Is Affordability a Climate Issue? Philadelphia Hunger Strikers Said Yes.

On May 21, activists with the Philadelphia chapter of the youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement began a protracted hunger strike, vowing to starve themselves until Mayor Cherelle Parker committed to spending an extraordinary $1.19 billion municipal budget surplus on community programs. They were demanding investments in renewable energy alongside demands not traditionally associated with the environmental justice movement, including affordable housing, food justice, and increased funding for rec centers and public libraries.

When the activists began planning the campaign, called Make Philly Affordable, last December, they knew they needed broadly popular demands to win the support of working-class Philadelphians. To develop the campaign’s seven demands, Sunrise Movement activists assembled a de facto coalition comprising a broad swathe of local progressive groups including economic justice, racial justice, education, and transit equity organizations. As the hunger strike entered its second week, Brit Christopher from the Good Energy Collaborative at Swarthmore College and Seth Anderson-Oberman of Reclaim Philadelphia, which emerged from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, joined as participants.

“The climate crisis compels us to act now and our cities need to be prepared. Our city is going to need to make sure that they are adequately preparing for the most devastating impacts of the planetary crisis,” Sunrise Philly hunger striker Giovanna Troilo told Truthout.

Sunrise Movement Philly’s members aren’t the only green activists pushing the boundaries of the environmental justice movement amid worsening climate catastrophe, accelerating authoritarianism, and international war.

In New York, Sunrise Movement activists confronted Sen. Chuck Schumer over his links to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “AIPAC has corrupted our democracy and bought off our politicians,” the Sunrise Movement wrote in a post, “and working people are paying the price.” In Los Angeles, Sunrise Movement members participated in a mass direct action to protest Home Depot’s collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of the Boycott Home Depot Coalition. Last year, the group formally expanded its mandate to include combatting authoritarianism. At the same time, Sunrise was labeled a “pro-terror group” by the far right Capital Research Center.

Noted climate activist Greta Thunberg made international news when she sailed on the June 2025 Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The following year’s flotilla received operation support from Greenpeace’s vessel the Arctic Sunrise. Thunberg explained that “there is no way of distinguishing” between her climate activism and her pro-Palestine activism.

“No matter what the cause of the suffering is, whether that is CO2, whether that is bombs, whether that is state repression or other forms of violence,” Thunberg told Democracy Now!, “we have to stand up against that source of suffering.”

White Skin, Green Masks

Contemporary environmental activists are framing social justice as central to their work in a way that some storied environmentalists of the past would have found incomprehensible. U.S. environmental politics, both reformist and radical, have a fraught history when it comes to racial justice in particular.

John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, celebrated Indigenous people being “dead or civilized into useless innocence.” Almost eight decades later, a Sierra Club official would found the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform. Edward Abbey, author of the iconic eco-saboteur novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, fretted over non-white birth rates while confessing that he “certainly [did] not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals.” Dave Foreman, co-founder of the radical environmentalist group Earth First!, militated against legal immigration and went so far as to argue for letting the victims of the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s starve.

A 2019 study found that leading environmental NGOs remain disproportionately white, including 96 percent of senior staff at environmental foundations. Meanwhile, the U.S. climate justice movement, especially at the grassroots, has steadily incorporated social, economic, and racial justice as integral elements of its work.

In 1991, the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit adopted 17 Principles of Environmental Justice, including “the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples.” The 1996 Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing, ratified at a meeting of 40 activists hosted by the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, called for social movements to practice a pervasive inclusivity that “requires more than tokenism.”

By the time of the alter-globalization movement in the late 1990s, radical environmentalists were working alongside labor activists, Indigenous organizers, and anarchist militants, a coalition whose heterogeneity is echoed in the broad Make Philly Affordable demands of today’s hunger strikers. Thousands of environmental activists joined members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in an attempt to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, with the water protectors’ struggle and the broader #NoDAPL campaign drawing a clear connection between tribal sovereignty and environmental justice.

Against Apocalypse

The co-mingling of environmental and social justice demands has only grown stronger with the rise of U.S. authoritarianism, the unprovoked U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

“The U.S. military is the greatest carbon polluter that we have globally,” Philadelphia hunger striker Giavanna Troilo told Truthout. “The U.S. military is the climate crisis. The U.S. military is committing genocide as well as ecocide, and they are one and the same.” An analysis by the Climate & Community Institute found that the first two weeks of the U.S. war on Iran created over 5 million tons of carbon dioxide, more than was generated by the entire country of Iceland in 2024. Meanwhile, the dramatic increase in ICE deportation flights has released hundreds of thousands of metric tons of greenhouse gases as well.

The Trump administration has gutted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with one former EPA policy adviser opining that it ought to now stand for the “Environmental Pollution Agency.” In April 2025, Trump issued an executive order to revitalize the “beautiful, clean” domestic coal industry through sweeping deregulatory efforts across the federal government. This January, the United States’s (second) withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement went into effect. Scientists expect the climate to warm by more than 2.6°C by the end of the century, with catastrophic implications including agriculture failure, ecosystem collapse, severe flooding, and lethal heat. The authoritarian right has fully committed to an end-times fascism of “monstrous, supremacist survivalism,” while Democrats in opposition have largely abandoned even referencing climate change.

“There is no serious way to think about stopping the climate crisis under a fascist government. The path to climate lies through getting rid of the authoritarian government we’re in,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement.

U.S. activists aren’t alone in drawing the connections between authoritarianism and climate collapse. In 2025, a European network called The Surge launched combined demonstrations with environmental, anti-fascist, and anti-war organizations in 33 cities. “We have the climate crisis, the rise of fascism and the far right throughout the world, and the rise of wars and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people,” said network spokesperson Leonor Canadas. “Right now, the movements opposing these things are losing, and if we are to change the pathway on which we’re headed, we must come together.”

“There’s fascism and the apocalypse, and on the other side there’s utopia and organizing,” said Philadelphia hunger striker Erica Brown. “The result of these fascists, the result of these authors of the apocalypse, is our world being destroyed. So anybody who is an organizer needs to know that those are the stakes.”

Brown described feeling as committed and resolved as ever when she spoke to Truthout on the 17th day of her hunger strike, three days after being rushed to the hospital and released. Brown fasted until June 11, the longest of any of the hunger strikers, before calling off the nonviolent direct action once the City Council voted to pass the next fiscal year’s budget without the social programs insisted upon by activists. She believes that the Make Philly Affordable campaign is nonetheless just beginning, having already succeeded in heightening tensions between City Council and the Mayor’s office, demonstrating the nondemocratic nature of traditional municipal politics, and cohering a new, diverse coalition of social justice organizations with shared goals.

“This is a fight,” Brown said, “that’s for the rest of our lives.”