Communists say “People and Nature Before Profits.” We are for policies that provide for both a sustainable economy and a sustainable ecology.

We seek to build unity between the environmental movement and other important movements: the labor, civil rights, women’s, youth, peace, and immigrant rights movements.

The capitalist economic system often presents workers, their families and communities with an impossible choice: either work in destructive industries, or face unemployment, hunger, and deprivation.

We can’t wait for socialism to save our planet. We have to make changes now to how things are produced, shipped, and distributed. At the same time, programs for saving the environment must address the needs of displaced workers, of entire communities dependent on fossil fuel mining, of infrastructure for poor and working class communities subjected to pollution and environmental degradation.

We oppose fracking for natural gas. It pollutes fresh water resources as well as causing earthquakes.

Industrial agriculture relies on mono-cropping (susceptible to disease and pests), over-reliance on fertilizer and pesticides harmful to agricultural workers and communities, and extremely toxic wastes from industrial animal farming.

We oppose drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge and we oppose the use of nuclear power until there is a safe way to dispose of waste and until the serious safety issues are resolved.

We fight against subjecting workers to untested new chemical compounds with unknown health consequences, currently being introduced at the rate of 3,000 or 4,000 new compounds each year.

We support the use of sustainable forest practices, which also are more labor intensive, creating new jobs and job retraining for laid-off lumber workers.

The military is one of the most environmental destructive forces, using up resources, polluting massive areas for “war games,” destroying people and nature. Cutting the military budget, and defeating the military-8ndustrial complex, are key steps to protecting the environment.

The greatest environmental threat is that of nuclear war. We are for complete disarmament and for the destruction of all nuclear weapons.

Fighting environmental racism is an important aspect of the struggle. Waste dumps, pollution-spewing chemical plants, polluted water sources are much more frequently sited near minority communities. This is true internationally as well—the countries already feeling the heaviest impacts of climate change are former colonial countries in Africa and Asia which have contributed the least to the accumulation of greenhouse gases from industrial development. International corporations seek to impose their greed on smaller countries—as for example efforts to privatize water in Bolivia, fought and defeated by the movement of indigenous people there.

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