Our Struggles are Interconnected and so are the Solutions: A Conversation with Activist Meera Ghani
Meera Ghani (she/her) is a Pakistani community organizer and activist living in Brussels. She’s the one of the Co-Founders of the Moxie Consultancy Collective. As a brown, queer, Muslim, feminist, immigrant parent, she’s deeply invested in building radical communities of care.
In a phone call, Meera and I connected over growing up, coming into a consciousness about the environment and feminism, and what it’s like to be a parent today. Meera first started caring about climate change when she was a child. “Back then, in the 80s, it was called global warming and as I became more and more interested in the world around me I became aware of the problems. It wasn’t until I went to university and was studying economics which I didn’t feel connected to it at all that I questioned, ‘What is out there that I’m more passionate about?’”
Meera recounts her childhood and her first environmental actions: “In Pakistan where I was growing up it was about your immediate environment. Cleaning up your street. Neighborhood. Later I became aware of degradation of the environment and pollution in things like soil from agriculture and the air. In Pakistan it was an anomaly to care about these things. When I was 10 I produced a zine about saving the planet.”
Although “saving the planet” sounds grandiose, we both agreed that taking the natural inclination of a child’s ego and being able to impose it on the earth is a more selfless perspective. Kids (and adults) want to feel I’m contributing, I’m important. “You want to do something that has impact.” For Meera, “It started with animals and moved on to the earth.” Back in the 80s and 90s, back before either of us had the internet, environmentalism was about saving the whales. Maybe an elephant or tiger or dolphins. It was about putting trash in a sidewalk wastebasket instead of littering. It was about no testing on animals and cleaning up oil spills.
Kids these days are engaging with environmentalism alongside systemic social justice issues. Meera talked about admiring Gen Z and younger. “They know about everything and are connected through social media. It’s more instinctive. Our kids these days see these things so rapidly changing.” Both of us have 7 year olds. The way they understand gender alongside disruption in recycling systems and how we nurture this knowledge in children helps to sustain it.
What about the barrage of emails, posts, videos, and campaign text messages? Even though I choose to do work in this space, it’s hard for me to not feel overwhelmed when I’ve clicked open 15 world problems before I finish my first cup of coffee. In the face of so much knowledge, it feels like I’m never doing enough.
This is part of what draws me to Meera and her work. She brings hope without false levity to the issues. “Abolition is the red thread through all [Meera’s] work. To her it’s practice is care. The systems (colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism) perpetuate each other and lead to systems of oppression like carceral punishment, militarization, and food injustice. All of them have the same root cause. We need to reset how we operate and exist. The only way is by replacing violence with care. We have to divest from life threatening systems and institutions that exploit people.”
“Within the climate space mostly queer people have needed to hide themselves. People can’t show up as their full selves. To this day people question my work because I choose to show up as my whole self. For instance, only within the last 5 years has nonbinary been introduced in the UN Convention Gender Caucus. There was no work being done between the different caucuses.”
This trend has been slow to change. Too often, we’re siloed in our identities, beyond the usefulness of affinities. In 2019 the first Gender Caucus at a New Delhi UN Convention discussed women’s issues linked to land. In Meera’s experience working in many NGOs in Europe, “it’s considered unprofessional to bring yourself into work. It’s ok to talk about beer and sports clubs but not about being queer.”
If you’ve never had the experience of listening to Meera, her voice is full of reassurance, conviction, and empathy. Throughout our conversation I thought, I can get behind care. If our systems of oppression, which hold us in a bind of injustice, with power and control in the hands of a few elite, with regulations on poor people of color, with deregulations for corporations and environmental protection agencies, boil down to violence and the antidote to violence is nonviolence then we don’t just need to fight violence. We can actively rebuild relationships, communities, and systems of nonviolence, kindness, and care.
In other interviews, Meera’s talked about dismantling colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism to address social and environmental justice and divesting from institutions and corporations that are destructive and reinvesting into local communities, services and institutions that center and provide care such as health care infrastructure, mental health services, child care, elderly care, affordable housing, public transport and a living wage.
Underfunded communities are also the places where you find the most pollution. For instance, Meera’s home in Brussels was 19 different towns brought together into one city. Income levels still dictate how resources are allocated. Immigrant neighborhoods, like hers, have less access to green spaces. All the good hospitals are two towns over. Schools are full. Their post office closed down for lack of resources. There are no banks or ATMs close by. People there, like many places, don’t have community resources to thrive. Her largely Muslim neighborhood is also most heavily surveillanced. All of our social and environmental problems are interconnected. As Meera said, “There’s never an issue in isolation.”
So what do we do about this? How do we go about redistribution of wealth held by a few?
In Europe there’s a progressive tax system. Even though Meera makes a low average salary in her field, she’s taxed at 45%. To an American, this might seem outrageous, but for Meera, the trade off seems worth it. She knows a basic level of standard will be kept and it won’t fall below that because it’s subsidized. Her health care isn’t strictly tied to her job. Even if she didn’t work for ten years, she’d still have basic health care. Public transport is also subsidized. This basic level of connectedness allows people to get where they need to go and feel assured that if they have a life threatening illness they won’t be crowdsourcing for medical bills.
“Until we have complete autonomy at the community level and can sustain our own resources, we have to have a state in order to provide universal services and redistribute the wealth. When corporations have personhood there are loopholes. In the US every new government changes EPA rules. The role of government is tricky. “While the state is fulfilling duties to people living within its borders it also has a monopoly over violence. A lot depends on how people can hold governments accountable. There are ways to curtail state power. The state has one role, that is to serve the people. The push should be for all kinds of decision making and resources to go as local as possible. The state should have control over basic services but then everything else, even energy systems, food, safety, and security needs to be local. It’s important to understand our struggles are interconnected.”
Meera distinguished the importance of identity and connecting with others of similar experiences but also the more we silo our identities, we risk fracturing our power against big systems of violence. When you have a handful of rich elite controlling the resources, the rest of us need to rally together.
Join Meera and find out more about her work on what she calls a Culture of Care over at Instagram on @moxie.cc.
