At a meeting of an equity-focused subcommittee of the Vermont Climate Council last week, Indra Acharya engaged other members in an exercise he acknowledged would be uncomfortable.
Six times, he asked the remote meeting’s 10 participants to turn their cameras off if they did not represent a particular demographic identifier. Then, he read a statistic that illustrated how climate change is expected to affect the participants whose faces remained on the screen.
He began broadly, directing participants to leave their cameras on if they were living beings who exist on planet Earth. The fact: Scientists expect climate change to negatively affect people, animals, flora and fauna, he said. Then, he directed participants who live in Vermont to keep their cameras on, and said climate change is expected to negatively impact people and ecology in the state.
Next, he asked attendees who have had low incomes, or have needed to rely on public benefits at some point in their lives, to leave their cameras on. Six of the screens remained active while the others went dark. Low-income communities have higher rates of adverse health conditions, he said. They are more exposed to environmental hazards and take longer to come back from natural disasters, and climate change will exacerbate existing inequalities.
Next: Those who identified as people of color, or members of the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) community, should leave their cameras on.
Acharya’s face suddenly filled the screen as all of the other participants clicked off their cameras.
“Race is the biggest determinant of environmental injustice,” he said. “Historical lack of affordable land, political power, mobility and financial resources has impacted communities of color. Climate change will only make the situation worse.”
He repeated the exercise two more times, asking participants to keep their cameras on only if they identify as Indigenous, and finally, as Black. This time, every camera clicked off.
The exercise put a fine point on the demographic makeup of the Climate Council’s Just Transitions subcommittee, which is charged with protecting Vermont’s most vulnerable communities while Vermont transitions through a web of climate-focused changes, intended to help meet Vermont’s emission reduction requirements.
Lawmakers created the Vermont Climate Council when they passed the 2020 Global Warming Solutions Act, which requires the state to dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, 2030 and 2050. They charged the council, a 23-member body made up of state officials and representatives from nonprofits, municipalities and other stakeholders, with mapping out the transition to a less-polluting state.
Acharya organized the reflection in response to letters sent in 2021 and 2022 from a group called VT Renews BIPOC Council — a collective of justice-focused organizations throughout the state — that criticized several state entities, including the Climate Council, for their lack of progress on that mission.
He also said he designed the exercise to address a January VTDigger story that outlined accusations of tokenism within the Climate Council.
The 2021 letter — signed by representatives of Rights & Democracy Vermont, the Vermont Public Interest Law Group and the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs, among others — pointed to a “lack of commitment on the part of the State to effectively engage the BIPOC community” and noted the “continued segregation of BIPOC leaders within advisory roles.” It listed eight policy expectations for the state and Climate Council that would protect communities of color and better include them in the process.
In the 2022 letter, the group expressed “collective disappointment in the State’s failure to implement its stated commitments to center racial justice and equity.”
As he concluded his introduction to the reflection, Acharya said frustrations have centered around “not being heard, not having a seat at the table, not being listened to, not being responded to.”
“Just Transitions is a subcommittee that is charged with ensuring justice, equity, respecting those voices, and that’s what we strive to do,” he said. “And we saw what we saw.”
With that, he turned to participants and asked, with the letters and the VTDigger story in mind, what they thought.
Kashka Orlow said she’s reached out to people within the BIPOC community but hasn’t been able to spark their interest in getting involved with the council. She attributed the hurdle to the council’s relatively meager compensation of $50 per day for attending meetings that often last hours and require preparation beforehand.
“Having representation in the government, in different things like the Climate Council, it’s one of those things that, it does come with privilege, because it takes time out of your day,” she said.
Anna Guenther said she’s lived in Vermont for two decades, and has seen her Black friends leave “because they did not feel comfortable or happy here.”
Her friends who have remained in the area “get so many asks” that Guenther said she has been hesitant to put something more on their plate by asking them to engage with the council.
Nor have all who have engaged with the Climate Council or its subcommittees felt welcomed.
Guenther shifted the conversation to the recent departure of Beverly Little Thunder, a former subcommittee member and member of the Lakota tribe. Guenther recalled one of her first meetings of the subcommittee, during which Little Thunder had tried to speak up about behavioral and cultural shifts.
Subcommittee members prioritized the agenda “over authentically engaging with the comments that she was offering, and as a result, we lost that member of the subcommittee,” Guenther said. “Her wisdom, what she was willing to bring, was a gift, and we lost that through our behavior, I think.”
Sarah Phillips, a member of the state’s Office of Economic Opportunity, said government and bureaucratic structures “have a foundation in capitalist white structural violence.”
“I see that as one of the fundamental tensions in trying to engage people in this process that is so drenched in a formal government process,” she said.
Committee members are “absolutely listening to people, we’re just not taking action,” she said.
Acharya urged the participants to consider next steps. Subcommittee members decided to form a group that will craft a public statement endorsing the 2022 letter from VT Renews and the actions it recommends.
At the end of the discussion, Acharya asked if a participant would read aloud Beverly Little Thunder’s explanation of why she left the committee.
“The patronizing and ‘polite’ ignoring of my concerns led me to step back from the subcommittee,” Orlow said, reading from Little Thunder’s statement on Acharya’s shared screen. “Nothing will change to heal the mess we humans have created in our climate. The council is just lip service. I felt like I was a token on the committee, so I left. I once had the energy to work towards solutions. Now I feel I can only address the problem by living in the best way I can.”
When Orlow finished reading, Acharya noted that Little Thunder represented a community, “and when I named it, all the cameras were off today.”
“I’ll just leave us with that,” he said.