Summers in Detroit were magical.
I would run up and down the streets of Santa Rosa Drive with all the other kids on the block — jumping rope, setting up our lemonade stand, and playing the infamous game of tag. To me, as a Black kid from Detroit, life was great.
Sure, the air didn’t always smell the best and the streets were often polluted with waste, but this was Detroit after all. The Motor City, the city that provided factory jobs for so many Black families. Who was I to complain about the smog, who was I to complain about fossil fuels? It felt normal. It felt… like “Detroit.”
But when I was 15, my father, a self-made entrepreneur, moved us to the suburbs. That’s right, we had finally made it “out.” The business that he had spent years building from the ground up finally broke through, enabling us to move to a nearby suburb. Though only a few miles away, this was the first time I felt like Detroit wasn’t actually that great.
The suburb, just 12 miles north of where we lived in Detroit, looked completely different — felt completely different. The air felt clearer, the water tasted better, and even the streets looked cleaner. At 15, I thought, “how could this be?” We were only a short drive away from the place I once called home. I thought all kids’ environments looked like my environment in Detroit.
People say change is good. But this change was different. The grass actually was greener on the other side of the fence. And I’m grateful, I always will be grateful. But what about the other kids who were still in Detroit? What about my family, my friends? My classmates who had no idea that the rest of the world’s environment didn’t look like Detroit?
My journey didn’t end in the suburbs. My curiosity about the environment led me to go to school for environmental policy and then later to study public health. I needed to learn more about the environment, but more importantly, I needed to learn more about the effects it was having on communities, communities that were filled with people who looked like me, to be exact. But that still never felt like enough for me. What good did it do if only I was aware of environmental and climate issues?
So I thought to myself, how could I not only increase awareness of environmental justice within our communities, but also encourage and position our communities to find their voice in environmental justice?
This led me to develop Girl Plus Environment, a national nonprofit working to educate, engage, and empower Black and Brown girls, women, and non-binary folx to stand up for environmental and climate justice in their own communities. Today, I have reached over 20,000 individuals from Black and Brown communities across the U.S. But I won’t stop until climate justice is normalized in our communities—until all communities are aware of climate justice and feel empowered to stand up for their communities.
Diamond is one of Climate Generation’s Window Into COP delegates for COP27. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest. You can support our delegates at COP27 with a financial gift today!
Diamond Spratling, MPH is an impact-driven environmental justice activist and non-profit leader motivated to dismantle health, racial, and environmental inequities in Black and Brown communities. She built the national nonprofit, Girl Plus Environment, in order to empower more Black and Brown girls, women, and non-binary folx to stand up for environmental justice in their own neighborhoods.
The Detroit native and 2x TEDx speaker has spent more than six years at the intersection of environmental justice and health equity. Her strong dedication to the sector has earned her the William H. Sterner Memorial Award (2017) as well as the Elmore Manufacturing Award (2018).
Ms. Spratling has supported many environmental and health initiatives for cities and organizations across the globe such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Bloomberg Associates, WaterAid Cambodia, Climate Advocacy Lab, City of Atlanta, and Greenlink Analytics.