Gab Mejia from Archipelago mundo on climate and class j… — Transcript

Hi, my name is Gab Mejia.

He or they, and I'm a queer Filipino photographer, multi-disciplinary artist.

And a co-leader of Archipelago Mundo, which is a Filipino collective and movement of different youth groups, indigenous leaders, local artists, and frontline communities who are forwarding culture and creativity as a solution to the climate crisis that we are collectively experiencing.

One of the issues I realized is that there's really this widening gap that exists in our social media platforms and educational systems in schools, in classrooms, especially within marginalized communities and the public sector.

There's really no existing space to be able to connect and contextualize your relationships of our natural heritage with the cultural knowledge here in the different regions of the Philippines.

And one of the movements that we did with the different youth leaders, with the different climate youth groups, we created the Philippine Youth Atlas, which is a youth-led, creative-based educational program that aims to document and preserve the Filipino ecology, livelihood, and culture through the lens of young Filipinos from indigenous and frontline communities tackling the climate crisis.

With this program, we engage with over 700 indigenous and frontline communities from survivors of super typhoons, to young farmers and advocates creating regenerative agriculture and space rules, turtle patrollers, weavers, forest guardians, and indigenous leaders using oral traditions to connect deeply with the lands and islands, which has been destroyed by the impacts of centuries of colonization and rapid industrialization.

In the Philippines, we're an archipelago, so we have about 7,600 islands, which is culturally and environmentally diverse with Archipelago Mundo, our vision is to really see the world as an archipelago, you know, how continents are just bigger islands that is connected to this fabric woven by the ocean.

We traveled all across the Philippines for the past two years working with the Philippine Youth Atlas to be able to constellate and connect all these different youth groups and advocacies.

You know, in their own self-determined ways to be able to represent and share and amplify their own local climate solution to each other, we created Bista ng Kapuluan or Archipelago Festival and Convention, where we gathered about 80 youth leaders and about 200, 300 participants convened together at the Children's Museum in the Philippines to be able to voice and to share either their solutions, their issues, their problems and woes that they're experiencing in their region.

At the same breath, this festival was a chance to celebrate this diverse culture and identities that each of the communities take pride in. This festival is really a culmination of the Philippine Youth Atlas for an upcoming vote called Kapuluan, which is translated to Archipelago in Filipino.

And this educational book will be co-authored by the 700 indigenous and local youth leaders, along with their elders and contributors from local artists to be able to share about ancestral knowledge, their culture, ecology, and how it's all interconnected. Our method and the heart and core of Archipelago Mundo is really on a co-creational process.

We had participatory photography workshops where the participants and youths were given cameras to be able to self-document and self-represent their ecology, their community, and what their culture is. We had a counter mapping workshop, which is sort of an emotional and cultural mapping program where the youth of the region were convened together in a shared space to be able to share which parts of their lands or their place and their homes have issues like land grabbing, where they feel safe, where they feel cared for, where they feel celebrated, certain rituals or festivals, and also deeply personal intimate experience where they feel the impacts of climate change.

One of the the testaments or one of the the projects defining projects of Archipelago Mundo is how we can create an interconnected inter-regional ways where we would be able to actually share knowledge to each other, celebrate the the the cultures that we have and raise awareness about the climate and the environment through the perspectives of young people who are being silenced or often ignored in global policy making processes and conventions.

And especially to to to really give a space for people to feel safe, you know, after being communities being displaced, ancestral lands being taken, super typhoons ravaging whole cities and communities, and the sea level rise that the uncertainty is unfolding.

This is the harsh reality that many Filipinos continue to face amid the climate crisis. This is not just in the Philippines, but in many other islands and regions across the world.

Filipinos and other archipelagos such as Indonesia, Fiji, Vanuatu, and Puerto Rico are carrying this shared struggle together. Most times, a lot of conflicts around the world are due to this fighting over natural resources such as water, land, oil, critical minerals for grid, for greed and profit.

These conflicts are really deeply rooted in inequalities and impacts of colonization and environmental environmental degradation, leaving vulnerable communities to continue to struggle to survive. There is no climate justice without human rights.

And climate justice is not just about reducing carbon emissions or protecting ecosystems, but it's about ensuring that all people from women to children, indigenous people, and marginalized communities should have access to public spaces, clean air, safe water, regenerative lands, and a livable environment.

And climate justice holds this power to acknowledge that we are the ones being affected by the climate crisis disproportionately, and at the same time, the ones least responsible for the problem caused by fossil fuel companies and extractive industries, usually coming from the global north or oligarchies. I hope, I guess for the international communities, especially those who have the privilege and are privileged in power, to first acknowledge this privilege and acknowledge the truth that we are living in a disproportionate reality amid climate change.