My close friend from college, Kristy Drutman, started the blog and media platform, Brown Girl Green, to write about her experience working in the white-dominated U.S. environmental field and bring other BIPOC’s (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) voices to the forefront of the conversation. I connected with Ngozi Chukwueke, intern and content creator for Brown Girl Green, about her experience working on environmental issues and how crucial anti-racist work is to environmentalism. Ngozi graduated from the University of South Carolina with a B.S. in Business Administration and is now using this knowledge to evaluate the harmful practices that stem from capitalism and push for sustainable change.

When did you first start becoming interested in environmental work and why?

Ngozi: I’ve always been interested in social impact subject matter, but in undergrad all I ever seemed to hear about environmental work was recycling and impending climate doom, which aren’t strong selling points for newcomers. I always thought, well if this is all it is… maybe it’s not for me. It wasn’t until COVID-19 threw everything from graduation to internships into disarray that I was finally forced into having free time to think about gaps in my knowledge I was passionate about filling.

I’ve known for a long time that I want a career in corporate social responsibility, and in all the research I’ve done, the one thing you can’t separate from even the broadest definition of social impact work is environmentalism. I look at it as the base, the blueprint. I got my bachelor’s degree in business, where I learned about the triple bottom line: profit, people, planet. You can’t do good in one area while ignoring the others, so I got to work learning about what I’d been ignorant about for so long, starting with pages like @browngirl_green! Brown and Black environmentalist spaces feel so welcoming, and I’ve found them to be a safe place to learn, grow, and just be myself.

How has it been working at BrownGirlGreen (BGG) and starting your work with AmeriCorps?

Ngozi: Brown Girl Green has been amazing. It’s challenged me and pushed me, but in the best way. Every new graphic or case study I work on, I’m walking away with a wealth of information. You never know how much work goes into creating/curating quality content until you have to do it yourself! I’m so fresh to the environmentalism space, and it makes me that much more grateful that Kristy, BGG’s founder, took a chance on me and took me under her wing through Brown Girl Green.

I start my work as an AmeriCorps CivicSpark Fellow for the City of Santa Monica at the beginning of September! I’ll be working with their sustainability office to decarbonize buildings and the transportation sector, as well as build a sustainable food system plan. My service year goes from September to July, and we’re currently looking at serving either a majority or all of it remotely. There’s a lot that’s still uncertain, but I’m so excited to be working with such a progressive city that shares the same values as me.

Why is environmental justice work so important compared to the approach traditional environmentalist organizations take? 

Ngozi: My favorite thing about environmental justice is that its main focus is to elevate voices that are too often covered up or silenced. There’s nothing I love more than a really good talk, and environmental justice completely flips the conversation on its head. For so long, just about any topic or subject matter has been created for viewing pleasure through the white gaze. Environmental justice is able to bring up complex issues of intersectionality and identity that traditional approaches can’t accomplish because by design, they’re not capable of seeing the whole story. It’s essential to be able to bring every part of who you are to what you do, and environmental justice allows BIPOC to deeply discuss how the past is still affecting their present, with a raw authenticity that can’t be faked or duplicated. That is special to me.

How have you been staying motivated during COVID-19 to continue the work you are passionate about? How has this pandemic impacted the place you live?

Ngozi: I went through a major period of adjustment going from overworking myself during school to having virtually nothing on my plate when COVID-19 hit. Since then I’ve focused on pouring my energy into all the things that interest me that I’ve never gotten the chance to do, essentially jumping down rabbit holes and seeing what I find. I’m community service-oriented at heart, and chasing crazy ideas, fleshing out concepts, and planning projects whether they happen or not is my form of self-care. My question for myself has always been, “What can I do?” The answer to that has taken me anywhere from sharpening my storytelling skills through media studies, to fundraising for protests, to diving headfirst into the environmentalism space.

My small suburb in metro Atlanta hasn’t been too affected by COVID-19, but Georgia as a whole is struggling to come to an agreement on what’s right for the state. The standstill has helped people stop and listen to important messages, like Black Lives Matter, and it’s powerful to see. If nothing else, COVID-19 has created space for Black lives to take center stage, with the whole world watching. People don’t have the distractions they had pre-COVID, and everyone, no matter age, race, or opinion, is getting involved in these discussions, and that’s how you know the movement is serving its intended purpose.

I know Brown Girl Green (BGG) has gotten many more followers in the last few months and it is great to see more mainstream environmentalists engaging with racism in the outdoors and environmental justice work. How do we maintain this pressure on environmental organizations to incorporate anti-racism into their work?

Ngozi: We have to keep the conversation going and keep holding people accountable for not just what they say and do, but also what they claim they’re going to say and do. As good as intentions can be, people have short memories. We need to remember how we feel now, when motivation is at an all-time high, and draw from that when things start reverting to what we knew before. People revert because it’s comfortable, but there are so many people whose lives depend on us not going back to “comfortable.”

COVID-19 has taught us all the value of stakeholder engagement: building a relationship with your audience and being able to make changes to fit their concerns. We need more unconventional relationships across industries/sectors and collaboration to create actionable goals for success, instead of littering social media with empty support. Our world is so intersectional, and once people realize that, anti-racism doesn’t become a hassle to incorporate into your work. It becomes natural because you understand it’s a basic, necessary, need.

I know this is a big question but: What is your theory for change? Or what do you think are the most effective avenues for shifting our society towards a more sustainable, more ethical, just future?

Ngozi: This is a great question! It’s something that I’ve thought about a lot lately. I’m currently reading Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas and it brings up a really good point about how people do good to compensate for the harm they’re doing without actually changing anything about the harm they inflict to others. If we want a more sustainable, ethical, and just future, that needs to change. Entire structures and systems need to be remade, otherwise we’re just treading water. It might be the business major in me, but while I don’t think we can completely rid the world of capitalism, we need to reevaluate the practices that stem from it. And it’s not going to be easy; there’s no way to create sustainable change while leaving everything the same.

The idea of a triple bottom line should be the norm, not a gold star for going above and beyond. Common decency has become so rare, that we applaud at the sight of it. And I’m guilty of doing that too. We need to stop discarding ideas for being “too radical”, and instead examine what concepts and frameworks drive those ideas and figure out how we can make those big ideas reality. I really want us to normalize caring about other people, in short. If people, brands, companies, and institutions would match their practices to what their mission statements say, we’d be halfway there.