Surfacing Systemic (In)justices:
Postcards from the future
What is your bold vision for the future?
Systemic Justice's panelists share theirs below.
Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah is a BreatheLife champion and founder of the Ella Roberta Foundation, following the death of her 9-year-old daughter in 2013. After a landmark ruling in December 2020, Ella became the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as a cause of death on her death certificate.
Rosamund’s vision for the future is a world where every child can grow up breathing clean air, regardless of socio-economic background, class or location.
This is a public health emergency and an issue of social justice, and one still under-reported on and under-represented in the public sphere. We are hopeful that Dr Chris Whitty’s report – due out later this month – will lay bare the challenge in even clearer terms, but we already know the science and what the solutions are.
Now we need governments to act, and to be held to account when they fail to do so.
Tatu (she/her) is part of the BIPoC Black Earth Climate Justice Collective and is based in Berlin. With decolonial, queer feminist and ecological perspectives, Black Earth advocates for an intersectional climate movement and narratives.
I would like to be a part of a future in which we have economic systems which are not based on extraction of racialised and gendered labour and the extraction our environment. Nor in one which places profit for a few over well-being of the many. In this future we would wake up from these weird dreams that feature unlimited economic growth or the idea that big companies can make profit off public services such as housing, travel or water.
I hope for a future in which jobs that are essential for society i.e care takers, cleaners, medics, teachers, farmers, public transport drivers, movement organisers are valued and appreciated by society. Currently we place more value on jobs and people who have “made it”, but these people never make it to where they are by themselves, they too are dependent on the essential workers.
And last but not least, I hope to live in a future in which history is not told by the winners, but by those who were in resistance. A future in which we won’t learn that anyone discovered the Americas (you can’t discover what is already there) or learn that Africa’s history merely started with European colonisation.
The good news is there are many people out there who have the stories of the resistance, there are societies out there that live with the environment in a reciprocal manner.
Let us dare to change what we currently understand as normal. Because it is clear that this normal is broken.
Tessa is an international climate change and human rights lawyer, campaigner and strategist. Before founding Uplift, she was co-founder and Co-Director of the Climate Litigation Network. She has spent more than fifteen years supporting grassroots, regional and international movements for justice and has served as an expert advisor to UN human rights bodies and national governments.
My vision for the future is one centred on justice, care and repair. It would be a world where everyone enjoys substantive equality, where our current concentration of wealth, power and resources is redistributed, and where everyone lives in conditions in which they can heal and thrive. By definition, this cannot happen in a world in which we live beyond our planet’s limits. In this vision for the future, each generation will pass a more perfect world on to the next generation.