I’m writing this fresh from New York Climate Week, still turning over what I heard during a whirlwind sequence of events. In room after room this year, ideas were exchanged, tough questions were asked, and hard truths were told.
I sat on panels on storytelling as strategy. On lifting up the researchers who come from the communities they study instead of just studying them. On what’s changed and what hasn’t in the 35 years since the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit named environmental racism out loud.
Each of these conversations culminated on resilience that means power, not just survival. Through all of it, we heard directly from people living the climate crisis right now, not people theorizing about it from a distance.
In and between sessions, we continuously circled back to the same question: Who gets protected and who gets left to prove they deserve it? That question is not abstract for us. It’s the funding fights we’re navigating back home right now, the fights to keep our work alive, and every community still waiting on standards that reflect that their neighborhoods truly matter.
In closing, New York Climate Week 2026 expanded what I already knew. This fight has never belonged to us in Louisiana alone. It belongs to people from every country, city, and state that I encountered, every person who stood up and said their piece, every community doing this work in innovative ways without waiting for permission.
Many people ask me what keeps me energized in the fight. It’s knowing that this generation and the next are here, they’re ready, and well-equipped to end the need for this movement.
– Dr. Beverly Wright
