Last Chance Road: Voices from the Frontlines of Climate Change
Steven Mayers and Jonathan Freedman
Sunday December 3, 2023, 10:30AM-12PM
CCSF Mission Campus, 1125 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA
Room 322
Join us in person or on Zoom!
Zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/272zb683
We’re excited to invite you to our upcoming book talk, “Last Chance Road: Voices from the Front Lines of Climate Change.” Our presentation with guest speakers features a “sneak preview” of our challenging four-year journey recording the harrowing and inspiring dozens of first-person accounts of people in four radically different environments: Yucatán, Mexico; Ethiopia, Santa Cruz, and Bangladesh. Their incredible stories bring you deep into Maya heartland, Ethiopia’s droughts/hunger, the wildfires of Santa Cruz, and the rising tides/floods of Bangladesh. Narratives are entwined, geo-synchronously, revealing the challenges people face month to month, year by year, hour by hour with uncertainty, suspense, realism. Our modest global outreach occurred during the COVID lockdown, when we reached out – and people reached back. As far-flung narrators become friends, we share their personal tragedies, hopes and collective dreams of cooperation against a common enemy: passivity and despair of climate inaction. What Can Be Done? Our Dec. 3 presentation happens during COP-28 in Dubai, and two of our narrators – Ibrahim Tchan from Benin, and Lipi Rahman from Bangladesh – hope to join us via Zoom from the climate conference. A third narrator, Seifu Assegid, from Ethiopia, will also join us via Zoom.
We’re asking displaced people the most fundamental human questions: How have they survived? What forces them to leave their homes? What are their journeys like? How are their experiences crossing borders? What is life like where they currently reside? What relief efforts are working? What can we learn from them? And more specifically: How do Maya farmers in Yucatán, Mexico, whose land is being encroached upon by destructive mega-projects protect their territory, their culture, their way of life? How do historically nomadic herders who have been driven by drought to farm in the highlands in Oromia, Ethiopia adapt to overpopulation while trying to maintain their cultural identity? How do firefighters in Santa Cruz County, California, fight the largest wildfire in one hundred years of history while masking up with COVID? How do coastal fishermen and farmers in the Asia Pacific adapt and respond to warming seas, typhoons, and rising sea levels?
We’re seeking wisdom from the displaced, those who come to their aid, as well as those who are fighting for their right to stay home and defend the land. We hope their stories will catalyze questions in readers. Since humans are causing these environmental crises, how can humans work to create change? What kinds of legal, economic, social, moral paradigm shifts would need to take place to ensure human rights are respected? How can we re-envision our relationship with nature?
Solito2Solidarity 