Introduction
Collectively, we approach the Climate Change and Environmental Justice Program with a commitment to enlivening the stories of people who fight to change systems. Based in Oakland, our organization, Mycelium Youth Network (MYN), prepares frontline youth for climate change with science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) programming focused on ancestrally grounded, place-based climate resilience. Our hands-on training blends the traditions and practices of local Indigenous people and the technologies of today to empower young people with the skills needed to survive and thrive while facing the uncertainty of a climate-challenged world.
Individually, we’ve grounded our collaboration in our personal relationships to land, a medium through which social systems have unearthed both the present moment and the challenge to dream of our resilience. For Jomar, who grew up in one frontline environmental justice community and now lives in another, and whose family has faced discrimination at the language, citizenship, and class levels, it is of utmost importance that we challenge the idea that climate change is a purely scientific process that occurs in a vacuum. For Maya, who is a descendent of enslaved African people, exploited Puerto Rican migrant laborers in the occupied Kingdom of Hawaii, and white colonizers, STEAM must be contextualized through interdisciplinary analysis of social and environmental ethics. And for Andrew, whose family survived diaspora amidst imperial reach because their labor power was valued enough to permit “citizenship,” writing and teaching are significantly motivated by an anger only matched by the love for another world struggling to breathe.
Our individual and shared positionalities are shaped by the very forces that we hope to illuminate and untangle through our climate resilience and environmental justice units: the relationships between violence and resistance, survival and resilience, and privilege, power, and struggle-joy that is situated in place. Moving at the speed of relationships, consensus, and trust has created an open space for creativity, mistake-making, and shared visioning. From that space, we experience dynamic, fun, and flowing time together.
The First Anchor Experience
Our first lesson is one that highlights the plight and protracted struggle experienced by workers in California’s largest industry: agriculture. In a case study of Kettleman City, the curriculum we designed first invites students to explore the range of community vulnerabilities produced by pollution and socioeconomic injustice, as well as community assets, which we refer to as “community cultural wealth” and which are underrepresented in environmental justice discourse (Yosso, 2005). We then introduce intersectional frameworks to encourage students to develop their own curiosities around linked systems of oppression that create environmental racism and climate-challenged futures, specifically in the context of communities like Kettleman, which are affected by both.
Through this process, students come to see how the social location of this specific community has framed Kettleman as vulnerable or disposable—and, at the same time, equipped community members with skills and strengths to defend their families, the water, the air, and the climate. Be it battles to stop incinerators or toxic waste facilities, this lesson attempts to live in a space of climate hope. It considers “cumulative impact” not only in the sense of bombardment of environmental racism but, more importantly, through analysis of transformative grassroots action (EPA, 1999).
The Dance of Iteration
We are excited to include in the curriculum design process an educator who teaches in the same county as Kettleman City, which has allowed us to receive direct feedback on how participants are engaging with our curriculum. Teaching and learning is dynamic interplay and relationship—to collaborate with educators and students in our curriculum writing process is to acknowledge that beautiful dance.
It will be interesting to see how our curriculum is adapted by educators from various backgrounds, with respect to teaching experience and familiarity with social justice, liberatory education, environmental sciences, and ethnic studies frameworks. This process reminds us that wisdom and expertise live in the collective rather than the individual and, accordingly, belongs to everyone.
Ultimately, we are offering a set of analytical frameworks that help contextualize both climate in/justice and offer practical applied skills for transformative grassroots action, including data analysis, asset and eco-mapping, campaign strategy building, and storytelling. While opportunities for action are often neglected in climate change and science education, our organizational approach underscores the importance of providing concrete tools because current community vulnerabilities will only worsen if frontline communities, especially frontline youth, remain sidelined from resources and decision-making processes.
Reflection
As in any learning process, this collaboration has also surfaced some informative and iterative challenges, such as making accessible the complexities of environmental and climate justice for audiences of different learning and lived experiences; relaying and representing information from communities that are not our own; and rejecting the siloing that happens between traditional humanities and scientific disciplines, which can often atomize or disappear the holistic and systemic nature of our environmental present, past, and future.
The larger scope of this project will affect the way we think, in collaboration with external partners, about evaluation and the dance between lesson implementation and feedback cycles. As an organization, we are excited by the alignment between the internal development of MYN evaluation processes and the coalitional work that Ten Strands has invited us into, which connects our conversations with educators, researchers, and nonprofit advocates.
And for the students in particular, mapping work will include making real-life connections to local resources, including natural resources (e.g., watersheds) and community resources, as well as local leaders, organizations, and local policy-making processes. This has huge long-term implications from the individual to the global level, as students disperse into young adulthood with this rich network of mycelial connections as a foundation to build from and lean into.
Justice-oriented climate resilience curriculum is one piece of a larger possibility in which young people have the schools, lessons, and material resources to steward their own lives and the trajectories of their communities. It’s a possibility in which educators are resourced with the material power and political safety to realize education as the “practice of freedom,” cultivating spaces of shared learning where the entire community can make meaning of their lives as they are and organize for the lives they desire (Hooks, 1994).
