A People's Climate

"The insanity of the settler colonial mindset has no limit."

Genocide is not only the destruction of human life. It is also the destruction of land, water, food systems, and ecosystems that make life possible. 

In Palestine, the devastation of agricultural lands, the poisoning and destruction of water systems, and the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of olive trees are part of a broader campaign to erase Palestinian life, culture, and connection to the land. 

This is the environmental Nakba: the ecological destruction woven into more than a century of settler colonialism that continues to unfold today.

On this episode of A People’s Climate, Shilpi Chhotray speaks with Dr. Hatem Bazian, Palestinian-American scholar, organizer, and professor at UC Berkeley.

They discuss how environmental destruction functions as a weapon of genocide and colonial control. From the destruction of Gaza’s agricultural infrastructure to attacks on beehives, they examine how the destruction of the natural world makes Palestinian life increasingly unlivable. 

They also explore the architecture of occupation: how border walls, checkpoints, settlements, and segregated infrastructure divide land, restrict movement, and engineer two radically unequal worlds for the colonizer and the colonized. 

Palestine is not somewhere “over there.” As Bazian puts it, “In every city in America, there’s a Palestine.” He points to collapsing schools, a healthcare system that leaves people to die, and endless wars waged to sell weapons. The same corporate and political systems shaping life in Palestine are also reshaping life in the U.S. 

But Bazian argues that colonialism is fundamentally unsustainable and is clear about what that means for Palestine. “Palestine will be free sooner than later.”

Key Topics

• The environmental Nakba: How more than a century of colonization has transformed Palestine’s geography, agriculture, and ecosystems, including non-native tree species that have contributed to devastating fires.
• The destruction of the life-sustaining systems: Including attacks on beehives, farmland, water systems, and agricultural infrastructure, which undermine food production and make Palestinian life increasingly unlivable.
• Water apartheid and environmental genocide: Gaza’s contaminated aquifers, the destruction of its water systems, and the stark inequality in water access between Palestinians and Israeli settlers.
• The weaponization of settlement expansion: How new settlements and outposts bring waves of violence, displacement, and land seizures, pushing Palestinians out of their communities.
• The colonial dividing line: How the border wall’s construction uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees and creates two radically unequal worlds.
• Black-Palestinian solidarity: From the Black Panther Party and Angela Davis to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, how generations of organizers have built connections across movements and struggles for liberation.
• Islamophobia: The demonization of Muslim communities and its role in shaping U.S. policy and public perceptions of Palestine.
• The role of religion in justifying empire: How religious narratives become intertwined with ideas of progress and development to legitimize military power and environmental destruction.
• Colonialism is fundamentally unsustainable: Why the systems built on dispossession and domination cannot last, and why Bazian believes Palestine will be free sooner than later.

Resources:

• Seeds of Resistance with Vivien Sansour - A People’s Climate Season 1, Episode 7
• Palestinian Land, Heritage, and Identity, Shilpi Chhotray in conversation with Rania Batrice for Peace & Riot
• Dr. Hatem Bazian
• Dr. Hatem Bazian’s Substack
• A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon

Credits

Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation

Powered by Wildseeds Fund

Host: Shilpi Chhotray

Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker 

Engineer: Dennis Maxwell

Project Manager: Asia Simms

🌐 apeoplesclimate.org
📱 @counterstream_media
📧 [email protected]

Love what you hear? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe and leave a review — it helps others discover the show.

“Those who own the land get to be decision makers over what happens to the land. They get to decide whether they're gonna frack and how much they’re going to pollute.”

Corporations have made fortunes by extracting from the land, while Black and Indigenous communities who have long understood land as something to steward have been systematically pushed off of it. But what if reparations could both repair the legacy of land theft and help solve the climate crisis?

In this episode of A People’s Climate, host Shilpi Chhotray speaks with writer and organizer Brea Baker, author of “Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership.” 

They discuss how land theft and slavery are connected to our broken industrial food system and the environmental crisis we’re living with today. But Brea argues that reparations are more than just a moral reckoning with the past — especially when they go beyond financial compensation. What does that look like in practice? Returning property. Reversing eminent domain seizures. Repairing polluted places. Investing in communities with generations of knowledge about the ecosystem. And the payoff reaches far beyond those directly receiving reparations: more sustainable land use, less pollution, lower emissions, and a healthier environment for all.

Key Topics 

• Reparations as a climate strategy: How repairing historical harms can also create healthier ecosystems.
• Land theft and the extractive economy: How slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and land theft shaped our extractive economy.
• Black Land Ownership: How heirs’ property, USDA discrimination, predatory debt, and government policy stripped Black families of land and wealth, including Baker’s own family history.
• From plantations to Cancer Alley: How former plantation areas in Louisiana became sites of petrochemical development, linking the history of land ownership to pollution and public health.
• Eminent domain: What it would mean to use the government’s power to seize polluting facilities for the public good, rather than using it to take land from Black communities.
• Redefining reparations:  Reparations can mean more than just financial compensation, including returning property, medical care, education, and more.
• Maroonage and mutual aid: How Black communities have built networks of collective care, self-determination, and survival outside systems that failed them.
• Reparations in practice: How cities and states are already implementing reparations, from direct payments to returning property to Black families.

Resources

• Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership
• Learn more about Brea Baker
• All Revolution Is Based On Land with Leah Penniman - from A People’s Climate Season 1

Credits

Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation
Powered by Wildseeds Fund
Host: Shilpi Chhotray
Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker
Engineer: Dennis Maxwell
Project Manager: Asia Simms

🌐 apeoplesclimate.org
📱 @counterstream_media
📧 [email protected]

Love what you hear? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe and leave a review — it helps others discover the show.

“No one has a right to tell you how to organize, to free yourself, and to liberate yourself.”

The fight over Cop City was never just about a police training center. In Atlanta, a multiracial, multigenerational movement brought together environmental justice, land conservation, police abolition, and grassroots organizing to challenge the destruction of a forest and expansion of police power.

In this episode of A People’s Climate, Shilpi Chhotray talks with organizer Kamau Franklin about the strategies behind the Stop Cop City movement—and the lessons it offers for fights still to come. 

Although the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center was ultimately built, the movement showed how organizers can build power across ideologies, work through decentralized networks, shape the public narrative, and connect struggles that are often treated as separate.

Franklin and Shilpi also discuss the criminalization of protesters, including the killing of forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán. They examine what it means to organize under state repression and ultimately, what the Stop Cop City movement can teach those fighting for justice.

Key Topics

• Climate & the forest: Why protecting Atlanta’s South River Forest was an environmental justice fight
• Movement tactics: The organizing strategies behind Stop Cop City, from town halls and petition drives to direct action, civil disobedience, and decentralized organizing.
• Defining violence: Why organizers challenged the idea that property destruction is equivalent to violence—and who gets to define legitimate protest.
• Organizing across differences: How a decentralized movement brought together people with different ideologies, tactics, and political traditions.
• The power of narrative: How organizers turned “Cop City” into a powerful frame and pushed back against efforts to portray protesters as outsiders or extremists.
• Criminalizing dissent: The killing of forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán and the sweeping RICO charges brought against protesters.
• Building power under repression: How movements can organize when the state is working to divide, intimidate, and silence them.
• Lessons for future fights: What Stop Cop City can teach organizers fighting for climate, racial, and environmental justice beyond Atlanta.

Resources

• Community Movement Builders
• No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement Edited by Micah Herskind Mariah Parker, and Kamau Franklin 

Credits

Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation
Powered by Wildseeds Fund
Host: Shilpi Chhotray
Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker
Engineer: Ameeta Ganatra
Project Manager: Asia Simms

🌐 apeoplesclimate.org
📱 @counterstream_media
📧 [email protected]

Love what you hear? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe and leave a review — it helps others discover the show.

“This is about life. And this extractive industry is not a giver of life, it is a taker of life.”

On March 23, 2026, a massive explosion tore through the Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, shaking homes and sending a plume of smoke over a community that has lived with oil and petrochemical pollution for generations. In this episode of A People’s Climate, host Shilpi Chhotray talks with John Beard Jr., a former refinery worker who spent 38 years inside the industry, about what happens when global oil decisions become local realities.

From U.S. policy toward Venezuelan oil to the expansion of petrochemical production and the world's demand for plastics, Beard connects the decisions made far from Port Arthur to the people who pay the price close to home. They explore who benefits from the fossil fuel economy, who bears its risks, and what it would take to build a transition that doesn't leave communities to pay for it with their health and their lives.

Key Topics

• Global oil, local consequences: How decisions about oil, foreign policy, and energy affect communities right here in the United States.
• The price of fossil fuels: Why communities like Port Arthur bear the pollution, health risks, and industrial disasters that make fossil fuel profits possible.
• The Valero explosion: What the March 2026 refinery explosion revealed about the risks fence-line communities live with every day.
• Oil & petrochemicals: How Gulf Coast communities became sacrifice zones for refining, plastics, and global fossil fuel demand.
• Who benefits?: The disconnect between the industry's promise of jobs and prosperity and the economic realities facing Port Arthur residents.
• A just transition: What it means to move away from fossil fuels while repairing the damage already done and protecting workers and communities.
• Building power: Why communities need political power to challenge an industry whose reach extends from local government to global geopolitics.

Resources

• Port Arthur Community Action Network
• A People’s Climate Episode: An Unreasonable Woman with Diane Wilson - Another Texan’s historic win against the petrochemical industry
• U.S. Gulf South Climate and Environmental Justice organizations:
  • Better Brazoria: Clean Air & Water 
  • Cheek Texas Community Association 
  • Climate Conversation Brazoria County 
  • Concerned Citizens of St. John Parish
  • For a Better Bayou
  • Freeport Haven Project for Environmental Justice
  • Houston Climate Movement
  • Mossville Environmental Action Now (MEAN)
  • Permian Gulf Coast Coalition
  • RISE St. James 
  • S.A.F.E. Communities
  • San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper
  • South End Charlton-Pollard Greater Historic Community Association
  • Southern Sector Rising
  • t.e.j.a.s. (Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services)
  • The Vessel Project of Louisiana

Credits

Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation
Powered by Wildseeds Fund
Host: Shilpi Chhotray
Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker
Engineer: Ameeta Ganatra
Project Manager: Asia Simms

🌐 apeoplesclimate.org
📱 @counterstream_media
📧 [email protected]

Love what you hear? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe and leave a review — it helps others discover the show.

“If you don’t control the Supreme Court, you don’t control anything.”

That’s why The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal thinks the Supreme Court should matter to everyone who cares about climate and environmental justice. 

The Court can block laws, limit the government’s ability to regulate polluters, and prevent communities from holding powerful companies accountable. In this episode of A People’s Climate, Shilpi Chhotray talks with Mystal about what happens when some of the biggest climate battles are being decided by a few unelected judges.

Mystal explains how the Supreme Court has changed, why its decisions have such far-reaching consequences for climate policy, and what recent cases like Loper Bright and Suncor Energy reveal about the stakes. He and Shilpi also discuss what can be done to change the Supreme Court, including stronger ethics rules, term limits, and expanding the number of justices.

Note: At the time of recording, Justice Samuel Alito had not recused himself from Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, which is discussed in this episode. On September 28, 2026, Alito recused himself from the case.

Key Topics

• The Supreme Court & climate: Why the Court has become such an important battleground over climate laws, environmental protections, and corporate accountability.
• The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court can block or change major climate policies through emergency rulings—without hearing full arguments or explanations.
• Loper Bright & the EPA: What overturning Chevron deference means for regulating polluters and protecting the environment.
• Fossil fuel accountability: What the Suncor Energy case could mean for efforts to hold oil and gas companies responsible for climate-related harms.
• Supreme Court ethics: Questions around conflicts of interest, financial ties, recusals, and the lack of a binding ethics code for the justices.
• Reforming the Court: What could be done to change the Supreme Court, including term limits, stronger ethics rules, and adding more justices.
• Climate & political power: Why understanding the courts is essential to understanding where climate policy gets made—and where it can be blocked.

Resources

• Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America by Elie Mystal 
• Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal
• Contempt of Court podcast hosted by Elie Mystal
• The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

Credits
Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation
Powered by Wildseeds Fund
Host: Shilpi Chhotray
Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker
Engineer: Dennis Maxwell
Project Manager: Asia Simms

🌐 apeoplesclimate.org
📱 @counterstream_media
📧 [email protected]

Love what you hear? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe and leave a review — it helps others discover the show.

“National security has always explicitly been about fossil fuels.”

The U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels—and one of the largest sources of environmental destruction. Yet its role in the climate crisis is rarely part of mainstream climate or environmental justice conversations. 

In this episode of A People’s Climate, host Shilpi Chhotray talks with independent journalist and documentary filmmaker Abby Martin about why meaningful climate action must confront militarism.

As military spending rises and wars continue to devastate communities and ecosystems, the connections between war, fossil fuels, and environmental destruction are becoming harder to ignore. Martin traces how military power has shaped the climate crisis, from the toxic legacy of U.S. military bases to the destruction of land and water in Hawaiʻi and the environmental costs of modern warfare. She and Shilpi also explore why climate and anti-war movements have so often operated separately—and what it could look like to build a broader movement capable of confronting both systems.

Key Topics

• War & fossil fuels: How fossil fuel extraction, U.S. military power, and global war are deeply intertwined.
• The environmental cost of war: The carbon emissions, toxic rubble, contaminated soil and water, and ecosystem destruction left behind by modern warfare.
• Military pollution: The toxic waste and contamination generated by U.S. military bases, including the devastating legacy of Camp Lejeune.
• Hawaiʻi & militarism: How colonization and militarization have turned Hawaiʻi into a military playground, with lasting impacts on Indigenous land, water, and communities—including the Red Hill fuel spill.
• RIMPAC: What Abby Martin witnessed at the world’s largest international maritime military exercise—and its impact on Hawaiʻi’s land and ocean ecosystems.
• War & wildlife: How military sonar, weapons testing, and munitions damage marine life and leave pollution that can persist for generations.
• Connecting movements: Why climate and anti-war movements need to break out of their silos to confront the systems driving both crises.
• Building power: How divestment, grassroots organizing, labor action, and community resistance can challenge militarism and corporate power.

Resources to Explore

• Earth’s Greatest Enemy
• The Empire Files
• Water Protectors Rise Up: Native Hawaiian resistance in the wake of the Red Hill disaster
• Collateral of the Permanent War: How 'national security' made communities and ecosystems disposable

Credits
Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation
Powered by Wildseeds Fund
Host: Shilpi Chhotray
Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker
Engineer: Ameeta Ganatra
Project Manager: Asia Simms

🌐 apeoplesclimate.org
📱 @counterstream_media
📧 [email protected]

Love what you hear? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe and leave a review — it helps others discover the show.

A People’s Climate is back for Season 2. Host Shilpi Chhotray takes you inside the fight for climate and environmental justice with organizers, legal experts, filmmakers, and movement leaders challenging the corporate and political forces blocking real change — from Big Oil and militarism to over-policing and the Supreme Court. 

This is essential listening for anyone serious about building a mass climate movement.

New episodes every Saturday starting Oct 3, 2026.

Guests this season include:

• LaTricea Adams - Founder and CEO of Young, Gifted & Green
• Brea Baker - Writer, Activist and Author of ROOTED: The American Legacy of Land Theft & The Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership
• Dr. Hatem Bazian - Decolonial scholar, professor at UC Berkeley, author, and activist
• John Beard Jr. - Founder and CEO of the Port Arthur Community Action Network
• Nalleli Cobo - Environmental Activist and Co-Founder of South Central Youth Leadership Coalition
• Kamau Franklin - Founder of Community Movement Builders
• U.S. Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost - Florida’s 10th Congressional District
• Abby Martin - Investigative journalist, Director of Earth’s Greatest Enemy, and founder of The Empire Files
• Elie Mystal - Justice Correspondent for The Nation
• Sean Sherman - Chef and Founder of Indígena by Owamni and North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems
• And more to be announced.

Credits
Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation
Powered by Wildseeds Fund
Host: Shilpi Chhotray
Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker
Engineer: Dennis Maxwell
Project Manager: Asia Simms

🌐 apeoplesclimate.org
📱 @counterstream_media
📧 [email protected]

Love what you hear? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe and leave a review — it helps others discover the show.

🗳️VOTE FOR A PEOPLE’S CLIMATE HERE 🗳️

https://wbby.co/57463N

Be sure to confirm your vote via email for it to count.

A People’s Climate is a top 5 Webby Award nominee (out of 13K+ entries) in the Sustainability & Environment category. And it’s an extremely tight race for the People’s Voice Award — which is decided entirely by public vote. 

We’re currently in 2nd place by just 1% point, so every vote counts.

If you support independent media and care about the climate, please cast a vote for A People’s Climate. It takes less than 30 seconds. Voting closes at midnight PDT on Thursday. 

We are grateful for your support!

https://wbby.co/57463N

Voted? Let us know! [email protected] 

Follow us on Instagram @counterstream_media

- - - - - - - - -

🌐 apeoplesclimate.org
📱 @counterstream_media
📧 [email protected]

Love what you hear? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe and leave a review — it helps others discover the show.

Bringing frontline stories into focus.

For this special season finale, recorded live during NYC Climate Week, host Shilpi Chhotray convenes a powerful storytelling event with three frontline media makers: Chantel Comardelle, Alexandra Norris, and B. Preston Lyles.

This is more than a conversation about films or campaigns — it’s an intimate window into the lived realities of climate and environmental injustice. From Indigenous land loss in Louisiana, to the ongoing fight against the petrochemical buildout in Cancer Alley, to exposing the violence of toxic prisons, this discussion centers the human stories too often sidelined in mainstream climate narratives.

Our guests speak candidly about their experiences, what sustains them in the face of systemic harm, why frontline voices must lead solutions, and how storytelling itself becomes a vital tool of resistance, survival, and collective power.

This live storytelling event was made possible in partnership with Dr. Margot Brown, Senior Vice President of Justice and Equity at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Frontline Resource Institute. Special thanks to Chess Jakobs, Counterstream Media’s Impact Producer, who produced this event.

Key Topics

• Frontline climate and environmental justice: Stories from communities directly impacted by the climate crisis  and extractive industries.
• Indigenous displacement: The Isle de Jean Charles Choctaw Nation and climate-driven migration.
• Sharon Lavigne’s fight against petrochemical expansion in Cancer Alley
• Toxic prisons: The intersection of mass incarceration, environmental harm, and systemic injustice.
• How spiritual grounding and faith sustains organizing. Using film and media to reclaim narratives and highlight underrepresented stories.
• Narrative power: How media shapes perception, policy, and the climate movement’s priorities.

Resources

Let No One Lose Heart

Toxic Prisons Campaign

Rise St. James

Preserving Our Place

Isle de Jean Charles Choctaw Nation

Frontline Resource Institute

Environmental Defense Fund

🌐 apeoplesclimate.org
📱 @counterstream_media
📧 [email protected]

Love what you hear? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe and leave a review — it helps others discover the show.

The path to climate justice is local.

In this episode of A People’s Climate, host Shilpi Chhotray sits down with Elizabeth Yeampierre, veteran organizer and executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, to explore how frontline communities are taking climate action into their own hands.

In a capitalist world that prioritizes bigger, faster, and more, Elizabeth’s work takes a different path. Small, hyper-local solutions like a community-owned solar grid have huge impacts. Residents of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, where UPROSE focuses its work, are seeing lower energy costs, good green jobs, and local ownership. All while creating a blueprint for other communities to follow.

Elizabeth also takes us beyond the buzzwords of “green economy" and “clean energy” to show what a Just Transition really looks like. Mainstream environmental efforts often focus on the end goal: shifting to renewable energy. But they fail to ask “at what cost and to whom?” Elizabeth’s work ensures community members aren’t left behind.

This episode is a masterclass in how grassroots power can transition us to a just future.

Key Topics

• A Just Transition: Shifting to renewable energy while protecting workers and communities historically harmed by pollution
• The community-led renewable energy GRID Project
• Resisting extractive economies and reclaiming industrial spaces without displacement or gentrification.
• The importance of building an intergenerational movement
• How Trump-era policies have dismantled climate protections and undermined renewable energy incentives
• How disaster capitalism exploits crises and how community-led responses offer real solutions

Resources

UPROSE

The GRID 

Sunset Park Solar

A new solar project in Brooklyn could offer a model for climate justice

US Spending On Climate Damage Nears $1 Trillion Per Year

The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein)

🌐 apeoplesclimate.org
📱 @counterstream_media
📧 [email protected]

Love what you hear? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe and leave a review — it helps others discover the show.