Whether or not you’ve seen Parasite, 2019 Academy Awards Best Picture, you can probably imagine a rainstorm. When it rains, a person with an umbrella is more likely to stay dry than a person without one. I bring this up because Parasite sharply displays the difference between a family with resources and a family without. When a torrential storm hits Seoul, South Korea, where Parasite is set, the wealthy Park family stays inside their house on a hill, protected by high-walled fences and security cameras on a pristine street. They have returned early from a camping trip and their kids have pitched a tent in the front yard. For them, while disruptive to their camping, this storm is just another storm. Posing no real threat, the rain almost seems romantic.

Meanwhile, across town in a basement unit with only one street-level window, the Kim family is experiencing a devastating flood. They run through streets rushing with runoff and sewage water back to their home, only to find that it has already been infiltrated by the water. They wade around in dirty water and sewage overflow that rises up to their armpits collecting their belongings as best they can. Flooded out of their home, they spend the night on the floor of a communal shelter. 

The entire film makes clear the differences between the Parks and the Kims, but the rainstorm scene gets to the heart of why these difference smatter. Climatology and the class struggle are intimately related. In the face of an ecological disaster, not every person is affected equally. This is not a new phenomenon. Climate change has always been an issue that transcends economic, social, and racial differences. 

It is impossible to separate our lived experiences from our environments. Our environments are the homes we occupy, the neighborhoods we live in, and the cities and towns in which we reside. Having control over our environments gives us power and that power comes with the privilege of choice. Did we choose the spaces we occupy? Did we choose our neighborhoods? Did we choose our cities? Did we have any other options? The environments that marginalized people have been relegated to historically are ones with sub-optimal conditions–– outdated infrastructure, lack of grocery stores, close proximity to freeway traffic and factories. This wasn’t their choice; it was made for them.

While Parasite was widely celebrated in the U.S., there has been little focus on the environmental justice issues portrayed. The film clearly distinguishes the wealth gap between the Parks and Kims, something any viewer could pick up on. Looking closer at the environmental conditions of the families— the disparate impacts of the torrential rainstorm and exposure pollution — is easier to miss.  A family like the Kims that lives in poverty will experience less sanitary housing conditions, and be vulnerable to a plethora of health hazards like flooding. It is less likely that a family like the Parks that has the means to afford property in a nicer neighborhood on a hill with paid help would ever experience those same conditions. That few American reviewers have paid attention to the environmental dimensions of the film is hardly surprising —in the United States, environmental injustices like this have long gone unnoticed.

In the mid-twentieth century, people with the ability to choose their neighborhoods and homes (often white, middle-upper class) moved to the suburbs to escape worsening living conditions in cities. Much like the living conditions of the Kim Family, often unclean, close quartered, and unprotected to weather and disease, inner-city housing has long been a health hazard with the expansion of urban development and industrialization. At this same time, housing laws largely relegated Black people to those inner-city housing options and excluded them from buying valuable property outside city centers. 

Generations later, many Black Americans find themselves living in neighborhoods with a plethora of environmental issues. Compared to affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods, neighborhoods with vulnerable populations have historically been forced to confront issues they did not create. Parasite shows what happens in the face of extreme weather: the rich are relatively unaffected while the destitute are devastated. Non-extreme scenarios play out like this every day for those who live in poverty, or are affected by environmental racism. Even in the face of a massive storm, those who have the privilege to not be affected will rarely pay attention to the damage.

As the global climate crisis continues to escalate, the poorer communities on the frontlines, as portrayed in Parasite by the Kim family, will continue to disproportionately suffer the consequences. People with wealth and access to resources will experience the same rainstorms, but can raise their umbrellas for protection. It is because of this that governments must step up to ask who are the most vulnerable, address the systemic issues that disproportionately affect lower-resourced groups (and that people in dominant social groups can often overcome without assistance, and empower those vulnerable communities in the face of climate challenges. Access to adequate and affordable housing, universal healthcare, and jobs to bolster the renewable energy sector are all part of larger solutions needed to address structural inequality. When the rainstorm comes we need government resources to provide umbrellas for those who can’t afford their own.