Hi everybody, welcome back to this final episode of Just a Peaceful Climate, where we are highlighting groups and organizations that integrate efforts for peace, justice, and planet care. It has been so fun and insightful to learn from Tala with PeaceBuilders Community, Inc., Jonathan with Blacks Run Forest Farm, and Lizzy, Divya, and Rithu with AYUDH.

 

So in this last episode, I decided it might be nice to share with you all a few key moments in my journey that have led me to being so intrigued with the themes we’ve been exploring throughout this podcast.

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Growing up, I wanted to be a marine biologist. Full disclosure, this was 100% motivated by the fact that I thought dolphins were really cute and I wanted to be friends with them. In 8th grade when we did career day, I went all in and did a bunch of research about what my life would certainly be like as a marine biologist. I grew up in a small town called Hesston, Kansas, so it was a bit strange that this land-locked girl wanted to become a marine biologist. Ironically, when I was a sophomore in high school and our family relocated to Sarasota, Florida, a coastal city neighboring the Gulf of Mexico where I actually would have access to some of these marine animals I had been so excited about, my interests shifted. I remember that I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew that it felt more important and meaningful to me to work with people rather than plants and animals. At that point, it was either I help people, or I help animals.

 

So fast forward a few years. I’m at EMU and I’ve just declared a Peacebuilding major. In the spring of my Junior year, I traveled to India for the semester with about 30 other classmates for our cross cultural experience. I have no idea what it was about this timing, but for some reason, I remember this being a distinct time when my partner Luke and I started having a lot of conversations about climate change. We started thinking more deeply about how we could make changes in our lives to reduce our carbon footprint. We even made a list at one point. I remember one very specific conversation we had at one point. We were in Mussoorie, a smaller city in the foothills of the Himalayas. Sitting on a stone ledge and looking out over the city, we talked about this newfound passion. I don’t remember specifics of the conversation, but I do remember that we felt a bit differently about where our priorities should be. I felt very strongly that humans and justice and equity should be our number one priority. Luke said that focusing on climate change should be the priority because without the planet, there wouldn’t be any people to left to need justice. These two priorities, in our conversation at the time, were conflicting. If we fully focused our energy on one, then we couldn’t equally prioritize the other.

 

The fall semester after coming back from India I attended one of EMU’s campus convocations. The Center for Sustainable Climate Solutions, which is housed on EMU’s campus, was hosting this one. It was called “Global South Voices.” We heard from three people from El Salvador, Zimbabwe and Nepal who described the impacts of climate change on their communities. This was the first time, at least from what I can remember, that I had explicitly heard justice, peacebuilding, and climate change discussed all in the same conversation. I could feel the gears turning. These themes that I feel so passionately about - peace, justice, and more recently climate change - don’t have to be separated at all! In fact, they shouldn’t be. This connection felt freeing.

 

The following semester, spring of my senior year, I was looking for a research topic for my Biblical Theology of Peace and Justice class. I don’t remember how I found this, I must have been searching for articles that included elements of peace, justice, and planet care. Anyway, at some point I came across an article titled “Ecofeminism: New Liberation Paths for Women and Nature” by Olga Consuelo Vélez Caro. Ecofeminism was a word I had never heard before. I was intrigued, and read the article. 

 

Now, I’m not usually the kind of person who says that academic articles drastically impacted me, but wow, this one changed my life. In the abstract, it says “ecofeminism responds to [the challenge of the deterioration of the environment], by making a creative link between the domination experienced by women and nature. Women and nature are not identified as one, but they can be allies in a search for common liberation.” I was hooked. This was significant to me for many reasons, but especially because I had recently been able to put language to my own experience with sexual violence. This article helped me to link some of the explanations (not justifications, though) for the abuse I experienced and the abuse that the earth experiences. I felt like mother earth and I were in solidarity with one another. The article talked about an ethic of care that has been lost because care is seen as a feminine trait and being feminine is something that the patriarchy says is bad. The loss of this ethic of care is hurting us all. I could go on and on about this article. It’s amazing. I recommend it to everyone.

 

So the following fall, my first semester as a full-time graduate student at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, I met with my advisor Johonna Turner. We were getting to know each other and of course I told her about my passion and interest in learning more about how climate change and peace and justice intersect. She sent me an email later telling me about a small independent study happening called “Whiteness and Radical Ecology.” It was being led by Jonathan McRay. I joined, and I’m so grateful I did. Each Wednesday afternoon that we met was typically the highlight of my week. These connections and intersections that I had started learning about earlier continued to deepen, this time incorporating anti-racism and decolonization, too. 

 

These experiences have led me to understand that peacebuilding, justice, and care for the planet cannot be separated. Of course, I still have so much to learn, as is evident especially in my interview with Tala. 

 

Like I said before, there is something really calming about learning that these subjects are intertwined. Part of that relief for me is because there was a time when I felt that if I was focusing my energy on, say, the fight against climate change, that I was betraying anti-racism work. I thought I had to be all in with one area. That made it feel so much more stressful because it seemed that the work to be done was an unbearably large amount. And I’m not gonna lie, it still feels like that sometimes. But there’s something about recognizing that all systems of domination are connected that just feels freeing in and of itself. As Audre Lorde tells us, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” White supremacy, the patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, imperialism, colonialism, classism...all of these are connected. And they are all peace, justice, and planet issues.

 

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So it’s time to wrap things up. What have we learned from Tala, Jonathan, and Lizzy, Rithu, and Divya? From Tala I learned that for some, taking land care out of the equation of peace and justice just doesn’t make any sense. From Jonathan, I learned that land and planet care must also be a part of restorative justice if we hope that it will be holistic. And from Lizzy, Rithu, and Divya, I learned that the ethic of compassion is one way of tying together these topics of justice, peace, and land care. And - I was reminded that youth have so much energy, wisdom, and ideas to offer!

 

I’m going to turn specifically for a moment to my learning community at CJP and EMU. At CJP, we have done a great job of making peace and justice inseparable from one another. I think it is now crucial that we make land and planet care equally inseparable from peace and justice as well. This should have been the case from the very beginning of our work at CJP. But it is absolutely crucial now. We are in the middle of a climate crisis. If we as peacebuilders continue to treat land and planet care as that less-than-necessary afterthought, we will be neglecting some of our core values such as embracing nonviolence, working to dismantle systems of oppression, and focusing on long-term and deep-rooted change. Some ways to better incorporate this could be to more intentionally include it throughout our course curriculums, collaborate with the Center for Sustainable Climate solutions to learn about ways we can live in more harmony with the earth, or to have a community-building event where we get our hands in the dirt and plant things. There are so many options.

 

Including the planet in our everyday conversations is not just something for environmental scientists. Climate change is a peace and justice issue. For those of us who consider ourselves peacebuilders, it is crucial that we center conversations on land care within our work. We are missing some key pieces to the puzzle if these aspects of the conversation are excluded.

 

So let’s move forward together, learning from one another and from the other beings of the earth. We are all on this journey together.

 

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Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. My name is Nicole and I’m the host and editor of this podcast. All the music in this episode is composed by Luke Mullet, who also generously let me use his sound equipment and helped me when I couldn’t figure out how to use it. A huge thanks to the bright pink tulips that are blooming in our backyard right now for bringing me lots of joy. This has been Just a Peaceful Climate. Take care, everybody.

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