I was raised by a mother who believes in and pursues Collective Liberation, and a grandma that learned what that means, bit by bit, from both of us. Collective Liberation to my mother, is every little thing that must change for everyone to get free. It involves naming and understanding what has happened and a dedication to shifting systems of harm and oppression, to reduce harm and renounce oppressive systems. To my grandmother, she may not have known about the collective part, but liberation meant being free to do whatever you want, and focusing on what you know to be true.

While I was raised with these Ways of Knowing, I used to not think of myself as an activist. 

I thought activism, e.g. protesting and public shouting (in my child-brain), was something for people that didn’t have to work, and white people. Not the kind that my mother is, but the ones who benefit from a continued status quo and question it nonetheless, usually when it comes to electric vehicles and renewable energies.

As I learned about Environmental Justice and Community Organizing in college at HECUA (Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs), I learned that my environment growing up was not only home, but one that was seriously affected by climate issues, systemic racism, pollution, and other barriers to success and resilience. And yet, the people I knew from my community were some of the most resilient I’d met. It’s just that our community knows environmental harms that we often don’t have the tools to advocate against.

I was taught to be a conscious individual and was always playing outside, playing multiple sports, reading any novel I could get my hands on, and had a knack for spoken language and hosting dinner parties. While I have a sharp wit, a sense of Spirit and the ability to question everything, I did not know public advocacy until adulthood. I began teaching swimming at age seventeen, when I lived in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the past 12+ years, I have had the honor of instructing people from each walk of life, as wise as six months and young as 85+ years. I have been screamed at, cried at, sneezed on, jumped on with full force in the stomach (by leaping 5-year-olds), and scratched. I have simultaneously witnessed and ushered in a whole new way of understanding the relationship with one’s environment. To create a space that is safe, loving, exciting and playful, so that you can shift formerly negative experiences into positive, is a blessing of a skill that I’ve gotten to build, and now I get to use this to inform the way I organize and engage youth.

When I get the chance to reflect on what I learned from this ongoing experience, I realize that I’ve learned how to shift the ways we view our environment, and our capacity to turn the experience that accompanies an environment that is attacking us, to one that underlines our resilience, ability to learn new ways of being, and meets folks where they’re at. To be able to work now in a capacity that leans into the ways our relationships with the environment can be healed, allows me to connect what I have learned and what I continue to learn daily.

As I got older, I learned more about the community I came from and how this influenced the way I connect environment and relationship. I grew up in and around North Minneapolis, a community which has the highest concentration of Black and Brown peoples and the highest asthma rate in the state. We experience hotter temperatures, higher pollution levels, a lack of green space, and other environmental racism and systemic injustices, in addition to a generally assumed narrative that our neighborhood is unsafe and scary. This community is under-invested-in, over-policed, and does not have consistent access to clean, healthy food, and is poisoned by countless sources. North Minneapolis is also beautiful, healing, and a home to communities that are re-writing their narratives every day. The ways in which our community has come together to re-green our spaces, shut down harmful pollution sources, educate our neighbors about ways we can advocate and know community again, are profound.

I see young folks stepping up and reclaim power, centering community and collective care.

I see families and schools and people of all ages planting trees and normalizing urban farming. And I am seeing spaces be knit together that know what needs to happen to transition North Minneapolis to a new framework of relationship to our environments.

During my last six years of working in Environmental Justice movement spaces, I have never been more proud to see the place I come from decide to re-define itself and challenge systems that seek to keep us stuck in this state of being. As I have learned more about what it means to come from this community, I have found myself in places where my skills can be amplified in advocating for liberation on many fronts, for my communities locally and globally.

Over the span of my working career, be it swimming or organizing in pursuit of Environmental Justice, I have had the pleasure of being in and holding spaces that center relational healing and community-based solutions. I get to do this work because I am abundantly blessed, but I love to do this because our relationship to our surrounding environment is one that looks so vastly different for each person, land, animal, and plant. Systems of oppression have disconnected us first from one another, and then from our environment, ensuring that we cannot know community and actualize solutions. Now we find ourselves experiencing a world where environmental impacts not only harm people and planet (not separately, nor are we separate) but continue to compound daily.

Holding all of these truths is a new reality–simultaneously heartbreaking, invigorating, depressing AF, and one that is calling for us to prepare for transformation. While we may know that our reality is changing every day, I find myself in conversations that focus on the future. I have always stood beside the Indigenous principle of taking action and being in service of/for the next 7 generations, and that is one reason why I do this work. Trees planted today must provide shade for someone who needs it down the line.

And, I continue to ask myself, what must we do to ensure that we have a better (more connected, loving, healing, relational, equitable, just, transformative +) right now, so that we see a future beyond this current context?

Analyah is a Climate Generation Window Into COP delegate for COP29. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation, support our delegates, and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest.

Analyah Schlaeger dos Santos is a young Afro-Brazilian-American woman born and raised in North Minneapolis, Minnesota. After living in Atlanta, Georgia, she moved back to Minneapolis in 2015 to study Global Relations and Environmental Justice at the University of Minnesota and the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs. She has been an aquatic guide to all ages for 12 years and counting and loves to infuse environmental wellness into her frameworks.

She is currently the International Campaign lead at MN Interfaith Power & Light, and serves on the board of multiple local organizations.

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A Thought on Environment