Renata Poulton Kamakura (she/her pronouns) is one of the current hub-coordinators for the Sunrise Movement's Durham hub and a PhD student in Ecology at Duke. She's been involved in Sunrise for a little over a year, but has been involved in community organizing and activism for around 5 years, originally focusing more on policing and mass incarceration. The Sunrise Movement is a grassroots, youth-led national coalition pushing for transformative economic and social change centered around defeating the climate crisis.
In this episode, we speak to Renata about her work with Sunrise. Renata elaborates on what Sunrise Durham has been working on over the pandemic, touches on the intersectionality of climate change with other issues such as racism and inequality, and makes a case that only a transformative, ambitious climate plan aiming to build a green, equity-centered economy that can properly address climate change and its impacts.
Guests:
Renata Poulton Kamakura
Writers:
Georgie Stammer ‘24, Rishab Jagetia ‘24
Hosts:
Georgie Stammerc ‘24, Rishab Jagetia ‘24
Audio Editors:
Emily Nagamato ‘24
Music:
“Tundra” by Casey Goldstein
Inspired to do more? If you want to learn how your time and skills can best help the climate, you can create a climate action plan at youchangeearth.org/operationclimate.
TRANSCRIPT:
Rishab Jagetia: If there’s one climate activism group you’ve heard of, it’s probably the Sunrise Movement. Sunrise has a bold message for any potential joiners: They’re fighting for a “Climate Revolution”. Over the past few years, Sunrise has caught the attention of millions of Americans with its grassroots, youth-led efforts to elect progressive politicians and advocate for “a Green New Deal and millions of good-paying jobs”. Sunrise has local hubs of organizers all across the nation, including one in Durham.
Georgie Stammer: Here with us to talk about Sunrise and their work in Durham is Renata Poulton Kamakura. Renata is one of the current hub-coordinators for the Sunrise Movement's Durham hub and a PhD student in Ecology at Duke. She's been involved in Sunrise for a little over a year, but has been involved in community organizing and activism for around 5 years, originally focusing more on policing and mass incarceration.
Katherine Li: Welcome to Operation Climate, the one stop shop for environmental issues that matter to Duke and Durham community members. We’re a podcast run by Duke University students, aiming to inform and empower Duke at large to create lasting change in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation. This season, we’re focusing on climate activism and activism in general.
Georgie Stammer: Thanks for joining us Renata. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the Sunrise Movement?
Renata Poulton Kamakura: Sure, yes. So my name is Renata, she/her pronouns, and I am part of the Sunrise Durham hub and also a Duke Ph.D. student studying ecology. And Sunrise, overall is basically a movement that is trying to get young people to tackle the climate crisis and doing so in a way that doesn't treat climate as something that's separate from other issues in the world and instead considers it within the framework of economic justice, racial justice, health care, all of these other things that are super important for us to be able to move, not just towards tackling climate change, but doing so in a way that is just and equitable.
Rishab Jagetia: Yeah. And we also wanted to know specifically what you guys are doing in Sunrise Durham. So are there any certain projects that you guys are working on, and what have been some of the obstacles or barriers to climate action in Durham?
Renata Poulton Kamakura: So Sunrise started out in 2020 having a plan around Earth Day, trying to make that a major mobilization. And then the pandemic started... really kicked off in high gear in the United States around March. And so in North Carolina, as well as kind of across the country, we started focusing on COVID relief and that was a big emphasis and a big question. It still is. And then around May, George Floyd was murdered and we're moving into the uprisings and then we're throwing down with the movement for black lives, trying to talk about abolition, changing the ways we think about safety and policing in our communities.
And for both of those things where there’s connections to the climate in many ways, like one in the broader form of justice, yes, absolutely. But if we think about, for example, the healthcare inequalities that we're seeing, inequalities in terms of who are essential workers, who’s deemed worth paying attention to, whose lives matter. Those all relate to the same people who are often hit the worst for climate change and also really necessary for us to change our infrastructure.
If you have, I mean, if you have a society where we're spending billions, if not more dollars on policing instead of dealing with our infrastructure and other issues, we're never going to move in the direction we need if we're throwing people in cages and shooting them instead of investing in our communities. So we pivoted hard into that, and then we moved into November elections. There's a lot of emphasis on getting good people, or at least allies, in office who aren’t going to save us, but are at least going to work with our communities to get the sorts of legislation that we need, or at least help us move in the direction we want.
And then kind of post November-December, there's support of Georgia, of course, but we've also been rethinking what does it look like to do Green New Deal stuff at a local level. So how are we rethinking our transportation infrastructure is another thing that comes up a lot, how are we building affordable housing that is also green. And so right now we're considering working with people in the People's Alliance and various other groups on a Green New Deal for Durham, and that's kind of a major emphasis point right now.
Georgie Stammer: So looking at the base of Sunrise, what do you think explains Sunrise’s success in attracting so many young people and building such a diverse coalition of organizers?
Renata Poulton Kamakura: For bringing together young people, one thing is that the climate crisis is a thing a lot of people care about. It's not just young people, it’s people in the world, but young people are some of the ones that are going to live with the consequences for the longest. So giving people a space like, “hey, we're taking this shit seriously. We think that you all as human beings deserve to be treated with dignity and respect”. That gives people something to get fired up about, and a lot of young people are and have been organizing around climate, right. So that's I think part of it, but it's also a movement that is designed for and by young people, young being broadly defined as under 35, and there is an incredible power to multi-generational organizing. The challenge, often in those spaces, is that young people are kind of kept out; we’re not allowed in leadership, because we're too young, too inexperienced, too naive. And I think it's true that we need to learn. We spend a lot of time experimenting making mistakes and learning.
But it is designed to have people who are in middle school, high school, college. Be in charge, making decisions, the ones who are at the forefront making speeches, doing whatever, and I think that's really empowering in many ways where you don't just have to listen to someone older, you can tell you what to do. Instead we work with an equality coalition within collaboration with other movements.
But we are the ones that are making decisions at our level, which I think is also pretty powerful. Now, with that, I think there is a major goal and we're like a very centered on the fact that we need a-cross class multi-racial movement to win a Green New Deal. You can't do it otherwise, it just doesn't make sense, not to mention the fact that it is unjust. If you're making decisions that impact your whole community without the community, right. I think it's true, though. That's ourselves a long way to go. It is not entirely whites, but it's still a heavily white space. And one of the things that we're trying to work on right is one, being very clear about our values and standing up against white supremacy, standing up for racial justice, standing up for economic justice, and not just saying nice words but actually doing it on the ground.
And then hopefully as we do that, we also train our own people have a lot of conversations around the ways in which the society that we live in, which is, it’s a cis-hetero patriarchy, racist as hell, ableist, and generally problematic. How do we do the work ourselves to create spaces that are actively combating that external pressure and the pressure that we have taken in as humans in our society. So we create spaces that empower all of the people that we think we need.
Rishab Jagetia: Yeah, I think your thoughts, just based on this last answer. They're really set at this next question, which is just to preface in an earlier episode, we talked to Nate Hochman, who is a conservative commentator for Citizens Climate Lobby and that's like an organization of course for the listeners that are advocating for a carbon fee and dividend, which would tax carbon issues from polluters, and then just equally distribute the tax revenue to all Americans.
So this proposal and proposals like these are embraced by moderates and some of the right that emphasized climate change as simply an economic issue in which incentives free market economics can reduce emissions and maintain other aspects of life. I think what makes Sunrise so distinct is that you were talking about these issues of racial justice, economic justice and the intersection of competencies. So when you're when you're talking about this whole mission of sunrise. First, why do you think that perspective is more valuable than a perspective that's simply based on climate change as an economic issue and what do you think are some of the problems you guys are gonna have to face and some of the the difficulties, perhaps, that you're giving up in taking such an idealized approach.
Renata Poulton Kamakura: I'll try to start with kind of part one: why it's not just an economic issue. And one thing is like, okay, so I'm in college. I'm in the scientific realm. And one thing that comes up a lot is basically eco-fascism and just you know neo-Darwinian ideas about eugenics. And the thing is, you can quote solve the climate crisis by deciding that you're just going to kill off a lot of people, or if it's just mass sterilized people. Now usually who those people are, is black and brown folks, a lot of times in countries outside the United States. Even very famous scientists, like Paul Ehrlich making comments about how people in India need to have fewer children. And this is someone who tried to desegregate the counters like lunch counters, right, like that's someone who thinks of themselves as racist. But if you're not sitting there thinking about the ways these interact, you can end up with “solutions” that are incredibly horrifying if you actually look at what that means. And so if we're going to seriously consider tackling the climate crisis in a way that doesn't lead to just like New Orleans disappearing or Malaysia disappearing and then the people there. It’s like, well, it's not our problem that there are climate refugees there, you know, brown people go somewhere else. They didn’t cause this problem, we caused this problem. What does it mean to really take responsibility and ownership of that.
And what does it mean to move us into a future where we're yes dealing with the climate crisis, but not just leaving certain people in dust in doing so. And so I think there's opportunities for economic tools to try to move us in that direction. I'm not going to say that economics is useless because at some level, the economy is just like taking care of home. If you look at the root of it, right. But if we don't think of it in the context of the other things that matter, we're going to leave people behind. So that's one piece. The other thing is like, we have spent a lot of time thinking about reform and this maybe gets to your second point around policing but reforming systems that inherently exploit workers and exploit the world makes it really hard for us to actually change the problem. It just morphs. So if you're thinking about for example, okay, we need to use clean energy sources, yes. Hundred percent totally agree.
If we continue if we do so in ways that just continue to go at really rampant rates, allow companies to have major control over that rather than, like, allowing for more decentralization, there’s still kind of people who are exploited. And you probably just going to still have waste, it’ll just look different. Right where you're going to have huge swaths of habitat that are turned into the solar fields that suddenly like animals can't move through, other beings can't move through. You still have these mass produced farms that are like the leading to a lot of pollution and environmental degradation, but just looks different. Right. So you might deal with like greenhouse gas emissions, but you're not going to deal with the broader environmental problems we have until we actually disrupt the ways in which we relate to the rest of natural world and that requires us to also disrupt the ways in which we react to one another. So we don't have some people's lives that are disposable so we put them on hog waste farms, and some workers are disposable. So we don't treat them well and they basically die. And it's like, well, we can just replace them with some other migrant worker.
Right, so that's like getting to the real root of the broader problems. What we have requires an exceptional analysis, that’s one. And two, what do we sacrifice when we take the radical positions? And one of the things that came up a lot recently was around defunding the police, right. A lot of people said if you say defund the police, you're not going to make any headway. And we actually got basically blacklisted by the North Carolina Democratic Party saying that we couldn't talk to or endorse a lot of their candidates, because we said to defund the police. Couple things there. One, people said that about Medicare for all too radical to out there, people aren't ever going to go for it. Is that the case now? The needle moves when you organize, the needle moves when you talk to people about what they care about and why the things that you're talking about actually serve their communities.
So there's something to be said for something that might seem radical right now isn't necessarily going to be radical forever. So it's like, at some level of holding on to the values and using the language that makes sense in your community to get that across. But I also think a lot of times we really educate ourselves and push ourselves to think why are we hiding away from the statement. Is it because we don't think it would ever make headway, or is it sometimes it makes sense because maybe people really will hate that even if they like the idea.
But can we really be thinking about how we show up for our partners and really stand up for what we believe in rather than hiding who we truly are.
Georgie Stammer: How do you reconcile support for these bipartisan, though arguably inadequate policies like a carbon tax, with Sunrise and progressive climate ambitions, and at what point does compromise become unreasonable?
Renata Poulton Kamakura: Oh, great question. Yeah, just going to emphasize that I definitely am speaking 100% for myself. I have been this whole time. But this is, I think, a subject of debate, and it is vigorous debate all over the place. When you're compromising your values too much. And when you're operating in the realities of the moment, how you need to both acknowledge that in the moment you cannot get everything like we need to make small steps that are moving us into a community. And also not make so many concessions that you make it impossible for you to actually get to what you care about in the future.
And frankly, this is a conversation you have around the electoral politics at all. Right. So to some level of having a Supreme Court that has like nine people who decide the fate of large civil rights legislation seems kind of ridiculous, like that's that's kind of a messed up way to decide how you're going to, you know, care about people's rights. At the same time as the system we have, and unless we're ready for a revolution tomorrow, like we need to work with that existing system.
And so it's kind of in a similar way. Like, how are we both pushing the needle to make sure we don't have a carbon tax be the end-all-be-all and decide that okay, carbon tax, we solved climate change, great, 10 out of 10, and push that so that we don't stop there. And if in a community they decide that some sort of market scheme to incentivize solar development is something that's going to move them towards clean energy and that's what makes sense for the community. That's the moment we live in. And that's the decision to make. Right. And that's why a lot of times, again, going back to local community decision making is often what makes the most sense--to give people the autonomy and, honestly, respecting them enough to know what they think they need in this moment.
But making sure that we have that constant push that like, what is our end goal? What are we actually trying to do? And don't let yourself get complacent in the little decisions we have to make right now, because they may impact people's lives. And that's the options that we have on the table.
Rishab Jagetia: Yeah, I just wanted to circle back to that because I've been struggling with this a lot too. What point are you just gonna say like enough's enough... I should stand for what I should stand for? Just like a perspective, a lot of Republicans are turned off by Sunrise and will not even work with them at all on any energy policies, just because of their idealist stance and I was wondering if Sunrise has a solution to this: to talking to the other side. Because of course the goal of Sunrise and many of these cases is to elect progressive politicians, elect progressive
people that are going to pass progressive policies. So it's just hard to straddle that balance. I feel like doing that, but also working with the other side. I mean, I don't know if Sunrise has an answer.
Renata Poulton Kamakura: Well, I would say, I'm not going to speak for Sunrise nationally, any of this. And I don't know if there is one solution necessarily. I think there's a couple. There's a difference between working with fossil fuel executives who want to have a “compromise solution” that allows them to make millions of dollars and working with, for example, coal miners who are trying to, like, make sure they have a living for the rest of their lives. And there's a difference between working with people who identify as small “c” conservatives and communities and there's a difference between working with the big “C” conservative politicians who have been profiting off of people's pain.
And so I think there's, like, what does it look like to go into communities and actually talk to people about the things that they care about and finding ways that, you know, what if you're a farmer and a lot of these places, environmental justice matters a lot because you also need to be one, getting enough support from state, federal legislation around farming--you're facing issues from development or a lot of people are losing their farmland.
Water is an issue, fire’s an issue. There are so many things we can talk about with communities that are often like painted as conservative Republican, whatever you want to call it. Certainly, and we can talk to those folks right and we do as much as we can, anyway. But I think that's something we can also grow into.
But I don't think that means that we need to go to Mitch McConnell and be like, you know what, actually, what we want is a lovely compromise solution and that means that you know your friends get tax write-offs and don't have any sort of like accountability for COVID related issues and instead it's like talking to people in Kentucky, talking to people in Kentucky on the ground and being like, Okay, what do you actually increase your communities, and what do we actually do to build what y'all want?
And at that level. It's almost, it's less about playing some kind of democrat republican game. So at the end of the day, like Sunrise doesn't align itself necessarily with the democrats either, right. It's not about it's we say no permanent friends, no permanent enemies. Like democrats make a lot of mistakes and we really call them out when we can. Right. It's not about that so much as it is, like, how are we moving towards the future that's just and equitable, and what do we do to talk to our communities.
Georgie Stammer: So looking back at the past year, what has been challenging about climate action during COVID-19?
Renata Poulton Kamakura: A lot of things. A lot of it is related to just difficulties with the action period in COVID-19, but one thing is that I think we need to be really cautious about not just making climate, the “conversation of 2020,” especially when there was a bunch of other things going on. And one of the things we were trying to really walk a line on his talk about the ways climate intersects with, for example, the pandemic, also racial justice and the uprisings and policing and incarceration without making, like, oh, you're having an action--let's make it about climate change. So I think that's one thing. Climate change wise, it's been a challenge is making sure that we do a good job of talking about the connections between things rather than stealing the stage.
But frankly, in the pandemic. There's a lot of things that are hard right? One, people are hurting. We are going up and up and people are sick people who've been working super long shifts and young people are not immune to that right. We are some of the people who are the essential workers. And so the things have just been hard on a personal level, because it's just hard right now for most people. So that's part of it. But also, we can't do in person gatherings, the same way. Right. We can't take action... for a long time it was kind of you're on the fence: can we go to protest? What does it mean to protest safely?
When it came around to doing stuff around the election, like can you canvas safel?. What does it mean to not put people at risk, especially in the communities that we're talking about that are hit hard by COVID? But some things that came with it is one, we shifted our idea of access. Right, so access was a challenge for folks who don't have computers and Internet. Right, that's real. And a lot of communities are really hard to reach for that. It also meant that we didn't have a physical location you’re meeting in. And so, and we got to other people, people who did have computers and the Internet. Suddenly, there was not the barrier of having to move to a space. And so we got to work with a lot of people, especially across the states and across the country.
And there was also this opportunity that really came through, like the North Carolina United for Survival and Beyond Coalition during the pandemic to really talk about these ties between climate change and everything else. And build basically an alignment of progressive orgs [organizations] that are trying to move towards a just and equal future, even though we all kind of come at it from different angles and build that kind of cross-coalition to work together, or at least work in side by side. It’s tough times: people are struggling, money is scarce, people are in really difficult positions and it's hard for us to be in the community. But there are things that we have tried to pivot to to do what we can given the situation.
Rishab Jagetia: Yeah, that's great. And then just to wrap up this podcast. This is a Duke podcast for the students. So we just wanted to know, what do you think students should do to support the work of sunrise and climate action more broadly in Durham.
Renata Poulton Kamakura: Yeah, great question. I mean, so sometimes it's a slightly easier answer, insofar as folks are welcome to join Sunrise. Like we're happy to have folks roll through and work with us on a lot of issues, especially if you're kind of in the vein of thinking of climate change is intersection with a lot of these other problems. And we have hub meetings, usually every couple weeks. But we're not the only group that works on climate change or environmental justice in Durham. North Carolina has a long history of environmental justice work and many folks aren’t aware, 1982, Warren County, North Carolina was kind of the breakthrough of the modern day environmental justice movement.
And there's groups, for example, the Poor People's Campaign has kind of an environmental sub-group that does a lot of work. You gotta clean water for North Carolina, and there's also going to be this big group that with the People's Alliance and Sunrise and hopefully a lot of other organizations are going to be thinking about a Green New Deal for Durham; that's going to be hopefully something you'll hear more about relatively soon. And we'd love to have folks hop into that. But I think one of the big things is just even for whatever you call home, whatever communities, you think of your community, which can be in Durham, it can be somewhere else. Thinking about, okay, what can I do to talk to those folks and work with those folks to build power in whatever space that is like, is it my local hometown somewhere. Can we be thinking about how we change our energy sources, how we talk about affordable housing like just really just taking a little time to think about it. Think of yourself as an agent of change, as someone who has power, as someone who can work in a community to make change.
Thinking about what is your community to do that in, and if you decide Durham is the place where you want to throw down like we'd love to have you to get stuff going and do work here.
But it also can be other places and other communities.
Georgie Stammer: Okay. And then we have one final question that we've been asking all of our guests the season. What does activism mean to you.
Renata Poulton Kamakura: Whoo, man. That's a good question, partly because there's a lot of distinction between activism and organizing but the thing about activism that I think about a lot is, it's a lot of times, putting yourself out there, maybe like having a big voice. And talking about something you believe in and trying to push for that change that you think is important for that issue that I think is important and that it can be incredibly powerful. Greta Thurnburg, good example of an activist who made big changes. What I think is also powerful are organizers and those are the ones who are more about working in the community a lot of times it's like in the context, potentially of unions, for example, and go door to door: you go talk to people and build that community power together. And that's what I think is super, super powerful. It's not just, like, yes, raise your voice, absolutely want to see that. And also how do we organize our communities to make the change that all of us collectively really want to see. And that's the kind of the ethos that I would like to go as we think about moving forward.
Rishab Jagetia: Renata, I just want to thank you so much from Operation Climate podcast for joining us. It's been so awesome. So just thank you
Renata Poulton Kamakura: Thanks so much for having me.
Rishab Jagetia: As Renata explained, the climate movement has quickly transitioned from a purely scientific problem--how can we cut down greenhouse gas emissions--into a broader conversation around building a more equitable, inclusive, and just future.
To learn more about the Sunrise Movement, visit www.sunrisemovement.org. If you would like to join Sunrise Durham, you can also sign up on their website, which will be linked in our description.
Georgie Stammer: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Operation Climate. Make sure to subscribe to stay updated about future episodes. For more information on who we are, what we’re doing, and a full transcript of this episode, visit our website at bit.ly/operationclimatepodcast to learn more.