This post was originally posted on the Restore the Delta Website and can be found here.
Part 1 of Restore the Delta’s artivist Ryan Camero’s blog series on his experience at the Paris Climate Conference 2015.
PARIS – Today marks the ending of the first week of the COP21 and the beginning of its second week. More than 200 nations of the world have come together to unify and to take action against global climate disaster.
So here in Paris, at the Conference of Parties (COP21), the international negotiations seeking a universal agreement on climate, my hope is to spark positive, life-saving ideas through art and storytelling. I am here to tell the story of my hometown’s river.
I live alongside the San Joaquin River, one the major rivers of the San Francisco Bay-Delta.
For decades, the San Joaquin has supported a massive industrial agriculture industry. Parts of the river go dry partly by drought and by over-extraction. Five times more water is promised to users than actually exists, and it hardly looks the same from one side to the other in its 417-mile lifeline. There is no mystery why it is referred to by CNN as the most endangered river in America.
The last few days have been a multi-layered whirlwind, meeting some of the most inspiring and diverse youth activists gathered together from across our entire planet. We all have our hearts wrapped up in this work for our very local and personal reasons, but with a determined spirit and with a moral compass locked in stone, we all see our economic and social systems failing, and the ecological one in which we depend on is going to shatter irreversibly if we do not make this period of time worthwhile.
Through this experience, I have many stories to tell about how the global ecological crisis is impacting my home waterway. It is affirming and heartbreaking to know we all hold stake in this heavy, historic time. I hope that art can help tell my story.
I think the plight of the artist is nurturing an idea that wants to exist, and going through the process of communicating from mind to reality. Without creativity, these ideas would be trapped in oblivion without any way to express themselves.
That oblivion, full of neglect and erasure, is a terrifying space. If an idea is never known, it will never hope to be created- let alone understood.
A recurring theme I’ve grown to understand in different parts of my life centers on this oblivion- the idea of conceptual and cultural erasure, and all the reverberating effects that come with that.
I’ve started to see the concepts of forgetting and losing in terrifying ways; growing up a Filipino-American in the United States, I struggled early on with assimilating into American culture. I was bullied for the color and culture of my skin in a predominantly white-centered world, and because of that I grew up hating myself and my own ways of being. Looking back, the internalized racism I had in myself was appalling, especially as a child, and now I yearn to remember the erased history of my ancestors. Even here, where the Philippines is the third most vulnerable nation to climate change, I feel disconnected from my roots – cheering on a battle against coal-fired plants and typhoons I’ve never known.
In that same sense, California’s forgotten and mistreated waterways have felt this oblivion. Take, for example, the San Francisco Bay-Delta (the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas). These rivers channel a crucial portion of the state’s water supply, and yet their value on an ecosystem is reduced as a disposable backwater to Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed twin tunnels. These thirty-five foot tunnels stretch forty miles from Sacramento to Tracy, would extract about 60,000 gallons of freshwater per second from the waterways in order to send it to corporate desert agribusiness and oil (examples include the largest fruit and nut tree grower Paramount Farming, now Wonderful Orchards, and California’s largest oil producer Aera Energy, both Bakersfield-based) to control water in the middle of this crippling drought.
And so I am – here we are – wrestling with our hopes, in this disorienting space of briefings, meetings, acronyms and policy text. We carry our voices like pens drawing and dreaming the ideas of protecting our beautiful world from the throes of exploitation and corrupt, corporate deceit. We offer our personal fragments of climate justice story and piece together a movement of mosaics, and I can’t think of a better way to start drawing power.
Watch a performance of “Its the Same Thing” by arts activist Rachel Schragis, from Ryan here.
Ryan Camero is an arts activist and community organizer who works primarily with Restore the Delta (based in his hometown of Stockton), the statewide California Student Sustainability Coalition, and the internationally known Beehive Design Collective. He is part of the SustainUS youth delegation attending COP21, the global climate talks in Paris. Camero is also a 2015 Brower Youth Award winner, one of six leading youth environmentalists across North America.