This upcoming spring, I will celebrate eight years of work with Plant With Purpose.
Eight years of being part of a team working to reverse poverty and climate chaos.
I’ve seen the organization grow substantially in those eight years, but it’s especially cool to know that I’ve grown as well. In those eight years, I’ve had three kids, seen a lot of the world as a climate storyteller, and learned. So much learning.
I don’t know if one can work as closely as I’ve worked with people who are directly affected by the climate crisis without a fortified desire to take on a few sustainable living changes. One thing I’ve become much more invested in is how long I can get things to last. The way so much of the world has oriented itself around disposable things only makes me more eager to see things hold up well.
The latest model phone is nowhere as exciting to me as one turning seven or eight. Some of my favorite items in my closet include a track jacket, about to turn eight, and a 2011 tee from a nonprofit I worked at.
It’s all about the material, really. And not taking shortcuts. While lower-quality things might look the same out of the box, the difference in material will be apparent in due time. Just ask Major League Baseball, whose “new, performance-oriented” jerseys debuted in the 2024 season to a whole host of issues, ranging from see-through material, jerseys that tore way too easily, and colors that often failed to match.
My senior year of college, I made my way to Portland with a couple of friends.
We were slated to attend an event titled The Justice Conference, featuring a lineup of speakers and artists around the topic of justice. There would be an exhibition hall of nonprofits, interesting art displays, and the speaker lineup included theologians, nonprofit leaders, and even Ben from Ben & Jerry’s.
(In case you’re curious, he used stacks of Oreo cookies to visually show how the US budget for military spending compared to virtually everything else, and all the problems a single Oreo could solve if redirected towards, say, education or healthcare.)
For someone about to leave the university confines and figure out what to do in life, the conference was energizing. Here was a conference center packed with hundreds, maybe thousands of people who somehow found a way to make doing good and solving problems into their life’s work. And they seemed energized by it. They had cool stories and so much to talk about. And sometimes… stickers.
I was captivated by the speakers, but even more,I was intrigued by the opportunity that seemed to be available to those who pursued it: to spend oneself on behalf of the marginalized, mistreated, and rejected. It felt cool and countercultural, while simultaneously being the right thing to do.
There were a lot of ironies inherent with the conference, the most apparent being that justice simply isn’t itself when you make it an intellectual concept. Justice is a course of action that bears itself out in each decision. But, it can be a whole lot easier to make those decisions when you’re with your people and it's baked into the culture. In Portland, that was how it felt.
My thoughts on justice have evolved a bit since 2012.
Hopefully yours have too. 2012 was quite a while ago.
Today, there’s a lot of talk about justice online, and I’ll admit, it just isn’t the same.
I saw some photos shared by Kamran, a cyclist I keep up with, who also happens to be a pretty sharp photographer. He was bike-touring Madagascar and he shared images from the country’s gold mines. Madagascar isn’t a country particularly known for gold, but in recent years, its been producing around 1.5 million kilograms a year. The gold is often found in remote areas, and men, women, and children from some of the most impoverished Malagasy communities wind up working in the mines. The work is exploitative and the worker treatment is poor.
Whether its cobalt in the Congo or gold in Madagascar, I can’t look past the irony of people being treated as dispensable resources in order to source the precious artifact of rocks. It’s like we’ve managed to lose sight of how valuable a person is, how precious life is, and how irreplaceable any individual‘s contribution to the world really is. The photos brought back some of my own memories of talking to brickyard workers in Bangladesh. We’ve really lost our way when it comes how to treat each other.
This is the sort of thing that gets me angry. That’s supposed to get you angry. It reminds me of that stirring I felt in high school, when documentaries introduced me to the unthinkable reality of children conscripted in war.
To me, there’s a difference in material, a difference between the righteous anger one is supposed to feel when the humanity of another is violated, and the rage bait the internet continues to try and sucker us into every day. The latter feels like a misuse of a holy sense of anger we were given. We’re supposed to channel that intolerance for injustice into action. Instead, the internet has give our holy anger a hamster wheel.
This winter marks four years since I lost a very good friend too soon.
A great person, who made everyone she connected with feel valued to no end. She seemed to see everybody in the best light possible, and in doing so, made them all a little more like that version of themselves.
Whenever I think about our friendship, there are plenty of memories to draw upon, but the thing that stands out more than any specific event is that feeling. The feeling of being celebrated and valued by somebody else. It was the basic building block of every action she took on, from giving other people rides to taking on office tasks, phone calls and stationery.
That was the material. The material was the good stuff, and four years later, it lasts.
I suspect most changemakers: activists, organizers, advocates, nonprofit leaders, have had someone in their lives who seemed to embody the values of change, justice, and unity, despite having a position removed from what we think of as the front lines. The barber who knows how to listen. The grandmother who gives and gives and gives. The person who always sees the best in you.
I love these people. And I’ve met so many of them around the world. They’re in preschools in Johannesburg. Special-ed classrooms in the Central Valley. Farms in Guatemala. And as they live lives full of seemingly ordinary things, those who witness it know that they are exactly what the world needs.
Good material.
The Justice Conference came with a pretty sweet swag bag.
A cardboard-brown moleskin, to remember all those hot, thought provoking quotes. A bracelet of beads, courtesy of a nonprofit, that was providing jobs and counseling to women escaping violence in India. A sample of coffee beans from Haiti, from these guys who told me about how Haiti used to have a robust coffee industry until US foreign policy ended it. Now they wanted to bring it back.
The item that stood out to me most, though, was the actual bag that it all came in. An actual burlap sack, re-shaped into a sleek tote. On its side, the slogan for the conference that year.
Justice is a Garment
Love is a Thread
One speaker, who I still remember all these years later, simply referred to justice as the perfect relationship between all. All living beings. All creatures. Neighborliness. And this calls for love to be the lasting material from which its woven. You can’t bring forth your macro-level vision of justice if you’ve neglected the core component of love.
When it comes to pursuing justice, I love and appreciate the role of strategic thought. I think a lot of good can be done by concentrating willpower and effort. I know that love can and often does take the form of forcing the hands of power towards some systemic change. I know that for so many people we love, that change can’t come soon enough.
But as we do the work, I think the material matters. There are many counterfeit products that could send someone down a path that looks like the one that leads towards justice, ego being one of the big ones.
But it’s further down the road where we see the real difference in material. Some hold up. Others don’t.
Today, I’m entirely discontent to stick with approaching justice as an abstract.
So many internet conversations about the pragmatic approach versus taking more drastic measures, so many internet conversations about people cutting other people out of their lives because of a clash in views. Because of violated boundaries and trust and a lack of safety. Because of a vote.
I can’t judge any of these decisions on an individual basis. I’m sure a good amount of them were merited. But it does seem like the work of repairing society is a lot less likely if we aren’t willing to attempt to repair our up-close relationships.
I resonate with some thoughts my friend Jordan put out there. Humanity is a group project right now, what with climate change and all kinds of other advances where our outcomes are intertwined. The way forward necessitates strong relationships, and yet we’re moving through a time where it’s easy to fracture relationships with no intent to heal.
Again, I can’t judge these things on an individual basis when some people were dealt an exceptionally bad hand and need those boundaries, but I think sometimes the rest of us mistake those times of necessity for an easy way out.
All that to say, you can’t give to the world what you don’t have within yourself. You can’t fill the world with wonder if your own reserve is running dry. Likewise, the work of justice and restoring relationships in the world is going to take an instinct to repair relationships when broken, rather than sending them to the landfill.
Justice is a Garment
Love is a Thread
In the end, good material is what lasts.
There’s a difference between the righteous anger we’re meant to feel towards injustice and the knockoff material of ragebait.
I think the distinction is this.
The former fuels you to repair relationships. To get people to see each other as human, and then to get people to see each other as intertwined. On the flipside, the main impulse that ragebait stirs up is always to separate. To quickly identify who’s doing it right, and who’s doing it wrong so you can position yourself accordingly. The actions that result are a defensive mood, meant to protect ego. Justice is a proactive posture, moving towards chaos with an intent to repair.
So much justice work is around recognizing what’s truly valuable. Knowing that people matter far more than the shiny rocks in life. Sometimes those shiny rocks are gemstones, other times they’re things like ego and being right.
When I think of my friend, who I often miss a lot this time of year, I think of the way she went through life with a lightness. She didn’t seem weighed down by the cynicism and frequent defeat that takes its toll on people who dedicate their days towards justice. She went about her work in a way that showed other people that they were valuable.
It’s not that she was unaware of the world, its problems, or distractions.
It's more like she was undistracted from the front-and-center work of loving the person in front of her.
Good material, indeed.