I’m here to tell you a story—my story. I come from a city nicknamed “the bride of the sea.” The sea is everywhere to me. My childhood was by the sea. My first love was by the sea. Even my sad moments were by the sea. I’ve cried to the sea many times. 

But my relationship with the sea started during fishing trips with my grandmother. We would sit on the tip of the pier, and I would eagerly wait for the next catch. She would teach me her little techniques and tricks for fishing, and after a good day, I would take a dip in the sea. I would feel it engulfing me, containing me. “I’m here. I’m with you. I love you,” it would say.

And then, as the years went by and I grew older, the weather grew harsher. In the winter, the rain and the sea would flood my streets, affecting the lives of many. I was so confused: why was this happening? Even then, it wasn’t until my friend confided to me that he had attempted to take his own life by drowning himself in the sea that I was filled with despair and sadness.

I decided to confront the sea: “Why are you doing this? Why are you hurting us?” 

As the waves crashed loudly, I could hear a distant cry from the sea. “I’m hurting. I’m dying. Help me!”

That’s when I decided to play a role and take action. I decided to pursue environmental health and pursue a career in tackling the climate crisis by fighting for the health of the people and giving voice to the voiceless. And from policy paper to policy paper and from one conference to another, I’ve learned that what seems to be a battle against climate change is actually a battle against each other.

The years pass by. On my way to the next climate conference, I see an ad: “Be the first in 2085 to see the Library of Alexandria underwater. Book now for only 300k!”

Suddenly, I just freeze. I stare blankly at the ad. Flashbacks of my memories with the sea. My childhood, my life, my home. What was once Alexander the Great’s dream now becomes a collective dream of all its people.

I hope you can hear me well. 
This is a story about how I became a climate justice activist. 
Yeah. Here we go. 

I first heard about climate change in 2019, when the IPCC said that we have twelve years to limit climate change. Since then, I have experienced climate anxiety, and I am worried about the future of my thirteen nephews, who are threatened by the climate crisis. 

I have thirteen nephews. They are very funny. Their smiles are very sweet. My nephews are the reason I became a climate justice activist. My nephews have the right to live a decent life. They have the right to a healthy environment. They have the right to live on a livable Earth. 

I don’t want to see my nephews’ sweet smiles disappear because of the climate crisis. Every time I hear the news of the climate crisis, I immediately feel sad, because I have thirteen nephews who are threatened by the climate crisis. The people of my country, Indonesia, are part of the Most Affected Peoples and Areas.

I worry all the time, because the climate crisis threatens our lives. I’m furious with world leaders who let us face heatwaves, droughts, pandemics, flooding, extreme rains, and ecological disasters every day. And I’m very angry with the corporations that have endangered the future of my thirteen nephews. 

Thank you.

That was it.

She had pronounced precisely, perfectly what I had failed to for eighteen years. With that single word she captured its raw beauty: the birds in their sweet symphony. The quiet, enigmatic rustling of leaves. The majestic army of trees, standing tall and unblinking, whether rain or shine. When she said that word I felt its light, sylvan charm rush through me, filling me whole.

She called my home a paradise.

Oh, paradise. She would not know that this magic spell would disappear in a few months.​

Nor would I.

Like a cancer patient, the forest was losing its hair far too quickly. Chunk by chunk the branches fell, with me scrambling to salvage as much as I could. For the first time in eighteen years, I could see through the leaves and branches outside my window. The never-ending patch of green was gone. Pallidly the trunks swayed in the wind, trying to stand tall. What was initially a thick and thriving piece of nature was now reduced to rows of balding, leafless, skinny sticks.

I remember the queasy, stomach-churning horror in me as I watched the squeaky cranes inch closer to the swathe of trees. Slowly they bent down, dug their claws into the ground, and yanked—the tree fell down, not with a single thud but with uncanny similarity to the beat of a million breaking bones. I heard my heart slam to the ground. The death of a tree. I felt like reporting it to the police. (In fact, I did report it to the police.)

I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene—it was that kind of horrific, grotesque thing that you just need to take one last look at. You know something horrific is happening, and you don’t want to hide from it. you want to be exposed to the bare truth of it, you want to feel every inch of it, you want to truly know it before it’s gone. The monotone growl of the machine. The indifferent, repetitive actions: claw, pull, throw. CLAW, PULL, THROW. I watched them struggle with one particularly stubborn tree. First beaten to the ground, it pounced back to life, then beaten again, it forced itself upright once more. What perseverance! Finally, the machine gave up, easily dug a circle around the plant, tore open the piece of ground, and flung the tree over. The breath in the tree died as it wobbled to stillness. Futile perseverance.

I jerked the window shut so I would not hear the sound of death. I pulled the curtain so I would not see. I forced myself to focus on my upcoming exams. For weeks, I made sure I only came home past sunset, so everything was dark, and I could continue kidding myself the trees were still there.

In Singapore, where everything operates with an uncanny efficiency, it’s difficult to build memories in a place that will last, and find a sense of connection to a place. I was lucky to have known and loved a forest, at least for a while, in my life. I remember, when I was sixteen, my teacher asked the class:

“How many of you are satisfied with the greenery in your residential area?”

I shot my hand up in the air proudly. Then, glancing around my class of forty, I was stunned to realize that only one other person raised her hand.​

I’ve always stayed in Bedok, but today I don’t recognize it anymore. Where home was once a place of solace and calm, today it terrifies me greatly that almost every week I see an alien appendage stuck somewhere.

“Save Semakau,” they tell us cheerily, referring to our only landfill, which is rapidly running out of space, while digging out our fine floor tiles to trash.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle!” they nod eagerly, while furiously uprooting our landscapes, replacing them with some more stolen sand. 

“Turn off your lights,” they warn us sternly, while decorating our apartment blocks with TV screens, blind to its invasive lurid artificial light that is more threatening than inviting. 

The absurdity of it makes me want to shout, “Stop!” It makes me want to scream. I’m sick of seeing my home, my memories, my childhood, bought away with dollars and cents. Forcing us to be complicit in delusional development, and to lead lifestyles that no planet can sustain.

I have come here to tell you a story of a river called the Colne.

But the story starts somewhere else. It starts maybe in a lake called Uddebosjön, or maybe in Kinda Kanal. We don’t quite know where it starts. What we do know is that it starts with a young girl who absolutely loves swimming outdoors: in a lake, a river, a canal, it doesn’t matter. She happily spends hours in the water.

The girl grows older. And the older she gets, the more aware she becomes of the world around her. This makes her feel heavy, not light like she feels in the water. But the more time goes on, the more time she spends not in the water—and the heavier things become. It isn’t just that she feels heavy—she feels like she is separate from her body, and she stops doing the things she enjoys.

But even so, life carries on: some bad things happen to her, and some good things happen to her. And at some point, the girl, now a woman, found herself living next to a river called the Colne. It wasn’t like any other river she’d met. It was tidal, constantly changing, ebbing and flowing. The tide would come in, bringing the water from the ocean, and the tide would go out, revealing glistening mud flats. She started visiting the river more and more often. She felt drawn to it. Like it was a friend.

And she swam in it, as well. She swam for the first time in a long time. The water was cold and constantly moving, and she felt the sense of lightness again, like… Not like everything she worried about was just gone, in a big flood. More like everything, including the dread, the anxiety, and grief, all of them were still there, but they were lighter, and they had space to float around. Like she didn’t have to keep them in place.

And the contact between her skin and the cold water, those exact points where her body ended and the rest of the world began also made it so clear to her that her body was part of her. It was never separate. And she was never separate from the world, either. When she moved, the water moved. It was that simple.

One day, a man told her “Phah! you’re brave swimming here! I wouldn’t put my head under water if I were you.” And he told her about a sewage outlet a couple of miles upriver. “If the wind is in the right direction, you can smell it,” he said.

She hadn’t noticed that smell before, but now she did, and getting in the water didn’t feel quite so appealing. And at some point—I can’t say exactly when—she stopped swimming altogether. She would just sit, watching the tide come and go.

One day, however, when the tide is high, she takes off her shoes, and her socks, and rolls up her trousers and puts her feet in the water. And then she feels it. That contact with everything else. But it isn’t just contact with the water—it’s contact with the sun on the back of her neck, with the gulls laughing around her.

She thinks about the people and the places she loves, and the feeling is almost too much. And for what feels like no real reason at all, she thinks, “Maybe we’ll be OK.” She looks out at the river again, thanks it and walks home.

In a nutshell, my story is about how the land, environment, and weather connect us to certain traditional and cultural practices here in Zambia. In the southern central part of Africa is a landlocked country called Zambia, a peaceful nation with more than 72 tribes. Zambia is divided into ten provinces, and some of these provinces are named after their geographic relation to the capital city, Lusaka. Mine is called Western Province, because it is on the western side of the country.

This province is well known for a tradition called the Kuomboka Ceremony, which happens annually because of the rains. The word “Kuomboka” simply means “coming out of the water,” signifying what happens during the ceremony: the king moves from the lower, flooded side of the plain to the upper side during the rainy season using a mighty boat called the Nalikwanda. The scenery of this colorful event is canoes and water in the floodplain; that already tells you a little bit about how the people of the land are connected to water.

I spent much of my childhood and teenage years in Western Province and was accustomed to the traditions and culture of the land. In a typical Zambian setup, a village is made up of different households comprising children and their parents—mostly mother, father, auntie or uncle. As a child, I was lucky to be in a household headed by my mom and my dad, and we used to do a lot of fishing.

Fishing is a part of our culture: it’s a way of knowing that we are in a land with an abundance of water. And there are different types of traditional fishing methods. In this story, I will share one type of traditional fishing mostly practiced by women and children using traditional fishing baskets. This type of fishing is common when the land is flooded, and it is practiced in the shallow, fresh water, which has a lot of fish. As children, we used to go out with our aunties, our moms, and our sisters in the afternoon. Our job as kids was to carry the calabashes and buckets where we put the fish we caught. We could not even carry the traditional fishing baskets because they were so big: like one or two meters in length!

What you do with those baskets is you go out into the shallow water. You immerse your fishing basket there, and then you move away about three to five meters away, and then you start disturbing the water and the grasses to push the fish in the direction of the basket. And when you reach for the basket and lift it out of the water, there are fish inside! Then you pick the fish out and put them into a calabash or a bucket. I used to enjoy this practice of fishing, because it was more than just an activity: it was such a happy experience. It was fun. You laugh as a family. You chat as a group. When you catch a big fish, and it tries to escape, then you start smiling and laughing. In other instances, dogs will accompany you as well, and will be walking by the riverbanks. It was a wonderful community experience that brought families together.

One day when we went fishing, I noticed that after just the first basket immersion, the people said, “Let’s go home!” and we went back. This kept happening, and at first, I didn’t understand. Eventually, however, I asked why. And I learned that, in our tradition, whenever your first catch is either a catfish or a tadpole, an eel or a very small fish (or if your first basket is completely empty), your day is jinxed, and you will have a very bad catch that day. So to avoid a bad catch, and a waste of time, families will decide not to continue fishing and will just head home. For us kids, this was not funny: to be looking forward to a great day of fishing, only to be told, “Let’s go home! We will come back another day!”

This tradition is still being practiced today, although some people have stopped. And although I was not originally a fan of this practice, because it deprived me of the joy of fishing, now that I have grown up, I have come to really cherish and enjoy it. This act connects us to the land and the fish and water, and it conserves the fish indirectly: when you return the small fish into the river and go back home, you allow those fish to grow and breed.

So today, I’m proud of this tradition, and I no longer mind hearing the words, “Let’s go home—we will come back another day!”

I’m sure many fellow activists get the question: when did it start? What inspired your passion? And I think like many, for me the answer to this question is not that straightforward, because it is often not just one moment or occurrence. I didn’t just wake up one morning and think, “OK, right—I’m gonna be an activist!”

At the end of the day, I believe a passion as deep as this is born from love… and regardless of everything else that is going on in the world, there is so much to love on this little blue planet of ours. So, the story I want to share with you really is a love story: a love story for our planet, for our shared humanity, and for our future.

It is written in the form of two poems that I have published in my book, Dear Earth, and they describe an experience I had here in South Africa. I would like to share those with you now.

FINDING A PIECE OF PARADISE

Today was beautiful. Magical.
We hiked to three magnificent waterfalls in a desolate mountain valley.
It was a hot, long walk but worth every step.

The burning sun rested over us.
The wind stroked the hair on our skin.
We walked over hills and rocks.
Up and down.

The valley was covered in green vegetation.
Warm winds drifted past us as we reached higher altitudes.
Sweat and salt.
The first gushing waterfall greeted us from afar.

The cold water lingered on our hot skin.
The taste of freedom.
Every droplet reviving us.

The second waterfall drew us into a different world.
Steep cliffs on either side as we walked into the narrowing gorge.
Insects and birds chirping.
Dark, nutrient-rich soil.
Slippery stones.
Lush greenery.
Bat nests hanging on the dark walls.
Frogs jumping ahead of us on the slippery stones.
An untouched world.
An untethered being.

We dissolved into its beauty.
In awe. Speechless.
Grateful.

Our last waterfall was a deep pond of cool water.
A calm bubbling farewell from the valley.
The sun set as we made our way back over the mountains.
I stopped to watch the last sunrays disappear behind the peaks.
Bathing everything in golden light.

LOSING PARADISE

The next day it caught flames.
The fire took down our little paradise.
It burned to ashes.

Never will it be the same.
We were the last ones to admire all the beauty before it crumbled away.
Every shrub and plant I saw no longer exists.
Every frog I saw had its breath taken away.
Every cricket that sang for us sings no longer.

The green mountain peaks saw the sun for the last time that evening.
This was my home. Nature is home.
I am nature. We are nature. And we are burning.

My heart is so sore.
My body is shaking.
My piece of home is burning.

Part of me wants to hide away from all this pain and all these problems.
But I am writing and speaking about what hurts and makes me sad
Because this is something we must share and learn from.

Fire is no toy.
Cigarettes kill.
Wildfires spread within seconds.

Our home is burning and with it, part of us burns.
It is our responsibility to act.
To do as much as possible to protect our home.

Recently, I went back to the valley. It is blooming again. It is not the same, but nature has recovered. Nature can heal. We only need to give it the space and the love to do so. Our stories in this world might sometimes be of fires and floods, but they are also about love and hope, and collectively, we have the power to let the latter dominate. To let love and hope blossom.

Thank you for listening to this little story from the tip of Africa.

I grew up in the village, and I used to watch my father going to the farms with baskets of maize and grains to plant. When it was raining, we enjoyed watering our crops. My mother used to sell most of the harvest in town until, one bad season, we had little to no rain at all. It was really bad. It was really crazy. 

My father was stressed out, and he said it was caused by the impacts of climate change, of extreme weather conditions. It was very hurtful: we had little or no rain at all, and the climate variability affected the ability of our crops to grow. It was very hard for them to respond to the changes in weather.

Being raised in the Maasai land of conservationists, who depend on agriculture both for their own livelihoods and for the pastures where they feed their herds, it was a really tough time. Extreme weather, no food to sell, no pastures. The sun was hitting constantly. We had no rain. I felt that the plants were crying, and the land was really crying. 

That’s when I began my advocacy. I spoke for the voiceless, because the land couldn’t speak. The rivers couldn’t speak. I started small, in my learning institutions, at school and in my community. I became so passionate, educating people and advocating for the planting of trees: I’m trying to build resilience for climate variabilities. 

Right now, conditions are clearly not yet perfect, but we are doing the best we have to store and use the little rain we have, and to utilize every resource of the environment. Little by little, small advocacies.

(The piece starts in full light.)

Hi, my name is Ethan, and I grew up in the theater.

For ten years, I lived in a sanctuary on top of a mountain, kept away from the rest of civilization, where I was expected to focus only on my craft.

Change lights.

(Lights in the room go off, with only the speaker’s face illuminated.)

The stage was my world. I started as an actor, from Greek tragedies to Shakespeare, all the way to contemporary performances—you name it. With a few other artists, we explored all the different theater vocabularies and broke them down to form our own laws of creation. We devised entirely new realities, all with their own laws of physics, of language, and of being.

Once, during a play we were doing, the power went out, and the stage went pitch black. So we decided to light some candles. Even though we could barely see the performers’ faces, we heard their voices, with just enough movement to see the emotion behind them. We did the entire play in the dark, with the storytellers creating a truly memorable experience, in conditions they had never rehearsed. The theater, our tiny little world, bowed down to whatever means we chose to command time and space.

Change lights.

(The dark room grows a little brighter.)

As we all became young adults, our world began to expand. Some left for college, some moved away, and some left the theater practice altogether. As I moved out into the world and into the busy cities, all that I was accustomed to cracked wide open, and I had to work with different people who practice different systems—whether that still be in the theater, or in education, or in political and climate activist groups.

I was introduced to a world that had no time to sit down and exhaust creative needs. A fast-paced world that needed to get things done now. I felt powerless in a world I could not compose. A world that had no time to listen. The sun did not follow my cues, nor could I call forth a gust of wind to simulate a storm, or have a prop-maker make more trees, or stop the floods from entering the city. It just doesn’t work that way. For the first time in my life, I bowed down to the systems that had been put in place years before my birth and the natural laws of the earth that cannot be moved or stopped.

Well how, then, can I make a difference?

(The room goes fully black.)

Change lights. Change lights. Change lights. Lights? Lights?

Well. What I’ve learned is: in a reality filled with chaos that darkens our view, with technology that overcomplicates things, with leaders who refuse to listen, I found hope in remembering simpler times.

(A candle is lit.)

A candle and storytellers to get us through this blackout. When all else fails, our voices are the very foundations of which to rebuild and continue creating our world.

(The candle is blown out.)

Thank you.

Hii3eti Nohobe3en, Hiiseisii Niicie Nee’esih’noo. Hiinono’eininoo noh hoteinicie.¹

For millennia, we have all relied on a stable climate for our way of life, the way that we’ve hunted, gathered food, medicines, and planned on living in a community. Now that’s all at risk. The world is becoming warmer and warmer. Hurricanes and disasters are becoming more frequent than that we’ve ever seen. We’re gathering here today because our lives depend on it, and we have a duty to act, because our home is on fire. No more business as usual. Now I’m going to share a story with you, to give you a window into why I’m involved in this movement. 

I want you to imagine that you’re waking from a deep sleep, and as you’re opening your eyes, you see the orange and pink hues tint the very edge of the horizon. You are in a tipi, and you can see the sky through the open flaps. As you’re waking up, you hear an indigenous woman joyfully shouting, “It’s Indigenous People’s Day! Rise with the sun! We are meeting at the South Gate for morning prayer. Get up! It’s a new day.”

The birds are chirping, the women are singing, the children are playing, you smell campfire and food. You are at Oceti Sakowin on the Great Plains.

Now, as you gather at the South Gate for morning prayer, you hear that there are invaders coming—coming to desecrate sacred places. People are buried there. People have picked their medicines there year after year, and to think that that wouldn’t be there for your descendants… You decide to venture out with your sister and people who’ve gathered from all over the territory. You’re one of the first on the ground. A tipi goes up. Tobacco ties are wrapped around the tipi, and you are asked to represent the Eagle in the ceremony of the Eagle and Condor.

Now, as you’re standing there with people who’ve gathered from all over the world, and as people are singing and dancing to join forces, you’ll notice that there are armed soldiers arriving en masse at the road. In Hinónoʼeitíít, our sacred language, the Arapaho language, these people are called “touk(u)3eihiiho’”—Those who tie you up. They tell you that the land has been purchased, and even though your blood is from the very land that they stand on, you’re no longer welcome, and they threaten to arrest anyone who decides to stay. 

You are filled with emotions. You start walking towards the road. Once you make it to the hillside, you’re looking for your little sister when you notice that your little sister is with fifteen others inside the tipi that was put up on treaty land. Your sister is the first one to be arrested. They slam her to the ground and then drag her away. 

How are you not supposed to protect your sister? How are you not supposed to protect your land?

I’m here to tell you that the events in this story didn’t take place 100, fifty, or even ten years ago. I’m here to tell you that this took place on October 10th, 2016 in North Dakota. I was the Eagle in the ceremony. My sister was the first one arrested, on what some people call Columbus Day. 

Over the next several months, more and more people would be violated by the mercenaries that protect what we call the black snake. The black snake takes many forms. It’s oil, gas, all fossil fuels that jeopardize our relationship with Mother Earth. Over the next several months, over 1,000 people would be arrested in the process, listed as troublemakers, wrongdoers, terrorists, when they were just trying to protect the land from this inevitable climate change. 

My people, the Arapaho, tell traditional stories of a time to come when we will see great destruction, and a great fire will make the world so hot that it could kill everything if we remained idle. I would imagine these stories were talking about climate change. After all, as we said, the world is heating at an unprecedented rate.

And so, in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, we all have to take steps towards a more equitable and feasible future. I’m a water protector who’s been fighting in the front lines, at Standing Rock and Line 3 and various other fights in Turtle Island with ordinary people just like you, because we understand one thing: we cannot ensure the health and well-being of future generations if we don’t take action. 

Thank you.

¹  In Arapaho: “Good to be here. My name is Big Wind River. I am Northern Arapaho from the Wind River Reservation.”

Hitting puberty was hardly biological, quite hormonal, and very political: a cycle of extremities. Seven days of bleeding from down there, with weeks of crying at the periphery. Seconds of discovering the elation of belonging before it collapses, and people frown on your tiny little too-abnormal self in a tiny little abnormal world. Two years ago was a different world, one crisis less, a 14-year-old gendered blob who’d stare blankly into familiar faces because everything was a crisis and underwater, and there was nothing she could do.

Flash forward to now: a 16-year-old genderless blob, awakened in the sense of the ecosociopolitical internet educational course. A nerdy high school student with several jobs and years’ worth of project ideas crammed into months because everything is urgent, and they are an underwater observer to perpetual human rights violations, life leaving bodies, systems crumbling, all on a screen on the internet, and they think it’s real. Because the coastal line is really being encroached on IRL, locally, because journalists and activists are really in jail, because it is a very real prediction that this city and its metaphorical bowl of urbanity will be underwater by 2050. And breakfast doesn’t taste the same.

And now that this 16-year-old blob finally has something to do that is not staring at the fake stars of their bedroom ceiling, they are going to spend their every waking moment working, volunteering. Lone. A singular blob. Because interdependence is an exotic utopia on his tongue, a spice she’s never tasted, and they’ve only grown up on elusive sips of independence, a bull’s eye on a billboard. And so they’ll keep filling forms after forms, trying to help everyone and anywhere where the future needs it, because people are hard to comprehend, because society is hard to comprehend, because people are dying, because this blob needs to reassure her adults that her future trajectory is a viable source of living. Because they need to pay for their undergrads. Because foreign lands may hold the key to a safe space. Because if they work hard enough, the future may still be—there, here. Because if they work hard enough, the thoughts may finally leave their brain, and my search history has “university options” and “climate apocalypse book recommendations” one below the other. Because which artist can deal with student debt? Because which environmentalist can deal with student debt? Because which human can deal with perpetual death?

I distinguish the last syllables of “debt” and “death,” thinking vaguely of the distinct letters of the Dravidian script, even though English is my first language, even though Hindi is my second, even though Konkani is my third, and that each time I try to speak it, my endangered maternal language, the syllables warp on my tongue, drowning in its own curious thirst—a grief that tastes like over-salted commercialized fish grease. I’ve heard that “grief” is a verb. I’ve never felt the loss of a loved one. Yet this, it feels like grief, anger, angst, anxiety, existentialist dissociation. But there’s no space to feel that, not in a busy city, not in Mumbai, where urbanity can look like plastic being banned, only for a plastic bag to float past your butt in a flood—but actually, it might have been a sly hand. Pat. Pat. Pat. Actually, it’s better if it was a plastic bag.

Nature is a heritage of stories I’ve never lived. Urbanity is the only place I’ve lived in as a home. Urbanity is lonely and full, full of opportunities to meet new people who’re just like you. Who’ll still always come to help in times of crisis. Here, something is always on the horizon. Always on the clock. Always on the agenda. Smoke, love, water, unity—each as evasive. I hope whatever it is, it will save us.