“Everything needs to become about local issues.”
2016 Kairos Fellow Eric Enrique Borja of the Sierra Club shares what the environmental justice movement must do under the coming Trump administration.
“We’re about to have a Secretary of the Interior that wants to open up public lands to fracking. We’ve fought for so many things and we can lose it in one administration. We’re about to have a dude that’s been suing the EPA forever as the head of the EPA — but the EPA might as well have not existed in Texas,” said 2016 Kairos Fellow Eric Enrique Borja.
Borja, who was placed with the Sierra Club as a fellow and is now a full-time staffer at the organization, is clear about the challenges that progressive movements face under president-elect Donald Trump. He’s no less clear about the failures of groups like the Sierra Club to “build an inclusive movement” and “move and educate our members” — two things that he believes must change in order for the organization and the broader climate justice movement to win.
Borja’s perspective is informed in part by his own history. He is a first generation Salvadoran American, whose father from a young age grew up on his own, often times forcing him to sleep on the streets in El Salvador. As Borja recounts it, “For him, the outdoors is traumatic. It’s full of that pain, so growing up we never went camping or spent much time in the outdoors.” The message of “protecting our parks and wilderness” often doesn’t resonate with communities of color, he said, adding, “I’ve always found the environmental movement to be excluding and never speak to my reality of growing up in Long Beach.”
Still, Borja was excited to work for the Sierra Club, in large part because the organization has begun to recognize that building a movement requires moving beyond its bread-and-butter issues of protecting our national parks as well as building a membership beyond its traditionally White base, and he was intrigued by the idea of running campaigns that coupled digital and offline organizing strategies. Borja, who is finishing a PhD program while working full-time, had previously done research on the intersection of digital media and social movements. “I’ve been really grappling with this question of what has social media and digital media done to how we engage with power,” he said.
At the Sierra Club, where he first worked with Sierra Rise, and now is working on the Beyond Coal campaign (covering the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas), Borja has run campaigns fighting coal mines in border communities in south Texas as well as the Trans Pecos Pipeline, a pipeline being built in west Texas by the same company — Energy Transfer Partners, based in Dallas — that is spearheading the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“The oil and gas industry has corrupted democracy in Texas for so long, but the environmental movement has tended to turn its back on places like Texas,” Borja said. He pointed out that while large organizations celebrate protecting the Arctic, the Obama administration has allowed more than 1,200 fracking wells to operate in the Gulf of Mexico for years, and similarly, the EPA has permitted oil companies to dump fracking wastewater in the Gulf unchecked. “What would it mean for the environmental movement to recenter the movement in the Gulf South, instead of centering places like the Arctic?” he asked. “The future of the Sierra Club is this work.”
In Texas, the work Borja and his team have been leading has focused on doing exactly that, not only by running online petitions and amplifying the work through digital strategies and media work, but by building the capacity of communities on the ground for the long-term. In the case of the #NoTPPL campaign focusing on Trans Pecos Pipeline, that work has included everything from working in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors and holding #NoDAPL actions in west Texas with the state’s Native organizations to planning actions at the headquarters of Energy Transfer Partners in both Austin and Dallas.
He sees digital tools as supporting the organizing work, which he views as less about ensuring that individual campaigns win victories and more about movement building. “We’re training communities how to organize, but that work is slow,” he said. “We may not close that coal mine now or stop that pipeline now, but this work goes a long way towards building that power base.”
Borja’s work in Texas has taught him that, in his words, “Everything needs to become about local issues” during Trump’s administration.
“In Texas, a Trump presidency doesn’t change our movement building plans,” Borja said. “It doesn’t change the way we engage in communities. What we need to do is move away from this framework of relying solely on the federal government.”
Digital strategies, in his mind, will play a critical role. “There’s this beauty in digital that we can take these very distinct and unique experiences people have — a coal ash issue in Oklahoma, a coal mine fight in south Texas, a clean air issue in California’s Inland Empire — and connect them online and elevate it nationally,” Borja said. “It’s so easy to feel isolated and to feel you’re the only community experiencing these things, but when you begin connecting fights and people through digital, people realize they’re not alone.”
More broadly, he believes large organizations like the Sierra Club must widen their scope and move beyond single issue organizing. “Hopefully, we use the next four years not just to survive, but to build a broad coalition of communities united against extractive capitalism, White patriarchy, and Islamophobia.”
