Black History Month profile:
rehena Harilall

rehena Harilall is an engaged Buddhist ordained in the Plum Village Tradition founded by Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, teacher, and writer. Of Asian and African heritage, she is a South African based in London. As a founder of Buddhists Across Traditions, she advocates for racial, social, and climate justice. She first connected with Faith for the Climate during a webinar for COP26 during an Eco Dharma Network/SGI-UK panel that Shanon, our Director, was also a speaker on. Since then she has been a steadfast ally and friend to Faith for the Climate and our climate justice work.

rehena spoke with our movement builder Rosh Lal on Wednesday, 13 August 2025, via Zoom. This transcript of the interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Part 1

Rosh: So the first question we’re asking people is, how did you find your way into the climate justice movement?

rehena: I would say that my path to climate justice begins with my ancestors, both Indian and African. My Indian ancestors came to South Africa as indentured laborers after the abolishment of slavery. On the same, probably, ships used in the slave trade. And they came to grow and cut sugar cane in South Africa.

So they endured a lot – famine, displacement, violence, signed contracts with thumbprints, and they were forcibly removed from their own land in India, surviving six weeks on cramped ships and actually laboured on another continent. I think my African lineage carries the wounds of slavery and the forced severance of people from their land. Both lineages, (from their) language, the culture, the kinship, and the agriculture. Both of them bear the imprints of exploitation. I would call it the theft of labour, the erasure of culture and the fracturing of relationships with the earth.

So for me, growing up in apartheid was breathing and living injustice every day. And I think it’s from there and the lineage of my parents that my activism arose, not as an abstract idea, but as a necessity.

For me, freedom and liberation are acts of courage and solidarity built from the grassroots level. I grew up in a resistance movement that says that liberation is inseparable from the love of people, for the land and for the future we want to live together.

Coming into climate justice comes from that lineage, in my head, I cannot separate climate justice from protecting and stewarding the earth. Because if we speak of protecting her as if it’s something outside of us, it reinforces the illusion of separation. In truth, we are the earth. And so climate justice for me is not a separate struggle. The earth itself is already just. The earth is a symbol of justice.

Any climate action that does not hold justice at its core replicates the very division that systemic structures have created in our planetary crisis. So to engage in activism for our earth, I would say we need to humanise ourselves.

So if the climate movement cannot dismantle this systemic dehumanisation of people, it is not addressing the real issues. It is merely protecting resources that should be freely available to everyone. It’s protecting the resources for the benefit of some at the expense of others. As Cornel West says, justice is what love looks like in public. If we truly love the earth and we truly want to protect and care and steward the earth and all that is offered, then love must include justice for all species, including human beings that we’ve othered.

Rosh: Thank you, that’s a beautiful answer. I think you’ve already touched on this, but maybe we can flesh it out some more in the second question. How would you express the connection between climate justice and racial justice?

rehena: I would say they are the same.

Someone once told me, and I remember, they said, we must fix the climate crisis first, then racial issues can come later. And I laughed. I laughed not from amusement, but from total disbelief and shock. Because we’re not just facing a climate crisis, we are living through a planetary crisis, an unraveling of life systems.

If we truly love the earth and we truly want to protect and care and steward the earth and all that is offered, then love must include justice for all species, including human beings that we’ve othered.

So environmental destruction, racial oppression, economic exploitation, war, genocide, they all spring from the same root – the belief that some humans can own the earth and take from it and from one another without limit. And one of the most insidious tools of this mindset, which we call colonisation, is dehumanisation. If we can convince ourselves that others are less human, less worthy of dignity, less deserving of life, it becomes easier to seize the land they steward, strip their resources, erase their cultures. This has been the logic of colonialism, both past and present. And greed continues to fuel it. So for me, [something] like genocide is ecocide. In Gaza, women have stood before bulldozers to protect 500-year-old trees, olive trees. Women in India in the Chipko movement married trees to prevent them from [being killed]. To protect and care for the earth is to protect and care for life. To protect and care for life is to protect and care for the land.

That’s why for me, when we talk about justice and climate justice, reparations is not only about money – it involves repairing, mending our broken relationships with the land, with the earth and with each other. You cannot fix the climate while ignoring colonialism, militarism, racism and greed. You cannot end racism while poisoning the air, water and soil for communities of colour. Liberation – human, ecological and spiritual – it’s one work.

So for me, [something] like genocide is ecocide. In Gaza, women have stood before bulldozers to protect 500-year-old trees, olive trees. Women in India in the Chipko movement married trees to prevent them from [being killed]. To protect and care for the earth is to protect and care for life. To protect and care for life is to protect and care for the land.

In Africa, we have this saying, it’s called Ubuntu: I am because we are. And those are the truths that live in my bones, passed from my ancestors who survived famine, land theft, force crossings, cane fields. The same forces that exploited them are the very same forces destroying the earth today. We are doing that. We are killing the earth. We are killing one another. If we reconnect to the truth, then they are inseparable. It makes it impossible not to act to create a new way of being in the world. I see activism as humanism, becoming human. Climate justice is making people see the other as human.

End of Part 1
In the next part, rehena shares more about her joys, challenges and inspirations.