Postcards from the Rogue Valley

For several years now, I have followed the tidal wave of youth action around climate change, close at hand and across the globe, bringing it up in casual conversations whenever I can. Folks who know me probably aren’t surprised: I’ve spent a lifetime championing the voices and visions of young people, in good times and bad.

In this blog post (maybe too long to qualify as a “post” — a ten-minute read), I share voices from young climate activists here in the Rogue Valley and from secondary students in Tanzania, where climate-induced drought has upended their lives. I also sketch the contours of the ever-increasing youth climate movement of which these students are a part. I end with the question, “Where are we, their elders, as they fight the fight of a lifetime?” As a recently appointed “Master Climate Protector” with the Southern Oregon Climate Action Now, I hope this adds to the conversation.

“Greenland ice sheet set to raise sea levels by nearly a foot,” a New York Times headline read the other day. “Climate ‘points of no return’ may be much closer than we thought,” another warns.

No wonder youth across the globe are taking to the streets, to the courts, to governmental organizations, to international conferences where the world’s powerbrokers and scientists meet, to local committees and commissions, to wherever they can make their case for climate action: “There is no Planet B,” “Our Future Is On Fire,” “When Leaders Act Like Kids, the Kids Become the Leaders,” “Bla, Bla, Bla, Action Now!,” “Like the Ocean We Rise.”

And no wonder that climate anxiety, nicknamed “ecoanxiety,” has seeped into young people’s mental health. What once seemed like one-off occurrences—an historic flood, a raging wildfire, a once in a lifetime drought—have become part of an evolving narrative of inevitable, accelerating change, with large regions of the world becoming potentially unlivable.

In a recent groundbreaking survey, over 10,000 youth in ten countries reported significant levels of psychological distress associated with climate change, exacerbated by the government’s failure to act quickly. About three-quarters felt that the “future is frightening,” about half said that they experienced climate anxiety to a degree that affected their daily lives, and about a quarter indicated fear about having children due to the climate crisis. 

“You’ll die of old age, I’ll die of climate change,” reads another sign popular with young climate activists.

An abiding connection

Young people have shown up for the environment long before the climate crisis took the stage. 

When Earth Day kicked off in 1970, hundreds of thousands of elementary and secondary students nationwide turned to cleaning-up parks, planting trees, recycling trash, riding their bikes to school, and more — small yet significant gestures. Fifty years later, this annual homage to the earth continues to involve school children in the U.S. and globally. The environmental awareness “teach-ins” on college and university campuses that were a universal part of Earth Day early on have give way to environmental science majors, surging in the past ten years.

Abiding, too, is the determination of young people to step in where adults faltered, to challenge their communities to right environmental wrongs.

My small nonprofit, What Kids Can Do, was part of moving the needle from gesture to action.

Between 2003 and 2006, we offered $5,000 grants to student “action-research” teams across the country who, like the students in Michigan, were driven to take action — against the disappearance of salmon in a Maine river, emissions from a coal-burning plant in Louisiana, stresses on hunting and fishing in an Inuit village on the Arctic Circle, expanding a highway through a Denver neighborhood where child asthma was already endemic, and more.

“If the adults won’t act, we will,” a group of middle school students in Michigan said about the toxic waste upon which their school was built.

Speaking truth to power

Perhaps we should not be surprised that a 16-year-old environmental activist whose autism put no brakes on her speaking truth to power should galvanize a global youth climate movment. In September 2019, Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, started the year before, fueled 4,500 student strikes across 150 countries, gathering roughly 4 million schoolchildren along with their adult allies. Most likely, it was the largest “climate action” in history.

This youth force had been building for half a decade. Here are some examples:

Founded in 2015, Our Children’s Trust has launched youth-led climate lawsuits and legal actions in all 50 states. In its best known case, Juliana v. United States, 21 youth filed suit against the U.S. government, asserting that the government had violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources. The case continues unresolved.

SustainUS brings youth to international negotiations to demand stronger, urgent action. In 2017, the group organized a demonstration that went viral when youth delegates disrupted the White House panel promoting fossil fuels at the UN climate change conference in Bonn, Germany.

The Sunrise Movement has redefined youth activism in the U.S. with the meteoric rise of their campaign to support the  Green New Deal and green jobs.

“The millennial generation is not starting from a place of what is politically feasible in this moment, youth are pushing to stretch the imagination of what is possible,” Varshini Prakash, co-founder of Sunrise told Teen Vogue in 2019.

Ashland, Oregon: When living in balance with nature means everything

Here in Ashland, Oregon, I was among the adult allies on September 20, 2019 who cheered a parade of Ashland High School students as they marched into the town plaza chanting, “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.” Like their peers across the globe, they were adding their voices to Friday for Future’s intrenational student strike. Uncharacteristically, I burst into tears. 

A year later, on a blue cloudless morning, the Almeda Fire swept through the Rogue Valley, destroying more than 2,600 homes between Ashland, Talent, Phoenix and Medford in a matter of hours. It was the most destructive wildfire in Oregon’s recorded history.

For those of us living in Southern Oregon, our house truly was on fire.

Anya Moore, then a sophomore at Ashland High School and one of the organizers of the previous year’s student climate protest, remembers her classmates’ panic as they tuned into reports about the unfathomable devastation 11 miles to their north.

It was her passion to make a difference (not her organizing experience she says) that thrust Anya at age 14 into leading her older classmates in the September 2019 Ashland climate strike. The following year, she became a founding member of the Rogue Climate Youth Action Team, joining the campaigns of their adult allies — around energy justice, “resilience hubs,” fracked gas pipelines entering Oregon, and more. This past summer, Anya trained with Eugene, Oregon’s BreachCollective, gaining skills in grassroots organizing and climate litigation.

What has engaged her most, though, are actions where she can see the direct impact of her efforts: helping fire recovery efforts after the Almeda Fire, leading Ashland’s climate strike walkout, working with the city council to develop local policies that support electrification. (She sits on the Ashland Conservation and Climate Outreach Commission though, as a 17-year-old, she has no vote.)

Looking across the current political landscape surrounding climate action — from national to local — what gives her hope? 

I try not to lose faith in the federal government, but I don’t have much confidence about what can be accomplished at the federal level. Today’s conflicts and political divides get in the way of what’s good for the planet. Where I have the most faith is at the state level, even if it means state-by-state, with states like Oregon and California leading the way. Local is important, but insufficient in itself.”

Anya’s classmate Te Maia Wiki grew up among Salmon fishermen at the mouth of the Klamath River whose livelihood has been dashed by the severe drought —  indeed water wars affecting the Klamath Basin, from eastern Oregon to northern California. 

The daughter of a Yurok mother (California’s most populous Native American tribe) and a Maori father (the indigenous people of New Zealand), Te Maia can’t remember a time when she wasn’t speaking up, including creating an anti-vaping public service announcement to combat big tobacco’s marketing targeted at Native youth.

Te Maia’s family moved from the reservation to Ashland a year ago so that she could get the college preparation unavailable to her at the local high school.

Like Anya, Te Maia is a member of the Rogue Climate Youth Action Team. However, her advocacy on behalf of Indigenous populations — often on the frontline of climate change but for whom living in balance with nature means everything — reaches across the country and the globe. She was part of an international indigenous group of young people who attended COP26 in Glasgow. 

In a 20-minute podcast Te Maia created for The Laura Flanders Show, she argues that “COP is not really a climate negotiation. The only way countries will agree to take action is by creating or taking away economic incentives.” Confounding these inequities, she explains, is that the power to make or take away economic rewards isn’t evenly distributed. 

The most powerful countries, often called the Global North, are the ones who’ve already benefitted from carbonization. And the demands they mandate fall on the countries that can least afford the change and are most impacted by climate change.”

Still, Te Maia called the high-stakes meeting a success.

Success was the fact that the words fossil fuels stayed in the actual language of the agreement. Success was sharing stories about the ceremonies my people have had from time immemorial, to maintain physical and spiritual balance between all things. Success was having the energy of youth, people of color, climate migrants, small island nations, and all impacted communities being present.”

Tanzania: When crops and livestock die

As Te Maia reminds us, top level conferences on climate change privilege the powerful and exclude the voices of the impacted. Swedish activist Thunberg recently adopted a new message: Listen to the most vulnerable. 

“We see the snow melt on Mt. Kilimanjaro,” 17-year-old Maximillian James Kessey writes from northern Tanzania. “But the hurt is much bigger than snow melting.”

Thanks to WhatsApp, I remain in touch with the secondary students in Kambi ya Simba who, in 2005, joined me in creating a photo essay about daily life in this remote Tanzanian village — and, with their classmates, wrote letters to President Bush urging him to stop global warming, which they hoped I would hand deliver. Now in their early 30’s, some have become secondary school teachers, low paid but respected.

In Tanzania, teachers do not choose where they teach but are placed by the government. Romana Julian Hharmi teaches at a secondary school at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro and Reginald Aloyce Boniface works in a Masaai (indigenous) boarding school in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose caldera teems with wildebeest, zebras, gazelles, and other animals.

This August, I invited them both to invite their students to reflect on the impacts of climate change in their lives. Some wrote essays; others shared comments on videotape. (Secondary school instruction in Tanzania, I should add, is in English, not Swahili, and students struggle with this second language.)

Tanzania — you may or may not know — is one of the poorest countries in the world and more than two-thirds of Tanzanians are dependent upon agriculture. Traditionally, the long rains from April to June and the short rains around October to December have refilled surface water basins, nourished crops, and allowed pastureland to recover from the dry season. For the past four years, rainfall has been 35 percent of normal and heat has set records.

Fully 90 percent of the families of Romana’s students in Moshi Rural and 100 percent of the families of Reggie’s Masaai are agro-pastoralists, eating what they raise and selling the extra when the growing season has been kind.

It has not been kind.

“My father is a good farmer but he cannot make it rain,” Amina Ally Mgaly, a Form III student at Moshi Rural’s Mashingia Secondary School, explains. “He buys quality seeds, we cultivate the land as best we can, we spread manure when we have it. But when the crops grow dry, my father feels he has failed.” 

In her classmate’s essays, stark sentences stand out.

There is no longer enough money for school fees. We have to choose which ones get to go to school. I am one of the lucky ones.” – Careen Andrew Swai

“When I fetch water for my family, I don’t know if the tap will be dry.” – Batilla Richard Minja

“Last year my grandfather died of starvation.” – Gloria Gerald Mtema

More and more, Romana tells me, parents relinquish a child to a grandparent or orphanage for the food and care they cannot provide themselves. Sometimes, Romana puts up students herself (she has three young girls of her own).

At the 1,250-pupil government boarding school where Reggie teaches, students are comparatively insulated from the daily hardships of their families miles away. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area covers over 3,000 square miles and the Maasai tribe, for whom it is home (100,000 live there), are hunter-gatherers with cattle their primary source of food and income. After multiple seasons of punishing drought, more cattle have died than lived. 

Harun Haggai Haraya, one of four students at Reggie’s school who submitted a videotape (13 minutes long), explains:

We used to get a lot of food before, at the times of rain, but nowadays there simply is not enough food. Dryness has caused the dying of crops, the dying of cattle. It affects everything.

Our water, it does not come to us but we go to it. Rivers we used to rely on have dried up.  We may walk two hours and come back with one gallon of water. That is not a good equation. Our search for pasture for our cattle can take all day, sometimes many days.”

Mariamu Selemani Ziagilah mentions another impact, one you might not think of as the ozone layer thins: an increase in skin cancer. “We are a people who make our lives outdoors, under the sun,” she says. 

Meanwhile foreign tourists pay up to $1000 USD for a private (canopied) wildlife tour in the nearby Ngorongoro Crater.

Well aware of the contributions of the developed world to global warming but powerless to affect it, Romana’s and Reggie’s students focus on the deforestation that is adding to climate change across East Africa, along with the ongoing drain of poverty.

Careen, 17, who by his own account is a “climate thinker,” writes:

The barriers to fighting climate change and conservation begin with poverty and ignorance. In my community, we depend on the trees for firewood, charcoal, building materials and timber. We extract trees. But when we cut them, we lose the carbon protection from global warming, it gets hotter and drier, we pollute the land we live on.

When the drought kills the crops, the farmers, they cut trees to sell firewood and charcoal so that they can buy the food they cannot  grow. It goes round and round.”

“There are many enterprises that would be good for our community, that do not rely on agriculture,” Careen adds. “But this requires capital, access to institutions like banks that can provide loans. We are low on this.”

At Reggie’s school in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, students belong to a“Roots and Shoots” Club, part of a movement started 30 years by Jane Goodall across Tanzania and much of the world. They grow seedlings and plant trees.

When Romana told her students that in America, people are advised to conserve water, recycle, buy less, and that electric cars are the wave of the future, Glory raised her hand and said, “Madam, if I can say this, theirs is a different world. Here in Africa, we lack water to conserve and we use and reuse. We have no cars.”

When Reggie told his students about the global student strikes, about the protests and court cases by young people on behalf of the climate, Careen said, “Please thank them for speaking for us.”

Photo: Meredith Nierman, WGBH Boston, npr.org, 2019

“This is why I am here”

Listening to young climate activists like Anya and Te Maia and climate change survivors like Amina and Maximillian — who are paying dearly for our love affair with fossil fuels — what also shines through is their optimism in the face of melting glaciers. Romana and Reggie’s students dream of becoming doctors and talk about conquering HIV and malnutrition and lifting their communities out of poverty. In a discussion Anya organized among climate activists in her school, students referred to themselves as “climate optimists.” 

Te Maia recollects a favorite day at COP26:

A favorite day for me was joining an action with other young people on the final days of the summit. The goal was to insure that the actual words, fossil fuels, were included and maintained in this version of the Paris Agreement. Using box sharpies, we drew eyes on the palms of our hands to symbolize that young people are always watching. Even if we can’t physically be where the decisions are made, our energy is always present. We held up our hands, marched close to the negotiation rooms and I remember thinking, ‘This is why I am here.’”

Whether these young activist’s passion and anger, their optimism and realism tilts the scale in favor of the survival remains an open question. But one thing is sure: we cannot expect today’s young climate warriors to take on the enormous burden of saving the world alone. 

“Boomers and Gen Xers on the sidelines, where are you now when we need you the most?” a speaker at a youth climate strike might call out.

Where are we, their elders, as they fight the fight of a lifetime?

While we may not join young people in the streets, we can support politicians who share the belief that our house is on fire. We can sign climate petitions when they come our way and disinvest in fossil fuels. We can lower our own carbon footprint and join a local climate action network. We can donate to the organizations young climate activists have created to change the script and volunteer our skills. We can add muscle (attending hearings, commenting on policy proposals) to climate-friendly policies at the state level.

And we can share youth’s anger, speaking truth to power and calling out climate injustice at the same time that we conserve water.

Like the ocean, we must rise too.

SUBSCRIBE
Add your name to the email “blast” announcing new posts. Please send your name and email address to: postcardsfromtheRV@gmail.com