We sat down with Jeremy Milloy, Lead, Integrity of Creation and Climate Change at Providence Care Providence Centre for Justice Peace and Integrity for our sustainably.eco podcast. Unfortunately, we had an audio issue but we were able to transcribe the interview here. We had a great conversation about activism, organized labour, and the role that faith based organizations play in finding solutions to the climate crisis.
SK: I wanted to begin by asking, with regards to your role at Providence Centre for Justice Peace and Integrity, what's the optimal role of faith-based organizations in the fight against climate change?
Jeremy: It I think that faith-based organizations and groups can contribute an awful lot, and some are contributing an awful lot. For example, like the Sisters of Providence continuing our office, going forward to work on climate change as one example. But in terms of, like, speaking to a bigger picture, I think there are things that faith organizations can contribute spiritually or culturally, and things that they can contribute materially. I'll start with the material one first. I mean, a lot of faith groups have resources, and those resources can be applied to the fight against climate change, which actually is not usually a term I like to use – I prefer in response to climate change. We cannot fight our mother Earth.
Faith groups can also build better relationships with Indigenous people. So, for example, what the United Church has done in partnership with the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Garden on highway 15, is a really great climate adaptation piece that supports biodiversity in our community. And it's also a very big piece about creating better relationships between settlers and Indigenous people, especially the faith groups who have done great harms towards Indigenous people. So there's a material example. There's land that can be given back to Indigenous peoples, and there's land that can be set aside to support biodiversity, carbon sequestration, that kind of thing. The Sisters of Providence donated their heirloom seed collection to KASSI and the Mohawk and Tyendinaga is another inspiring local examples
Jeremy: One of the things that I think is really powerful about faith traditions is that care for the earth and each other is considered very important and a beneficial goal as part of life, as part of one's responsibility as a person of faith. Laudato Si’, which is Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change is addressed not to just Catholics, but to all people of good faith with the understanding that we all know this, that we should all be grateful and respectful of the incredible natural gifts that we are born into. And it's our duty to steward those for the future. That's very standard thinking. And I think that that is the best kind of thinking that we can have with regards to facing the climate crisis. Not that this is a problem that we can solve and then goes away, and then you don't have to worry about your relationship with the natural world.
What faith traditions also have to offer is faith itself; the concept that we don't know how the world is going to turn out. We never have and we never will. But we can trust in something greater than ourselves. And that allows us not to ignore what's happening, but to do our best and kind of leave outcomes for the future, which is where they belong, and instead concentrate on what we can do today, now, in the present, which I think is so important and really gets away from some of the kind of doomers that you sometimes see in the climate. The final thing I want to highlight is that living a more climate friendly and environmentally respectful life can often get framed as a worse life because we live in a society that is so driven towards consumption, materialism competition, status. And again, a lot of spiritual, religious traditions are very vocal about the fact that those are false. Those are not places that you're going to find your happiness. And instead, your happiness is founded in spirituality and in meaningful relationships in your community with the natural world. And I think that's a really powerful message and one that allows us to be climate friendly and also realize that that is actually the source of a real life.
SK: Well, you mentioned that great project on highway 15 here locally. Are there some other standout examples of faith-based groups that are doing some really compelling work that come mind?
Jeremy: Absolutely. The Global Catholic Climate Movement is a really good example of that. They have united Catholics all over the world in pushing for climate justice and climate activism in a variety of ways at school levels, at parish levels, in healthcare, in business. And the Laudato Si’ movement created a film called The Letter, which is a really great documentary about climate change that's available for free on YouTube. It highlights the testimonies of different people representing different aspects of how the climate crisis is playing out. So, we have somebody representing the poor, somebody representing youth, two scientists representing wildlife in the natural world and the voice of Indigenous people.
And if you want to check it out, it's a fantastic documentary. They travel to the Vatican to educate the Pope about the climate crisis and things that are happening. The Justice and Peace Commission and the Kingston Interfaith Fellowship locally are presenting a screening of The Letter that's taking place at the screening room on April 18. That's another example of how different people of good faith in our community, representing a ton of different faith traditions, are coming together to share a message of hope and responsibility. And, yeah, it's a great film. I encourage you to go April 18 and check it out.
SK: Now, you've been involved locally here in the climate movement and elsewhere, and I was wondering, what are the main observations with regards to the last ten years? What's changed? Is there anything that has sort of caught your imagination as, like, a trend going in the right direction or an interesting trend in activism in particular?
Jeremy: The biggest thing that's changed is almost nobody's willing to deny that climate change is happening and represents a major threat to the future of our civilizations on it. My predecessor in this role, Bridget Doherty, who's now our executive director, when she started the role, it was very much climate as a bad word. People don't want to talk about it. People still don't want to talk about it. A lot of things that she came up against were, “well, this isn't happening,” or “It's not real.” That's gone now, and it's gone because of activists, and it's gone because activists forced leaders to speak up about it and set targets. When people in leadership treat things seriously, then more people take it seriously. So that's happening. But unfortunately, what we're kind of confronted with now is, yes, climate change is happening, but and there's a lot of things that pose as action that are non-action. There's a lot of greenwashing by corporations, those in government or the people who may in the past have said it's not happening and now say, it's too late.
Jeremy: So climate denial is less prevalent, but it looks different, and in some ways, it’s more slippery. And again, that's why I don't think that we should be focusing so much on whether we are going to get to a specific warming or emissions target in the future. We need to keep an eye on whether are we doing the things right now to, for example, transition from fossil fuels to renewable economy. Is that happening? The future will take care of itself on its own timeline. But what we need to start thinking is, are we making the moves that we need to make now? Because future-focus always allows those with power to delay and deny.
Another thing that I think is happening is there's a lot more of a justice focus on the climate and environmental movement. And that's mostly due to the leadership and struggles of Indigenous people and people who experience environmental racism or environmental harm, like working class communities that live near pipelines or near chemical plants and have experience and say, “hey, this is not just like an outgrowth of the system. It is part of intersectional systems of oppression that people live in”. So that climate change comes out of other things in our society like racial hierarchy, like injustice, like capitalist inequality and we have to respond to those if we're going to fix this burning problem. The good thing about that is we have the opportunity to address a lot of really serious problems in society and build a truly better world while we address the civilizational challenge in our times.
Geoff: I want to talk a bit about your academic research in your area of study and the work you're doing in that world. Specifically your focus on labor, violence, addiction and capitalism. How your research has impact your activism and your perspective on the climate issue.
Jeremy: Yeah, it actually plays a big role and I'm really grateful that there is a link between that work that I do and my work for climate justice. A big part of it is having a historical perspective on this and that could also lead to hope. For example, the fossil fuel economy sometimes seems like completely intractable and then we can't move beyond it. I've studied American history going back a couple of hundred years and if you read newspaper editorial in 1858, 1859, 1860, people are saying, “well, we know that slavery is evil, we know that slavery is wrong, but we can't have an economy in a country that's not built on slavery. We've been doing it for too long. Everything that we make depends on slave labor. It's just not going to happen” five years later, slavery has been destroyed. Obviously, the price that was paid to get there was horrific. But it does show you that, number one, we don't know what's coming, and number two, that massive changes are possible in a very short period of time.
I'm inspired as a historian by people who stood up for injustice previously, both in the environmental field and otherwise. One of the messages I try to impart to younger activists I work with is we look back at those people like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or Dorothy Day in Catholic circumstances , and you're like, wow, they're brave. And they were incredibly brave. And partly they were so brave because people didn't like what they were doing at the time. Right? We look back now and they're venerated figures in our culture, but at the time, they were hated and despised, and yet they still stood up for what they want to do. And understanding that it's okay to swim against the tide, it's okay to stand up and say, I don't think this is right. It's one of the reasons why some of the young climate activists in KYCA and QBACC are so incredible. And another thing that I think of is from my historical research, is I write currently a lot about substance use disorder, what we used to call addiction, and the way that we can develop harmful attachments to all kinds of things, not just substances, but work or sexual behavior or overeating. And our society really encourages us to do so. It's a big part of every advertisement. And that's the same kind of attachment and materialism that's driven the heating of our planet, if you look at the growth of consumer society and the growth of fossil fuel usage since World War II. And so, once again, it's unfortunate that we live in a world where we chase so many of the wrong things all the time, but there are clearly alternatives and opportunities. And I'm always really inspired by people who are saying that different world is possible, and the benefit of historical study is learning about those people, those worlds, and how they made change or protected what was valuable.
SK: I wanted to ask about organized labor specifically. What are you seeing? What, historically, can be helpful to look at with regards to how organized labor can be a part of the solution to the climate crisis and where do you see organized labor playing a role today?
Jeremy: Yeah, thank you so much for that question. I don't get to have to talk about that very often. First of all, just to share that somebody that people should look at. On the history of this, I want to mention Tony Mazzocchi, who led the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union n the late 60s, early 70s one of the first people to really understand and articulate that workers have an environmental consciousness. Workers exist at the front the world of all these projects that we're talking about on the front lines of oil and gas extraction or chemical production. Workers experience those in ways that most people don't. And workers suffer a lot of the first harms before they go into the atmosphere. It's workers who are experiencing exposures that lead to cancer, suffering injury and violence at their workplace. Kate Beaton’s new graphic novel Ducks, about her time working in the oilsands, is a phenomenal meditation on this. So any transition of our economy has to be centered around a better working life for everybody. And I think that organized labor in some areas does a lot in terms of pushing for that, but in some areas can be a little hesitant because organized labor has different memberships that push in different directions.
I used to be a membership of LiUNA and LiUNA, being a construction union, supports a lot of aprawl. And as Dianne Saxe says in Ontario, we don't have tar sands, we have sprawl. Right? And LiUNA is good with that because that means jobs, whereas other unions maybe not so much. But I think where unions can come together is, number one, they have an enormous amount of capacity in organizing for change. And two, to say that if we need to consume less to effectively meet the challenges of the times and I believe that not everybody does, but certainly the people in the very top, including myself here, income brackets, top 20% or so in North American need to consume less, then we also need to build a vision of a society where we have more, where we're working less, where we're less stressed out, where we have more time with our families, we have more time to go to ballgames, we have more time to relax and build our communities.
All these things that we know determinative of a good life and are very low carbon compared to a world where we just are working all the time to buy things that we really don't need. Where did we get the weekend from? Right. Now increasingly there's labor pushing for a four-day work week, which is something that would be enormously beneficial both from a quality of life and from an environmental perspective. The federal government has just introduced just transition legislation which they are calling something about green jobs. And it'll be really interesting to see what does labor push for. Is it we want X number of jobs in X amount of industries or are they going to say, well actually we need to think about kind of reworking how we work, why we work and what the rewards are and who reaps them? Because I think that that's a big part of climate politics that really offers a lot of opportunities for people.
SK I want to also ask you about the climate activism online versus in person. This is a hornet's nest, but what do you recommend to those who are discouraged by the culture online? Because it is obviously so polarized. And while not everyone’s online, it’s where a lot of the discourse is taking place.
Jeremy: The ways people can be and interact online are almost as multifarious and diverse as the way we are in the real world. Sure. People are online in so many different ways for so many different reasons. And yeah, I mean, arguing on the Internet is normally a bad idea, but, I mean, I'd be hypocrite if I said I'd never did it! Even there there's opportunities, you know, to connect with like minded people which for isolated people, young people, people in in areas where, you know, there maybe there are not a lot of people around that share their interests or passions or views or outlook that's enormously valued, it can be lifesaving.
And as an activist, it is important, number one, to publicize things like events and actions . Another thing that I think has been possible online- not exclusively because these platforms are owned and bought by, as we know, giant corporations and very rich opinionated men- but there is a chance within these spaces to frame our own narratives and tell our own stories in a way that we usually didn't get to do in other media landscapes. There was that young woman, Ever, who disrupted the Juno’s a few weeks ago for climate activism. There is a world if she did that in the 90s, like what happened during Bob Dylan’s performance at the Grammys, basically all you would hear was how the media covered it.
Today, people were able to share her discussing her thoughts and actions on social media, levelling out some of the coverage. I think all that stuff's really important. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff online that's really negative. There's a lot of abuse directed at people. In the climate space, being online can be really hard because there's a lot of really bad news and a lot of people freaking out. Twitter exists to watch people freak out stuff in real time. When you're working on something like Climate, that can be really demotivating. Yeah. So, I'm not giving an easy answer to any of this, I guess, but one thing I would say, maybe that would be helpful would be to ask yourself questions about your online behavior and its relationship with your activism.
If you're doing activism online, it should always be pretty much connected to work in the local community and having that accountability so that you are doing things to serve something that has material impacts in the real world rather than just like scoring points online which can just end up being a video game. The second thing is always ask yourself: what are your intentions being active online? What are you doing it for? Are you doing it for clout? Are you doing it to connect with other people? Are you doing it to publicize an event? Are you doing it to demonize someone else? Like there are good reasons and bad reasons to be online, and if the bad reasons are prominent, you might need to recalibrate. But there are good reasons: I learned so much about climate and about organizing and activism from activists I get to see all over the world. That's amazing. So, I think it really comes down to a question of intentions and how online activity serving your life outside.
SK: What are three pieces of advice for young climate activists today?
Jeremy: One of the things that's amazing about this job is I get to work with some wonderful young activists in our community of climate and I want to share Kingston Youth Climate Action, which Sarah Gingles is involved in, Queen’s Backing Action on the Climate Crisis. And for young adults who are a little younger than those groups, there's an opportunity to get involved in the youth group that I facilitate at the library, which is Kingston Youth Climate Council. We meet every couple of weeks and it's a great group of high school students teaching each other about climate and doing some climate projects together. And so, things I've learned from that work and my own experience as someone who was young and active, would be number one it's okay and a good idea to connect your activism to things that you already enjoy doing, whether that is sports or whether that is art or whether that's public speaking or writing or organizing your friends to do something. Because we know every group has one of those that makes things happen. It's okay to start there with things you already like doing and saying, well, “how can I push this in the direction towards making an impact on the climate issues that I care about?”
Number two, get involved locally. Try to see what's happening in your community and how you can participate. But also, if you're not feeling like you're being treated well or respected in the space, that’s not OK. You deserve to be treated carefully and respectfully in activist spaces, no matter your age, young or old or in between. And if you feel comfortable saying, hey, I don't think this space is healthy or working well, then you should speak up. And if you don't feel comfortable, then you are free to leave or reply in other ways. A lot of times activists create spaces that are not welcoming enough, and everybody has a right to be welcomed and valued and included in our spaces.
And the final one is I just wanted to point out about some examples of intergenerational activism that I see happening, which is really cool. Last week there was a really big demonstration at Royal Bank downtown highlighting the bank's investment in fossil fuels and it was co -rganized by SCAN.. So, Seniors for Climate Action Now, which is a pretty new group on our scene and QBACC. It was a really amazing example of intergenerational activism and young people working together with older people to share knowledge and support and they created a joyful event with really great vibes and that was really powerful. I think that that's one of the things that's happening in climate that I think is exciting is that kind of integrated generational connection because I think sometimes that young people, and this is the last suggestion, I thinlk they get too much put on them to solve this problem. Older people are like, oh, I"t's so great young people are doing something, it’s so necessary.” Young people literally have the least responsibility of any of age group, right? And young people like, they need mentorship, they need support more than they need expectations. That's part of being young and that's part of our job as older people. So, it's great to see that kind of intergenerational activism happening and support for young people. And so, yeah, don't take it all on yourself. If you're young activist or an activist of any age, what matters is that you're doing what you can.
SK: Thank you Jeremy, this has been great. Where can people learn more about your work?
Jeremy: For our website, Providence Center for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation, you can find it at pc-jpic.ca. You can follow what myself and my colleagues, Sayyida Jaffer and Bridget Doherty and see what we’re up to in justice work in Kingston. We're also out there on Facebook, Providence Centre for JPIC. You can follow me on Twitter @JeremyMilloy. That should give you an opportunity to keep up with what I'm doing and some of the great climate activism that local people are making happen every week in our area.
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