We are the Appalachian
Climate Action Collaborative
Our Vision
We are a youth-led climate justice-centered group based in the so-called High Country of North Carolina in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Our vision is to pressure extractive institutions and industries into implementing sustainable measures and investing in building equitable communities.
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We imagine a world where people and the planet live harmoniously outside of greed, and life is considered valuable because it exists. Communities have sovereignty over their basic needs, and therefore, have deep incentives to treat them well. Interspecies relationships are founded on respect and mutuality, and so the world is filled with diverse, abundant, and thriving life forms free from pollution.
Our Values
1. We act to avert climate catastrophe
by mitigating climate change, building resilience, and creating just alternatives.
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2. We work for justice and liberation
so that all people have the power to create safe, meaningful, and healthy lives in harmony with their ecosystems and communities.
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3. We advocate for social and environmental healing
to create enriching and meaningful lives grounded in stronger, more supportive, and loving relationships and equity in order to bring about cultural transformation.
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4. We are nonviolent
in action, word, and relationships.
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5. We are inextricably connected to the whole;
and so we maintain a holistic perspective in a just transition that creates more harmonious relations.
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6. We collaborate through difference
though we are not the same, we are aligned in our values to work towards a common vision.
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7. We promote agency
by holding space for decentralized action towards our collective goals.
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8. We center the pursuit of the good life
and let this continuous questioning and deliberation guide our action.
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9. We create alternatives
to the systems we denounce and dismantle.
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Our Values - Extended
1. Climate action.
We, the Climate Action Collaborative, act to avert climate catastrophe by radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, building community resilience and adaptive capacity, and dismantling the systems that create and profit from crisis, and creating just alternatives. We recognize that the impacts of the climate crisis already harm marginalized communities, and that they will continue to disproportionately harm those communities and future generations. We therefore pledge to center the needs and desires of both marginalized and vulnerable communities and of future generations as we act.
2. Justice and liberation.
We ground this movement in climate justice. All people must be assured respect and the right to an autonomous, fulfilling, and healthy life. We work to create a just world where all can live with dignity. This requires freedom from domination and exploitation, violences at the heart of climate catastrophe. We also work in support grassroots, democratic institutions that ensure local sovereignty over energy, land, water, food, health, and education are essential for true liberation.
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3. Healing and transformation.
We advocate personal, interpersonal, community, interspecies, ecological, intergenerational, and ancestral healing as a way to combat fear, animosity, self-hate, scarcity, overwork, judgment, othering, and objectification for the sake of true reconciliation and cultural transformation. We aim to care for our community and ourselves by building alternative norms for living well and systems that meet material needs and provide community support. Through healing ourselves and our communities, we can create enriching and meaningful lives grounded in stronger, more supportive, and loving relationships and equity.
4. Non-violence.
We are committed to nonviolence in our actions, words, and relationships. This requires stark opposition to dehumanization and violence. We therefore avoid blaming, shaming, and othering in our own actions and words, and we will non-violently expose and oppose institutions that perpetrate these forms of violence. Nonviolence also requires the proactive and continuous humanization of all people and respect for all life. We pursue these values by upholding the other principles described here and by opening our movement to all who fully embrace these values as well.
5. Interdependence and holism.
We are inextricably connected to the whole– to all beings, plants, and minerals. Because of this, we recognize that unjust exploitation of any part of the whole will inevitably lead to injustice for others, especially for those who have been systematically silenced and ignored and those that are not heard. We maintain a holistic perspective in order to create a just transition to more harmonious relations.
6. Collaboration.
We celebrate diverse ways of knowing, acting and being and are inclusive to all. We will collaborate with all who denounce the exploitative systems in place and commit to create another way in accordance with our shared values and vision.
7. Promote agency.
We ensure space for people to realize their individual and collective agency, including asking for help when they need it, through a democratic, decentralized, and distributed structure for decision making so that we can make change collaboratively. All can and must act by these values and towards our collective vision.
8. Living the question.
Our actions are guided by the question: what is the good life? We are in agreement of what it is not, and we will continuously deliberate together on what kind of future we want to create for ourselves. Because a definite answer is impossible, naive, rigid, short-sighted, unwise, and unjust, what matters is the question, the continuous conversation, and the ongoing action that we take to manifest it.
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9. Living our vision.
In order to create the future we envision, we must create alternatives to our current systems. To that end, we strive to act at all levels–personal, small group, ClimAct, university, community, state, and beyond– in a way that is consistent with our broader vision of change.
