Climate Justice Fellow 2021-23

TERESA CAVAZOS COHN: I'm Teresa Cavazos Cohn, and I am the climate change fellow with RPL this year. So the first time that climate change really became different for me and personal was when I was evacuated from the Los Alamos Los Conchas Fire in 2011.  

And as we were leaving our house, after we had packed all of our things, we drove around the mesa and pulled off right, right where we could see the fire coming down from the Jemez Mountains.  

And as we got out of our car and looked, there were other people there too looking at the fire. It did not look like a fire to me, like a surface thing. It looked like the ocean. It looked like the Earth had split. And the fire was coming up from the inside of the Earth, like an oceanic trench. And it was one of the most beautiful and powerful things that I've ever seen.  

So I came out of that experience, not just thinking about wildfire, but thinking about the kinds of things that we do with our fires, like J Robert Oppenheimer, The American Prometheus, and also real issues of fire justice. So my burning questions then are, what do we do with our fire? And then, how can we bridge this sort of abstract experience of climate change with lived experience and therefore engage and do something about it in ways that sometimes we are hesitant to do?  

There are three ways in which I'm working around some of these issues. First, in Idaho, I'm working with state parks, national parks, environmental education centers to create education spaces that are more storytelling spaces than data-heavy spaces, as we think about climate change and engage in managing fires differently and living with more fire on the landscape.  

Secondly, I'm working on a climate justice atlas of the Pacific Northwest, focused on fire. And then third, I'm working on a book project that really is helping me think about my own story of fire through climatic time frames, so 30-year increments or greater. So not just my experience of fire, but my mom's experience and family experiences of fire.  

So for example, with my dad's family, my dad fled Nazi Germany. And a lot of my conversations, dinner-table conversations growing up, were around fire bombings, atomic bombs, all of the fires of World War II.  

My mom's family is a Latino family from the Mexican border. And her fires really remind me of the Mirabeau Lamar quote, right, the first president of the Republic of Texas, who said, "the stout hearts and sharp swords of Texans will make the border river roll like a flood of fire."  

And so I have delved into what that means. For example, when my grandfather was 14 years old, the Texas Rangers burned the town of Porvenir to the ground. And so my grandfather would say, [SPEAKING SPANISH] Be careful. The Texas Rangers will come after you, when he wanted you to behave.  

In sum, the question I really want to think about this year is, how can we recognize fire as part of ourselves, as part of our landscapes, as part of our world? And how can religion help us explore that question?