I love the question: “Who are my people?”
I like answering it. I like asking it in community dialogue spaces, and I love to hear how it forces us to turn the cogs in our minds about who, what, and where we come from.
My people are: loud, caring, passionate, funny, emotionally mature and emotionally immature, fire signs, water signs, everyone in between. My people are Afro-Brazilian, Euro-American, Latinx, young, elders, kids, bookworms, organizers, disorganized, chaotic, calm, joyful, curly, tall, short, energetic, so so so loving, and the list goes on.
Every time I am asked this or ask it, I feel I have left some huge faction of my reality out; and yet, I am consistently finding out who my people are, and what my place is in the world. Part of my reality is that my people, globally, continue to suffer in many places, and my people in other places, continue to turn a blind eye to what is happening at present and historically.
As a person coming from the United States, but having a foot in multiple global community spaces calls for me to show up in a way that is consistently mindful and doesn’t take up as much space as possible. Being in this COP space has been a whirlwind, to say the least. Having now completed four of these conferences has taught me a lot about my people and the place I come from. It shows me a lot of the realities that our country would rather us not notice.
I will gladly continue to remind folks that I did not know what COP or the UNFCCC was until a few weeks before my first one, COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland. I learned while I was on the go, and I didn’t have much support through that experience. I did not know what Loss and Damage was until a few weeks before my second, in Sharm-El Sheikh, Egypt.
I am still learning, and there seems to be a different lesson each time.
As I’ve grown through this experience of attending these yearly conferences, it has become clear that the country I come from is a consistent blocker to all forms of progress. And yet, it tells the people back home that we emerge triumphant, time and time again. The Global South has been fighting for a just, equitable transition away from fossil fuels and towards a regenerative economy, and, year after year, countries from the Global North, like the U.S., tell them (and us) that this just, equitable reality we could be living in, is not only not a priority, but simply “not attainable.”
Year after year, Civil Society attends this conference, and others like it, only to have our voices diminished, our presence limited, and turned away just to plan to “talk about it next year.” While we see 1,700+ fossil fuel lobbyists attending this year, down almost a thousand from last year, we started this conference knowing that the COP president is striking oil and gas deals on the ground, because it’s a good business opportunity! How am I supposed to go home and tell my people that we have achieved some sort of solution to the climate crisis here? How am I supposed to build a global community that is just, kind, caring, regenerative, and community-centered when the highest level of supposed solution-focused conversation ends up like this? How am I supposed to tell young people that they should still have hope?
These questions, while potentially negative in scope, don’t leave me feeling hopeless, disdainful, or dejected, have actually pushed me to remind myself (and others) that this is not the final solution. These people making decisions for us are not rooted in community and ancestral intelligence. They are not our people. And yet, our people must figure out ways to come together and actualize the solutions that we know we possess.
If we’re now looking at 2.5 degrees Celsius global annual temperature increase, it has come time for us to change our tactics.
It has come time for us to take all that our communities know and put it into practice, globally. Because this event’s success is not dependent on climate negotiators and finance mechanisms that colonial governments have no intention of funding… the success and future of our world depend on our people. One people. There is no Planet B. The question won’t be will the planet be here? The question is: Will we be here?
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.
The post Where are my people appeared first on Climate Generation.
Climate Change
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Picture an American farm in your mind.
I fell flat on my backside one afternoon this January and, weirdly, it made me think of you. Okay, I know that takes a bit of unpacking—so let me go back and start at the beginning.
For the last six years, our family has joined with half a dozen others to spend a week or so up at Wangat Lodge, located on a 50-acre subtropical rainforest property around three hours north of Sydney. The accommodation is pretty basic, with no wifi coverage—so time in Wangat really revolves around the bush. You live by the rhythm of the sun and the rain, with the days punctuated by swimming in the river and walking through the forest.
An intrinsic part of Wangat is Dan, the owner and custodian of the place, and the guide on our walks. He talks about time, place, and care with great enthusiasm, but always tenderly and never with sanctimony. “There is no such thing as ‘the same walk’”, is one of Dan’s refrains, because the way he sees it “every day, there is change in the world around you” of plants, animals, water and weather. Dan speaks of Wangat with such evident love, but not covetousness; it is a lightness which includes gentle consciousness that his own obligations arise only because of the historic dispossession of others. He inspires because of how he is.
One of the highlights this year was a river walk with Dan, during which we paddled or waded through most of the route, with only occasional scrambles up the bank. Sometimes the only sensible option is to swim. Among the life around us, we notice large numbers of tadpoles in the water, which is clean enough to drink. Our own tadpoles, the kids in the group, delight in the expedition. I overhear one of the youngest children declaring that she’s having ‘one of the best days ever’. Dan looks content. Part of his mission is to reintroduce children to nature, so that the soles of their feet may learn from the uneven ground, and their muscles from the cool of the water.
These moments are for thankfulness in the life that lives.
It is at the very end of the walk when I overbalance and fall on my arse—and am reminded of the eternal truth that rocks are hard. As I gingerly get up, my youngest daughter looks at me, caught between amusement and concern, and asks me if I’m okay.
I have to think before answering, because yes, physically I’m fine. But I feel too, an underlying sense of discomfort; it is that omnipresent pressure of existential awareness about the scale of suffering and ecological damage now at large in the world, made so much more immediately acute after Bondi; the dissonance that such horrors can somehow exist simultaneously with this small group being alive and happy in this place, on this earth-kissed afternoon.
How is it okay, to be “okay”? What is it to live with conscience in Wangat? Those of us who still have access to time, space, safety and high levels of volition on this planet carry this duality all the time, as our gift and obligation. It is not an easy thing to make sense of; but for me, it speaks to the question of ‘why Greenpeace’? Because the moral and strategic mission-focus of campaigning provides a principled basis for how each of us can bridge that interminable gulf.
The essence of campaigning is to make the world’s state of crisis legible and actionable, by isolating systemic threats to which we can rise and respond credibly, with resources allocated to activity in accordance with strategy. To be part of Greenpeace, whether as an activist, volunteer supporter or staff member, is to find a home for your worries for the world in confidence and faith that together we have the power to do something about it. Together we meet the confusion of the moment with the light of shared purpose and the confidence of direction.
So, it was as I was getting back up again from my tumble and considering my daughter’s question that I thought of you—with gratitude, and with love–-because we cross this bridge all the time, together, everyday; to face the present and the future.
‘Yes, my love’, I say to my daughter, smiling as I get to my feet, “I’m okay”. And I close my eyes and think of a world in which the fires are out, and everywhere, all tadpoles have the conditions of flourishing to be able to grow peacefully into frogs.
Thank you for being a part of Greenpeace.
With love,
David
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