Transcriber: Van Nguyen Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
In 2017, the year after I gave birth to my daughter,
wildfires in California burned over 1.5 million acres of land.
As I was breastfeeding her,
I could smell the toxic smoke seeping into through the closed doors
and windows of our home.
I remember thinking this is not OK or normal.
Our children deserve better than this,
but I didn’t know what to do,
and that led me to feeling anxious and depressed.
I was a working mother trying to raise two small children,
write a doctoral dissertation
and work full time at a social justice school.
It was a lot.
To de-stress, I would spend my lunch hours
running Dungeons and Dragons games with fifth graders.
But then I would see some of those same fifth graders
leave their classrooms with nosebleeds from the smoke.
On one day, when the smoke was particularly bad,
I asked them what they thought about what was happening.
One student shared
that while he was afraid,
what made it worse was it so many adults were pretending that climate change
wasn't happening, and that is what made it terrifying.
So I began to research to see who was preparing our young people
for climate change and spoiler alert:
Almost nobody was.
This was inconceivable to me
because if we do not act and prepared now,
we could be living through multiple extinction level events.
But in that moment, I did not despair
because I had stood
amongst the countless flags and tepees of native nations
the year before at Standing Rock.
And as a detribalized person of Nahuat Pipil descent,
I knew that our ancestors have always
pushed us to dream and imagine the impossible.
To pull from the words of the writer Arundhati Roy,
“Another world is not only possible,
she is on her way
and on a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”
And I knew deep in my gut where ancestral knowledge lives,
that any solution that we create
to the climate crisis cannot just be scientific in scope,
but necessitates a rekindling of our relationship to our plant
and animal relatives and all that they can teach us.
And it requires us to center
and prioritize traditional ecological knowledge
that deep wellspring of wisdom
that so many of our native brothers and sisters hold.
And so, together with those fifth graders that I played D&D with,
I began to combine a deep,
deep love of all things nerdy.
With the traditions that I had learned from my mentors,
as well as my own understanding of organizing
to create a curriculum that would actively address our changing world.
I taught them that action is the best antidote to hopelessness and to despair,
because in the words of Gandalf the Grey from Lord of the Rings,
“Despair is only for those who have seen the end beyond all doubt.
We do not.”
And here’s the thing.
We are living in a terrifying
yet beautiful moment in human history
where the world is literally remaking itself.
And it is up to us to decide what shape that remaking will look like.
For me, it looked like shifting my reality
to respond to our climate crisis.
So,
soon thereafter,
I dropped out of my Ph.D.
because who needs a degree in theology with an upcoming apocalypse?
Left my full time job.
And together with those fifth graders,
and eventually young people from across the Bay Area,
built a grassroots organization that would actively empower and prepare them.
Inspired by the underground root system
that fungi use to communicate with one another,
I called the organization Mycelium Youth Network,
and I’d like to share some of the best practices we use
in order to talk to young people about climate change.
One, talk openly and honestly about our climate crisis.
That means acknowledging the things that we know,
as well as the things that we don’t know.
If young people are old enough to experience climate change,
then they should be supported and how to think about it.
Two, meet youth where they’re at, work with their strengths,
particularly around gaming and social media.
These are two powerful tools that we can use to support young people
to feel like active participants and change makers.
Games, in particular, are amazing vehicles to freedom dream another world.
Three, create spaces where young people have institutional
and infrastructural power.
To paraphrase the great Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
“Youth belong in all places where decisions are made,
especially when those decisions have long term impacts on their lives.”
And Four, draw on the traditions of our frontline communities, these black,
brown and indigenous communities that are first and worst hit in a climate crisis.
These communities, our communities have the knowledge
that can help save all of us.
If we are to survive our upcoming climate crisis,
we need to uplift and center this knowledge that has been historically
devalued and ignored.
I believe that when we combine the creativity and ingenuity
of our young people with the ancestral traditions
and practices of our frontline communities
and the best in scientific thinking,
a whole new world is possible.
A world that on a quiet day you can hear coming.
It is up to all of us to decide
what kind of world we want to leave our young people
and how we will prepare them for it.
I’d like to end with the words of youth, poet laureate Amanda Gorman, who said:
“For there is always light,
if only we are brave enough to see it.
If only we are brave enough to be it.”
Now, let’s get to work.
Tlazohcamati. Thank you.