I Was A Star Student. Now I Risk Arrest To Fight Climate Change.

“I’ve never seen a perfect world,” storyteller Mary Annaïse Heglar writes. “I never will. But I know that a world warmed by 2 degrees Celsius is far preferable to one warmed by 3 degrees, or 6. And that I’m willing to fight for it with everything I have, because it is everything I have…Even if I can save only a sliver of what is precious to me, that will be my sliver and I will cherish it…This planet is the only home we’ll ever have…And home is always, always, always worth it.” Heglar underscores what climate activists do when they put their bodies and livelihoods on the line for a livable future: running toward the flames set off by the billionaires and executives with a probably-psychopathic disregard for the devastating social and ecological consequences of their vampiric profit ventures.

It’s been a year since 20 activists and I stood out in the rain and peacefully prevented private jets from taking off at Hanscom Airfield. The jets stayed grounded for hours after we were hauled away. Private jets are essentially flying limousines whose flagrant emissions accelerate the climate crisis. They are the most conspicuous example of how this crisis is fueled by the greedy excesses of the rich, who leave the impoverished world majority to bear the brunt of the consequences. If you needed this in numbers format, the one percent out-pollute the poorest 66%; their luxury emissions overshadowed by their deep and vast investment portfolios soaked in fossil fuels. 

Billionaires cruising high above in their jets, filling their coffers with enterprise in deforestation, extraction, and Cancer Alleys, have for so long escaped blame for gambling away our collective futures. They get away with causing climate chaos partly because their high-flying lifestyles are glorified across media and culture. Who can hate the rich if 6 in 10 Americans say they want to be billionaires themselves?    

This April, my co-defendants arrested at Hanscom Airfield will stand trial, one of whom faces a felony charge for opening an exit door, while the real climate criminals count the zeros and commas in their bank account balances and sit back as their wealth generates more than 17 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.  

What would you do to save a life? Generating huge amounts of wealth to spend on carbon-intensive activities isn’t saving anyone. At best, it’s apathetic and complicit to ecological collapse; at worst, it’s homicidal. Wealthy people may think they’re creating a comfortable cushion for their own grandchildren, but as wildfires swallow multimillion-dollar homes in Los Angeles, the financial wealth they pass down might as well line a coffin. Indeed, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are approaching the same amount of CO2 that concentrated in the atmosphere during the Permian extinction, which wiped out 90 percent of all life on Earth.  

I don’t have a trust fund, nor do I have unlimited trust that billionaires and wannabes will do their part to halt this climate from careening off a cliff. But I will invest my faith in the courageous people who disrupt business as usual and run toward this burning house to pull as many species, including ours, from the flames. 

Miranda P. Dotson is a Boston-based climate activist with Extinction Rebellion and a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Northeastern University. She is originally from Chicago, the unceded and ancestral lands of the Council of Three Fires: the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations. You can read more of her scholarly work here or follow local activist gatherings in your community here.         

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