How are you impacted by climate change?
My home town of Pueblo, Colorado has a large coal power plant. As a child, I would swim in the Arkansas River that flows next to my house, and get really sick after each swim. As I got older, I realized it was from all the toxins from the power plant nearby.
I started to see the effects of climate change when I went back home a few winters ago. The mountains that are usually a beautiful, pristine white color but the last time I went and looked, there was no white on them; it was just all brown.
What do you think young people should do?
Honestly I think that the best way for young people to find their voices is to first find their passion and to find others that share that passion. The thing about this work is it can be done in so many different ways because frontline activists working towards change are just as important as the lines of support that are behind them. The movement is sustained by the communities you build around it.
Being a youth and also just a person in this world is looking at everything we are doing and asking, “What is the impact?” “What am I doing every morning, afternoon, and evening and what are the consequences of it?” From the breakfast I eat, to the toothpaste I use at night, to the water I use and to the companies I’m unknowingly supporting. I think they also need to realize that we hold the power to change our world if we believe it!
What should be the role of the government in achieving climate justice?
At a governmental level, it’s a tricky place for work to happen because there is so much corruption within it and so much higher corporate interests, so much influx of money, and influx of businesses that have a lot of control and say. So, I’m constantly torn if government work is effective, but I think that it’s necessary element as well as community organizing. There can be a lot of pressure put on through governmental entities by economic incentives To put pressure on these corporations that are perpetuating climate change and on governments for taking action for taking action, as well as creating plans and concrete agendas of ways to combat climate change. I really think that hasn’t hit home yet!
How do we get to a just world?
It happens in a few respects. One is understanding where we’ve come from and the accurate history of the world that we currently exist in, and also the transparency of what’s going on behind closed doors in our current world. Behind the closed doors of a detention center; behind the doors of the industrial agriculture; behind these locked doors that the public doesn’t have access to and really understanding what’s going on behind these locked doors.
The first step is to have transparency in education around that. The next step for a just world is self-sufficiency and as I mentioned before, this community building and developing that trust and being able to be self-sufficient in terms of if you want to create a world, you have to have the ability to sustain yourself in it. Like, a lot of the problems that we are currently combating in this current, unjust world we live in we have to put up with in order to survive.
We have to put up with the food industry because they are providing cheap food for us. We have to put up with the inhumane conditions of workers, animals, and the mistreatment of the land; but say if you were able to be self-sufficient in the way that you grew food, and the community around you was able to nurse itself, then you wouldn’t have to rely on these other entities that are mass-exploiting the world and the people/animals that live in it.
