Climate Generation is honored to host the Minnesota Transform 2022 Environmental Justice Institute project on our storytelling collection in partnership with Change Narrative, LLC and the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Transform grant initiative. Continue reading to discover the project and explore youth climate stories.
Environmental Justice: the movement for equitable environmental benefits, burdens, representation, and decision-making.
Power of Stories
Stories are powerful tools for advocacy and organizing. They remind us that everyone has unique and valid experiences to share. In an era of fast-paced headlines and “doom scrolling” on social media, they invite us to slow down and listen authentically. Stories allow us to merge often-siloed styles and disciplines, encouraging more creative, effective, and meaningful communication. Storytelling is an age-old, cross-cultural practice that both entertains and transmits knowledge, values, and lessons.
Stories have also been critical for the environmental justice (EJ) movement, where the slogan “nothing about us without us” is oft-repeated. Before EJ enjoyed the recognition it now receives in the United States, testimonials in the forms of consciousness-raising pamphlets, neighborhood surveys, protest slogans, and visual art conveyed experiences of environmental racism, classism, and colonialism ignored by scientific, political, economic, and academic institutions of authority.
Today EJ has a canon of guiding principles, evidence-based science, peer-reviewed sociological and epidemiological studies, documentary films, and municipal, state, and federal policies. Yet none stand as substitutes for the power of first-person stories, for as a subjugated knowledge, EJ has historically been rendered inferior by the very institutions now embracing the movement. Institutional knowledge is never as advantaged as insights “on the frontlines” because the latter operates with an advantageously dual perspective: how to survive the normative cultures that create material and ideological toxicities on the one hand, while connect with suppressed cultures that often hold wisdom on ecological mutualism, social interdependence, strategic resistance, and just futures.
As educators, we recognize the potential to model the wisdom of EJ in storytelling toward developing students’ confidence, unique voice, and capacity for effective EJ communication. We recognize that EJ storytelling is especially powerful because much EJ information conveyed via mainstream media outlets is fact-based and depersonalized, making it difficult for consumers to connect with the movement on an emotional level. Stories about EJ, when told by advocates “on the ground,” invite us to appreciate a different kind of expertise, to see ourselves as the relational creatures we are. Finally, we recognize that the process of creating and sharing stories can help people cope with the anxiety, frustration, anger, grief, and/or isolation that often accompanies a clear-eyed appreciation of extinction, ecosystem collapse, and other traumas of climate change.
MNT Environmental Justice Institute
This is a project of Minnesota Transform, a three-year, Mellon-founded, public-humanities grant initiative that employs the public humanities toward community-engaged anti-colonial and racial justice work. During the summer of 2022, Dr. Michelle Garvey facilitated partnerships between undergraduate students and various EJ orgs to complete projects of mutual benefit to both the organization and students’ learning: organizations received the paid labor of student workers, while students received hands-on experience with the support of a cohort and EJ educator.
EJ Organizations:
Community Members for Environmental Justice: Masnoo Adem worked with Community Members for Environmental Justice, a North Minneapolis coalition committed to addressing local environmental injustices. She assisted CMEJ’s initiatives on climate preparedness, toxic tours, and urban gardening.
Minnesota Environmental Justice Table: Maia Bowman worked with the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table on their campaign against the Hennepin Energy Recover Center (HERC) by researching common misconceptions about the HERC, learning to create graphics, and educating students through social media.
Minneapolis Climate Action: Annie Bush spent the summer working with Minneapolis Climate Action, a local non-profit organization dedicated to making clean, equitable energy accessible to all communities. During this time, she produced digital content for their social media, tabled for upcoming solar projects, and engaged with many community members and organizers about the importance of accessible solar energy.
Tamales y Bicicletas: Zaynab Ahmed worked with Tamales y Bicicletas, a Minneapolis food justice organization, tending to the urban farm, helping host, plan, and promote garden events for the neighbors, attending White House Justice40 seminars, developing their youth summer program, and writing grant applications.
Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy: Eddy Olson-Enamorado interned with the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA), a non-profit environmental law firm, researching disparities in tree canopy cover policy in the Twin Cities metro.
COPAL: Siri Vorvick contributed to COPAL’s radio station Radio Jornalera by assisting in the studio and writing short scripts for the radio’s environmental justice program. She also helped research for their media department, looking for relevant news that pertained to environmental justice in the Spanish-speaking world. Lastly, she helped coordinate a team and set up a plan for a new podcast platform they hope to start.
To contextualize students’ internships and network with the wider EJ movement, Garvey’s institute involved experiential learning “in the field.” On one occasion, we traveled through Minneapolis on a Green Zones Toxic Tour, visiting sites of contestation like the Upper Harbor Terminal, 26th Avenue Pier, Northern Metals, Arsenic Triangle and Roof Depot, the HERC Incinerator, and Bdote.
Another occasion, students labored in a rainstorm alongside Growing North and Project Sweetie Pie’s urban farmers, planting kale, cabbage, collards, and native wildflowers…and in so doing, helped “seed” food justice in Minneapolis’ Northside.
“North Minneapolis is going green.
Give us a call and learn what we mean.
Where once lay urban blight
Now sits luscious garden sites.
Gardens without borders,
Classrooms without walls.
Architects of our own destinies.
Access to food
justice for all.”–Michael Chaney, Director of Project Sweetie Pie
With Four Seasons Foraging, we tasted the cityscape that supports not just concrete highways and skyscrapers, but edible native and medicinal plants.
Photo: Eddy Olson-Enamorado enjoys ripe serviceberries in Minneapolis’ South Side Green Zone.
Finally, a land walk at Sharing Our Roots farm demonstrated the potential for cooperative ownership and ecological management to support immigrant and BIPOC farmers as much as Northfield’s biodiversity and climate resiliency.
Narratives
To create an occasion for meaningful learning and leverage interns’ hands-on experiences with EJ organizations, Jothsna Harris facilitated a synthesis of their labor with reflections on their own identities and relationships with the EJ movement. Harris is the climate justice storytelling consultant behind Change Narrative LLC, which exists to build capacity in the climate justice movement through the power of community storytelling. For her, “changing the narrative” implies supplanting dominant and/or damaging narratives about climate change with the voices of everyday people and centering the stories of those typically excluded from, but unduly impacted by, critical discussions and decision-making on climate change and environmental issues.
Jothsna led students through a two-part storytelling workshop to prepare our interns for sharing personal narratives publicly as a qualitative written record of their engagement. Their stories are published on Climate Generation’s online story collection.
The compelling and unique stories captured here were prompted by Harris’s guided writing meditation, which elicited responses to the following prompts: Think about a memory of a place…. Recall a community that exemplifies reciprocity of which you have been a part…. Describe your personal experience of environmental justice…. As you think about your internship: which concepts, ideas, people, or topics have challenged you the most? What is the role that you feel you can play, and in what ways will you continue to be involved?
In both in-person and independent writing sessions, Harris encouraged students to note the presence of emotions their stories elicited and lean into them. She requested that they include sensory details in their writing to enrich the story and draw readers in. While thoroughly personalized, Harris suggested reinforcing aspects of their narratives with facts and statistics to underscore the legitimacy of their claims. Finally, she offered the idea of introducing an ask of readers to inspire action, perhaps even with their internship site.
Students’ Story Themes Include:
• Personal Growth • Oppression • Racism • Power Relations • Imagination for the Future • Indigenous Knowledge • Grassroots Organizing • Policy • Ancestral Knowledge • Generational Trauma • Decolonization • Liberation • Leadership • Healing • Advocacy • Toxics • Sense of Place • Belonging • Reconnection to the Land • Regeneration •
Please enjoy the following narratives, and join us in uplifting the voices of our youth, whose futures depend upon an environmentally-just world, and amplifying the labor of local EJ advocates, who will lead us to that world.
Jothsna Harris is the founder of Change Narrative, LLC, which exists to build capacity in the climate justice movement through the power of our stories. With a decade of experience building capacity for the climate justice movement, Jothsna has designed and implemented award-winning climate change programs rooted in community, centering personal stories and other values-based ways that resonate, coaching thousands of people to find compelling narratives to share in live events, on radio, as op-eds in print media and through creative arts.Jothsna Harris, Founder & Director, Change Narrative, LLC
Dr. Michelle Garvey is an environmental justice educator-organizer and current Education Assistant for Minnesota Transform. Michelle educates through experiential, community-engaged projects that channel student scholarship and academic resources into movements for environmental, food, and climate justice. Prior to Minnesota Transform, she served as the Environmental Justice Program Director at HECUA. She continues to teach Sustainability Studies at UMN and advise UMN Students for Climate Justice.