Hello everyone, my name is Yebin, and I am haunted by internet granola nazis.

I don’t really know how to tell this story, other than to start with like a “once upon a time” start in third person so that I feel less silly. So here we go:

Once upon a time, there was an online extremism researcher named Yebin. She studied groups online so vile and so “out there” that she never knew how to explain her job to family and friends. Basically, she spent most of her days staring at a computer screen drenched in violent extremist content, the authors stitching and unstitching their hate like some weavers of human horror. Because she spent so much time lurking in extremist ecosystems like some ecologist of hate and bigotries, she gradually became numb to how ludicrous her profession was—that is, until one sunny afternoon Yebin said a bit too much at happy hour and had to confront the horror-stricken face of friends who had “normal jobs.” Something had to change.

A colleague suggested that she go for a run outside to escape work. It was said to help with mental health. Desperate for respite, Yebin Ubered herself to Anacostia National Park. She stepped onto the muddy trail, put on her shoes, and felt determined to fix her brain and let mother earth heal her, goddammit.

But even as she sought to enjoy the damp DC air, her broken brain whirred. She saw the little buds on the tree branches and remembered something that an ecofascist said earlier that week online—something about preserving America’s vast natural beauty and resources for their white descendants, and white descendants only. Her eyes caught the national parks signs peppered all across and wondered what kind of forced displacement made this park, perched on Potomac’s hip, possible for burnt out DC transplants like her. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, blood and soil…?

She grew increasingly frustrated. She had heard beautiful things by beautiful storytellers on connecting with their ancestral spirits in nature. Sinking their toes into the soft earth, letting the breeze weave its fingers through their hair. Something wonderfully grounding, like that. And you know, she may have felt that once too, when she was young and more in tune with nature. But now, Yebin was frantically power-walking through Anacostia while granola nazi ghosts faithfully trailed a few feet behind her.

Thinking back to this experience, Yebin rejected the idea that she was some self-torturing researcher submitting herself to the heroic burden of witnessing environmental decay, racism, and fascism. That just wasn’t her, by any stretch of the imagination — braver, stronger, smarter environmental activists took on that role. But she also couldn’t deny that she was a little bit haunted. The lines between her work and recreational life bled most profoundly when she was in nature. Even as she admired the cherry blossoms and let grass stains develop on her jeans, she could never sit too far away from these granola nazi ghosts, their piercing gazes trained behind her skull.

Nature, she realized, was not neutral ground. Our parks and greens and trees and daffodils are steeped in human suffering that we can’t see. The money we give to plant trees in American parks isn’t devoid of political forces, some of which believe that the parks belong only to white people.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, blood and soil.

Thank you.

I’m going to talk about a moment from my childhood, when I realized why confronting the climate crisis is important for me. 

I have spent most of my life in the plains of Nepal. I was a nature-loving kid who loved playing with my friends in the open spaces and nearby deep forest. My village house was near the forest, so I used to walk along a path through the trees, and I would see a lot of wild animals. I would hear the howling of wolves, sometimes the screaming of monkeys. Village farmers grew a lot of crops at the edge of the forest, and I used to love exploring the whole area with my friends. 

But that was my village house. Later we moved to the city, far from there, and I was traveling back to my village only during school vacations. But I missed the village very much. Time passed and it had been about a year since I had returned. And when I was finally able to visit, I saw that the village had completely changed. To my shock, most of the trees were not there. The shallow riverbanks where I used to go fishing with my friends had become dangerously steep, because miners had started extracting stones and sand from the river. There were also bulldozers all over, cutting down trees and flattening the land to make it fit for agricultural and residential developments. The village farmland near the forest had been destroyed to make room for housing developments. 

I didn’t know what to do. I was a young child who had been really attached to nature, but the destruction totally devastated me. Something happened to me that day. I started thinking about the future, and I promised myself that, no matter which career path I chose, I would make sure to do something for nature. Nepal is the world’s fourth-most vulnerable country in terms of the impacts of climate change. We have the world’s tallest mountain, Mt. Everest, and many glaciers and lakes, but they are all melting at a tremendous rate, which is alarming.

So, I started my climate activism in my school days, and after I grew up, I started doing a lot of advocacy and activism with young people.  My activism journey started with my involvement with Tunza Eco Generation: I worked with youths and children and formed many different “eco-clubs.” We organized many advocacy events together, and I also went on to draft a policy for local government to strictly minimize illegal mining of sand and stones. I’m fortunate to say that a lot of good things have happened to me in this life. I have even been awarded by UNEP & Samsung for my climate activism. I have been a delegate to COP two times and represented Nepal in various international platforms. 

In Nepal, we have been dealing with a lot of ecological challenges. Deforestation was a big issue for us, but in recent times, we have almost doubled the forest cover in the country. Nepal is also the first country in the world to have doubled the population of wild tigers. We have started taking small actions for conservation.

My journey started with a small boy living near the forest who was highly attached to nature. But the sudden disappearance of the forest disturbed the boy. The boy (me) then thought to himself, “I’ll do something for nature.” And I’m still taking small steps, but humans have done a lot of damage, and we need immediate action. It is important for youths like me to come into climate policymaking conversations, and to help bring youth-friendly sustainable legislature in future.  I hope to continue creating positive impacts for my society—communities not only in Nepal, but all over the whole world.

I loved my childhood. I really loved it. It was more clear and hopeful. In the mornings, I would wake up very early—much earlier than I wake up these days—and run barefoot in the wet grass, and play in the morning mist with my brothers and sisters and friends: we’d pretend that the mist came from a demon underground, smoking a cigarette. And when it rained, we’d go to the red soil, kneel down and smell the petrichor—it smelled so nice. At times, we would hold these puny bugs with grains and go around feeding the birds. It all felt so good. 

Other times, early afternoons mostly, we would run up the hills through clouds of butterflies, or fly our kites among them. It felt so free, and there was joy and happiness and hope for our future. I remember sneaking through our neighbor’s orchard, stealing his ripe mangos and eating them with salt. The old man, called Okemo, would catch us running around, and, funnily enough, he would give us a bucket of mangos to take back home. In the evenings, we would go to the nearest swamp and try to catch mudfish, and leave time for games and mischief. I remember, a number of times, we would throw something at a swarm of bees resting nearby. You know what happens after that! We would go home, take garlic that was fresh from the farm, smear it on the bee-sting wound, and everything turned out OK. 

And suddenly, now we are adults. Most of us have moved to different cities around the world, and we live in these concrete mazes that are close to noisy pubs or car repair shops. In the morning, we are not woken up by birds singing, but by cars rushing to the city center. And the petrichor of the earth has been replaced by the stench of gasoline, smoke, trash. Nowadays, the demons don’t live underground—they live among us. In the evenings, I sit here on my couch and order chicken nuggets and fries, because other foods are a luxury, and vegetables are just, like, medicine. 

Sometimes I go back to the village, and I don’t hear the birds anymore. How many years has it been? Close to twenty now. And the birds are no longer singing in the morning. Sometimes I say that they woke up late, or that they are demonstrating against their low wages. And when I talk to my grandmother, she says that they went off on holiday. The bees that used to sting us are no longer there either—again my grandmother jokes that they have been employed by the sugar factory nearby, the one that replaced the forest where we used to play hide and seek. There’s a network mast, a massive one, red and white, sitting on the swamp where we used to catch mudfish. There’s no orchard where we would get fresh mangos—instead, there is a massive building. It belongs to the sugar factory.  

And I just walk around thinking about all the joy that I had and sigh, and then I go back to my little apartment in town. I tend to my two dying plants, then I sit on my couch again and order chicken nuggets and fries, because what else can I do? I sit there, hoping that my two plants will end up growing and surviving—unlike the forest we had when we were kids, which has been replaced by the sugar factory. 

And I try not to lose hope, because I honestly believe that’s the only thing that I can confirm I truly own. That’s the only thing that nobody can take away from me.

As they always say, most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain smells, lights of the day, fleeting sounds, and certain views. That’s how life sounded to me, growing up in Kajiado County, Kenya. For a little girl who enjoyed taking nature walks with her father, it was a place of stunning beauty, where the land stretched out in every direction, and the blue sky was vast and open.

I frequently observed groups of giraffes, zebras, gazelles and other wild animals and insects sauntering across the plains. My favorite part has always been watching many kinds of birds of unique colors and unique sounds in the acacia trees that stood tall and proud. The river Mbagathi was a vital source of life for the indigenous community living on this land, providing fresh water for our homes and fields and an abundance of fish for the community to catch and eat. It was where we went to dive. In Swahili, it’s a common term: “Duff – mpararo,” a game that involved us diving and playing with mud, and we’d often get into trouble for that! Our moms would beat us up for coming home with soaked clothes, and others would even lose their clothes during the swim! There were often moments of our brothers from the neighborhood being chased by an ostrich after trying to steal her eggs! Hilarious memories!

As I grew older, I began to notice that the environment around me was changing. The wild animals started to disappear, due to human encroachment, and the river Mbagathi began to dry up. The weather became more unpredictable, and we started to experience longer periods of drought, followed by sudden and heavy rains that caused flash floods. Our livestock started to die, struggling to find enough food to eat. 

The once-beautiful landscape was slowly turning into a barren wasteland as more human development happened.

It was then that I joined university, and I started to interact with other young people who were also concerned about the environment. I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t simply observe as my surroundings fell apart. We began to rally together and take small-scale actions to make a difference. We started by re-sensitizing the community to traditional water-harvesting structures designed to catch the rainfall during the wet seasons, which were becoming less and less predictable. We also started to plant trees and clean up the river Mbagathi, removing the waste that was clogging the drainage and causing flooding.

Although the journey so far hasn’t been simple, we are gradually realizing the outcomes of our actions. I noticed that our sense of community grew stronger as a result of our collaborative efforts. 

Preserving the land that had sustained us for so long was our shared objective, which brought us all together. We are now a startup community organization, called the Greener Communities Program Kajiado. What started as an initiative now is a movement that seeks to work with communities to embrace climate action. We adopted some sections of this river Mbagathi, cleaning up frequently and taking the trash to recycling plants, so that this river can start to flow freely again during the wet seasons. Our trees are striving to grow strong in order to provide shade and shelter for the animals that still call this place home. It feels like we are a part of something much bigger than ourselves when we rediscover how to live in harmony with nature.

But there is still a great deal of work to be done. I am aware that as young people, we will have a significant influence on how the world develops. Our generation is the one that will feel the full impact of climate change (that’s why I get eco-anxiety sometimes), but I will never stop trying. Although we may appear small given the scope of the issue, giving up is not an option. I have hope, just like the hummingbird who tried to put out the forest fire, despite the fact that the big animals who could have helped had already given up, in a story narrated by our celebrated legends, Prof. Wangari Maathai.

To ensure that future generations may appreciate the same beauty and plenty that we have been lucky enough to experience as kids, we must continue to take action both big and small on behalf of the environment. The lush greenery, the diverse wildlife, and the endless blue skies always left me in awe. I was aware that I had a responsibility to safeguard and maintain this beauty for coming generations, because it is the legacy we should leave them. 

We must not let this opportunity slip away. Let’s all work together to preserve and cherish the earth, learn from its history, and respect the crucial bonds we have with the environment and our shared future.

Our story is Biblical and lyrical, generational and sensational. My story is a call to action, a hope that you’ll react to these disasters. This is a piercing steeple, this is an account of a dying people. 

I remember when the heavens opened and flood waters cried across the city of New Orleans, in the same way that the earth quaked and cracked at the feet of Haitians holding hands hoping for a moment of solace, a minute of silence, both from the climate’s creaking curses and the media’s menacing malice that painted them as the cause of their own suffering. 

Why is it, then, that we’re constantly, consistently the victims, the melting brown ice-caps whose colors never qualify for the same coverage as some others? From here to there, don’t you think we too are scared of the skies that seem to force us into more misfortune? Every minute and every hour someone who looks like me dies at the hands of a natural disaster that acts more like a master, whipping and lynching with rain instead of rope, pain instead of hope — flood waters wiping out what was once someone’s village, someone’s home, someone’s town that has been drowned down into nonexistence. 

When was the last time you thought about the rising Caribbean seas that see floods and insane hurricanes, winds that blow harder than kids with their birthday cake candles? No, instead we look at what’s trending, while people are fending for themselves with no help. And before you tell me these are things not from any familiar source, half of these facts were read in an article from Forbes. So pull the cord on your subtle bias. You cannot deny this. You cannot hide this. 

A 2009 report from the USC states consequences of climate change, including extreme heat, devastating floods and air pollution, result in higher risks of death for African Americans and low-income individuals. 

According to the APHA, communities of color are more likely to experience pre-existing health conditions and poor living conditions, making it difficult to build climate resilience, or the ability to prepare and respond to extreme events that occur due to climate change. In South Los Angeles, where residents are predominantly people of color, nearly three-fifths of households did not have access to air conditioning in 2020. 

This is not a moment to show off your Instagram wack activism, this is life or death, a matter of this Black man’s health. Kids in the projects are exposed to the most pollution, but I’m supposed to place my hand on my chest and sing high keys of the Constitution? There are no trees in the ghetto, only concrete and heat with no solar panels. At this point most people have changed the channel. I mean, why take a stand, when our kids are dropped into a wasteland and there really is no reason to bother when Flint, Michigan still doesn’t really have clean water. More likely to breathe in polluted air, more likely to live near coal plants, more likely to live near housing waste from fossil fuel infrastructure. 

In my short time I have to make these mentions, even if you can’t do anything to stop it, I urge you to at least listen.

I’m going to recite a poem—a poem that I didn’t write. It was written by a poet called Amrita Pritam. She’s a Punjabi author, and her poem is written as a letter to Waris Shah, who was an even older, 18th-century Sufi Punjabi poet.

For context, Waris Shah is known for the tragic love story of Heer and Ranjha, and for his evocative descriptions of the lovers’ pain when they are separated. In her letter, Pritam talks about the partition of India and Pakistan, and she calls upon Waris Shah to come back and realize the pain of everyone in Punjab, as he did when he wrote about Heer and Ranjha.

So I want to start with that. And I want to recognize that I will get parts of it wrong. My Punjabi is good, but not good enough—but I think that’s part of it. I want to recognize my role in the diaspora, as well as in Punjab.

Amit recites Amrita Pritam’s 1947 poem “Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu” (“Today I Invoke Waris Shah”)¹

The poem ends by saying:

“Today I call upon you Waris Shah.
Speak from inside your grave,
And turn, today,
the Book of Love to the next affectionate page.”

The reason I wanted to share this is first to recognize the damage that has been done, and continues to be done, to our communities primarily by the hands of colonization—colonial entities: capitalist entities, and governmental entities alike. But I also want to recognize the power that we hold together.

Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte, an Indigenous philosopher and scholar, refers to indigenous communities in Turtle Island, but his ideas resonate with me as well. He wrote about how Native Americans have seen the end of worlds, and have survived them.² This means that we can survive this one as well.

So I’ve been carrying that pain, and carrying that suffering, but also carrying that energy and that connectedness—which they don’t have. And I think that’s what differentiates us from them. It’s all that we have, but also all that we need.

¹  Visible here in the Gurmukhi Shahmukhi scripts, and here in English.
²  Kyle P. Whyte, “Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises,” in Nature and Space, 1:1-2, pp. 224-242, 2018.

As some of you may know, we are in Ramadan now, so Ramadan Mubarak. To celebrate Ramadan, I will tell the story of my friend Amal, who lives close to the Nile River—the longest river in the world. (I really suggest you try to visit.)

Amal is 35, and she is Muslim. She lives with her sixty-year-old mom and her three younger sisters, all in university. She’s not married, and she is the only breadwinner in the whole family. What is her job? She is a secretary in an oil company. The oil company, while it operates in her country, is a foreign corporation. The job offers her and her family bread, milk, and coffee, and it pays her sisters’ tuition. It’s a normal life—quite peaceful. But the peace does not last long.

Due to concerns over climate change and other issues, the government drives out the foreign oil company, and Amal loses her job. What is she to do with her mother and her sisters? She cries to me, “Why did this happen? This company is good! The boss treats me well. They’re good people. Why does the government not want them? It must be bribery.”

I cannot answer Amal’s question. I explain to her, “Amal, this is a climate change issue. It’s not only about you or me. It’s not about any individuals. It’s for the whole world. It’s a global issue. So, Amal, you don’t have an oil company now, but maybe soon you will have more renewables here. You can find a new job.”

Amal doesn’t understand that. Amal tells me, “I don’t really know about climate change, but I need this job. My sisters are at university. They need to pay tuition, and I need to feed my mom bread and milk next week.” I don’t know how to answer Amal’s question. She tells me about the bribery—how it’s a common issue in her country. I don’t know how to answer that, either.

Half a year later, after this oil corporation has been driven out of the country, the government replaces it with a local company. So the oil field is producing again. Everything is the same, except Amal and some other people have lost their jobs. And renewable energy companies’ investors are not really interested in this small country. Amal can’t find a new job for a long time.

The last time I heard from Amal, she was married, at almost forty years old. She married someone she didn’t really know. She only met him once. But he can support her family, her mom, and her sisters. He can buy bread and coffee, and he can pay for tuition.

Amal told me, “I’m already 40 years old. I don’t have many choices. But we’ll be OK as long as there’s a guy who can help the family.” Since then, I haven’t heard from Amal for a long time. I want to text her, but I don’t know what to talk about.

This is the end of Amal’s story in my life, maybe, but it’s not the end of many other stories. In many underrepresented countries, oil and gas are among the few resources they have, and renewables investors are usually reluctant to enter into these countries. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies cause environmental accidents, including in the beautiful Nile River, the longest river in the world.

People there rely on the jobs from oil and gas companies. For people like Amal, they don’t even know what is happening. They don’t know about climate change. They don’t care about climate change, because their lives are super simple. They love their family. They like their job—even though the job is provided by what we see as an evil oil and gas company.

Are those people the same as us? I don’t know. They don’t even know about climate change, while we are fighting passionately against it. So they are not us. But they also are us, because we are all together, living on this beautiful Mother Earth, wanting a happy life, and wanting to do something worthwhile in the short time we have.

So climate change: this global narrative impacts the whole world for hundreds, or even thousands of years. But what about people like Amal, who may live just for less than 100 years? Where is Amal’s voice? Where are people like Amal, in conversations about global climate change? Where are they?

I have no answer to that, but as we confront this global narrative of human beings and environment interactions, can we not forget the individuals who are not being seen and may never be seen, like Amal? They don’t fight against climate change. But they also have a right to a happy life. So people like Amal deserve to be seen.

Let us see them. And let them see us. And let us all see each other, even as we confront climate change on Mother Earth. That’s the end of my story. Thank you.