Solito2Solidarity presents
The People’s COP26: Voices from the Front Lines of Climate Change
As the global climate summit in Glasgow concludes, we bring together voices of the people left out: environmentally displaced people and defenders of the earth. How is climate change affecting you in your region of the world? What do world leaders need to know? What can we learn from people on the front lines of climate change?
This global people-to-people forum will take place on Zoom, so tune in from wherever you are at your local time zone!
Sunday November 14 and Monday November 15, 2021
6pm in Glasgow, Scotland
10am in Santa Cruz, California
12pm in Yucatán, Mexico
9pm in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia
12am in Chittagong, Bangladesh
Sunday November 14: https://ccsf-edu.zoom.us/j/96086948879
Monday November 15: https://ccsf-edu.zoom.us/j/93808550912
Participants will include:
Seifu Assegid works for Save the Children as a Roving Humanitarian Communication Coordinator. Seifu’s photographs and stories have appeared in popular television programs, newspapers, and magazines including the UK Daily Telegraph, Aljazeera TV, and media outlets in Australia and elsewhere. He has been voice to the voiceless by sharing their stories for donors and members of Save the Children. His work mainly focuses on people affected by climate change, and is informed by his personal experiences as a child and adult.
Gina and Gardner Lund survived the CZU Lightning Complex wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California in August of 2020 with two of their children. Gina and Gardner have started a community organization based out of their business location in called 3 Sisters 3 Corners, which will be providing workshops and seminars on fire prevention, regenerative farming, and medicinal herbs and plants with the main focus being on community resilience. They are also working to learn from local indigenous groups to care for the forests, replant indigenous plants and trees in burned areas, and restore the Santa Cruz Mountains to health with Gardner recently completing a wild-land firefighter course. Their underlying goal is to put the healing power of the land and all of its magic back in the hands of the people, where it belongs.
Pedro Uc Be is a poet, teacher, and defender of the Maya land in Yucatan, Mexico. He is a member of Múuch ‘Xíinbal, Assembly of Defenders of the Maya Territory, an organization that aims to defend its territory from the dispossession applied by mega-companies of renewable energy in the Yucatan Peninsula. Pedro is currently a professor at the School of Literary Creation of the State Center of Fine Arts (CEBA), a campus where he also studied. He also graduated as a theologian from the San Pablo Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1985 in the city of Mérida. He has a degree in Secondary Education in the area of Social Sciences from the Escuela Normal Superior de Campeche. He was a professor of Philosophy and History since 1993 in the city of Ticul, Yucatán at the José Dolores Rodríguez Tamayo Educational Center.
Anahí Haizel De la Cruz Martín is a Maya photographer. She was born in Ticul, Yucatán, on July 25, 1993. She has shown her work in various exhibitions including the collective exhibition The Memories of the Mayan Territory at the Museo Maya Santa Cruz Xbáalam Naj in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo, Mexico. She was a fellow of the Young Creators 2019-2020 program of the Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) in the Visual Arts Photography Area. She has published her photographs in the magazines La Ojarasca, Revista Sinfín, in the Italian magazine La Macchina Sognante, as well as in the Mexico News Daily newspaper and the Diario de Yucatán. Haizel accompanies and documents processes of struggle for the vindication of the Mayan language and culture as a member of the Assembly of Defenders of the Maya Múuch ’Xíinbal Territory. She has shared his photographs on Facebook and on her blog for the outreach of the communities.
Prabal Barua, Program Manager of Young Power in Social Action (YPSA) in Chittagong, Bangladesh, earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Jahangirnagar University’s Department of Environmental Sciences. His research topic was “Sustainable Adaptation in Responses to Climate Change for South-Eastern Coast of Bangladesh.” At present he is working as a Program Manager of the project “Addressing the Rights and Needs of Climate Forced Displaced People of South-Eastern Coast of Bangladesh” with the support of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF). He is one of the editorial members of ‘Social Change’, a journal of YPSA, and staff member of Knowledge Management and Development (KM4D) Department of YPSA.
Steven Mayers and Jonathan Freedman complied and edited Solito, Solita: Crossing Borders with Youth Refugees from Central America, which was published by Haymarket Books as part of the Voice of Witness book series in 2019. Since 2019, they have been listening to the stories of environmentally displaced people and defenders of the land. Steven Mayers is an oral historian, writer, and professor in the English Department at the City College of San Francisco. Jonathan Freedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and social activist with more than forty years’ experience reporting from South America, Central America, Mexico, and the US border. His six-year series of investigative editorials for the San Diego Tribune was influential in the passage of the landmark 1986 US immigration reforms that authorized 2.7 million undocumented immigrants to become permanent legal residents.
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1253342611758559/
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