When it comes to climate change, the heavy hand of colonizers is as important as our carbon footprint

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of a CBC News initiative entitled Our Changing Planet to show and explain the effects of climate change and what is being done about it.

This column is an opinion from Stephanie Arnold, a climate change and adaptation researcher in P.E.I. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

World leaders are meeting in Scotland at COP26 to urge action, make promises, and develop plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — just as they have in 2019 at COP25 in Spain, 2018 at COP24 in Poland, 2017 at COP23 in Germany, etc.

The Conference of Parties (COP), as it's known, meets every year and is the global decision-making body set up in the early 1990s to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and subsequent climate agreements.

Reducing our carbon footprint is important; so is increasing our use of renewable energy. But developing plans centered on carbon accounting and energy mix is a futile exercise that distracts us. Even if they do slow down climate change, the world will still be left drowning in rampant, unmitigated social and environmental disasters. Is this what we are all striving for?

Why are we spending our focus, energy, and resources on decarbonizing oppression and exploitation, rather than on this very oppression and exploitation that created the climate crisis?

It took a lot of learning and unlearning to ask that question.

At the core of it is the understanding that the climate crisis is a colonial, white supremacist construct. Legal scholar Carmen G. Gonzalez pointed out that the European colonizers used oppressive practices to transform the subsistence economics of the Global South into economic satellites of Europe. This process warmed the planet while creating wealth for colonial powers. The domination and exploitation of BIPOC peoples, lands, and ecosystems continue to this day and span across the globe, fueling the climate crisis.

Once we start asking the right questions, the answers become self-apparent. With this understanding, it becomes clear that solving the climate crisis requires us to commit to decolonization and to reexamine our values.

Take the recent attacks on the Mi'kmaq fishers and fisheries as an example. The Mi'kmaq have a constitutionally protected right to fish. The continued infringement of those rights is a deliberate choice to value profits and commercial interests over treaty rights. The group West Coast Environmental Law reminds us that conservation has been used historically to mask racist motivations. Mi'kmaq fishers have managed fisheries sustainably through their own laws and processes for millennia. If not for commercial fisheries, there would be no concerns for conservation.

To decolonize and address the climate crisis, we need to value treaty rights over profits and commercial interests. The values that push us to decolonize also push us to respect peoples, lands, and ecosystems.

Recentring our core values will not be easy. It will disrupt personal relationships, social fabrics, economic systems, political systems, legal systems, etc. — many of which are long-standing and deeply entrenched. 

But this is how we can meaningfully tackle the climate crisis and all other social injustices we face today. When we focus on the right things to push back on, everything else will fall into place.

For example, we need to push back on fast fashion not because of the waste it generates, but because we object to how it exploits natural, human, and social systems to produce clothes so "cheaply." When we refuse to conveniently ignore the hidden social, human, and environmental costs of our daily decisions and alter our consumption patterns, the types and amounts of waste we produce will automatically change. When our priorities are adjusted, our decision-making processes will change, and the impacts of our decisions will follow.