Commit2Respond is grounded in environmental justice rather than environmental ism — and we are specifically focused on the injustices related to climate change.

• Justice means recognizing that the peoples who contribute the least to climate change are the ones suffering the most because of it, and that climate change mitigation is an essential component to reduce the suffering of vulnerable peoples.

• Justice means understanding that oppressions are inextricably linked and the values that have resulted in the degradation of human groups through slavery, colonization, genocide, and mass incarceration are the same values that are leading to the destruction of Earth.
  
  
• Justice means grounding our work in the needs and leadership of marginalized peoples who are impacted by and fighting climate change—Native peoples, island peoples, poor and low-income peoples whose livelihood and lives depend on the land, and others.
  
  
• Justice means working for intergenerational equity, honoring the leadership of youth and elders, recognizing that today's children will carry the burdens of climate change forward. 
  
  
• Justice means honoring the interdependent web of all life by recognizing that destruction visited on one part of the web—whether one person, species, or ecosystem—impacts all, and working to combat species extinction and ecosystem destruction.
  
  
• Justice means working in relationship and partnership, always seeking out community-based solutions that challenge the status quo rather than individual actions that only uphold the power structures and values that are destroying our world.

Find out more from Alex Kapitan, one of the coordinators of Commit2Respond:

Learn more about environmental justice

• Principles of environmental justice from the Unitarian Universalist Environmental Justice Collaboratory

• A short history of the environmental justice movement from the Natural Resources Defense Council
  
  
• A comprehensive collection of resources on environmental justice from Energy Justice Network
  
  
• Hear about environmental justice from Robert Bullard, considered one of the founders of the movement, in the 3-minute video “The Genesis of Environmental Justice”: