Video: Climate Justice as Racial Justice: Student Panel
On April 11, 2023, HDS students gathered to give a panel on climate and racial justice. This panel presented an opportunity to learn from the critical work being done by students to advance justice through analysis, reflection, and action at the intersection of race and climate. Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies, will offered the opening address and the panel included Phil Scholer, Tracey Robertson Carter, Nathan Samayo, and Eve Woldemikael.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Climate Justice as Racial Justice, Student Panel, April 11, 2023.
ALIYAH COLLINS: OK, everyone. Hello. Good afternoon.
SPEAKER 3: Good afternoon.
SPEAKER 4: Hello.
ALIYAH COLLINS: Nice to see so many beautiful faces. My name is Aliyah Collins. I'm a 30-year MDiv here at HDS. Also part of the HDS Climate Change Week, I'm a part of the planning committee. And it's so nice to see you all here. This is the Climate Justice as Racial Justice panel discussion.
[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]
And I'm so excited to have these presenters here alongside to talk about some very important issues when it comes to climate justice. So when it comes to climate change, some have a very narrow view. We often see the fight for change focus in improving the ability for affluent, wealthier, predominantly white communities to become more sustainable, clean, aesthetically pleasing, and safe.
Yet, communities of color, whom are disproportionately impacted by climate change, pay the ultimate price, being locked out of resources and become a scapegoat for environmental degradation. Oil companies, fossil fuel producers, industrial powerhouses, and corporate greed leave communities of color displaced and vulnerable to the wrath of climate change. Their Indigenous knowledge are myths, and their voices are legitimate.
Therefore, seeing racial justice through the lens of climate justice is critical and inevitable. This panel discussion will explore the inextricable link between climate justice and racial justice by centering the lived experience of those most impacted. It will deconstruct European Center ideas and images of climate justice to redefine buzzwords, like sustainability, green energy, and climate adaptation, through the voices of communities of color.
We are happy to have with us faculty and students who will help us understand climate justice and racial justice and the ways that this takes shapes within communities on the margins. Through scholarship, activism, and art, these presenters will tackle important issues of today as it concerns climate change and communities of color.
I myself approached this conversation as the founder and CEO of the Eco Healing Project, which sheds light on the impact of climate disasters on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, HBCUs. HBCUs are only 3% of the country's colleges and universities, yet produce 20% of all African American graduates. 2/3 of students at HBCUs are low income. This makes the recovery from climate disasters devastating.
The Eco Healing Project will help HBCUs build gardens to use gardening as a form of spiritual care to navigate recovery. I'm excited to be in conversation with these student thought leaders, who are at the forefront of climate justice and truly embody what it means when we say, climate justice is racial justice. So without further ado, I would like to introduce a beloved faculty member, Professor Myra Rivera, who will provide our opening presentation. Mayra Rivera--
[APPLAUSE]
Mayra Rivera is the Andrew W. Mellon professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University. She's the president of the American Academy of Religion. Rivera works at the intersections between continental philosophy of religion, literature, and the theories of coloniality, race and gender, with particular attention to Caribbean postcolonial thought.
Her research explores the relationship between discursive and material dimensions in shaping human embodiment and social material ecologies. Her most recent book, Poetics of the Flesh, analyzes theological, philosophical, and political descriptions of flesh as metaphors for understanding how social discourses materialize in human bodies. Her book, The Touch of Transcendence-- A Postcolonial Theology of God, explores the relationship between models of divine otherness and ideas about inner human difference.
She is also the co-editor, with Stephen Moore, of Planetary Love-- Spivak, and Postcolonial, Theology; and with Catherine Keller and Michael Nausner of Postcolonial Theologies-- Divinity and Empire. Rivera is currently working on a project that explores the relationships between coloniality and climate change through Caribbean thought. Please welcome Professor Mayra Rivera.
[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]
MAYRA RIVERA: So thank you Anna Del Castillo for the initial contact about this conference and everybody who has been involved in conceiving and organizing it. I know it's a lot of work, but it's an amazing topic. And I'm glad that you are putting your energy into such an important discussion. So it might be odd-- yeah. [CHUCKLES] It might be odd to say that a hurricane left its marks in my scholarship, but it actually did.
Like many Puerto Rican scholars, I perceived Hurricane Maria as a rupture in time. And it stirred for me worries about the future of Puerto Rico, the island that claims me, and the future of the Caribbean. Yet, this rupture could only be understood in relation to the past. As an event in the unceremoniously archived procession of our catastrophes, to use adored Gleason's words, 500 years of colonial history in which Puerto Rico has been a laboratory of economic and social experiments have materialized in soil and sea, as well as in our flesh.
The environmental history of the Caribbean is inseparable, from colonial desires, for economic gains, and for the power that wealth would grant. As Edward Said observed, quote, "to think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them, all this occurs on about or because of land. The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about," end quote.
And Christianity, of course, was implicated in this process. Who can forget the image of Pope Alexander VI granting the kings of Castile and Leon and their descendants all dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights and jurisdictions and all islands and mainland's found and to be found?
Still, taking possession of land is not simply a matter of occupying space. It entailed new ways of understanding and documenting the world, as well as the transformation of soil, water, entire ecosystems, and human lives. Colonialism creates zones of vulnerability that make climate change all the more catastrophic. This is both all too evident and worth repeating. But reframing our ways of knowing the world requires also moving beyond generalizations.
If colonialism extricated nature from culture, [? Glissant ?] argues, we must now attempt to re-establish those links. To do so, he invited readers to return to the point of entanglement, which I interpret as returning to those moments in which we lost a sense of belonging to the Earth and replaced it with flat ideas of territory and of the human. The point of entanglement I returned to was a 16th-century Caribbean, and I'll share some stories.
The Taínos or Arawak, the Native peoples of the Caribbean, were the first to experience the sudden catastrophe brought about by the Spanish conquest of America. They were enslaved to extract gold. And as the Arawak population was decimated, the Spaniards brought African captives to provide enslaved labor for gold and agriculture. Cataclysm would now fall on them and their descendants.
This history of genocide is entangled with environmental devastation. Imagine the environmental impact of all the things that colonialism brought to the islands, European men with their myths and guns, chickpeas, citrus trees, sugarcane, weeds, rats, and viruses, cattle and swine trampling land use to the light touch of birds and iguanas.
Imagine all the products necessary to sustain the lives of voracious conquering men, then the extraction from the islands of gold and pineapples and wood and Indigenous people. Cultivation of sugarcane entailed deforestation on a massive scale and the displacement of people from land use for sustenance agriculture. Forests were promptly cleared to plant cane, for timber to build processing facilities, for fuel for boiling the raw cane juice.
The impact was visible in the islands. But as the scale of production grew, the plantation assemblage extended globally. Rowers imported captives from Africans for slave labor, wheat from New Orleans, and catfish from Newfoundland. They brought cotton for clothing. Some islands imported timber from Louisiana and from New England.
Colonialism destroyed the material conditions that had sustained communal life. It also broke the social material ties between peoples and their islands, violently tearing them away from the soil. This uprooting gave way to forms of dispossession and displacement that continue to this date. It also gave way to forms of knowledge that uproot people from their social material environments.
This is to shape the Caribbean materially, religiously, and culturally. But it is not just a local history. Colonialism, environmental devastation, and genocide reshaped local ecologies around the world in the Canary Islands and the Banda Islands, in New Amsterdam and New Spain, each in distinct ways that merit their own narratives.
And that, as the process moved from one place to another, it wove the fabric of racial capitalism. These processes would have lasting effects in the material environment, and they would change our ways of understanding the world. I am suggesting that we need to return to such points of entanglement to understand what is happening, what has been happening to our environment, and to begin transforming our ways of engaging the world.
Tracking the linked paths of ecology, extraction, dispossession, and forced relocation requires methods that can incorporate different temporal and spatial scales, including the long histories of extractivism, as well as attending to the communities that have suffered them. Histories of colonial and racial devastation teach us that environmental futures are linked to our pasts. We may describe them as ancestral catastrophes, as Elizabeth Povinelli suggests.
Time and again, communities that experienced the onslaught of colonialism and racial capitalism have warned of the environmental effects of such practices. Many of their voices are lost from the archives, but many others are still calling on us. These voices, past and present, call us to active listening. And I hope they prompt us all to support works that seek to amplify the voices muffled by our grand discourses.
Listening for and retelling the stories of ancestral catastrophes is to take responsibility for the stories we tell and those we quickly forget. In times of climate change, it is easy to turn to readily available homogenizing visions of the world at the expense of the particularity of places. It is tempting to rush past the long histories of catastrophes to focus on present threats.
But we need a more capacious sense of collectivity that can only emerge when we're willing to honor our stories and tell the truth about the injustices that have shaped both environmental devastation and responses to it. We need a world made of our many worlds. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ALIYAH COLLINS: Thank you, Professor Rivera. Now we'll welcome our first presenter, Nathan Samayo.
[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]
NATHAN SAMAYO: How fun. Thank you, Aliyah. And thank you, Anna, too for putting this week together. I know this is a lot of work, so I really appreciate y'all doing this. And for all the other folks who had a hand in putting this whole week together, it's fantastic. Perfect. Awesome. And thank you, Dr. Rivera, for that opening word as well, and to my fellow panelists who I'll be doing this panel with today.
So to start, my presentation today is titled American Nostalgia and the Conservation of Guahan, which, in English, people say Guam. And I wanted to preface this presentation by making it known that what I'm presenting is not new information, that the content of this presentation would not be made possible if it wasn't for the grassroots activists in Oceana and Guam in this specific case.
And as these matters have very, very immediate real-world consequences for people on the daily. I came to the conclusion that my job, as someone located in the Academy and within the colonial metropole, is to leverage voices of those who are not shown in mainstream American media.
So with that, I want to begin with this image on the title page. Now, pictured here are the shelves built inside the newly constructed Guam Cultural Repository, a joint project between the University of Guam and the Guam Museum of the Department of Chammorro Affairs, officially opened in October 2022. Now, the mission of the Guam Cultural Repository is to provide long-term curatorial services for the material remains recovered in the island of Guam.
Now, where are some of these material remains, quote, "coming from?" Mostly from places like Tarague Beach located in the village of Yigo, which harbors historical significance from World War II into the safe haven for migratory birds, sea turtles, and other endangered species, as Sara Mar reports in their project, Fanohge Guahan.
But Tarague Beach has looked like this after it was marked as the site for OB/OD, or Open Burning, Open Detonation, which is a US military practice, where munition waste is thrown into a pit in the sand, which gasoline then gets poured onto it and blown out. This releases chemical toxins directly into the air and water, including lead, uranium, PFAS, and more.
Now, another site for material remains-- it's called Litekyan. Now, Litekyan, also known as Ritidian, is home to Millennium-old Native limestone jungles, Indigenous medicinal plants and herbs, and the home to more than eight endangered animal species, and the location of the largest freshwater aquifer in Guam that is used by 90% of the island, but is now the site for new life firing range training complex to test machine guns, grenades, and other US military technologies that will lead to the destruction of Litekyan.
And lastly, [? Malojloj. ?] [? Malojloj ?] is one of the oldest ancestral villages in Guahan, home to ancient latte stones and burial sites that literally have ancestral remains in them but has now been bulldozed for a new US Marine base. And it's hard to find some of these photos because these aren't the first thing that Google typically likes to show and tell.
But you know what other photos don't pop up immediately? Clearly outlined United States Department of Defense massive military destruction plans. The ones shown here are built over all the sacred sites in Guahan that I just showed earlier, and it gets even worse.
Back to the Guam Cultural Conservatory, where all these, quote, "cultural artifacts, i.e. ancestral remains are being stored." The project was contracted at over $10 million. And of course, it was the US Department of Defense that funded it.
But before any major federal project is executed, it must conduct an environmental assessment to make sure it doesn't pose harm to the environment, as outlined by the National Environmental Policy Act. And in this case, it was the University of Guam who conducted the environmental assessment. And in order for the assessment to get approved, it must be over-reviewed by a government agency. And of course, the agency that said that the test was conducted sufficiently was also the United States Department of Defense.
So to wrap this up, If I have to be quite honest, I don't necessarily think that a five-minute academic presentation is going to stop the DOD from bombing up the Pacific and throwing the remains in government-run facilities. But what I do think is that we can walk away from this and be more aware that museums, conservations, and refuges are the product of very violent histories of colonialism, imperialism, ecological disaster, slavery, occupation, and theft, and that we should reconsider the ways in which we glorify and romanticize these types of institutions.
And the last thing that I'll say is that in our contemporary moment, domestic and international, quote, "conservation projects" spearheaded and funded by the US empire signifies a much larger imperial project at play. And lastly, if you're interested in following along with the issues going on in Guahan that the US empire is currently bombing, I invite you to follow these social media accounts titled Prutehi Litekyan, which is a social movement in Guam trying to protect the cultural resources. So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
TRACEY ROBERTSON CARTER: All right. Thank you. So again, my name is Tracey Robertson Carter. And I'm so thankful to our PL and Steph and Aliyah and all that put this together for inviting me to be here today. I love talking about the arts, and particularly when we're talking about the ways that arts can help highlight and I'm going to say elevate issues, and in this case, in the case of the environment.
So if you just bear with me. And Steph, I'm going to go 2 seconds over because I have to go back and forth. But what I'm going to focus on today is one of the nonprofits that I lead called Artists in Residence in Everglades. So you're going to hear from two artists because that's how I choose to use my efforts and resources around elevating artists to be able to speak on the issues of our time.
Let me-- so this is an artist named Kunya Rowley. Yeah, I just need-- so that artist that you just saw is named Kunya Rowley, and he's one of the artists in Artists in Residence in Everglades for 2023. This is a young man-- we just pull up any of the climate justice ones at the top.
ALIYAH COLLINS: OK.
TRACEY ROBERTSON CARTER: Great, thank you. And he's one of our artists that lives in Florida. He's about 35 years old. He's lived in Florida all of his life and only lived about an hour away from the National parks, from the Everglades National Park and had never gone.
And what you'll learn, how I'm using climate justice as racial justice, is trying to create abundant spaces of belonging for artists, BIPOC artists, the Everglades National Park and in other park units around the country. So that was just a taste of what it looks like when you put a BIPOC artist who's never been to the park into the park and that beautiful original piece that he created.
This is another gentleman. I think, since we're in a climate justice conversation, some of you may have heard of him, maybe not. His name is David Lammy. He is a parliamentarian in British Parliament. And I just wanted you to hear a few words from him that guide the reason why we talk about climate justice, as you can't have racial equality without dealing with environmental and climate justice.
So I'm at the minute mark, so I'm going to go through this quickly because I want you to hear the artist. So what I'm doing is a case study using AIRIE, and what we did with AIRIE is that AIRIE is located in Everglades National Park. The Everglades National Park is at the tip of Florida, close to the Keys. And what we do is we have an artist residency. We do programming and have a gallery in the park.
But what we didn't have were Black people and Brown people who are part of the residency for the past 20 years. So about a year ago, about two years ago, I took it upon myself with another one of my co-chairs to reimagine AIRIE, so do that radical imagination that we do here at Divinity School every day. And what that looked like was simply bringing on some a new National Advisory. There's one of our dear National Advisory in the room today, the newest Guggenheim fellow, my friend Christina Seely, as well as 20 others that we had.
We increased the residency stipend, so it was less of something that was a privilege to do, but something that was for others to be part of. And we ended up getting over 500 applications. What that ended up looking like is that we had a prompt that asked the artist not to create it-- [LAUGHS] not to answer the question, but to come up with that theme, that prompt of what it looks like to make the outdoor is a place of belonging.
This is just a picture of our creative director and fellow from last year, who-- again, I'm pulling up all these folks, and I asked them because these are all incredibly intelligent folks. This young man's out of Cornell. But he also lived only an hour of the park for about 20 of his 25 years for 24 years of his life, and he'd never gone. And he went from being one of our artists to now being artistic creative director of AIRIE and someone that is using the environment in his work on a much larger scale.
To end, we had a huge event during Art Basel. But I did want to just share that-- I know I'm at time, but I just wanted to share how important it was. So the reason you're using climate justice, racial justice, and what I'm so proud to be here today is that the way that I use it is using the arts, using the lens of the artist, and particularly putting people of color into the environment and what can come from that.
And what comes from that is where you have the National Park Service who's looking to take AIRIE into-- that's a personal pride, that they're looking to take AIRIE into many different park units, but particularly that it's coming from the fact that they're also-- they're tackling structural racism in the park. They're tackling what it looks like to create spaces of belonging in the park, and we're just one of the NGOs who's doing it.
And from what you heard earlier, it's so important that we have the people who are most impacted by the environment having a voice in the environment. So later, since I'm at time, I'll make sure to share more later. But thank you. Sorry about that.
[APPLAUSE]
PHIL SCHOLER: I thank you all for being here today. Thank you for the invitation from Religion and Public Life. And thank you so much to Steph and Aliyah for the opportunity to be on the panel with these incredible thinkers. And I will add, Aliyah, as someone from Nashville, thank you for all the environmental justice work you're doing there. I really appreciate it.
Today, I'd like to talk about Tennessee's New South, Marquita Bradshaw and her call for environmental justice. Now, as the polls closed on the evening of August 7, 2020, Marquita Bradshaw etched her names in the annals of Tennessee political history. She became the first African American woman to win a statewide race, winning the race of the Democratic US Senate primary.
And what makes her campaign so extraordinary is not only these historic markers, but the issue she ran on. She ran on environmental justice. And I had the opportunity to interview Mrs. Bradshaw, and she told me that she sees environmental racism as a modern-day lynching.
Now, as we heard before, environmental racism refers to how the government and corporations have intentionally put harmful and deadly toxins in communities of color and low-income communities. So here Bradshaw contextualizes environmental racism within the long line of historical injustices, specifically here, the racial violence and terror of lynching.
And it's important to note that Bradshaw is not equating environmental racism to the public violence and intimidation of lynching. That took place in a different era. But what she is calling our attention to is how both environmental racism and lynching, an act state sanctioned violence upon communities of color. And Bradshaw did not come to this environmental justice platform based on political pundits telling her, that's what you need to run on in Tennessee. I don't think any political pundit would tell you that.
[CHUCKLING]
Instead, she came to this platform based on personal experience. She grew up in South Memphis, where an Army defense depot, an old EPA Superfund site, was emitting toxins into the soil where she lived. It tragically killed her grandmother and other community members. And in response, she and her community organized.
And she felt called in 2019 to say that, I know this happened in South Memphis, but I'm not going to let it happen throughout Tennessee. So she launched her 2020 historic Senate campaign based on these environmental justice principles, reclaiming the term "New South" as a progressive rallying cry in the State.
And she understands that this stretches throughout the whole state of Tennessee, saying that, "we have farmers who are experiencing flooding and losing land and are being phased out of what's going on when it comes to climate," and posting this powerful picture of her meeting with farmers in Tennessee and meeting with people in South Memphis because, as she told me, "my campaign is based on environmental justice principles that those who are closest to the pain should have a voice in shaping the policies to make sure that their communities are healthy and safe."
And we see her here campaigning in 2020 in the midst of COVID. She's putting on a mask because she understands that environmental justice is linked more to pollution. It's linked to this pandemic that is adversely affecting communities of color.
It is linked to economic equity in Tennessee to make sure that farmers and all working-class Tennesseans get a fair wage, which is why she says, I'm reclaiming this term of a "New South," a term that was used by redeemers in the era of post-reconstruction to justify Jim Crow. She's saying, this is now a call for environmental justice, and I'm meeting with people in South Memphis. I'm meeting with people who are closest to the pain, and I'm meeting with farmers throughout my campaign in 2020.
And she does this with this spiritual formation and foundation of faith. During our interview, she told me, faith is ingrained in everything I do. And when I approach environmental justice, she told me, I see Jesus as a community organizer, getting a group of people together, using narratives, using stories to inform her platform.
And after she unfortunately lost the general campaign that November, she founded an organization called Sowing Justice in Memphis, drawing on the popular biblical allusion of we reap what we sow. So this biblical allusion invites us to explore new Democratic possibilities and environmental justice and state campaigns, and also alerts us to the pressing urgency of environmental justice because we will reap what we are sowing today. So let us heed Bradshaw's call for New South in Tennessee and sow justice, so that's what we will reap in the future. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
EVE WOLDEMIKAEL: Hello, everybody. Thank you for being here. Thank you all for your beautiful presentations. So my presentation is called Artful Resistant Songwriting as Myth and Archive. And I'm going to be talking about creativity through the lens of songwriting, but it can really apply to any creative art.
So I came up with this framework for thinking about climate and racial justice and art, and the first point is mythmaking and myths. So songs are stories and-- I don't know what that is-- Dr. Sean Taylor, who's a folklore scholar, said, "our mythic and folk lives are literal armor and weapons that we can use against white supremacy."
So thinking about the role of understanding ourselves in our world mythically and how that can be a tool for resisting various forms of oppression. And then how does engaging mythmaking when we tell our stories shift our sense of power and perspective facing climate catastrophe?
Then the second point is songs as archives. So what can we share through music and through song? And how can songs be containers for our pain and our longing and our grief? And then also just thinking that as things are changing, there will be places that we'll lose and won't be able to recover. How do we keep them alive? And how can a song keep places alive for us?
And then there's the medicine of the medium. So what is unique about music and songs that allow us to feel and know and understand things differently? And then, what forms of knowledge, like sensory, embodied, shared knowledge?
And then, lastly that these are practices-- songwriting and all creative practices are practices of vitality. And they're life-giving, and they connect us with life, with each other, with our worlds. And especially as people of color, telling our stories and telling the stories of our people and the relationships that we have with the land is just vital.
So I'm going to share some examples. This is a song that I wrote that I'm thinking about as mythic, and it's basically through the lens of a coyote but me thinking about the loss of the land that I grew up with. I'm going to play a clip. This is a voice note-- like, whatever. Yeah, just don't have time for that.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- (SINGING) Once I saw her around the block, heading straight down the sidewalk, a suburban nightmare but I don't care. She never really did give me a scare. She told me that since the houses went up and the bulldozers drove up on the bluff, she's been hungry, sure enough. She's got nothing to feed her pups.
The signs went up, danger, danger. Creature like that is a stranger, stranger. My tears flow because I know there's nowhere left for her to go. They burned her grass and took her home, nowhere left for her to roam.
[END PLAYBACK]
EVE WOLDEMIKAEL: Cool. So that I was thinking of mythically. I'll move on to the next one should we have time. So this is what I was thinking of as archive, so this is a song I wrote about a very special lake that is really small and in definite danger of possibly not existing in the future. And I didn't write this song thinking of it as an archive. But now that I have it, I'm like, oh, the lake is in this song.
And even if the lake doesn't exist anymore, I'll always have this song. And I can share this song. So I'm just going to play it-- this the last thing I'm going to do-- and just invite you all to close your eyes if you feel comfortable, and see if it takes you somewhere. If not, you can also just think about a place that you love.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- (SINGING) Diving in a sea of darkness, the stars scatter my dying ghost on the black water. I'm a marauder. Warm and thick and sticky hair, the water of my land drinking my hair. [INAUDIBLE] burning bright [INAUDIBLE] I just want to be this water. Take me as your naked water. What is darkness that I can from the nights here to know that true time moves slow.
[END PLAYBACK]
EVE WOLDEMIKAEL: OK, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ALIYAH COLLINS: Thank you. Can we just give our presenters another round?
[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]
So now we're going to start our Q&A, just a few minutes for a Q&A. So if you have a question you would like to ask our presenters-- OK, I already see hands going up. I want to start us off with my question, I guess, first.
[CHUCKLING]
Thank you all. So my question is around, what are some of the common misconceptions that you all have experienced in your work? Because I hear a lot of people talking about different things.
Tracey, you were talking about some of the artists who live so close to the park, yet never have been there. I worked in Chicago last summer on the South Side, but I also lived right off Lake Michigan. And I could go there and just chill there and relax there. And then I learned that there are kids, Black kids in Chicago, who have never experienced that. And it was just disturbing.
But so some of the common misconceptions about climate inequality and climate activism because a lot of times people don't think about art and activism-- so what are some of the common myths, perceptions that you have experienced about your work that people don't understand or put together?
TRACEY ROBERTSON CARTER: So hi. Thank you for that question. I definitely think it starts with the fact that people-- is what I see is that people don't believe that BIPOC people want to be engaged in the environment, that they don't care. And most of it, what I didn't-- yes, because I was losing time.
But what I didn't get to is that they didn't go to the park because they didn't know how to get to the park. They didn't feel that they belonged in that environment. It wasn't something that was, as you would say, creating a space of belonging. And that's the same for our friends the Miccosukee of Florida that have been preserving the area before then, when the National Park Service was created to protect the lands. But it also took it away from the people who were of the land.
So I think that would be the biggest misconception, is that you don't have-- that people of color aren't interested in the environment. And just to say, these days, there's so many groups that are doing the work to make sure that we're seen and that we're engaged and being part of lobbies and other things, as well as groups of just getting people into the park. So that would be mine. Oh, please.
NATHAN SAMAYO: Thank you, Tracey. I think, for me, I also want to locate where the misconception comes from. I think that's a big part of it. And I think, as I talked to a lot of climate activists, one of the misconceptions emerges from this kind of white liberal regime of climate change discourse, saying that it's carbon emissions that's the leading cause of climate change, when, really, a lot of folks understand it to be capitalism and military occupation in the Pacific as what's causing devastating climate change impact in the Pacific. So both what the misconception is and where that misconception is coming from I think is really important.
EVE WOLDEMIKAEL: Yeah, OK. I think, yeah, when I was thinking about the presentation I just did, I was like, are people going to see the connection with racial justice? And I feel like part of it is just people of color being allowed to claim our relationship with land and the love we have for land and the misconception being that that isn't just natural to us that we don't have that or that loving the Earth is this white people thing, which has already been like deconstructed by a million people. But I think I even saw that coming up when thinking about what I was going to say, that it's like, is the connection obvious? But yeah, it's everywhere.
PHIL SCHOLER: Thank you for that question. The biggest misconception that I face is that environmental justice is some radical departure from Tennessee politics and activism, when, in reality, I think it's a radical application of Tennessee's history and Tennessee culture. I mean, we hear in Bradshaw's campaign how she refers to anti-lynching, and renowned journalist Ida B. Wells in Memphis with the quotes about lynching.
And during our interview, she talked about how she sees a parallel legacy between the anti-lynching work and her own work that alarms Tennessee and the South and the nation to the casualties of environmental racism. I mean, the statewide newspaper in Tennessee, The Tennessean, called Bradshaw a political novice after she won, which was absurd, given that she'd been organizing for environmental justice for fair wages in Memphis for over two decades now. So I think we're trying to battle those misconceptions in this work.
MAYRA RIVERA: I guess, one of the areas I like to emphasize a lot is that environmental devastation-- I prefer to use environmental devastation to include toxicity and longer processes. So I like to repeat that environmental devastation has a very long history and to try to recover that history is part of the work we have to do, not only to address the immediate consequences of that long history, but also to even change our ways of thinking. As I was saying before, it really requires a deep restructuring of our ways of thinking and our ways of being in the world. Hello.
[CHUCKLING]
SPEAKER 5: Hello. I will say, good afternoon, everyone. I'm [INAUDIBLE]. I went to the Div School a few years ago. I graduated from here. And I'm currently the director for Harvard's Outdoor Program, which is super exciting for [INAUDIBLE] doing it.
[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]
And I am also reading this book called Nature is a Human Right, and it's talking about how nature deprivation is a form of violence. And I guess, in my time at the Div School, learning from people like Curtis Williams and others about climate grief, I'm just like, after this, I feel really down, I think.
You can watch Nathan's presentation. I was just like, [SIGHS] wow, this is real. I'm really taking it on. And I guess, just from anybody's perspective, what do you do with that? I don't know. Art? Yeah. But what else?
NATHAN SAMAYO: I'll start because I'm not going to end on a good note. So hopefully, someone else does [LAUGHS] because I'm very cynical. And I'm a pastor, so this kind of move to always have to point toward something joyful or hopeful is something that doesn't really sit with me. But hopefully, someone else answers this question a little different.
I was talking to some other pastors, and we were like, yo, we are in-- ministry is hospice care because everything is dying. And I think, when I find hope in something, I recognize that where we're at right now, I just don't think we fully comprehended the kind of existential condition that we're in right now and the devastating conditions that we're in right now.
And when we are able to address that and grieve through that, I think we can probably make a turn. But personally, for me as a cynical person, I don't really find any hope beyond this. But hopefully, someone else has a better answer than that. I keep giving you all the mic. My bad.
TRACEY ROBERTSON CARTER: I mean, I may not be cynical. And I don't think you're cynical, but I guess so. I'm so glad that you brought this up because, in all seriousness, I actually do relate very much to what you're saying because it's not to have everything end on some happy note.
But I know that I'm going to say, so personally, it's the reason why I'm involved in so many things. What do they say? Those who can't-- I might not be the artist, but I'm definitely going to elevate and create that abundance for the artists to help us look through that lens. Just in my world, it seems sometimes a way that people can engage with grief, with joy, with a myriad of emotions.
What I found, though, with getting more involved in this work is that I'm from the islands. I mean, my family's from the islands, so I do feel very connected. But when I'm in America, it's something that there are so many barriers in terms of, you got to have a car to get here. It's not something that is directly in front of you.
So all I can tell you is that I know that it's the long view. It's something that I will say, my father's gone a long time now. But I played golf for many years, and I have a very good long game. If anyone wants to know. I have a great long game. And he said, it's very important to understand that a lot of the stuff you learn on the golf course, he said, you'll use in life.
But I'm saying that because everything, reparative justice, and all of this is honestly the long view. It's why I'm back at school at such a advanced age.
[CHUCKLES]
And I wish I had something joyful to tell you about grief, but I've grieved. [CHUCKLES] I'm grieving over something, and it's a process. And I do use nature. I do use waking up to that sunset every morning, getting out into this crisp air, and trying to connect with nature as much as we can. But it is why I'm involved in things like Earth University, AIRIE, anything I can do to be engaged in any way that I can be engaged with helping to save the environment with friends who are doing work in the environment. That's the way I get through presentations like we've had today.
EVE WOLDEMIKAEL: Yeah, thank you for your question because I also think about that a lot. And just some initial thoughts I'm having are like, if we allow the grief to be there and hold it, or whatever, like, where might it take us and what will happen if we just kind of-- yeah, there's a lot of grief for very good reasons, and we can't avoid that. And what happens if we lean into that, especially as a community or collective? What might change for us all?
And then, lastly, I think just something-- my personal way of grappling with that question is just to really feel that no matter what happens, I will love that we've been here and that we are here, which maybe doesn't resonate with people. But that's how I came to that conclusion for myself, and so I just want to share that. Yeah.
MAYRA RIVERA: I can just share a verse from a Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott that I returned to as a mantra. And he said that the fate of the Caribbean poet was to fall in love with the world in spite of history. So I try to keep that tension, to keep hope in the present, rather than projecting to the future.
SPEAKER 6: I have another question. This is more personal. What brought you personally to climate change?
TRACEY ROBERTSON CARTER: Would someone else like to start?
MAYRA RIVERA: Say something. It's a winding path, I guess. My first job was as an environmental engineer long time ago. But I think that where I began with the question of Hurricane Maria and in the increased sense of the immediacy of its threat to this little island that I love just illuminated for me that there were deep methodological limits with the methods that I normally use in my research.
So many of our methods focus so much on human histories in detachment from its ecologies. So I think it's been that kind of slow process of seeing that approach, that it's not so much an awakening to the reality, because it was always part of my professional life, but more that intense affective commitment to try to think differently.
PHIL SCHOLER: Thank you for the question. I used to work as a Housing Navigator in Nashville for people experiencing homelessness. And what I notice is that affordable housing is inextricably tied to pollution and climate. How much space do we have? If we can get housing, is that housing even in a safe and healthy community?
So I became very interested in environmental justice in Tennessee. And to partly answer the question, from before Marquita Bradshaw's campaign took place during 2020, I was losing hope in the midst of COVID and in a racial reckoning.
And then I saw Marquita Bradshaw's campaign online because she had to do all of her-- she couldn't do a lot of events in person because of COVID. And that really gave me hope to see a public figure in Tennessee running on this platform and repurposing the term "New South" for environmental justice. So I had the honor of in to interview her and others in Memphis involved in this work.
EVE WOLDEMIKAEL: I think I haven't necessarily conceived of my work as being connected to climate justice, which is interesting. But when I saw the call for the panel, and I was interested in applying, and I was like oh, wait, my songs-- I've been writing about that. I just never thought of it that way. It's just, I've been writing about the things I care about, and that's just there.
So I guess, for me, it's maybe just the places I grew up loving and the ocean and the desert. And I just wrote about that in Terry Tempest Williams' class, but the places I want to protect and I care about and I think about.
TRACEY ROBERTSON CARTER: Oh, yeah, you should go last. You're good. So I'm going to go with, just it's very personal because my experiences are, as a young person, I spent a lot of time in Jamaica. And I know Jamaica from what you call cockpit country, which is the mountains where it's more of a cooler climate. And what we call organic now is just what I grew up with because you had to catch water on the roof. You had to raise your chickens, and that's what you had for dinner, all of that type of stuff.
And then to be an American-- I'm an African American. I'm born in America. But to be a first-generation American and just see that I'm-- I get no joy at all about being the only one. So I snowboard, and I get no joy out of that. No joy of being-- I mentioned golf. There's no joy that comes out of being the only one.
So the climate justice peace came from the fact that I do enjoy the environment. I engage with the environment. I love being out in the environment, and there's lots of other things. I'm talking art. And it might sound fluffy and light, or maybe it doesn't.
But there's a lot of statistical reasons of why I'm doing this as well. But the art piece I just have to keep repeating. It feels like it's something that then people can then experience maybe the environment or experience these issues through a different lens, through the different lens of people that you haven't seen out there.
And now there are statistics with the National Park around now that they're dealing with issues around tackling structural racism, which then means that people are in an environment, which then means that you're closer to what's impacting you most and engaging with conservation and other things.
I mean, they're the numbers aren't up significantly, but they are moving up because we're addressing it now. So the reason that I got involved is just that-- I'm going to be honest with you, it was getting tiring being the only one. This is a very big country. And it's very strange when you're like, why aren't other people of color engaged in these things? Some of it could be other reasons, but there are ways that we can do and help to get people engaged. So that's how I got there.
NATHAN SAMAYO: Thank you, Tracey. I have two answers. I'm going to make it really quick. The first one is also very personal. My family left Guam because of a very violent incident that happened that I can't really say publicly, but it was linked to military occupation in 1997. So that's the first thing.
The second thing, I want to save myself from that cynicism comment because I'm not advocating for all of us to be cynics. But what I will say is, there's this quote that my friends and I talk about all the time because we ask this existential question of, why are we doing this? And I want to say it's from Anthony Pinn. I don't remember who said it, but I was trying to look it up. I couldn't find it.
They said, we don't fight because we think we can win. We fight because we can.
SPEAKER 7: Yes.
NATHAN SAMAYO: And was that Anthony Pinn who said that? Someone said yeah.
SPEAKER 7: OK.
NATHAN SAMAYO: Oh, OK. I may not know why I continue to do this, because I'm so cynical. But I do it because I can do it. And that's it. Fill in the blank with whatever you want to say, but I'm going to do this because I can do it. I don't know why I keep lifting up the mic like this. I ain't on a pulpit right now. Let me put this down. For real.
ALIYAH COLLINS: Thank you all. This was great.
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[CHUCKLING]
Well, I want to thank everyone for coming out to this panel discussion. I hope that you found it useful, helped you learn something. I hope you found it was a good dialogue about some really important issues. I hope it helps you think differently about climate justice, and I'm so grateful that we were having this conversation here at HDS.
So I am going to ask Anna to come and talk about the rest of the week for our climate justice week. We have a lot of things planned, and I hope that you come out to it. But again, I want to thank everyone for coming. And yeah, Anna.
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ANNA DEL CASTILLO: Thank you so much, Aliyah. And round of applause to our amazing student organizer, Aliyah, for putting this together. Can you give a round of applause? And also, to the wonderful Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging office, and especially your leadership staff. Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
We have witnessed, we have been activated. And I think that this panel really shows the well of deep wisdom that is within this school. So if you feel activated today, I encourage you to connect to some of the speakers and just stories that we've heard and that this leaves the room that we've been in.
So I want to shout out some of the awesome programming we have for the rest of the week. Tonight, we have our Climate Common Read-- Fire Salon, which will be from 6:30 to 7:30 right out there in the HDS Terrace. All are invited. Tomorrow, we have our "Stories are cages, Stories Are Wings-- So What Stories Do We Tell About Climate?" That will be from 6:30 to 7:30 at Memorial Church and will feature our very own Terry Tempest Williams, who's here today, and a wonderful author Rebecca Solnit.
Then Thursday, we have our Art and Activism Workshop from 4:00 to 5:30 in the Braun Room. It's going to have an amazing artist, Angelo Baca. Please come through. And then Thursday night, we are going to have a beautiful, joyous time at our Climate Justice Open Mic Night from 6:30 to 8:00. Again, all are invited.
And then Friday, we have two panel conversations, one from 10:00 to 11:00, Religious Literacy and Climate Change; and then our Keynote Conversation-- Examining the Religious and Spiritual Implications of Climate Change from 11:30 to 12:30. So we have a lot of exciting things coming up, and we encourage you all to come. And thank you so much.
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SPEAKER 2: Sponsor-- Religion and Public Life.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023, Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.