It's TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu.

It's no question that when it comes to the warming planet, we're in desperate times.

But creative solutions are not out of reach.

In her 2020 TED Salon talk, climate justice leader Anheila Maheja Adrar makes the case for who should be leading the way

and how climate justice is racial justice and vice versa.

We don't just have a climate crisis. We have a climate leadership crisis. We've acted as though

an environmental crisis created by corporate and government elites

can now somehow be solved by these same corporate and government elites.

While the people on the front lines, the people most impacted by wildfires, pollution,

rising sea levels have no other role but to suffer.

Centering the leadership of these communities and leading us out of this crisis isn't only the

just thing to do. It is the most important thing that we can do to actually solve this crisis

because people, when they can't take

anymore, they rise up and they lead us to a better future. Desperate times lead to creative

and just solutions by and those most impacted. I know that from experience because like so many other

low-income families searching for livelihoods, when my mother, brother, and I immigrated from

Colombia, we made our homes alongside landfills, incinerators, oil refineries, power plants, and waste treatment plants.

In neighborhoods that serve as the sacrifice zones to fuel the economy of this nation and

oftentimes the world, in the 70s in southwest Detroit, we lived in the shadow of the

marathon oil refinery.

And in the 80s, in Queens, New York,

we played handball in vacant contaminant lots,

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