I have always been afraid to talk about climate change. The barrage of doomsday numbers and the overwhelming magnitude of the problem leave me feeling small and powerless. But in the run up to COP26, the most important climate change meeting in history, running away from the world’s toughest problem was no longer an option. So, as an audio journalist and podcast producer, I instead tried to imagine what a different approach to the discussion around climate change could sound like.
So I created the podcast As She Rises with Wonder Media Network as a way to reframe the climate conversation around Indigenous women and women of color who are on the front lines of preserving their homes and communities. Along the way, I expected to find organizations to support or ways to take action. What I didn’t expect to find was that my entire understanding of the climate crisis was wrong.
Just look at the scourge of wildfires that have devoured much of California. On another episode of As She Rises, I had the pleasure of speaking with Margo Robbins, the executive director of the Cultural Fire Management Council, which seeks to facilitate cultural burns on the Yurok Reservation and surrounding ancestral lands in California. Cultural burning is the Indigenous people’s practice of skillfully using low-intensity fires to manage the landscape. It removes the fine fuels on the forest floor, such as fallen leaves and twigs, kills pathogens, fertilizes soil, and stimulates biodiversity and healthy creeks. The Yurok practiced controlled burns for millennia before U.S. forest management policies forced them to stop. In the wake of these devastating fires—such as the recent Dixie Fire that is poised to be California’s biggest yet—Robbins and her fellow Yurok are teaching California firefighters how to practice controlled burns.
Fortunately, ancestral practices like cultural burning are not entirely lost. A courageous group has kept them alive despite repeated attempts to silence these voices. In August, a report by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International found that Indigenous-led resistance efforts curbed the equivalent of 25% of U.S. and Canadian annual emissions.
When Native voices are at the forefront, tangible progress is made.
To read more of Grace Lynch's article, please click here.
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