Putting Dialogue to Work for Climate Justice

Over the past two years, Karuna Center has been co-facilitating Transforming the Conversation on Carbon Pricing (TCCP), housed at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ). In this unique initiative, a range of climate justice activists and policy advocates come together for confidential dialogues to cultivate common ground.

TCCP is working to transform the relationship between two key groups within the overall push to address climate change and environmental devastation: environmental justice activists, and advocates of carbon pricing. The dialogues are a joint initiative of DSCEJ, Karuna Center, Pricing Carbon Initiative, and Citizens’ Climate Lobby.

As the Biden Administration takes steps to address the climate crisis, new opportunities for shared action are emerging—if we can understand and coordinate across divides. To share more about the critical issues at stake, we put together two brief videos from an earlier zoom conversation we had with Tina Johnson. Tina directs the newly relaunched National Black Environmental Justice Network and is co-facilitator of TCCP along with Olivia Dreier of Karuna Center.

In the first video (5:05 min), Tina talks about how environmental racism has made COVID-19 so deadly—and why members of the National Black Environmental Justice Network (NBEJN), originally formed in 1999, felt the urgent need to re-launch the network in 2020:

In this next video (6:36 min), Tina talks about how Transforming the Conversation on Carbon Pricing (TCCP) is building common ground among an array of environmental justice activists and carbon pricing advocates. She discusses the critical importance of dialogue within our movements to advance our common goals: