Climate Leadership with Vision: Elizabeth Yeampierre
August 4th, 2022
“Climate change is already disrupting us.”
Elizabeth Yeampierre is an internationally recognized Puerto Rican attorney and environmental and climate justice leader of African and Indigenous ancestry, a national leader in the climate justice movement, and the co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. She is also the Executive Director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization.
UPROSE helped the Sunset Park community in Brooklyn lead their efforts against industry city with a vision that reflected community priorities. They preserved the working class character of the neighborhood and prevented displacement, which would have threatened social cohesion. Now, the community and the developers know that an economy built on just relationships is possible.
Follow Elizabeth on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/yeampierre
Follow Mila on Twitter:
Follow Future Hindsight on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/futurehindsightpod/
Love Future Hindsight? Take our Listener Survey!
http://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=6tI0Zi1e78vq&ver=standard
Want to support the show and get it early?
https://patreon.com/futurehindsight
Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Elizabeth Yeampierre
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
-
Elizabeth Yeampierre Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] This episode is sponsored by the Jordan Harbinger Show, a podcast you should definitely check out. I enjoy the show and I think you will as well. Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show. That's Jordan HAR BINGE R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:22] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. I'm really excited to introduce you to today's guest. I first heard her speak when she was being honored at an awards ceremony a couple of months back. I was utterly captivated as I listened to her at the New York Women's Foundation, talking about her work as a citizen change maker, a climate justice activist, and a person deeply invested in her community. Elizabeth Yeampierre does the work to make environmental justice real for her neighborhood, and she's taken that experience to make change at the national level, too. She's an internationally recognized Puerto Rican attorney and environmental and climate justice leader of African and indigenous ancestry and national leader in the climate justice movement and the co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. She's also the executive director of Uprose, Brooklyn's oldest Latino community based organization. Uprose is intergenerational, multiracial and deeply connected to Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood. Elizabeth, like I said, I'm really excited for this conversation. Welcome to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us.
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:01:42] Well, thank you so much for having me. Mila, I'm very excited to be here with you today.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:46] So tell me about your community, Sunset Park. We have listeners all over the world. Can you help us paint a picture of the neighborhood?
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:01:55] Absolutely. I often think that Sunset Park looks like the future. It is a working class and industrial working waterfront community, 130,000 people with a substantial Latino mix, Caribbean, Mexican, Central American and a large community from China specifically that are Fujian. And so we have about four different languages being spoken in Sunset Park. It is a community that is very young and also old and a community that is really at the front line of the climate crisis, having historically
having to endure a toxic exposure from all of the polluting infrastructure on the waterfront and now really working very hard collectively to try to engage on what we call a green re industrialization to build for our climate future. So yeah, it's a really interesting working class community and it's a place where you're going to find families, great food, walkable, wonderful, culturally grounded place. So that's where I live and that's where I work and that's where what I call a just transition and transformation is happening.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:07] Excellent. Thanks so much for sharing that picture. So when you first started, what were the biggest challenges facing Sunset Park and what are the challenges that remain today?
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:03:19] Well, that's a really great question. I really started doing environmental justice work around 1997, 98. I came to Uprose because it was an organization that was about to lose all of its funding. And I spent literally a year listening to people in the community and trying to get a sense of what their priorities were, what the unmet needs were, and how we could create an organization that would work in cooperation and collaboration and not in competition with other organizations. And I quickly learned that people were really concerned about asthma or respiratory disease, the lack of open space. There was an enormous number of young people with childhood diabetes and no open space. And so I started doing the work of environmental justice because that's what the community said was a priority and no one else was doing it in the neighborhood. We also started doing youth organizing and integrating young people into leadership because every organization had a traditional and conventional youth development model where you basically, you know, provide programs for the young people. And I felt that given our history as black, indigenous, and people of color, that we had a long and deep history of young people leading movements, and that they needed to walk in their power and that they needed to be integral to decision making and leadership. So early on in the mid-nineties I start working in an area that I have no history. I never took an environmental policy class, never did anything on environmental studies and really learning with the community and with the people that came into Uprose about open space, brownfield redevelopment, renewable energy, infrastructure, transportation, amenities, all the things that a community needs to thrive and to be a livable community. We kind of learned those
things together and that's where the journey, at least in my life and in this work begins. It's in response to the community saying, this is what we need.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:18] That's fascinating. Well, you've just explained that Sunset Park's challenges or frankly, any neighborhood's challenges, right, are not in buckets. And so you talked about the multiple layers here. You know, poor housing, poor health outcomes, not enough space. And I think in New York City especially is also layered with real estate profiteering, access to resources. And you also just mentioned brownfields. So I really love your approach because it looks at the whole picture, you know, from a community eye view, but also holistically sort of what can we all do? So can you talk a little bit more about that approach and how you execute it?
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:05:59] Well, that's a very important point because it's kind of central to how we define environmental justice, right? When we talk about environment, we're talking about where we live, where we work, where we play, where we pray, all of the things. And we don't live siloed lives and we can't have siloed solutions. And so in the middle of all of that, that is environmental in the way that people think about it. There's also all of the stressors that people are going through, whether it's extreme policing, whether it's ICE raids. And so from an environmental point of view, people think about the environment in one way. But from an environmental justice point of view, we don't have the luxury of choosing between fighting ICE and fighting for our ability to breathe. And so the way that we think about it is holistic, it's comprehensive, it's multi- sectoral, and it's also multi-dimensional. We're thinking about how do you build community and how do you make sure that people's histories and their legacies are able to redefine what democracy looks like and what the solutions look like? How do we make sure that there's investment in infrastructure, that we're getting policymakers to make the right decisions and at the same time building leadership on the ground? So it's multidimensional in the sense that we're thinking about a whole lot of ways of approaching complex problems, and it's the only way to do them because they are complex.
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:07:21] And there are things that we inherited from the legacy of historical harm that has been done to all of our peoples. You know, people from the Global South who live in Sunset Park and in different parts of the United States. We have so many things in common, and it can be challenging for people in
communities to have a mom who's got two or three jobs and is taking care of two or three children, and you're asking her to come to a meeting at the end of the day. And people judge that. They're like, "Oh, well, these communities are not engaged at the same level as, let's say, Park Slope, right? Where you've got civic happy people and they have nannies and the nannies live in Sunset Park. Right." Well, we have to make different kinds of choices. And so what we do at Uprose is we really sort of ask people, what do you need and how can we support that? And so community meetings can happen on weekends. They can happen at night. They could look like a dance, an arts build, and they could be a healing circle where you've got a bunch of women that are sitting around just making earrings and needling beads. And in the process of doing that, we're talking about how we can strengthen social cohesion at home and in the community and collectively. To do it in a way that doesn't add harm and doesn't add stress to a community that is stressed at so many different levels. And to do it in a way that really takes language into account, the fact that maybe they have lots of children and those children can come into the space and we will be engaging them and involving them there and nourishing them and providing the kind of support that they need so that meaningful engagement on all this complexity is possible. We think a lot about that. We ask people who their people are, and we do that because we want to integrate culture and their lived experience into training, into popular education, and into solutions. And what people are and what their story is is tremendously valuable to us. We celebrate difference. And so in other places they talk about homogenizing. What does everybody think? No, we want to know if you're Fujian, you've got a particular set of challenges that maybe you wouldn't have if you were Cantonese. We actually know those differences. They matter to us. Dominicans are not Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are not Ecuadorians. Their trajectory and that experience is something that has value to us. And so we have created an organization that really sort of captures all of that, focuses on commonalities, but it celebrates differences and creates spaces where people can feel and know that they're leading solutions locally and that those local solutions are now shaping national policy.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:05] That's so fascinating. It's so fantastic that you really listen and that you really want to hear people out and meet them where they are and then transform policy through this feedback. What were the things that were common among these different kinds of people in your community from which you could influence policy and advocate for the community?
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:10:30] Some of the big bucket commonalities are health disparities. Lack of access to decent educational options. Displacement. You know, displacement is one of those things that really threatens social cohesion and our ability to survive. Language. The fact that our young people, for example, are often tracked into different areas based on what their race and ethnicity is. Right. So. So the stereotype for Blacks and Latinos is that they're not going to do well in math and sciences. And then the stereotype for Asians is that they will and stereotypes across the board hurt us all. So if you're Asian and you want to be a poet and you want to focus on literature, you will be discouraged from doing that because you're supposed to be good in math and science. And if you're Latino and you want to be a scientist, you're not going to do so. So there are so many similarities and there are so many stereotypes that we have in common and creating the spaces where, safe spaces where we can have those conversations about how we have been pitted against each other and how we are competing for limited resources and how deep solidarity is important has been transformational, I think, in our community. But these are some of the things we have in common, like the assumption I'm going to use Asians and Latinos as an example because that's the community in Sunset. The assumption that Asians are doing well economically when that's not true in Sunset Park. Socioeconomically they're doing very poorly and and there's a lot of poverty in Sunset Park and a lot of health disparities and us being able to lift that narrative for all of our communities. If we're going to address climate justice, we in the climate justice movement talk about building a just transition, but you can't build a just transition without building just relationships. And this sort of capitalist patriarchal system has created this colonised way of us engaging with each other. That makes it very difficult and very challenging to build just relationships. And so we really sort of take that apart and make it possible for people to really focus on those things that we have in common.
Mila Atmos: [00:12:43] I'm so excited to speak to you because we've done a lot of climate shows and, you know, people don't really know what to do, what can we do, and especially when you talk about climate justice and these relationships. So what's really great about your story is that you're out there achieving concrete results for your community. So of all of the work you've done, if you were going to choose one thing to brag about, what would it be?
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:13:09] Oh my God, that is so hard because we've had a lot of wins and they're all wonderful.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:15] Well, let's talk about your wins. Talk about the one that you're excited about because you're laughing here and you're smiling. And we want to share that with the world.
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:13:22] You know, we've doubled the amount of open space. We've stopped the siting of a 520 megawatt power plant that would have been the size of three football fields. We were able to stop the rezoning of that industry city proposal that would have resulted in the displacement of our community. It was a seven year fight and we were told that we'd lose that. It was a, it was like David and Goliath. And that was something we won in the fall. We've launched the first community-owned solar cooperative in the state of New York. We have also been able to attract half a billion dollars in investments for offshore wind. And now we're working with that sector that has very little, if no experience working with EJ leadership to center a just transition so that it becomes a model of what a new infrastructure and the green economy looks like that centers racial justice and equity. We've helped pass the most aggressive climate legislation in the state of New York. We were co-founders of New York Renews, which is a statewide coalition of over 300 members. So from the very, very local to the national like, we've been engaged in transformation. And so it has been surreal to us, but we believe that we can manifest the future that we envision and we're able to do it because we're leading, because we are matriarchal, because we're intergenerational. And I think that we have a leadership structure that is radically different than what existed before us, right? Generations before us always had an iconic leader and they were very hierarchical in decision making. I think the climate justice movement is different. And so Uprose I'm hoping really models those principles. But yea, we've had, we've had quite a few accomplishments. And I'm just really proud of how from year to year it's always something big and wonderful and necessary.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:17] When we come back, Elizabeth is going to take us inside her community's seven year fight against displacement by commercial real estate. How they won. And what it means.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:26] But first. Thanks, Jordan Harbinger for supporting the show. The Jordan Harbinger Show combines in-depth interviews with some of the world's most fascinating minds, like Richard Clarke, who served for 30 years in national security policy roles in the U.S. government and worked directly for three presidents. You'll learn about the state of global cybercrime, how cyber attacks can be, and have been, used to wreak physical damage on infrastructure, and why we should take them as seriously as traditional warfare. And that's not all. In Feedback Friday episodes, Jordan responds to listener questions about everything from conventional conundrums, like asking for praise at work to doozies, like helping a family member escape a cult. Whether Jordan is conducting an interview or giving advice to a listener, you'll find something useful that you can apply to your own life. That could be simply about how to ask for advice the right way. Or it could be discovering a slight mindset tweak that changes how you see the world. Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show. That's Jordan H A R BINGE R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:37] Let's return to my conversation with Elizabeth Yeampierre from Uprose. Elizabeth's been telling me about how her Sunset Park, Brooklyn, community fought back against a huge commercial real estate project that would threaten the neighborhood and how they won.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:52] Talk to me about the work that you do to weave the themes of sustainability and racial justice through your projects. You said it took seven years and and if you're fighting three Goliaths and like an army of lawyers probably, how did you do it? How does a grassroots community effort work against the powers of utilities or real estate or just bad legislation that doesn't take people into consideration because that's not easy to do?
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:17:24] No, it's hard. A lot of sleepless nights. But what happened with that particular campaign, we were in the middle of operationalizing a block to block organizing effort, to develop leadership on every block in Sunset Park that would be engaged in climate adaptation and mitigation, because we thought it's not enough to put down infrastructure. It's important to build the relationships, because what we know that has been documented is that communities where you strengthen social cohesion are able to survive even extreme weather events. And so we were really excited about that. That hadn't happened anywhere in the country, and we had a plan.
It's what the community had asked us to do after Superstorm Sandy. They had said, we want to be able to do more than change the light bulb and we want you to help us to provide us with information. And so we we see ourselves as staffing the community the way that an elected official is staffed. We staff the community so we don't sit around in our offices thinking about big ideas. Everything that we do really some comes out of community priorities. So when we bought back the B37 bus, it was because our elders told us they needed their bus back, that they had lost their bus line. When we expanded the median on the Fourth Avenue, it was that our elders had told us that they felt like roadkill getting across Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. So with Industry City, we had never done any anti displacement work. Industry City wanted to rezone the industrial sector so that it would be a recreation destination where they would bring high tech and offices. And we wanted an industrial sector that was going to build for climate adaptation and mitigation. We wanted it to remain industrial because we wanted to keep the working class character of the neighborhood, and we wanted to make sure that the community will continue to be able to walk to work. And we wanted people to have access to jobs that pay well, not these entry level jobs that was being offered by Industry City that would make it possible for them to work there but not live there. They would be not be able to keep their small businesses or live there. They were already promoting gentrification internationally because they had like something like five public relations firms. So the community literally said to us, "this is what's happening and we need you to start helping us organize around this. We are concerned that we're going to lose our homes." And so we needed to be really creative about how to do this when you're dealing with such a powerful sector that has so much money. These are companies that are connected to the partnership of New York, the Chambers of Commerce, REBNY, the most powerful lobbying groups in New York. And here we have this industrial working class community up against that threat. And it was something that had been lost. We lost it in Williamsburg, where they lost within ten years in some places, 40% of its Latino community, and it was turned into something else. So we needed to have an alternative to their vision. It wasn't enough just to fight it and to organize. We needed an alternative. And so we did a few things. We created a coalition with people who came from different backgrounds to be able to provide support on how we were going to fight them. We also gathered over ten years of community-based planning and visioning that talked about infrastructure, that talked about zoning and land use, manufacturing uses that forced the question of whether the manufacturing sector was going to follow the market or create the market for climate threats. And we came up with a plan called the
grid. And the grid is a comprehensive waterfront plan that is not just aspirational but operational and literally takes the industrial sector away from being an extractive economy to a renewable economy, will bring jobs and is a vision of what does economic justice look like with a climate lens. And so we were able to create a lot of excitement and we shared that with the community, and then they shaped it and influenced that and then gave it back to them and it was going back and forth. And so that was the vision, I think, that won this fight because it wouldn't have been enough to just say it's bad, and that planning is going to hurt us. We needed to lead with vision and we need to lead with things that were operational. At the same time, while we were doing this, we were also helping pass legislation that would fund this vision. So the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, the Climate Mobilization Act, and City New York, all of these things that all this legislation that is part of a movement we're getting passed is so that there is something that those investments can land on. And nationally you see Justice 40 kind of mimicking the CLCPA, not as aggressive and not as good as New York State's CLCPA. It's kind of like a greenwash version of what we created, but the CLCPA was created to invest and fund these community-led infrastructure visions that would make it possible for us to reduce co-pollutants or eliminate them, bring in renewable energy, provide a sector that would employ our community and pay them well, prevent displacement, check all of the things that we needed to do to address climate change while at the same time engage in the kind of mitigation that we need to make sure that our people are safe. And so it was hard to look away from that vision. They just couldn't do it. The other thing that was helpful to us is that we're part of a national climate justice movement. So we weren't alone. We had people, we had the Climate Justice Alliance, we had people who had our backs. So you got this scrappy grassroots organization that is doing all this organizing. And so even though they have people, power has shifted in the nation.
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:23:16] It has shifted in the sense that we have learned how to organize at such a level that you can no longer think that you're going to be picking communities apart because we literally are leaderful and we have access to resources and to each other. My mom passed away a few months ago. I remember like at night calling my mom and I would say, "Mom, they keep telling me we're going to lose it. How do we lose? We can't lose because if we lose, what it means is that people will be pushed out and they will be dispersed." And I'm someone who was displaced as a child. I went to five schools in eight years. And when you displace people, you literally destroy
social cohesion and sometimes they can't survive that. And so at the heart of it was this sort of thing that I felt like they will destroy families, they will destroy ecosystems that support community. It's one of the reasons I don't like the word resilience, because resilience sort of expects that we're strong every single time they come at us. And resilience is also a word that means to bounce back to the past as if the back was ever normal for us. So resilience is good for people who are privileged, and their normalcy is that they have economic stability in a home. But for us there was never anything normal about our past. So I always talk about how we strengthen social cohesion, and then we won that fight, I think it was last fall.
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:24:40] And then I think I enjoyed it for like a day or two because it was surreal. That was big; seven years. I got gray. I've been asked to write about it. I haven't. I'm just too busy. And then I just started on the next thing, which is now that we've won, how do we bring in the infrastructure so that the community doesn't think that this is just a plan that is on its shelf? So we were able to negotiate memorandums of understanding with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and we've got two projects. Offshore wind is possible because we were able to beat that. And so now the community and even the developers know that another economy is possible and it looks like this, and that what we were talking about wasn't just aspirational. We were talking about investments and infrastructure and transformation because climate change is here. And, you know, it wasn't a 9 to 5 thing. I tried telling people that white supremacy and climate change and injustice is not 9 to 5, that this is not for people who think that this is a job. This is a life. This is a life so that we can ensure that there's a future for our children. Because if we haven't learned anything from Superstorm Sandy, from Ida, from Katrina, from Hurricane Maria, from tornadoes in Brooklyn, then I don't know what we can tell people about the fact that climate change is already disrupting us.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:01] I'm sorry about your mom, losing your mom. That's very hard. And I'm glad that she was there to support you throughout the fight. You know, I think the thing that really resonated the most here with me is that you presented an alternative vision. I think that's incredibly important to say. This is what it should look like. And then you endeavor to make that happen. And now you're doing the follow up work, so to speak, to actually execute the vision. So you have been this true force to
strengthen these communities. And I'm wondering, how did you come to do this work? What was your journey to get here?
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:26:37] So I'm a descendant of colonialism, of enslavement, of extraction. My grandmother was living in a place in Puerto Rico called Isabela. And because the United States basically brought in all these petrochemical industries and destroyed the agricultural sector, she was forced to move to the San Juan area, to Santa Fe, to what was the biggest and most horrible slum in the history of Puerto Rico with open sewers. It was called the ghetto. She lost half her children. She had 13 children and half died. Disease and hunger. And she came with what was left of them to the United States. And I was always with her, listening to her stories and asking her lots of questions. And so we would have these political fights. And I was like eight years old. I wanted to be one of the young lords and I wanted to lead the independence movement in Puerto Rico. And all of this is happening while I'm growing up. And my grandmother is saying to me, and this is how I learned how to listen, right? My grandmother is saying to me, "you know, you can have your revolution, but don't forget the people have to eat and that you have to listen to what people are telling you they need. They need shelter. They need food. They need to be able to take care of their people. And you can't eat a revolution." And so I sort of learned how to be practical in my politics from a very early age. And then my uncle, who was Black, queer and fabulous, really was the person who would adorn me, would put makeup on me, would make me... Sorry. I loved my uncle. He taught me how to walk and sit and made me super femme, which is hilarious because people always tell me how growing up with so many brothers did you turn out like that? I was like, "Oh, it was my queer uncle who taught me that." But one of the early lessons that I had with him was that when I was little, I was with him. I was holding his hand in front of the building. A bunch of boys started calling him names and throwing rocks at him, and I remember taking my body and putting it in front of him and thinking I was going to protect him even though I was little. And so growing up witnessing injustice and listening to my family share stories, watching my mom wring her hands every time my brothers walked out the door because she was afraid the police would be having a bad day and would harass my brothers or incarcerate them just because they were young men of color growing up and listening to that. And also, you know, you're talking about the seventies and you're in a community where you're learning on television about the Young Lords, the Black Panthers, the civil rights movement.
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:29:17] And I'm in a home where my parents were very young parents, teaching us about how we are strong and how we need to walk with our ancestors and about belief systems that literally are the same all over the Global South. I think that early grounding, I feel like I just feel like I was born this way, like I grew up this way and and I saw my education as a gift from generations before mine. I was the first to go to college and I saw it as a gift. I understood very clearly that people had sacrificed and given up everything so that I would have access to this education and that it was my responsibility to use it to fight for my people. And it is the biggest blessing to be able to do that. I am so honored to be able to do that. You don't know how much joy it gives me to be in community and to be able to use these gifts for our communities and to be also in a gathering of people that are so smart, like our people are just brilliant, right? When you think about where we came from and where we are and you measure that trajectory, then you know that we're a bunch of badasses. I mean, people who try to diminish us and try to make us feel like we're less than, don't understand that when you come from a place of privilege and you accomplish something... Well, that's that's one measurement. But when you come from a place of struggle and you accomplish what we've accomplished, well, you know, we're just slaying. We're just, we're just slaying. So so I don't like confidence, but I have a lot of humility and I have a lot of gratitude for having grown up and honestly, no privilege at all. I grew up really poor with all of the challenges that come from growing up in a home in the seventies where there's economic disinvestment and my father was an addict and who left early, and my mom did domestic work and she did different kinds of jobs, but she filled the house with books and New York City was like this cultural mecca. And my God, did my mom take advantage of all of us taking us out to the museum, to street fairs, to every cultural event? So even though we didn't have money, it just felt like a really rich home where I was politically grounded and spiritually grounded. And I felt like I was just being nurtured to be an activist fighter, a warrior. My mom said I came out of the womb with the fist first. So it's not an easy answer because it's a whole lifetime of having listened and watched and experience and then thinking, Oh my God, you're the one who gets to go to college. You've got to change things.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:57] So exciting. You really are living it. That's. It's so inspiring. Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:32:03] I'm living my dream.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:04] You're living it. Yeah, it's amazing. Well, you have also worked at the national level. You have organized massive climate marches. And I wanted to ask you about your role as the first Latina chair of the US EPA, National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. How would you compare your hyper local work today with working at the federal level? Like which have you found to be the most effective space for making change?
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:32:33] So the local is the most impactful. And I think that what is happening and this is why the Climate Justice Alliance is so important, because the Climate Justice Alliance is shaped and informed by local struggles all over the country. So instead of being grass tops and making decisions and creating solutions for us, we populate the frameworks, the policy, with solutions that are coming from the front line. Without a doubt, the most impactful is what's happening locally all over the country, whether it's the Gulf South, whether it's Detroit, Portland, Guam, Puerto Rico. The solutions that are being the most impactful are the ones that are coming from communities. And it is a very different way of thinking about power than in the past, where neoliberals and liberals thought that they knew what was in our best interests. The truth is that our communities are highly sophisticated. They know exactly what they need and they just need to be invested in so that they can operationalize those visions. And so everything that we move on a national scale right now, and I do sit on those national tables, quite a few of them, is being shaped and informed by everything that's happening locally. Those are the most powerful.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:45] What would you say are the lessons or the action points that can be applied to other communities or even on a national level? I mean, you just mentioned, but I know they're all a little bit different. But there are some things that must be, you know, slightly universal that you could apply in other communities.
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:34:01] Yeah, I think people need to move away from a capitalist competitive structure of organizations competing with organizations. I think they need to really decolonize their organizations. And what that means really is that they need to start thinking about how do you build community power and not cook up solutions for the community, make sure that you're not supplanting leadership or duplicating efforts. This is a time where we need to be mindful and strategic. And so there's the rhetoric about how people build and how they serve community. And then
there's the culture of practice. And the culture of practice really has to be centered on racial justice and equity and deep democracy. And there are a lot of lessons and you don't have to reinvent the wheel. There's a lot of information out there about how you build that, how you support that, how you come in as an ally. I know what the Climate Justice Alliance, we have the best principles for democratic organizing, but we also have a lot of different guidelines for what's a just transition, what's a just recovery. So there's been an extreme weather event and all of a sudden the Red Cross comes in and organizations helicopter into communities. That's not the way that you engage in recovery. You literally ask people what they want and you give them what they need so that they can develop the tools and the strength to be able to resist recurrent extreme weather events and disaster. And what you see is a kind of like you're seeing it in Puerto Rico and you saw it in New Orleans where there's a disaster and it isn't just corporations that are coming and speculating and land grabs. That, that's the worst of it. But you're also seeing institutions coming in and saying, "oh, I'm going to go and I'm going to help these people" and raising money so that they can go in and have the experience and the selfie. That's not what a just recovery is. I remember when university students in New York wanted to go to Puerto Rico, I thought, "Wow, instead of going to Puerto Rico, why don't you support the university students in Puerto Rico so that they can engage in restoring their homes and their lands, and instead of using it as a box checking, resume building opportunity." And so that sort of missionary way of thinking about how we support each other has got to end. If we really are interested in transformation and self transformation and building a different kind of future, we need to be really thoughtful about what our real intention is because this is not about us. To give you an example, the Red Cross gave water bottles to Puerto Rico because there was no water and there were water bottles all over this tiny little island. We send water filtration devices. They send diesel operated generators. But we know that Puerto Ricans lead in the world on levels of asthma per capita. So we send solar operated. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you're listening in terms of how you show solidarity, you know, introducing people to foundations and philanthropy and then moving out of the way, not feeling the need to be in the middle, but moving yourself out of the way.
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:37:07] So that culture of practice, of honoring what people on the ground are telling you is important and providing them with everything that they're asking for will make it possible for people to survive what is heading our way that
is unpredictable, that would be destructive and will be extreme. So that culture of practice should really honor how we are in solidarity with each other in deep democracy. And then the other one, I'd say, is to check your privilege, to really know that there's ways of using that, that don't supplant, don't duplicate, don't compete, and don't speak for us. You know, we got this right. But can you be an ally? Absolutely. Because why do we look like we look? I always say jokingly and lovingly that the future looks like Bruno Mars when everybody's mixed. You know, we're not people who've ever excluded anybody. We're not prideful that way. But we're not going to go to the back of the climate bus and we're going to lead by 2042 with a majority in this country. And we can either have people in our communities who believe in the extractive American dream and are replicating a lot of the problems that we've inherited. Or we can have people in our communities that understand that everything is at stake and that it's only our relationship with each other that is going to help us be able to thrive and survive in the midst of climate disruption.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:31] Yeah, thanks for making that really plain and obvious. You know, sometimes we hear, you know, here are the things you should be doing. And it's so vague that it's difficult to know exactly, but you just spelled it out. Thank you. So drilling down on that, what are two things, two action items for our listeners that we can take away that we could be doing.
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:38:51] Well, if you want to be involved in addressing climate change, I think it would be really great if people would identify organizations in their community and call them and ask them, "How can I be of service?" And be honest about, "Hey, I'm really good at fundraising," or "I can do tabling" or "I can do outreach and I could do organizing." Or "I'm an artist and I can create art builds," or "I have skills to do digital communications." The needs are vast, and so you don't have to recreate yourself. You could start with where you live, our young people, our organization is intergenerational. And we hold these climate justice youth summits and there are mothers who just want to come and serve food and clean up and set up so that the young people can participate. And so, you know, there are people who do gardening. If you, if you sing, you can do a concert. If you do spoken word, you can have an open mic night and bring people together around climate and create that. If you're a filmmaker, no matter where you are, there's something that you can do. So you can start with the things you love and what you're good at and then offer those. And I think
that's a good way to begin and don't duplicate efforts. Also, we create learning circles and they can happen everywhere. They can happen in a community garden because I think people feel really kind of powerless and hopeless, and I think that they're just holding a lot right now. And so the other thing that people need to do is connect this moment that we're in right now to everything that is important to people. So understanding that if you are suffering from economic instability, if you're dealing with health challenges, if you're dealing with mental health issues, because COVID and everything that we're seeing every single day in the press is triggering, that climate change is going to exacerbate all that. So how do we make sure that we create wellness and invest in wellness in the midst of chaos? I would say those two things.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:54] Thank you. So here's my last question. Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:41:00] Well, I get up every day and think about the future. And I always say I work like it's climate change, like it's here and I have to work hard. I think what makes me hopeful is that our fingerprints are all over the place, that we are changing power, we are changing narratives. Like there is no way that you can open, read an article, turn on the television, or go through any social media space without knowing that we are already changing everything. And so that makes me really hopeful because the "we" is big, right? And the "we" is not only big, but it is really engaged in self reflection and transformation and is really driven by a future that looks radically different from our past. So that that gives me tremendous joy and hope.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:48] Yes. Yes, me too. Well, thank you for doing all of the work that you do. It really is tremendous. You are definitely at the forefront and bringing forth a new world, the one that we need to live in. Because, like you said, climate change is here. The climate crisis is here. It is among us and everything that you do, it's the kind of thing where I feel like we didn't know it was possible. But you're showing us that it is. So thank you for your work and thank you for being on Future Hindsight.
Elizabeth Yeampierre: [00:42:13] Thank you, thank you.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:16] Elizabeth Yeampierre is the executive director of Uprose and the co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:42:42] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.