Colette Pichon Battle – Expanding Our Movements for Climate Justice
One of the Southeast U.S.’ and Gulf South’s most renowned veterans of climate justice struggles as an activist, community organizer, coalition-builder, and award-winning litigating environmental and human rights attorney, Colette Pichon Battle, born and raised in Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, focuses on creating spaces for frontline communities to gather and advance climate strategies that help them steward their water, energy, and land responsibly. She draws from her decades of experience fighting for equitable climate resilience to unearth historic lessons and expose the root causes of the inequities and imbalances that characterize our relationships to the natural world and to each other. Colette argues that we must expand our understanding of what a genuine Climate Justice movement needs to encompass if we are to succeed in innovating a better future, and why such struggles as gender and migrant justice are inextricably connected to human rights for clean air, clean water, sovereign land, and community control of justly-sourced sustainable energy.
This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.
Colette Pichon Battle, a generational native of Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, is an award-winning lawyer and prominent climate justice organizer. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Black and Indigenous communities were largely left out of federal recovery systems, Colette led the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy (GCCLP) to provide relief and legal assistance to Gulf South communities of color. After 17 years at GCCLP’s helm, as frontline communities from the Gulf South to the Global South face ever more devastating storms, droughts, wildfires, heat, and land loss, she co-founded Taproot Earth to create connections and power across issues, movements, and geographies.
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