaca. Their population is often threatened by high-level earthquakes because its territory is close to the usual epicenter. That not only entitles its entire ecosystem to suffer the ravages of earthquake magnitudes, but the poverty and the precarious conditions in which they have lived for decades, constitute a big part of their nightmare, because of their reduced capacity of infrastructural resistance and resilience.

During the first class of Societies and the Anthropocene’s spring course at Ku Leuven, our teacher, Steven Van Wolputte, from the social and cultural anthropology department, confronted us with Paul Stoller’s article in the HuffPost: welcome to the Anthropocene: Anthropology and the Political Moment. It was the first time I ever heard about the concept the ‘Anthropocene’, but somehow, as the lecture went on, it seemed I was all my life contact with it. The concept itself links the ecological crises to the growing social issues from an anthropological point of view.

The fact that nobody talked about the waste management of grey ‘rejection’ containers back in my hometown, the same waste in which the luxurious Colonia of Santa Fe in México City was built, suddenly appeared to be linked to a social generalized feeling of ignorance and reticence to address climate change. Even when during the past years, ecology issues –leading to social instability– have been striking harder, and the scientific community warns, the environmental crisis will only get worse. Anthropologically, the Anthropocene as a concept explains this diaspora.

As a vegetarian transfeminist writer, my articles on climate change and social issues might be biased because of my specific enthusiasm for gender and climate topics. If you are a usual reader of this blog, you'd have noticed it. And it is fair to disagree on some of the topics treated here. It is my goal to incentivize debate. However, there is a strange impossibility for relativism when encountering ecological issues.

One could be either an active feminist or, directly, a sexist person. An actively antiracist or a straight-up racist. Of course, the world would be a better place if everyone was antiracist and a feminist, but that is not my point here. I have the sensation that, with climate change, there is something more dangerous happening than social polarization.

It seems the majority of the world has already understood that the clock ticks fast. However, there are more sympathizers and hypocrites than actors. The Green Washing speech is became the substitute for green and radical action. Even if sustainability is the baseline for the Sustainable Development Goals, international action on climate change is still short, local communities already feel the consequences, and global social inequalities further increase.