SEAS Events

Lunchtime Lectures: Justice Agendas for Confronting Environmental Crisis

Where to Go From Here? The Role of "Violence" in Movement Building for Environmental Justice

In movements to protect life, land, and water, who is labeled as “violent”, and why? What is violence? What is direct action? What is non-violence? What is non-violent direct action (NVDA)? Who defines what behaviors fit into these categories? What are their strategic advantages and disadvantages in advancing movements for social and environmental justice?

This panel discussion will challenge the construction of the “violent”/”non-violent” binary, and examine the ways that movement participants employ both “violence” and “non-violence” to meet their goals. We will hear from local activists in support of militant direct action to protect life, land and water, as well as from lawyers working to defend environmental activists arrested for their engagement in NVDA tactics. Panelists will discuss different understandings of “violence”, and challenge listeners to reconsider the ways that participants in movements for environmental justice might employ “violence” to accomplish their goals.

Panelists:

Sewer and Grandma hold radical anti-state politics and encourage a diversity of tactics to protect life, land, and water. These are not their legal names.

Kira Kelley (they/she) asserts that suffering in the world is an intentional product of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, not a design failure. They went to law school to learn more about power, and graduated wishing they had spent more time organizing and less time studying. Since then, Kira has worked with people across the country fighting coal plants, pipelines, injection wells, landlords, white supremacists, militarized borders, police brutality, and other forms of corporate/state repression.

Claire Glenn holds anti-racist, anti-colonizer, anti-carceral, and anti-capitalist values. Most recently, she worked as the Attorney-Fellow for the Line 3 Defense Project of the Civil Liberties Defense Center and Water Protector Legal Collective, representing Water Protectors targeted by the State of Minnesota for resisting Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline.

Both Kira and Claire are currently staff attorneys with the Climate Defense Project.

Zoom:

This is a virtual event that will be recorded and posted to the collection of talks on the Environmental Justice website. It will be held on Zoom. Please note that you will be muted upon entry to the webinar, but can avail yourself of the Question and Answer function throughout the conversation to contribute to the topics and themes discussed.