The Climate Crisis is a Privilege Crisis
by Anya Graf
“Three of history’s strongest typhoons hit the Philippines,” the headline reads. You drop your coffee mug as you scan pictures of the devastation that swept through an archipelago thousands of miles away from the safety of your white picket fence. “Sheesh, that’s awful,” you think to yourself, taking a bite of your breakfast — pancakes still warm from your induction stove. Suddenly, your phone dings. It’s your boss. You’re nearly late for work.
At once, you tuck the freshly inked paper away, and just like that, any thought of a drowning archipelago thousands of miles away fades into oblivion. I’m sure stories of disasters happening all across the globe unnerve a great deal of people everywhere, but for the vast majority, that’s how I imagine news of my reality penetrates theirs. You can choose to look away from the destruction, but that is a privilege my people cannot afford. The nightmare doesn’t stop once your eyelids flutter open.
In 2020, the world came to a pause. In 2020, I learnt that the world needed digital activism more than ever. That year saw me campaigning for justice in all forms left and right, shaking hands and occasionally shaking heads with different groups of people, collaborating, disagreeing, creating, remaking — I’d done everything I could think of within the confines of my own home. But one of the biggest things I’d learned along the way was how privileged the environmental movement actually is. How, in a movement that wants to give our generation a voice, some voices still end up being silenced — voices that come from people who look like me. 2020 taught me that there is still room for inequalities and privilege gaps even in the world’s largest and most ambitious movement for global justice.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact beginning of this story. Ask any Filipino child about their first brush with a typhoon, and while they probably might be able to recall their very first one, there’s a fat chance they’ll still end up struggling to pick which ‘typhoon story’ to talk about. When I was seven in 2009, the typhoon Ondoy submerged thousands of homes all across Luzon, the country’s largest island — the island I called home. By the grace of god or any divine force you believe in, my home wasn’t one of those blown away or submerged under sewer water.
My house sits on an extremely average, suburban side of the state where practically no nature grows, but for some reason, we’ve always been safe from any form of disaster. My Ondoy experience consisted of complaining about the heat because the power was out, reading about people my age swimming to safety amongst rat carcasses and fallen power lines, and watching my uncle sing a song he wrote on TV.
As a seven year old, I realize that there wasn’t much that I could’ve done anyway, but that was my first lesson in privilege. I was so happy that school was cancelled, when so many kids would never set foot on campus again. I hated that I couldn’t use the air conditioning, while thousands of homes were literally hanging by a thread. I was watching my uncle on the music channel, while millions couldn’t take their eyes off the news trying to see if people they once knew had washed up ashore somewhere.
Every year, I get flashbacks from this experience, because every single year, history repeats itself. Fate closes its eyes and throws a dart at a map of my country, picking the next town to submerge, and it does that twenty times a year. My first lesson in privilege taught me that as a Filipino, the privilege I had in typhoons was paper thin. That the only things that would truly keep me safe were luck and divine intervention.
My next brush with privilege happened when I was fourteen years old. I had just seen Before The Flood, a National Geographic documentary on climate change. I wanted to learn about the issue as much as I could. This curiosity soon paved the way for volunteerism, and I slowly found myself dipping my toes in the ins and outs of the world of changemaking.
I caught wind of one of the country’s largest youth organizations centered on environmentalism. I thought they were absolutely incredible. They were doing hands-on work I initially never thought people my age were capable of. The organization practically bred trailblazers in our small corner of changemaking. But, one thing I did notice, though, was the homogeneity of the organization’s members. This was my next lesson in privilege.
It only took me less than an hour to look up the team’s core members, and sure enough, they’d come from the country’s most exclusive schools and had influential family names to go with their features in society magazines. Did I feel bad about myself? No, but it did prompt the questions, “are they really innovative or do I just not have the opportunities their connections can afford them? Could I have done the same if I had access to environmental education earlier in my life?”.
I started questioning the small things, too. Did my family’s weekly burger nights endanger the planet or is beef just a lot cheaper than imported vegan granola and quinoa? These were two lessons in privilege rolled into one. I learned that, yes, I was uninformed, but it wasn’t my fault that resources available to more privileged individuals weren’t accessible to a middle class citizen like myself. I also learned that while I was part of the problem, it wasn’t my fault, either, that products with a larger carbon footprint are the ones in mass production — the ones that come as cheaper alternatives.
Though many years have passed, this hypocrisy is still something I struggle with today. I try to be vegan in ways that I can, but I can’t just stop buying fish and ask my countrymen to do the same like certain documentaries recommend. The Philippines is made up of more than 7,000 beautiful islands. So many of us rely on fishing for livelihood. Our fishermen don’t use trawlers or steel cages — we don’t have the money for that. Advocating for phasing out the local fishing industry is akin to advocating for the displacement of millions of Filipinos.
The truth is, everyone in the environmental movement is a hypocrite. Whether you’re Greta Thunberg or a small Filipina woman dodging typhoons annually, you can’t avoid the fact that your carbon footprint still grows. What only matters is that you lessen it, but it’s also important to keep in mind not to villainize everyone who doesn’t think climate change is an immediate concern. Developed countries are so quick to throw criticism at developing countries for our largely pro-consumerist, pro-mass production lifestyles, they don’t realize that this is largely because this is the only life we can afford.
People love to blame the consumers, but never the producers. Europe, for instance, loves to criticize Asia’s sachet problem. Sachet products are banned in Europe, whereas in Asia, they continue to thrive. Knowing this, it’s a little ironic once you take into consideration that the corporations manufacturing sachet products in Asia are European owned or at least funded.
The environmental movement is a privileged one, and only when I began checking my own privilege did I learn to stop being so angry at the uninformed. Why? Because it’s not their fault.
It’s not their fault environmental education in our country is glossed over on the rare occasion that it’s even mentioned.
It’s not their fault that the government chooses to allot more profit into projects that carve off mountains and contribute to soil degradation, rather than projects that help us understand the climate crisis better.
It’s not their fault that the faces that give perspective to the climate movement are almost entirely white.
Blaming the masses is an act rooted in privilege (first world privilege, particularly). Climate change isn’t a primary concern for everyone, because where I live, it’s not a concern everyone can afford to care about. But it’s a concern that affects us all.
I acknowledge my privilege. I know that I only know what I know because I have access to the internet, finally attend good schools, and have enough money to buy absurdly expensive books on climate science. I only know what I know because of privilege, and I acknowledge that. However, merely acknowledging my privilege isn’t enough, and that’s why I say this to you now, the person behind the screen reading this.
I want you to see the gaps of privilege in a movement you may or may not be part of. I want you to see past your own and take action in ways that you can think of. With our privilege, we could do so much more than send people our prayers and give them a shred of pity. We need to amplify the voices of the vulnerable and lend them our platforms, not serve as “voices’ that eventually drown out and silence theirs. We are not saviors, a stroke of luck is the sole thing that separates us from people more vulnerable than we are.
Just recently, my friends and I opened our own youth organization. Mission Isla, we called it. We recognize our privilege and the privilege that gave rise to modern day climate education. We want to “decolonize” that. To create solutions for our developing islands that take into account our cultures and traditions, which resources are and aren’t accessible to us, and of course, the privilege gap that rapidly grows in size in countries like ours. It isn’t anything groundbreaking, but big leaps are born out of baby steps, and we’re excited for what the future has in store for us.
The next time a typhoon in my backyard ends up in bold headlines at your breakfast table, there’s a fat chance you’ll grant me a shred of pity and continue to go about your day. But I hope this makes you realize that you can do so much more than that. We need so much more than that.
About
Anya is a nineteen year old writer, public speaker, and full time changemaker. She is the founder of Mission Isla, and currently serves as Youth for Our Planet Asia Pacific's Regional Mobilizer — youth movements that call for urgent action on the world’s climate and biodiversity crisis. Outside YfOP, Anya writes for ARGO Manila, and acts as Project Blue Ilocos’ Head of External Affairs. Her approach to the climate crisis is heavily rooted in policymaking, as a European Studies student at the Ateneo de Manila University, specializing in International Relations with a minor degree in German.