The Eco Friendly Student

As climate change worsens, naturally we start to imagine our potentially apocalyptic future. This begs the question: Who will face the consequences first? Unfortunately, evidence suggests that non-white people and the global south are already disproportionately becoming victims of environmental degradation. Racism and environmentalism are often thought of as two independent problems that face society today. However, these two -isms have more in common than you might think. In this article, I will examine how environmental issues of pollution, fast-fashion and oil are already having disproportionate effects on non-white people and the global south. Firstly, when looking at the issue of air pollution, poor air quality has always disproportionately affected inner-city areas and race has been proved to play a role as well. The Guardian did a study in 2016 which showed  black, African and Caribbean people account for 15.3% of all Londoners exposed to nitrogen dioxide level

As mentioned in my previous post, I am quite the sceptic on isolating environmental activism to individual action. The recent popularity of Zero-waste trends/lifestyles basically sums up all the issues I have with mainstream environmentalism. This is mainly because this Pinterest brand of activism puts the blame on consumer and their personal greed/frivolity and is often completely tone-deaf to limiting factors such as wealth, convenience and education. That being said, I do feel it is somewhat hypocritical of me to preach about environmentalism on the internet but not make any changes to my own life which reflect my support for sustainability. If you can reasonably make small changes to your everyday life or you have the energy and financial ability to make bigger ones it would be counterproductive not to. Not to mention, as we are so often faced with a rather bleak image of the realities of climate change and other environmental issues, it is understandable people want to be doing

In researching environmentalism over the last few months, two questions have popped up time after time: Who is to blame for this mess we're in? and by extension - Who's responsibility is it to sort it out? Accusations of blame usually point towards one of two culprits - big business or us, the consumer. However, in the last year, in particular, we have seen many more attempts to push the blame onto the consumer in the form of anti-plastic campaigns and the popularity of zero waste lifestyles to name but a few. I agree to some extent that personal consumption of non-sustainable materials certainly is a part of the problem but I don't feel it is the only way to address the fight for our planet. Instead, more overwhelming for me is the how this non-sustainable consumption is encouraged by big business and their profits which are being prioritised within a capitalist system. As a result, I believe the ones who should be taking the most action are not the consumers but the