It’s been three years since we were able to gather in person for a Nature Forward Taking Nature Black Conference, so this year was bound to be special, extra-special! And it was. With two virtual days, and two in person days, I gathered with hundreds of environmentalists from around the region to share in uplifting our stories of Belonging – the conference’s theme.
I was grateful to provide a welcome on Friday and moderate the panel, Belonging: What Healing and Wholeness Might Look Like. I also was honored to give a keynote Thursday evening titled: The Environment: A Love Story and a Reason to Say Their Names. My speech was peppered with spoken word, traditional poems, and snippets of songs. An opening excerpt laid the foundation for the connection between what’s traditionally thought of as the environment and what scientists, Indigenous people and healers have come to understand is the real environment — all of us, humans, plants, animals, insects, waterways, air, and land. We’re all elements of nature and the environment, and, as such, and how we treat each other morally manifests materially, so we’d be wise to treat nature, which includes us, imperially, serially.
And this is where Say Their Names comes in. Say Their Names, on its face, is about 7-year-old Aliya’s quest to create a love-inspired movement in response to the George Floyd murder and protests. And with that, we’re surely blessed, the child met the test. Yet with a closer look, I must confess. Aliya reveals the 5 things we need to change the game not only to save lives from police and racial violence. She gives us the blueprint to save lives in the so-called natural world and helps us understand, like the scientists, how they/we are inextricably tied.
Aliya’s Blueprint includes these 5 Elements:
- Recognize that we’re in a love story – Give Mother Nature the glory.
- Gather our gifts – such as courage, hope, truth, and let it be swift. Gather our gifts of friends, family, community. Peace, grace, and unity.
- Tap into the one super-power that can change the game at any hour – LOVE.
- Become peerless when it comes to being fearless.
- Fight – All day, all night, harder and smarter until we get it right
I’ve created an entire professional development training and strategic campaigns training that delve deeply into how we can use the blueprint in Say Their Names to accelerate victories in campaigns for social, environmental, and climate justice. Email: caroline@carolinebrewerbooks.com for details.
Photo: That’s me at the Conference with U.S. Forest Service Sponsor Beattra Wilson, in the middle, and Singer, Storyteller, and Cultural Historian Karen Wilson Ama-‘Echefu, who spoke (and sang a bit) on the Belonging panel and provided outstanding support during my book signing.
About what the Anacostia High School students saw
with their own eyes,
and filtered through their lived experiences.
This book is about voice.
About what came from the students’ mouths
–rhythmically, poetically, chronologically, with vulnerability —
about what they observed, reflected on,
and processed alone and in community with one another.
And in the seeing and speaking,
they have given us a book to cherish
— a book of poems, essays, reports, and images
that reveals what they felt, emotionally,
what they touched physically,
what they tasted, and what they heard.
And we owe them our deepest appreciation,
because what they have given us is profound!
The book is about journeys,
each of us separately, and all of us together
liberating ourselves, flying, like the birds, free,
dismantling the shackles of fear,
overcoming our insecurities,
touching truth and becoming one with it.
This book is about partnerships.
Many thanks to Conservation Nation
for sponsoring my Nature-Wise program with
the students, to Xavier Brown for
inviting me in to host the literacy
and the environment training,
to Patrick Gusman, UDC, the
Department of the Interior and
NPS for leading the establishment
of this summer internship program
and enthusiastically supporting our efforts
to engage the students as thinkers, readers, writers,
and critical observers of their relationship to nature
and in how to become even better advocates
for sustainability.