On July 29, I was arrested while trying to intervene in the drilling of the Red River and face charges of trespassing on critical public-service facilities and obstructing legal process by interfering with a police officer. I penned this in jail after my arrest.

As we look at the impacts of the climate crisis in the U.S., we now turn to the continent of Africa, a region whose 1.3 billion people are responsible for less than 4% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, yet Africa has already been battered by some of the most dire consequences of climate change, through no fault of its own — rising sea levels, deadly drought, hotter temperatures, water shortages and food insecurity. Recently a locust plague hit portions of East Africa.

“There won’t be climate justice if specific groups of people are being left behind,” says Nakate, founder of the Africa-based Rise Up Movement. “We are facing the same storm, but we are definitely in different boats.”

They believe that climate change is already putting dire constraints on our resources: water, land, food. They believe that accelerating chaos will lead to greater violence and greater instability.

Climate denial was never about science and always about white supremacy.

Margaret Sanger and other feminists and social reformers adopted similar language to argue against involuntary motherhood, suggesting that unwanted children were likely to be morally or physically defective.

But another medical outrage is less well-known. Jane Lawrence documents the forced sterilization of thousands of Native American women by the Indian Health Service in the 1960s and 1970s—procedures thought to have been performed on one out of every four Native American women at the time, against their knowledge or consent.

Another Native American woman requested a “womb transplant,” only to reveal that she had been told that was an option after her uterus had been removed against her will.

Abortion was not just legal—it was a safe, condoned, and practiced procedure in colonial America and common enough to appear in the legal and medical records of the period. Official abortion laws did not appear on the books in the United States until 1821, and abortion before quickening did not become illegal until the 1860s. If a woman living in New England in the 17th or 18th centuries wanted an abortion, no legal, social, or religious force would have stopped her.