Jackie is a Native American (Yurok and Wahsho) and Filipino, indigenous and environmental activist, and artist currently living in Ventura, California. I had the pleasure of sharing a ride with her to and from the 2015 CSSC Fall Leadership Retreat and she is one of the most energizing and engaging people I have had a chance to spend a road-trip with. On the ride, she had a bag full of zines filled with her artwork, ready to hand out to other Leadership Retreat attendees; each included piece had a compelling story of a call-to-action in them. She was quick and eager to tell the stories behind the art and give credit to the people and the movements that inspired them. In March of 2016, Jackie let me interview her.

What made you decided to go to the CSSC Leadership Retreat?

Jaime* invited me out to the retreat and said it was something that I would be interested in. It was an incredible and welcoming space that made me gain a better concept around sustainability. Sustainability is something that I would love to embrace more for any form of actions in the sense of - let’s say there’s a weekend long action for protecting rivers and the support group is handing out Nestle water bottles to the activists, to me that’s not right. I’m not for one time use bottles that support big corporations that are part of macro problems.Even if it’s little changes, like water bottles, it makes a difference not only in using less plastic, but by not supporting those corporations. Because of my time at the CSSC leadership retreat, I learned new perspectives and made incredible new friends and I can’t wait to shut stuff down with everyone I met. I am really hopeful to attend the next one.

*Jaime is a member of the CSSC Board of Directors

Solidarity Action led by Jackie at the CSSC Fall Leadership Retreat

“This solidarity piece is for my friends in Hawaii and their fight for Mauna Kea. Right now there’s a telescope planning to be built on a sacred sight, which makes no sense to me! The woman portrayed was inspired by the Hawaiian snow goddess Poli’ahu.”

When did you first start getting interested in making art?

When I was 6, a classmate that I sat next to was drawing casually and I thought, “Wow, you can draw for fun?!” That’s when I truly was intrigued in practicing art and it was an incredible escape for my imagination. I was introduced to Photoshop when I was 12 and started heavily practicing digital art when I was 16, that’s when my dad got me a graphic tablet for me.

Do you feel that art helps you communicate in ways beyond words?

For sure! Art has always been there for me. I feel like my strongest way of communication to have people listen to me is to make a visual for people to see. I get lost in words when my passion for a subject takes over and I heavily rely on my art to help me explain what I’m trying to get across. When I get into creating an illustration, I first think of the story and how I can capture such big issues and stories into a single image. I give big credit to all my English teachers in high school that were big on symbolism, which I didn’t care much for in school but I now heavily use in each image.

So from what I see on Facebook, it looks like you’ve been doing some traveling! What have you been up to?

Ahh, yes! I’ve been trying to get much traveling in as possible. Arizona has been incredible and welcoming from the O’otham/Pima territory to the San Carlos Apache territory. I had the honor to run with them for their sacred sites, Oak Flat and Moahdak Do’ag. This past week I was able to train with Greenpeace for the action training out in Florida for actions climbing. I’ve been trying to get all the experience I can to make new relationships, the more people standing together the bigger the difference!

Jackie in a tree, displaying a banner at the Greenpeace actions camp with her mock action crew.

How did you first get involved in this type of work?

I got interested in the idea of activism when I canvassed for an LGBT campaign but got truly invested into the world of activism when I canvassed with Greenpeace in Sacramento. From there I started showing my art and talked to everyone there. Mary Zieser, an incredible activist and warrior, was working for Greenpeace after I left the office and had invited me out to the Greenpeace arts actions training tract. That’s where I started getting into the feel of using my art to make a difference.

What was one of the most powerful gatherings you’ve attended? Why was it so powerful?

Every event I’ve been to has been incredibly powerful, but for me it must’ve been the first one. Last spring I attended a healing gathering with my dad. For our people, healing is important. I was able to heal my mindset of my need to get away from home as far as possible, now I find myself wanting to return home ASAP. I started dreaming of the Klamath, the redwoods, and the salmon more often awake than asleep. This ceremony to me was important because it was my first sweat and I had the honor of being lead by two elders that gave me the answers I needed so desperately. Because of that moment in my life, I do what I do.

“…This piece is about my home, Klamath. We need to un-dam that river and revive the lifeline that is under siege. I grew up fishing on that river with my dad, generations of my people before me as well. Rivers are the veins of the planet!”

Can you tell me a bit about how your heritage has propelled you forward into different types of action?

I definitely feel and know in my heart that because of my ancestral roots, it’s not only an obligation but it is in my blood that I have to take a stand not for my people, but with my people. When I was a kid I wanted to run as far away as I could from home, but the further I ran the more I saw how afflicted other communities were and the all of the heart breaking struggles. Because of that, I started realizing how important it is to take a stand for indigenous issues and have your voice heard. The river and ocean, the salmon, the redwoods, it’s in my people’s blood and it’s because of all that richness of the natural world engraved in my people’s roots, I can find the strength and courage to put myself out there. Many people forget that there are people indigenous to this land still living here and that we are not sitting back any longer having the little left, taken from us. I am honored and blessed to take that stand with my brother and sister nations as well as my own. I am still all new to this world of activism but I trust what my heart is telling me to do because of what’s at stake. And because of this growing need to stand, I am looking into moving back north and applying for Humboldt State University.

A piece Jackie did for World Wildlife Day: “The story behind this one was inspired by the story of the blind men and the elephant. The six men were each given a different part of the elephant to describe and all it brought about was unending arguments over who was right. The six butterflies in this piece represent their respective continents and while the world is in disagreements over such issues, the elephants are still suffering. The child presented is the only who can see the beauty and importance of the elephant with no judgement. We are losing our elephants at an alarming rate. To protect our futures and our children, we must protect our elephants and all wildlife.”

How does your appreciation for the environment tie in to where you grew up?

My fondest memories was when my parents would leave us with our auntie Pam, who lived on a hill nestled beneath the redwood as well as late summer and early fall days my father would take us fishing for salmon along the Klamath. Being the daughter of a fisherman and learning of the secrets hidden amongst the redwood as a child has stayed with me and has been a constant reminder of why I must continue to stand so that I can share these memories with future generations where they can experience it personally rather than a story of the past.

If you would like to stay up-to-date on Jackie’s work please like Jackie Fawn Illustrations on Facebook!

After years working with CSSC in many different roles and capacities, Emili Abdel-Ghany is saying her goodbye to the organization. She is departing to focus on the health of herself and her mother. In a country without an adequate healthcare system, taking care of each other is crucial. As Johanna Hedva voices in “The Sick Woman Theory”

“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.”

When I spoke with Emili, she communicated a range sentiments and concepts when looking back at her time with CSSC: friendship, growth, empowerment, kinship, family, excitement, highs, and lows.

This mixture of feelings is understandable when you realize how CSSC influenced Emili in a way that shaped her as a person. Through her experiences, she was able to personally feel that she could accomplish much more than she had envisioned for herself. CSSC has connected her to people and movements even bigger than the individual. It challenged her perceptions of sustainability and environmental work while always being a welcoming place for her, helping her to find a voice for herself. As she grew, she was able to pass that knowledge and strength onto other student leaders.

She was introduced to CSSC as an undergraduate with a job at the UC Davis Campus Center of the Environment. Part of this job was to be a council representative for the university where she spent the first term getting students out to convergences and starting the Fossil Fuel Divestment chapter through the UC Davis Chapter and their Sustainability education program. She volunteered at her first CSSC Convergence, which was the 2011 Davis Convergence.

Before she was introduced to the CSSC chapter at Davis, she had come to the university excited about environmental work and social justice, but had never taken a leadership role. The folk in the Davis chapter were warm and welcoming and encouraged her to try out different roles, to do projects of her own, and connected her to others. For her, it left an impression to see older students to nurture younger students and investing in their growth as leaders, and personally encouraged her to embrace what CSSC could offer.

Emili is particularly proud of her involvement with the 2014 Davis Convergence as well as organizing Regents Meeting Actions with Fossil Free UC. These actions spread between 2013 and 2014 and Emili was a part of organizing travel and housing logistics as well as holding demonstrations inside and outside the meetings. During the Regent’s Meetings, Emili and other students wrote and held public comment, organized a mic check, and extended the time they were given to have more people speak. Some people did silent direct actions outside, while others set up props that represented of fossil fuel industry. Many groups came out and gave their support. On campus Emili showed solidarity with UAW and Students for Justice in Palestine, among other groups, as the interconnectedness of our causes became apparent. These were empowering moments and important to the overall sustainability movement on the larger perspective.

Also, in recognition that the focus of solving sustainability issues should be approached through an intersectional framework, Emili created a new CSSC Program called the Solidarity Organizing Program to actively involve anti-oppression into all aspects of CSSC’s work. As a statewide network, CSSC has the potential to influence the sustainability movement as a whole. By providing a structural example of actively institutionalizing anti-oppression into our work, we provide a framework to our peers and partners that extensively and holistically address the three E’s of sustainability (Equity, Ecology, Economy).

To work through these goals, SOP moves forward on two strategy tracks: educational training and developing networks. Emili will be an active part of the process to bring on her replacement.

Emili urges that if you are new to the sustainability or social justice movement, that you remain curious and ask a lot of questions. She emphasizes that it is vital to think critically about your relationship to sustainability and the changes you want to see. Think about the different things you care about and look to see how they connect with each other. Come from a place of curiosity and openness to what interests you. If you’ve been here awhile, she advises that you nurture new leaders and invest in the potential of others.

The last thing Emili left me with made a strong impact:

“The world we want to see may not exist in our lifetime but everything we do is essential and important to value. “

Thank you for your work with CSSC Emili and we wish you luck in all that you work toward for yourself, your family, and your aspirations.

Change can be exciting. Change is especially exciting when it brings wonderful and empowered people into CSSC Leadership Roles. CSSC welcomes Jaime Gonzalez as a new member to the Board of Directors!

Jaime was first introduced to CSSC when he saw an announcement for the 2014 Fall Convergence. As the President of Students for a Sustainable Future at Consumnes River College (SSF CRC), he spearheaded the action of the group to become an official CSSC chapter by the time of the then upcoming convergence. They received their chapter status two weeks before the convergence and attended with the full force of open hearts and open minds.

Before and during his work with CSSC, Jaime has gifted much of his time to the sustainability movement. As President of SSF CRC, Jaime worked as an organizer on the Take Back the Tap initiative as well as Seize the Grid. The club as a whole also worked on a variety of sustainability campaigns mostly focused on waste reduction and energy use. Outside of the club, Jaime also organizes with 350 Sacramento on the Stop Oil Trains campaign, which hits a special chord with him as his family has lived in a home situated 100 feet from tracks that carry oil for most of his life. He’s also supported the work of Restore the Delta and participates in miscellaneous solidarity actions. Most recently he participated in the January 26^th Sacramento Right 2 Rest Protest of City Hall, calling on city officials to repeal unconstitutional anti-homeless ordinances. Jaime says that CSSC helps him feel supported in his work:

“I think when you do this kinds of work – environmental justice work – it’s easy to feel isolated when you’re not surrounded by people doing this kind of work. When I attended my first convergence, I found this new community and a constant sense of support which kept me around and made me want to be involved.”

Jaime continued to become more and more involved in CSSC, especially in organizational development. Using his perspective as a community college student, Jaime focused on ways to help further open opportunities for junior colleges and community colleges to work with and be a part of CSSC. His continual volunteer support and involvement led way to the natural progression of joining the Board.

As a Board member, Jaime plans to continue representing the needs and interests of community colleges and junior colleges. He feels that much of CSSC is tailored to four year institutions even though many of our active members are from community college campuses. As CSSC is currently moving through a restructuring process, he is hoping to use the organization’s transitional phase as an opportunity to strengthen this aspect of CSSC.

“It is scary and exciting, but I am glad that I am here to help be a part of that change. I have a real passion for organizational development and the board lets me see the organization at a macro level.”

Jaime also hopes to continue working on CSSC merchandising and branding. Though all of these efforts are inherently challenges, Jaime sees his biggest challenge as being a full-time student while working and being on the board – juggling it all is hard.

After finishing his education, Jaime hopes to work for an international environmental or social justice non-profit. Taking lessons from what he’s learned at his time with CSSC to better our world. However, we won’t have to say goodbye to Jaime too soon, and he sounds like he’s happy to spend more time with us:

“[CSSCrs] are the warmest and most welcoming, brilliant-minded group of people I have ever had the pleasure to live with, work with, and be friends with. It feels like a big family when we get together for convergences and retreats.”

Thanks Jaime! We’re glad you’re with us and excited to see what you bring to the Board.

I came to Paris representing the California Student Sustainability Coalition, in this rare and crucial point in time to decide a global agreement on collective action against the climate crisis. Because unexpected circumstances many groups, including ours, did not receive their requests for badges (they are expectedly difficult to obtain), I was very grateful to be taken into the arms of SustainUS, a United States-based organization that enable youth climate leaders across the country to attend the actual negotiating talks. With my heart trying to hold everyone back home in my head, I dove into the unfamiliar.

As a newcomer being welcomed into a space that had delegates preparing months beforehand, I felt as if I was entering a new world of community organizing on the international scale.
I hold a deep love for this year’s dreamy heart breaker delegation of 21 (22 including me as the black sheep delegate!), not all pictured here:

Official SustainUS group delegation photo.

A typical meeting for our delegation involved us huddled up together in the corner of our hostel, taking turns offering our viewpoints and planning our individual and collective actions for the day. As time passed, I began to see the immense and shared passion that centered us as a team - and the very diverse skillsets and experiences inspired in me an understanding that I was in the presence of a supergroup of resilient youth representing the U.S. I was astounded at the team’s ability to produce a maelstrom of news pieces across major media, spanning BuzzFeed, Thought Catalog, the Takeaway on NPR, the Huffington Post, and others.

There were the fearless and adventurous Morgan Curtis and Garrett Blad, a duo who went on a five-month bicycling/listening tour called Climate Journey in pursuit of understanding this crisis from personal stories, having traveled through three states, two provinces, and nine countries to get to Paris.

The focused, kind, and reserved Jeremy Pivor working diligently on influencing language of the agreement, his unwavering resolve setting our reasons for being here deep into perspective: “I have a brain tumor, and I’m more scared of climate change than I am of that.”

The critical and clarity-inducing Chloe Maxmin whose thoughts on youth power and powerlessness revived my spirit in such a withering time.

And the examples grow endless.

Mountaintop removal in Virginia. Fracking rigs in Vermont. Tar sands pipelines in the Midwest. Students from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Oxford. Migration research for the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Canada’s Top Environmentalist Under 25, galvanized through firsthand experiences in the Arctic. Every story I learned about I held tightly, as my barriers of insecurity gave way to bridges of solidarity. Every beautiful human being in our delegation was fighting from every angle, and fighting hard.

I kept grappling to understand the reality of our conversations. Every single person who was here in Paris, inside the negotiations or outside, were carrying narratives that we never thought would play out. These were such difficult conversations. And it still continues to be a never ending process of learning. Every sentence, story and article contributes to a vast and endless consciousness rising out of society; all waiting, worrying, wandering, wishing for a better future than the path we are currently on.
These thoughts propel energy for the changes we need to see- the ones that reach not just some of us, but all of us. And it’s with these moments that I am feeling, more than ever, that our shared awareness is unearthing a undeniable movement of movements.

In the streets at the D12 (December 12th) protest, where thousands gathered. Photo by Joel Lukhovi.

Movement is a beautiful, multi-faceted concept. There is an absolutely inspiring and incredible video called Orgesticulanismus, by Belgian animator Mathieu Labaye that I deeply encourage anyone to watch. Labaye made this nine-minute animation in tribute to his father Benoit, who suffered from a multiple sclerosis that turned him paraplegic. His work celebrates his father’s intimate understanding of the human importance of movement, physically and metaphorically. I find so much beauty in these words, narrated in the video:

“I think it’s by the movement you appropriate your own life. By the freedom to come and go, to have gestures of love, tenderness, anger, whatever. When you are deprived of movements, as I am and as a lot of other people are, I think if you want to survive, you must reinvent the movement differently. And so what happens inside my head isn’t purely brain, purely intellectual. It’s a way of recreating an inner space which is also my freedom.”

When you live a severe handicap, when you live absolutely still, dependent, you live, in fact, something that can’t be shared, that can’t be easily expressed, which you can’t easily talk about. Because when two people talk, to be able to understand each other, they need to have a minimum of common experience between them, to speak of something they both know from some form of experience.”

The many movements of Orgesticulanismus, the animation by Belgian artist Mathieu Labaye.

“Sure, the stillness, the handicap, brings you to the conclusion and to the gradual acceptance that there’s a certain number of things that you can’t do. But conversely I think it opens a whole bunch of new possibilities, notably with inner freedom, inner space, but also with the way you can come in contact, in relation with others.

I think there is in the handicap, in the disease, a lot of potentiality. The human being have endless supplies of desire, of energy, of inner strength. And it’s something you discover with maybe more urge, more intensity, when you’re deprived of movement.”

There is momentum in the things that immobilize us. Our scars are symbols of our survival.

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.

Ryan Camero is a twenty-two year old community organizer and arts activist born and raised in Stockton, California. This year, he won a Brower Youth Award, officially recognizing him as a young leader making impressive strides in the environmental movement. He is one of six youth in the entire nation to be given this award. We want to send him to COP21 (Conference of Parties), which is a United Nations-led series of negotiations that hope to reach global consensus about the response to climate change. This is why we should send him.

1. He has dedicated his life to social and environmental justice.

Ryan wears multiple hats as the Outreach Coordinator of the California Student Sustainability Coalition (That’s us!), Delta Artivist for Restore the Delta, and a California-based “Bee” storyteller and educator for the Beehive Design Collective, He has dedicated his life to social and environmental justice, because he knows that the need for change is greater than ever before.

2. He can and will be able to represent California’s story at an international level.

He is representing Stockton, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and the Central Valley of California at the international climate talks in Paris from November to December. His presence there will elevate California’s story of drought and water privatization as one of many across the world of ecological disasters, and uplift the urgency for the necessary positive social change that protects our natural resources, beautiful ecosystems, and thriving ways of living harmoniously for generations ahead.

3. He uses multiple mediums to educate and communicate.

“I am a deep lover of characters and story arcs, and these themes inform my mindset about life. I’ve spent the last five years organizing on the local and national level, and while sometimes emotionally disheartening, I feel the experience has given me resilience and perspective in dealing with our era’s most complex monsters of social issues.” – Ryan Camero

His organizing initially sprouted from arts-based projects. Stockton struggles with deep pockets of poverty, gang culture, drug abuse and violence, and he believes wholeheartedly in the transformative power of expression to achieve cross-cultural and intergenerational solidarity. In being active in this work, he gained a lived understanding of both the internal and external oppression in his community which reinforced his view that organizing approaches must be holistic

Ryan has the chance to use his passion for fighting for a better world on a whole new level.

He needs your support.

In the situation of many other students, Ryan does not have the funds to get to COP21. Funds gathered will go directly to travel expenses throughout the trip, housing and food, and research and preparation to participate as a delegate in the negotiations. If you donate, you also have the chance to receive some of Ryan’s Art.