, Columnist
Fighting Climate Change Means Fighting Racial Injustice
Inequality permeates the very air we breathe.
The Watts Towers.
Photographer: Ann Johansson/Corbis Entertainment/Getty Images
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“You can’t let one segment of society become a sacrifice.”
Michael Méndez, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, was on the phone talking about the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd beneath a white police officer’s knee. But he was also talking about environmental justice and climate change. And he could just as easily have been talking about Covid-19, which has taken more than 100,000 American lives and, in the process, exposed gaping inequalities of wealth, access to healthcare and job safety.