When I was a kid, the running joke of my family was that I would be the one to save us. Saving us from what was never actually outlined. But somewhere along the line, I took it to mean saving the very world we call home.

I went to school in New York to protect the nature that I grew up with in California: the redwoods I used to hike in, the hummingbirds that visited my backyard. My New York apartment, meanwhile, was a 200-square-foot studio shoved between two 50-story luxury buildings. My view? A concrete patio I didn’t have access to.

But we did what we could. We turned our rotting fire escape into a balcony, decorated it with a picnic blanket, lined it with miniature succulents to fake a green space (never quite taking the plants out of the plastic containers they came in.)

Still, I couldn’t help but feel a hollowness. In school, I studied ecosystems we hoped to save while staring down concrete. It became hard to visualize the world I knew back home, where thousand-year-old redwoods towered over any sense of ego bubbling inside of you. For the first time ever, I actually noticed the difference in feeling between being planted on the true ground, feet to earth, versus existing multiple stories above land. I swear I could feel the energy of the neighbors below. I’d wondered if they’d had breakfast that morning, if they struggled to fall asleep in the hot human summer nights that were only growing worse each year. Conceptualizing entire lives through floorboards: that’s how much I craved any sense of connection.

And then one early spring day, in the week of warmth and sunshine before “second winter” hits, I noticed a small weed growing across the alleyway from our so-called balcony. I forgot about it for another month or so as the cold returned. But as the storm subsided, I looked over to see that the weed still stood. Taller. Stronger than before. It became a type of meditation to notice the plant as it grew. And the same way you might call a friend to say, “Look at the moon!” on gorgeous nights, my partner and I would take turns pointing out the new growth. By summer, it grew so tall it covered the back-alley window of the opposite building (we never actually knew if it was apartments or offices, but it was pretty much always empty either way).

Every day I would look out the window at the reminder of something growing, something very much alive, something against all odds fighting to survive. And I was taken back to a story I heard once as a kid at camp: the one about the hummingbird who saved the world when it was covered in a blanket of darkness.
How the hummingbird flew a little bit each day to reach the drape blanket.
How the other animals laughed at him.
They thought he was too small, too weak to be the hero of his own story.
How he reached the blanket.
He poked holes in the darkness to reveal the light.
To create the moon and the stars.
How he did it alone.

For so long, I thought I had to be the hummingbird. I thought that I had to do it all myself. But our fight for climate justice will never be an easy one. There’s certainly no one hero that’s going to swoop in and save us all. But we can all try a little bit each day. Fight a little bit, survive a little bit.

Most of all, we can notice.
We can appreciate.
We can find kinship in the weed across the alleyway.
Maybe even grow alongside it.

When I was growing up, I witnessed nature in many glorious forms. I had the privilege of playing in the mountains, and seeing the rivers and green pastures in the different villages where I lived with my family. 

When I was a child, I lived with my parents and my grandmother in a village called Nyamwaga, in Tarime District, in the northern part of Tanzania. It had the most beautiful scenery, with green pastures everywhere and water flowing from the mountains to the village and farms, turning into the Tigite River—one of the main rivers of my region. That is where I learned to rear livestock and farm. It is so sad that when I go back to this village today, my heart breaks to see that there is no water: the river is barely flowing. Nineteen years ago, as I remember, is when things started to change. Things kept getting worse, little by little, every year, as the river dried. The beautiful scenery started to disappear; green pastures became a rare sight. They would come back a little, with the rains, but the river kept getting drier.

Next, I lived in Nyarero Village with my grandmother. It is quite dry—just a rural village, with one gold mine nearby. Back then, beginning in 2008, we experienced severe seasonal water shortages that continue today. I was always worried about water whenever I left the house. When I went to school, I thought, “What if tomorrow there won’t be any water at all? What shall we do?” The buckets that we had for water storage were not enough. Every June to August, we were running out. The months dragged on. We did not have enough money to buy water from the people who sold it, and the nearest springs that still had any water were very far away: 3km from our house.

One morning when I was ready for school, I stood in the middle of my room and wondered if I should take a bucket with me so that, on the way home, I could fetch water either from school or from the spring. But I also thought that if I filled the bucket on the way home, I didn’t know where to keep it. People might steal it. I might get home very late. So I didn’t take the bucket with me, and I didn’t take a bath that day. I just went to school. But there, I couldn’t concentrate properly on what my teachers were saying, because I was constantly thinking about water at home. And I hardly even knew about what other communities or other countries were going through when it comes to water shortages and climate change.

I have always loved studying different places, and when I went to high school, I chose to study geography. In my university, I chose to pursue geography and environmental studies. And one day, my lecturer introduced us to the concept of climate change. However, I still had no link between the water scarcity in my village and global climate change—because it was taught as something that would come in the future, thirty years from now. But when I started researching and reading extensively about the topic, I realized that climate change is a real issue happening right now: even what we were experiencing in our community was the result of climate change. 

Still, my village continues to experience water shortages. Although the local mining community provides some water and builds boreholes, it’s not enough, and the water is no longer as pure as it was when I was a child. People are also realizing that there is no longer enough water in the springs, because the water table is sinking deeper and deeper down, because it doesn’t rain enough in the rainy season and because the mining operations are continuing to expand. 

Now that I understand the links between climate change and what I have witnessed in my community, I also understand the need for climate mitigation, finance, adaptation, and interventions in the water sector. People have to come together to solve the problem with a common goal. Like everywhere else in the world, people in my community need access to water for drinking, cooking, washing, and growing crops. And I believe that, through unity and action, we can achieve that. 

These problems are very complex: they cannot be solved individually. So when we try to separate ourselves from our communities, seeking individual advantages, the problem remains. But I believe that it’s possible for most of us to not have to know how it feels to go without water, without food on the table. The 2022 IPCC report projects that 700 million people in Africa could be displaced due to droughts and water scarcity. What does that imply for us? Must we continue to act individualistically? We must all act together collectively. 

Thank you.

So my story is one of communities and climate injustice. My story is about the pastoral communities of Kenya, communities that have been living in harmony with, and preserving, biodiversity since time immemorial. Communities that prioritize the well-being of our wildlife and plants, coexisting in a symbiotic relationship, enabling all parties to thrive and flourish. 

The pastoral communities depended on their livestock, which was not only their economic activity, but also their identity and culture. They knew no other way of life. They depended on seasonal rainfall, which came without fail. 

This continued until these innocent communities were failed—betrayed and left with nowhere to turn to. Betrayed by people who put profits before people, pockets before humanity, caring for no one else but themselves. By that, I mean the fossil fuel companies, who have contributed to the arrival of droughts due to climate change, which have ravaged the pastoralists’ source of life and identity, forcing them to diversify into activities they knew nothing of before. Forcing them to be exploited by doing manual low-paying jobs for survival’s sake, with their minds still wondering how this came to be, all while enduring the continuous trauma of losing their culture and wealth and having to leave their homes to go to towns and cities that they have never been in before. 

The communities remaining in their villages are undergoing abject poverty, with only a few households able to navigate through these tough times. As if that were not enough, these communities remain excluded, under-represented, and missing from climate decision-making spaces. Left out of the conversation, yet most affected. 

Do they really deserve to go through this? Why is there climate injustice for such communities? The pastoralists have been failed, and it’s time for reparations.

Do you hear us?

Children of the world, let me share a story with you.

It is said by our ancestors that a long time ago, at the beginning of the third millennium, three brothers named Fuel ran the world. The rays of the sun were no longer good for our globe; the heat was becoming unbearable, and the planet started to burn. Mama Tierra was constantly crying, and her pain was mistaken for rage. Nevertheless, in most parts of her body, her children could still run freely. Their hearts still beat in sync with every step they took on the land: a reminder that their mother was kind, giving, and forgiving.

And yet, the world was so different that our elders struggled to find the words to describe it. The hearts of most humans were consumed by ideas that a few tyrants from long before had imposed as the norm. They had exchanged dancing for labor—labor that neither resonated with their calling nor brought them joy, labor that only sought to claim possession of artifacts in an ongoing cycle of use and refuse. They had forgotten the name of their mother and why she gave them their very breath. And suddenly, there were whispers of the end of life. Mama Earth was running tired and could not breathe because the three Fuel brothers were suffocating her lungs.

The younger you were, the more grief you felt.
There was pain, pain, pain, pain with a capital P.
P—A—I—N
¡Ay qué dolor!
Pain for what was, what could be, and what was no longer possible.

The whispers became facts, and the nations of the world could no longer turn their backs on the outcries of the land. Mama Tierra was still merciful, and she sustained the web of life. Meanwhile, the children would smile among themselves—they could sense that they were different, and yet the same. Some of their ancestors had built the very net in which the world was trapped, but this new generation became the hope of a world that had stopped dancing in order to labor. The children felt betrayed, but more decisive than any generation of their ancestors. The voices from what used to be called the “Global South” grew louder than ever. They wanted a world of fairness stretching from the mountains of Bolivia to the peaks of Pakistan. They knew they could make it, but they did not know how. They were aware of their collective power, but they did not know how to embrace it, for the world had taught them to think as a single unit and not as part of a whole.

H—O—P—E—L—E—S—S
Hopeless—they took the word and removed the last four letters to regain “hope.” And suddenly, they turned back to Mama Tierra. They listened to her heartbeat and her calming voice when she told them,

“Wherever you go, I’ll hold you, my children. I gave you life and you’re part of my life. You are ancestral water and life. Your veins are a reflection of mine. Your heartbeat is a reflection of mine, too. You are nature as much as everything I ever made and hold. You were, have been, are, and will be my water and my air. If you breathe, I do too. Work together. Embrace your nature. You are one.”

From the grasslands of Juba to the coast of Capurganá, children from every biome raised their voices in protection of their lands. Eventually, their seniors did too, and saved life so that you and I, y todos los demás, can continue to feed from the love Mama Tierra provides, una y otra vez.

After my heart broke, I stopped going to the lake. 

Lake is a misleading word. I live near the coast of Lake Michigan, which along with the rest of the Great Lakes forms an inland sea containing more than a fifth of the world’s freshwater. 

During lockdown, my partner ferried me up and down Lake Shore Drive to the hospital and back, over and over again. Along our route, police barricades blocked off the public beaches, because no one yet knew what was safe. I heard that people went to the beach anyway, but I didn’t. I wasn’t well enough. Instead I went to the riverbank. The stretch of the Chicago River near my home is lined with trees. I don’t know if you know this, but trees pass electrical impulses through their roots, which scientists sometimes liken to the neural pathways of the brain. But I prefer to think of them as akin to the heart’s cardiac conduction system. My own cardiac conduction system is faulty. During that time I went to the river and imagined the trees’ earthborn electricity would somehow calm the stormy signals misfiring inside my heart.

Summer passed this way. And then fall. And then winter. And then finally, one frigid February day, I returned to the lake with my dog. As I unleashed her and she streaked across the sand—this little gray-blue blur against an infinite gray-blue blur of sky and sea—I realized the beach was unrecognizable to me. The fence demarcating the dog beach was buried in the sand, and the water had receded, like a pair of giant fingers had reached into a bath and pulled the plug. At the same time, that doesn’t totally make sense, because I know that farther south of where I lived, and farther north, the lake was encroaching on basements and building foundations. The logic of erosion and flooding simultaneously doesn’t make sense: a misfiring, perhaps, in my neural pathways.

A few weeks after I’d gone back to the lake, there was this massive storm, one of those ones that meteorologists call a “once-in-a-generation” storm. The river and the lake both began to overflow. Our sewage was threatening to seep into our drinking water, which is why the city of Chicago reversed the flow of its river a century ago. Now it’s only a matter of time until that once-in-a-generation storm recurs and the water can’t be tamed.

When summer arrived again, I made my way back to the lake once more, hoping that there would be a return to normal. But nothing can really return to normal ever again. In my bathing suit, you can see the scar on my chest and the defibrillator poking out from underneath my skin. And as for the beach, I don’t even really know what it looks like anymore.

The story I’m going to tell you guys is about a lady called Amina. I met Amina when I was working in one of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps here in Somalia. 

Amina was a strong woman, full of courage and determination. She lived in a small village in Somalia with her five children and husband. They lived a happy life, with Amina taking care of the children and her husband working in the fields to grow crops. However, all of this changed when drought hit their village. Amina’s crops withered away, and she lost every single one. One by one. She was scared that her children would die due to starvation. She could not bear to see the pain in their eyes, so she decided to move away from the village as soon as possible. 

Amina was heavily pregnant, but she did not let that stop her. She walked four miles with her five children until they reached a village. However, they were still in dire need of help. The villagers took pity on them and helped Amina give birth to her sixth child. The villages provided the family with food and water. Amina was extremely grateful for the help. She knew, however, that she could not stay there forever, so she decided to take her children to the capital city of Somalia, Mogadishu, hoping to find better opportunities there. Amina boarded a minibus with her six children and rode until they arrived at an IDP camp. 

The camp leader welcomed them and gave them shelter to stay in. Amina was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people living in the camp, but she knew that this was the only option left for them. They could not go back to their village or they would die of starvation. They had to stay in this overcrowded camp—that was their last resort.

For the first few weeks, Amina and her children struggled to adapt to the new environment. They missed their home in the village and longed to go back. However, with time, they learned to adjust and make the best of their situation. Amina started doing laundry for other families to make a living and earn a sort of income for the children.

You might be wondering where the father is. It’s very common for women in my country to bear all the responsibilities, especially during droughts. When I go to the IDP camps, it’s mostly the mothers and children. They are the most affected ones, and they are the ones who bear all the pain and all the responsibility, whether it’s man-made or conflict or even natural disaster. 

Amina continues to hope that the drought will end soon and that she and her family can go back to their village. However, for the time being, the IDP camp is their new home. 

That is the story of Amina.

When I was young, I grew up with my grandfather, who really was my best friend. He used to take care of trees in his compound. We used to see him argue so passionately that we needed trees, and we could feel the difference between our land and that of our neighbors, who did not have any trees.

When we lost him in 2006, when I was six years old, things changed in our family. My grandfather’s children didn’t see the need to take care of the trees, and some neighbors felt that their freedom to do whatever they wanted was finally here. Things changed, and within just a few years, all the natural trees were destroyed. The land was empty. That’s when we started to really understand how important they had been.

Growing up, I didn’t really understand the concepts of “environment” and “conservation” until I completed high school and was able to read about sustainable development goals. That’s when I started to identify my own little things I could do to contribute to climate action. That’s when I started relating the challenges that we face in our own communities to global climate change.

Our pastoral communities have existed for a long time in harmony with biodiversity, and now they’re on the receiving end of so much injustice. It’s crazy how those injustices come not only from those contributing the most to climate change, but also from local governments. I’ve realized that the community itself is always willing to do whatever it takes, but because of ongoing challenges and a lack of political will, the community gets left behind. The community is left to do the work, but then they do not get to enjoy the results of their efforts.

As I look at climate change and all the issues around it, I keep asking myself the same question: how is it possible that the most intelligent creature to ever walk the planet is destroying its only home?

How is it possible that the most intelligent creature to ever walk the planet is destroying its only home?

Thank you.

My story is one of movement, of activity and reactivity. 

I think that, like many good stories, it starts from the history of my family and my roots. My family is originally from Sichuan, China. They would move to Tucson, Arizona before I was born: one of the driest deserts in the United States. The home of the Grand Canyon, under the hot, hot sun—that is where I was born.

A couple of years after our acclamation to this desert environment, we moved once again, to Houston, Texas, where I call home. Houston sits on the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, a body of water which connects us to the Atlantic Ocean and the rest of the world. When I first moved there, we were immediately greeted by the BP oil spill, and then later again by floods and hurricanes that damaged our neighborhoods, flooded our land, and meant that we were unable to attend school for months on end because of the lack of access to basic roads. I remember kayaking through the river that used to be my driveway to go places and being locked in our homes during a time before the pandemic. 

I think that these experiences have been incredibly radical, because I think that these are experiences that people shouldn’t have to go through. That’s what has encouraged me to work on climate now, so that others maybe don’t have to face similar experiences, so that their stories can be written in different ways. I think, in the future, it would be really amazing to work on something at the intersection of the US and China and connect these two parts of my background, which I think are very integral to who I am as a person, to my story. I would like to help ensure that people, especially in China, can also share their stories, because I know that for many people, this is not the case, even though all of our stories should be heard, especially in developing countries.