A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

When we center ourselves around people, center ourselves around liberation, and we take back the narrative that we can’t do this, we’re too young, that it’s too late. It’s never too late to build power. It’s never too late to engage with your community. It’s never too late to tell your truth and tell your story about your experience with the climate crisis, your experience with the fossil fuel industry.

You’re listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern, your host, I’ve got a great guest on the show, Amelia Southern-Uribe. Amelia works for a number of different organizations. They’re a climate justice strategist, a youth led movement leader and Director of Global organizing at zero hour, as well as co founder and editor in chief of roots magazine. So as a nationally recognized climate justice strategist and communication leader. Amelia works at the intersection of environmental justice, narrative, power and youth led policy based in the American South.

In Arkansas, they’re committed to uplifting frontline communities and off who are often left out of national climate conversations, particularly the bipoc communities. Their work is grounded in the belief that effective storytelling is essential to both organizing and policy change. Welcome to the program. Amelia, thank you for having me. Matt. So tell us a little bit about your journey. I was like to start at the beginning, and what were the things that led you into the climate movement and being environmentally aware and wanting to focus your passion and work on this area?

Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the American South, and that, for me, held a number of responsibilities and shaped a lot of my beliefs. But when I was about six or seven years old, I was living in South Florida, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill had just erupted, and I had seen through not only the news, but in the local community, the impact that that oil spill had, and particularly for me, coming from a Colombian American background, living in a predominantly Latino and immigrant community, it became very clear to me, without actually knowing what environmental injustice was, that that’s what was happening. And as I moved through life with hurricanes and oil spills and corporate extraction.

I noticed that there was a pattern, and ultimately, when I ended up moving to Arkansas when I was about 12 years old, I noticed the same was happening in another predominantly immigrant community where I was living in Arkansas. But this time, it was due to industrial agriculture. And I live in an I used to live in this area that was tainting the water, it was tainting the air, and the people that were working in in this factory, meat packing plant, were under horrible labor conditions, and ultimately, one of my close friends, their sister, lost lung function because of this corporation. And so growing up in South Florida and then moving to Arkansas, I had noticed that environmental justice is so central to this work.

When we talk about climate change, when we talk about, you know, working towards a sustainable future, we have to lead with frontline communities and living in areas that were on the front lines for all of my life, in an area that had been so neglected, I wanted to do something so I found an organization that prioritized environmental justice and youth leaders Zero Hour, and I didn’t want to just take my anxiety, my pain and my frustration with the lack of an inaction. I wanted to do something with that. So when I was 16, I founded a chapter in Arkansas, and over the course of six years, I dedicated, like all of my time to building and training the next, like generation of leaders of in climate in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to to do something about what was going on in our community.

That’s a great story. Thank you for sharing that. I do think that sometimes it is kind of lost, you know, in the news cycle that real people are affected by this pollution, and that we’ve got this kind of pollution blanket that covers the planet. Quite frankly. A, you know, speaking to this, this NASA scientist, he said, if, if some alien civilization were to come and look at the Earth at some point in time, what they find is a layer of plastic on the bottom of the ocean, for example, you know, so we just, we’ve just littered the entire planet with garbage and chemicals.

And you know, we just it’s unfortunate and and like you said, poor communities tend to bear the brunt of this because those industrial facilities are built closer to these poor communities, and they’re spewing their waste products right out into the air, and young kids are the ones that are most adversely affected in their young lungs and all that. And see it here in Los Angeles that you know, high rates of asthma and stuff like that because of all this pollution. So great work in addressing that, tell us a little bit about the things that you’ve done on the ground there in Fayetteville or the surrounding area and and how that’s moved the needle.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, organizing in Fayetteville, I didn’t really have a model of what it meant to build power. There’s lack of unions, there’s a lack of visible and present activism, and at the same time, we were up against these big corporations. It’s a big, daunting thing to think that I was 16 years old wanting to take on the corporations, literally, that own, the grocery stores that I was shopping at, the chicken that I was eating and also tainting the water. So I knew that it I had to build power. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it in an area that is outwardly, you know, less progressive very, very like suburban communities I didn’t have the same access to resources like they do in bigger cities, with people mobilizing.

So I wanted to get young people involved in a way that felt fun. And what we did for the past six years is we combined so many different tactics and strategies to provide an entry point for people. We threw parties, we created a youth and student, made zine, and we distributed across Arkansas. But at the same time, we knew that we couldn’t just have fun. We had to have a structured campaign that had escalation arcs of and timelines and our ability to take on, you know, the environmental injustice in our community relied on us being effective, but also building a narrative that people felt related to, not the narrative that we had seen so much, or that I had seen so much, that environmental justice work is for people with privilege. It’s for this. Work is for people that don’t always like are grounded in other issues, right? And why I’m bringing this up is because a lot of my community members wanted to address racial justice. They wanted to address economic justice.

They were working three jobs they had families to provide for. So we needed to create an intergenerational movement, and we did that through through building a movement that centered our experiences, and we knew that what worked in Arkansas wouldn’t work in California and vice versa. So our big accomplishments over the last six years is I started out with a team of like three people, and by the time that I launched the organization, we had impacted over 19,000 people in Arkansas. We had mobilized people to protest. We threw fundraisers. And what we really wanted to do, though, is leave with a sense of visibility. We in preserving and disseminating information through our zines.

We were able to document the harm in our community. We were able to address corporations and distribute this information that we had all felt but we had never seen in paper, because it felt too, too risky, too difficult to have the conversations of what these corporations were doing out loud. Because they fund, yeah, like I’ve said before, they fund, they funded my school, they funded and they owned the grocery stores that we shop at. It was so central to our lived experience that we needed to find a way to get creative. But yeah, so six years in Arkansas, we built this massive mobilization of affected over 19,000 people, and I. Um, that was through, that was through a lot of structured, based organizing.

That’s great. I like the term that you used. I’ve never heard it before, escalation arcs. So, you know, I think that that’s, that’s an interesting term. And I think if we can build a movement that is kind of escalating. It has a good arc of there has been a kind of curve ball that has been thrown into the escalation arc by the current administration. And I guess I I’d like to know from you, what are your thoughts in in dealing with what is now a radically changed environmental agenda from the current administration, as opposed to the prior us executive administration?

Absolutely well, I will say that a lot of the stuff that we’re dealing with now deregulation increase deportation, increase presence of factors that make our work and in the environment harder, not just because of policy changes, but of like lack of federal funding. These are challenges that we were already facing, but now they’re amplified. And I want to say that, especially being an organizer from the American South, where they tested out these policies, where they tested out deregulation, where they tested out increasing increasing authoritarianism, we have to look to areas that have been affected.

We have to look to organizers in the red states, we have to organizers in southern states that have already felt this repression before, and it is harder to organize under these conditions of not having the same financial resources, not having the same federal visible support. But the work still needs to continue, and I know that at zero hour, we’re changing our work to be less federal focused, because we know that we can’t push the same legislation that we were able to a year ago. We aren’t able to have the same relationships with with with the administration. But we do know that the one thing that hasn’t changed is the power and ability of local organizers to make change in their community.

And when we focus less on what we can achieve federally and more what we can do on a local level, I think we could actually see global effects of that. So one way that we’re changing is we’re training young people in California to stop the to stop fossil fuel subsidies, and we know that that’s possible in an area where California is the fourth largest economy in The world. And according to a Institute study there was we have found that 50 to 60% of fossil fuel projects, new fossil fuel projects, would not be economically viable without fossil fuel subsidies. So there’s ways that we can implement change. We just have to get creative.

We have to look to organizers that have had this experience before, but also empower communities that relied on or organizations that relied on federal change federal funding, to consolidate our power and find community with each other, to collaborate better as organizations, to find that we don’t have The same privileges that we did a year ago of being able to work in silos. We really need as organizations, as movement leaders, as people that care about our future on this planet to work together and find new, creative ways to empower local communities, but also to share resources, to strategize together and to go back to that work, the escalation arc, to escalate the fight strategically, but not alone.

Well, I like the part that you mentioned about doing hyper local projects, because I do think that in the last time Trump was in power and as a president, a lot of states and local governments did a lot of great work because they they now knew, hey, the the federal government is not going to do anything, so it’s on us. We’ve got to do it on local level. And some amazing work got done. And so kudos to you for the work on in California to stop fossil fuel subsidies. And you know the Republicans are always saying, or Trump is always saying, Hey, we were subsidizing wind and solar, but he never talks about the subsidies for coal and natural. Gas and oil, which are huge.

I mean, they’re tremendously large. So one of the things that I’ve been read about recently, and I think makes some sense, is kind of populism based upon, you know, environmental justice and in terms of how it affects working class people, and really shifting the narrative to how, how these policies affect working class people. And one of the things that you talked about was the water being tainted from factories that are polluting and that’s that’s a message that’s got to resonate with basically everybody that’s that was the beginnings of the environmental movement here in the US was like one of the rivers up in the Northeast actually lighting on fire. There was so much toxic stuff in the water. So maybe talk about that, and what change you’ve helped effect in, in, in, you know, in that area of Arkansas with the water?

Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I do think it’s a relatable thing. And I think that the fight for clean air, clean water and healthy children is something that resonates with everyone, especially you know, being in an area that is less progressive, and knowing that, like the struggle in Fayetteville or Springdale or northwest Arkansas is not unique to Arkansas. It’s it was hard to enact change when corporations own and own and take ownership of of a lot of the good that they bring to the community, but don’t acknowledge the bad, but the work that we’ve done in Arkansas relied on the ability for us to be trained and to have these conversations with community members that don’t even know what environmental injustice is, that they don’t understand even that the water shouldn’t be like this, that the air shouldn’t be like this.

But so it really became down to relationship building, if we could gain the community’s trust and instead not just engage them, we took our ownership of being community led, community founded, and solving the community solving the community’s issues by the people that were most affected by it, but it required us to build coalition with partners outside of Arkansas. So we took this strategy of working on policy with the Arkansas environmental policy board, because we knew that water was an issue across Arkansas, and actually is even worse the more south that you go. In Arkansas, there’s communities of predominantly black, communities in south Arkansas and East Arkansas that didn’t have running water for eight months, and it was so tainted, not just by for us, it was industrial farming, but in other places, it’s been lithium mining, and so we knew that we needed to work together and strategically, but our niche was mobilizing young people, so we built out a campaign where we polled over 300 members of our community, asked them what they wanted to see change.

And we are now in the process, and now I’m advising the group that I founded, so I’m still involved with them, making sure that they are not only just holding these corporations accountable, not just testing and doing research on the water, but even more so, figuring out a strategic parts of how To mobilize members that didn’t even think that they cared about environmental injustice or that they knew what that was right. So the work that we’ve done to stop this pollution, to stop to stop corporations extracting our land, our people and our labor, is a much larger fight, and when we zoom out, it needs to be addressed in several other parts. So this campaign has been focusing on not just corporate accountability, but University accountability. Um, we’re taking on a housing crisis. We’re taking on an environmental injustice crisis, but also a labor crisis. We started working with a labor union group for one of the corporations in Springdale that is predominantly immigrant led, and we found ways to not only support our work, but support theirs, because we knew that we needed to have people inside that had information.

Um. Um, but also we found ways to protect the workers, and it’s it’s unfortunate to say the least, the harm that is not just on the land or in our water or in our air, but we can’t separate what this does to the people, and that’s where our zine came in. We found ways to not only just disseminate the information that people you know, when you grow up in these areas, you think that it’s normal, you think that it’s normal to experience injustice. You think that it’s a part of your life. I know I had a unique experience coming from Florida to Arkansas, but for people that had been socialized to just accept the harm, accept this extraction and pain in multiple ways, physical, emotional, spiritual pain.

We needed to address that too. So we actually started providing climate anxiety sessions, to have spaces where people could talk about what was going on in the community, to talk about these feelings of of grief, of loss, and over the course of six years, we did a lot to not just address the root of the problem, but to also address the symptoms. And that’s where that’s where we are now, and in building out and escalating this campaign of we disseminated zines about not just the harm, but what the corporations about, the stories that aren’t being told from young people and intergenerational knowledge of our of the stories of our land, of the stories of Our communities, but more so we want to communicate to people outside of Arkansas that just because this is happening in one part or multiple hubs of the state, our pain and the struggle and the fight for liberation from this is so connected to other people.

It’s connected to people outside of Arkansas, and our story is one of 1000s across the nation. There’s so many towns across the US and globally that are struggling to fight for their liberation because corporations own land, water, food, and they’re the ones that provide their income. So I say all of that to say that we knew that to make a difference, we had to train people, we had to document the harm, we had to disseminate the information, but we also had to mobilize people in a way that had not been attempted before, and to make activism feel welcoming.

Well, it’s a it’s a big job, and there’s a lot of facets to it, and it’s and it at its best, it’s organic, and it kind of grows out of people’s concern, and obviously you’ve got to help that along when people are busy with their lives. I you know, as you were talking, one of the things that came to mind is kind of like the slow poisoning that takes place in communities with living around factories or places that pollute a lot, and it’s just kind of little bit by little bit by little bit sending out poison into the community and and there is a sense of helplessness that, oh, I don’t even I don’t know where to start, I don’t know how to stop this, and I know that I certainly have driven by industrial facilities here in Los Angeles, and feel the same way, like, Geez, how do you stop this from occurring

It’s, it’s a big effort. So, you know, kudos to you for for working on that. And empowering people to say, yes, we can do something. Yes, let’s start doing something together. We have a voice, and maybe you can tell us about some of the victories in terms of, have you gotten people to listen on the ground? Have you gotten corporations to change their behavior. Have you gotten local communities to stand up for their citizens and and say, Hey, we’re not, we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.

Yeah, absolutely. So it makes me think about, you know first that it is a long fight, right? Right, and there’s small and big wins across this fight, but in the last year, especially, I think that we faced more oppression. I’m thinking of the now co president and my friend Helena, who led this huge fight to protect some land near us, and it was a really rapid response campaign where we were, you know, protecting land that was going to be destroyed and bulldozed by the city. And it related to our, you know, a work of conservation in the sense that, like, this was a community space, and we wanted to protect it. Ultimately, the trees were cut down.

The land was that land was destroyed. But the real win is that we found consistent ways to bring the community together, around art, around music, around land, and we ended up having a lot of conversations with city council. Helena was at city council every Tuesday. Building trust with the members of city council, and now we have built our relationships with local leaders to have them know us by name, have us like at meetings and talk to us, and they became some of our biggest allies. Even though it was a huge loss that the community, you know, space was just was destroyed, we actually were able to build something with the leaders of our town to advance this campaign.

So while we haven’t been able to change, you know, corporations labor practices, or, you know, hold them accountable for attaining our air and our water. What we have been able to do is find ways to strategically, not just, you know, again, mobilize people around these spaces, but build relationships out of them. And so now, as we move into our second phase of the campaign, they have, they’ve even helped some of our leaders at the Arkansas chapter sponsor resolutions and have them speak and invite them to to hold town halls about housing and about just climate justice. And I guess the win is that in the most unexpected places you can find solidarity. Even though they, um, they tore down the area we had, they were also resisting, right?

Not? It’s not just like one or two people that vote for something like that to happen, but we did find and strengthen relationships with the city council members that yeah, that wanted we’re also advocating for the resistance of land destruction. So other wins though that feel more tangible and real is that we raised over $10,000 for environmental education work and organizing work because we became the place where young people would go to find their political and movement home and housing so many young people, training So many young people and providing them with this space to not only find their community and to make a difference in the community, we were able to mobilize so many people with because we became so structured, we became so self sufficient and finding resources and creating allies like like how we did with the city council members.

But as we did, as we found, you know, our political home and our movement home, we diverted over 200,000 pounds of waste because we began to engage in mutual aid work, where we would give young women free menstrual cups on campus. So we were meeting this need of in the community, saving them hundreds of dollars, but also finding ways, unique ways to save, to save the planet through sustainability. And so these like little, small things of that feel so intangible and, you know, obscure these relationships, or finding and building spaces for young people, to raising money and to distributing resources across the community, we found that the real win is how we’re supporting each other and how we are, you know, up against this giant and multiple giants of corporations and companies, but the win had always been that we can build people power, and the people power is what will sustain the movement so that we can win those wins of changing labor practice. And changing ways to hold the corporations accountable, and finding ways to not invest in the corporations, but invest in the community.

Well, it’s a great message. I believe this is a marathon and not a sprint. So So trying to get long term wins versus focusing so much on the short term stuff. Obviously, the short term stuff is important. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, but building an organization, building relationships and building trust with the community and and maybe you don’t get that first win, but maybe down the road, you affect some positive change, maybe you compromise, and it’s not a full win, but it’s not as bad of a loss. So you know, you’re constantly improving and maybe reaching some people.

Like you said you’re you’re reaching people by showing up, being human, being caring, being compassionate, those kinds of things communicate, and they change minds a lot more effectively than almost anything else. So that’s great work to just keep showing up, keep engaging and doing it with intelligence and kindness and compassion and good arguments, and sooner or later that that those things will win the day, but we’ve got to keep showing up to do those things. And I guess the other part of it that I I resonated with was do something now, and that that’s one of the themes of this show is to encourage people to do something today. And along those lines, I’d love to hear your thoughts as to what your encouragements are, as to what listeners can do today. And it may be small, you mentioned some things that are, you know, modest things, but they’re, they’re movements in the right direction, and I think it’s a shift in consciousness when we start taking those those movements, even if they are modest.

Yeah, absolutely, I think that’s a beautiful question, and I think that’s what keeps us engaged with the work too. Is like, what can we do to not only ground ourselves in the movement, but to keep ourselves going? I think that I would ask the listeners to educate yourself on environmentalist fights that are happening across the country, and not just in your community, but finding ways to get involved in your community. Right if you’re organizing, I want to ask you, are you organizing with frontline frontliners? Are you organizing with communities? And maybe you live in a frontline community, right?

Like the biggest thing that we can do to work on this giant fight, this global fight, is to find local solutions and to lead them. And I think the one thing that we can do that doesn’t feel so overwhelming is to lead with love. And I say that all the time because I think that truly this work is exhausting. And if we remember our wall, our ultimate goal, our shared goal of a clean and sustainable future. Lead with that lead with the intention of making an impact, of showing up with love, of showing up with care, of showing up with the hope, the radical hope and joy that we will celebrate a win. We will celebrate this crisis being over, because if we believe it to be true, if we believe that we can actually take on the giants, if we can take on the corporations, if we can take on the fossil fuels that are making us sick and even leaning to death, I think that we can truly fight something that we believe in.

And so I asked those listeners, get involved in your community, find ways to show up for your community. Outside of organizing, you know, have those hard conversations, engage other people in this work, bring them into it, bring your friends. And also to know that this is, this is a marathon, not a sprint, right? Take time to do the work, but also enjoy it. Throw a party. Throw, throw, you know, an art show, and celebrate that this work doesn’t have to feel so centered around pain, but instead, could be something that bring people together.

So tell us about the role you believe storytelling plays in connecting youth led activism to concrete policy out.

We are at a critical point of the climate crisis. We were building out new. Two liquefied natural gas journals that could lock us in to a threshold of passing even two degrees Celsius. We need a mobilized fight. We need a mobilized story that we can tell, because it’s never just about the story, it’s about the people with real life impacts, with real stories of loss, of real stories of pain. And as a movement, we need to honor those stories. We need to honor those truths, and especially even if we look to the beginning of this year with wildfires in Los Angeles a year ago, from a couple days ago, there was Hurricane Helene in Milton.

So many lives were lost. And we’re not telling and embracing these stories enough, because they’re painful and they’re not platforms, you know, in the same way that I think other stories are. And so when we center ourselves around people, center ourselves around liberation, and we take back the narrative that we can’t do this. We’re too young, that it’s too late. It’s never too late to build power. It’s never too late to engage with your community. It’s never too late to tell your truth and tell your story about your experience with the climate crisis, your experience with the fossil fuel industry.

Because the more that we bring this into the main topic of conversation and culture and community spaces, even peer to peer, one conversation can be the difference between someone getting involved and not. And the more that we make this a topic in our arts, in our media, not just the news, but even in the literature that we consume. I think the more we normalize that these experiences are happening across the nation, and we’re not just watching them on our phone anymore. We’re seeing them outside of our window and in our community, and we need to be honest about those stories, right?

Well, I have three friends that had their homes burned down in the wildfires here, and many others affected by it and and certainly all of LA County was breathing this horrid smoke that was, you know, somewhat it was very toxic because it was burnt a bunch of cars and batteries and all kinds of plastics and, you know, God knows what. So we were all breathing in just terrible air because of these wildfires, which clearly were exacerbated or caused by the increasing temperatures that we have here and across the globe, that we’re having these wildfires in Canada that are unprecedented. You know, these, these types of fires, never occurred in recent history, or at least, anyone can discern that they’ve occurred anytime recently.

So yeah, these are painful stories to tell, and it’s, it’s uncomfortable to talk about these things because they are so darn painful, it’s easier to kind of avoid them and and sweep them under the rug. But those are, they’re real stories. And you know, one of my friends is actually, two of them may not be able to rebuild for various reasons. So, yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of economic pain, and just, you know, people’s entire life went up in flames. One friend was an artist. All of her art was burned down. I mean, just it was, it’s, it’s a loss of epic proportion. So those stories kind of need to be told, because otherwise they’re just statistics of, oh, yeah, X amount of 1000s of people had their houses burned down, that can be easy to kind of push off into the back corner of our brains versus actual humans had this happen to them, and it was horrendous.

Yeah. Oh, I’m so sorry about your friends, and I’m sorry that it’s that I even have to say sorry, like this is the way that we dehumanize humans that have gone through like this trauma, this climate and natural, natural disaster trauma. It’s, it’s heavy, it’s, you have to grieve. You have to mourn the loss of not just these like tangible things, these items, but what they mean to you, right? It’s never just about losing your home or losing your the art that you created. It’s it’s about what it represents, and it’s about that. It’s hundreds of people that I’m sure share similar stories.

Stories and and I’m just so sorry, and I think that you’re so right. When we tell these stories, we humanize this pain, but we also are able to empathize with people that in a way that statistics can’t do, and I think it’s important that we center that experience of of grief and of pain and of loss, but also acknowledging it and turning that grief and and paralyzing grief into knowing that we we may not be able to replace the things that were burnt down, um, or the health impacts of natural disasters. But what we can do is tell it, acknowledge it, mourn as a community, and rebuild a rebuild something outside of this future that we’ve been told that we have to live, we have to experience natural disasters. We have to experience climate change, but we can, we can tank that, and we can organize around it.

Well, looking ahead, what are the key opportunities for integrating youth voices into the National Climate decision making? And how can youth led organizations kind of lead us out of or help lead us out of the current situation we’re in right now.

Yeah, I think that historically, when we look at periods of history, youth led movements have led the way. They have mobilized college campuses. They have been able to enact historic policy change with civil rights to to liberation from, from economic struggles with like the with the don’t bail out Wall Street movement in 2000s to, you know, playing A huge part and the resistance against the Vietnam War, when we looked at history, I think we can also look to the future. There is so many groups of youth led climate justice leaders doing incredible things, mobilizing young people in every context in this country.

And I would, I would advocate that we can’t do it alone as young people, and we need intergenerational support, and I think that’s what we’re building as a movement right now, as a youth led climate justice movement, I think that we can build us out of this moment in time when we address issues as intersectional at zero hour, we’re building out a program to train young people, to train other people in their communities, because we know that site fights are only going to increase with The expansion of muscle fuels, the expansion of industrialized corporations taking over public lands. We know that there is a long and hard fight ahead that we may not even know the true impacts, but I think that young people have this innovation.

They have a drive. They have the ability to connect with people, and also the energy and solutions that are just not being tapped into. And I think if you’re a young person listening to this, if you’re in high school, if you’re in college, get involved, because truly, as institutions, universities, hold so much power. And when we look to history, when we hold our institutions accountable, we actually hold a larger group of leaders accountable. And as we move through these fights, not just site fights, but the national fight for liberation from these, from not just climate injustice, but injustice as a whole, youth are going to play a huge role In building bases and building power and mobilizing people to take on these fights. So the answer is not, not a pretty one, but we’re going to need help.

We’re going to need support. We’re going to need everyone involved in this fight that it cannot just be used. But some people right now are mobilizing in ways that I haven’t seen happen in a while. And I think it’s really beautiful to know that even when we look to the encampments or just recent history of youth coming together and building power, truly. Anything is possible when we can band together as a community.

Lots of work ahead. Thank you, Amelia, so much for being on the show. Enjoyed having the conversation and really congratulate you on the amazing work that you’ve done thus far, and look forward to collaborating with you going forward, and please tell our listeners where they can find you and and how can that? How can they help you to continue the work that you’re doing down there in Arkansas and in other places as well?

Yeah, absolutely. So thank you so much for having that. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you about the work that we’re up to, but you can find me on Instagram and the work I this is your hour on Instagram and other social media platforms with the same name, and then you can find my work and what I’ve been up to at Amelia southern on Instagram. And we don’t need to just tell these stories and acknowledge the truth of what we’re up against, but also we need to support and work with youth leaders through this fight. So get involved with us and support us in the way that you can.

Okay, well, amen all that. So thank everybody for listening. And yeah, check out Amelia and all the social channels that you mentioned and the Zero Hour, and continue to support those groups that are doing tremendous work in challenging circumstances. So we all need to get involved. So everybody go out there and do something today. That’s the motto to learn more about our work at A Climate Change, and how you can help us reach our goal planting 30,000 trees in the Amazon this year. Visit aclimatechange.com. Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts? If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. See you next time.