THE LAND BENEATH OUR FEET

Earlier, on page 2, I was kvetching about how the climate crisis isn’t getting enough attention in everyday conversations in the sector. Though it impacts all our work, it’s rarely built into our strategic plans or scenario exercises. Thankfully, Nonprofit Quarterly recognized its relevance through the lens of our 250-year-old democratic experiment and the power of community organizing, movement building, and grassroots organizations by joining with Oakland’s Counterstream Media to co-publish the Summer 2026 issue of Peace & Riot. It’s refreshing to see climate invited to the table.

With 20 articles reflecting diverse voices and ecosystems, the issue offers readers many entry points. Three articles stood out to me, for very different reasons. (The first, “Energy is a Human Right,” I mention on page 2, as it speaks directly to the citizen resistance to AI data centers.)

In “The Land Beneath Democracy: America at 250,” author Steve Phillips sets the stage for why a healthy democracy is crucial for a healthy planet (and vice versa):

“The fight to build a true multiracial democracy and the fight for environmental justice are not separate struggles. They’re two expressions of same questions: ‘Whose lives matter? How do we all live—and thrive—together on this planet while sharing responsibility for its care?’”

That shared responsibility is what binds us all together—not just within this construct of a country, but as one terrestrial community.

Phillips links exploitation of the land to the exploitation of people, naming it as a problem of representation and of excess: overrepresentation of some groups (here, challenging the mainstream framing of “inequality as a problem of deficiency among marginalized groups rather than excess among those who dominate positions of power”) and those powerful groups’ excessive demands on the land itself.

Excess. At the expense of the land, and of the people it was stolen from, and of the people forced to labor over it.

Dr. PennElys Droz names this same problem of excess in her article, “How Origin Stories Shape the World: From Greed to Generosity,” invoking the Spirit of Greed as the poison seed of both ecocide and genocide. She describes the power of belonging to the land, and what happens when this is taken from people:

“A first stage of the spread of empire is the disconnection of people from their homelands. This has been practiced through Indigenous genocide and land theft, land enclosure, forced removal of people from their homelands and the removal of children from their communities through the boarding school system. Because our greatest power comes from our loving relationship with our homelands, this disconnection diminishes our power, foundation, and safety.”

Separation from the land robs power from the people and consolidates it among the proponents of empire. (Colonialism 101.)

Droz calls for “the restoration of land to the people, and the rebuilding of cultures that are able to collectively care for land again.” This will look different for each of us: rematriation,  restoration, reparations, learning—and much relational bridging. It will be hard work for us to come together across so many unhealed wounds and perhaps irreconcilable differences, but she believes in us:

“We can, and must, do this across cosmologies and belief systems. When we focus on the lands, waters, and human needs that bring us together, we can build systems of care for one another even if we don’t like each other.” 

Again, the reminder that there is only one way forward, and it is side by side and hand in hand.

On September 2, the UN Environment Programme released a climate report that no longer cautions us (as it has in previous years) about what could happen if we exceed 1.5°C global temperature increase—but tells us what to expect now that we are certain to do so. Limiting Overshoot - Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return makes no bones about stating that “Decades of insufficient action have locked us into three compounding challenges to limiting temperature overshoot, with an urgent need for action now.” These three challenges are not strategies to avoid what is unavoidable, but to mitigate and adapt: to (crucially!) slow the rate of warming and to prepare for, respond to, and recover from climate-related disasters that are already increasing in frequency:

“Transformational adaptation is an overarching requirement. Responding to overshoot requires a futures-oriented, systems-based approach grounded in multilateral political will and the integration of local and regional perspectives instead of global frameworks alone. Rather than relying on incremental adjustments, adaptation must address the underlying drivers of vulnerability and support transformational change across practical, institutional and political spheres.” (p. 65)

As Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (co-editor of All We Can Save and author of What if We Get it Right?) observes, the biggest nut to crack is a systems/ governance issue:  “There’s a lot of emphasis [in the report] on the need for ‘careful’ and ‘long-term’ governance, which we definitely do not have in place right now.” Independent climate and ecology journalist Patrick Mazza is similarly critical: “It strains credulity to believe systemic change, the kind that draws us back within those [life-sustaining] planetary boundaries, will emerge from the political system as it is presently constituted.”

But neither is ready to give up hope. Both urge us to fight for every bit of margin that still exists to slow the burn—to save more lives.

Because of the Spirit of Greed, change will not come from the 1% at the top. It must, as ever, grow from the multitudes at the grassroots. From all of us.