When future generations look back at our time, will they be filled with awe at how we came together to transform our way of life to be regenerative? Or will they look back with confusion and anger, wondering how we knew about the problem but did not address it? This question fuels me.
I long for a world where we all belong. Where human beings feel our inherent belonging with the land, where the land and all the creatures feel that they can belong safely in their homes. Belonging and connection are the fertile nutrients we need to grow sustainable and regenerative land-use and climate policies. I am from the United States, a complicated nation that has both given freedom and prosperity to my family and ripped apart the very fabric of people’s realities with centuries of violence, colonization and racism. We cannot address the climate crisis without also addressing these deeper systemic roots of our disconnection and abuse of the land.
I have East Coast roots in North Carolina and West Coast fruits in the Bay Area of California. I am a currently a Peace Studies student at Naropa University in Colorado. As a community organizer, youth educator, artist, facilitator and activist I follow a passion for linking personal, interpersonal, and systemic change in the building of a radically just and beautiful world. I became active in the student fossil fuel divestment movement in 2013, co-founding Tufts Climate Action. As an organizer, I love to facilitate space that is productive and transformative, where people leave more inspired, connected and alive than when they started. I am also a youth trainer and mentor with Earth Guardians. A student of Joanna Macy, I am honoured to be a facilitator of the Work that Reconnects, a body of work aimed at enlivening our sense of agency to create change amidst systemic crisis. I am called right now to explore how to use dance, restorative justice and contemplative practices such as meditation and yoga to decolonize my own being and support others to bring a critical lens to our movements. I am also pursuing a path of being a coach for change-makers and youth. As a 2016 recipient of the Goddard Prize, I am working to ignite a “Soil for Life” movement for soil-based carbon sequestration with small-scale farmers in Colorado and beyond. While in Morocco, I am delighted to be a youth delegate with SustainUS, a youth-led climate justice group.
I believe that we all have gifts to contribute to the world and that our collective legacy can be one of beauty and resilience if we give what we have in service to all life. Young people today are at the leading edge of changing our culture and worldview so that we can change the systems that govern our lives. When future generations look back, I hope they see COP22 and the Global Landscapes Forum in Marrakesh as an important moment where the watersheds of our lives came together and formed new alliances to protect the water, earth, climate and people of this earth.
Daniel Jubelirer can be reached at daniel.jubelirer@sustainus.org
