ABSTRACT
A climate justice movement will instead demand advancing democracy as well as the health and welfare of the people within systems that will sustain the people and the planet. Environmentalism has attempted change within a system that is designed to externalize the real costs of business as usual whether that is the burden of subsidizing workers. The workers are paid poverty wages without benefits, or the destruction of local and global ecosystems by international corporations that go wherever they want, and leave behind whatever disasters they make, while creating corporate refugees. Social justice activists are the hope of the environmental movement because the climate crisis will not be averted without a major restructuring of our economic, social, and political systems. If the standard of success is preserving the Earth, the environmental movement and environmentalism has been a failure. It has been trapped in a world of policy strategies while the democratic system needed to actualize these approaches has collapsed.
