The Orlando People’s Climate March was held on the afternoon of April 29 in the Pine Hills community in coordination with cities around the world. These events drew attention to the effects of climate change on a social level. To that end, the Orlando event was deliberately made family friendly, featuring plenty of children’s activities, an emphasis on art, and at one point a group of young siblings leading the chants.
There were speeches on racial justice, climate justice, reproductive justice, fair wages and the struggles of farmworkers.
Rosa Flores of the Florida Student Power Network described the need for having a platform to be heard from: “I come from a marginalized community, and we are low income families. So issues like clean water and when food is too expensive or different climate issues are effecting us directly, impacting my community. We don’t have as many resources as other communities to deal with these issues.”
This need for a platform was echoed by Tasnim Mellouli, a volunteer with Organize Florida. She told Liberation: ”A lot of Muslims don’t come to climate change marches. I want to represent my community.” Mellouli also brought attention to the international effects of the climate crisis causing droughts in places like Syria, Somalia, and Yemen. “In Yemen there’s a starvation problem, same thing in Somalia. In Syria the war was exacerbated by climate change, because of, again, a drought. All these things have a domino effect. When drought comes, you lose your agriculture and farming, which a lot of Muslims in these countries, that’s what they do, it’s mostly agriculture. So when they lose that livelihood they have to come to the cities and there’s overcrowding. It becomes a huge conflict.”
By coming together as a community on that fittingly hot Saturday, showing solidarity with the people of Pine Hills and standing against an economy that exploits the Earth and its people, the people of Orlando stood with their comrades around the world.
