This fall Global Justice Ecology Project is teaming up with Global Exchange, Speak Out and the Mobilization for Climate Justice for a fall New Voices on Climate Change tour in the U.S. to enable our New Voices speakers to communicate directly with U.S. audiences about their experiences both with the impacts of climate change and with real, local solutions to the climate crisis.

These tours will allow us to not only inform audiences, but to mobilize people to join the U.S. movement for climate justice.   Each leg of the tour includes a media outreach strategy to link up our New Voices speakers with regional radio and print media.   This will allow these voices to reach people far beyond those who actually attend the event.

Each tour will focus on one New Voices speaker, as described below:

Anna Pinto is the Secretary and Programme Director of CORE (Centre for Organisation, Research and Education), an indigenous peoples’ policy research and advocacy organisation based in the North East of India.  She has been an active member of the Indian Women’s Movement for over two decades.

Anna  will speak about the intersection between climate change, gender issues and indigenous rights.  She will tour the northeast U.S. in September to help mobilize participation in actions and events that will take place in Pittsburgh during meetings of the G-20.  While the leaders of the twenty richest countries meet about the financial and climate crises, activists representing diverse movements will convene in Pittsburgh to expose the common root causes of these two crises and the climate crisis, while linking them to war and to the other crises we face: including food, water and biodiversity.

For more on Anna, click here

Jihan Gearon, is Diné (Navajo) and African American. She is Tódích’ií’nii (Bitter Water) clan, and her maternal grandfather is Tl’ashchí’í (Red Bottom People) clan.   Jihan is the Native Energy Organizer at Indigenous Environmental Network, on the Steering Committee of the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative and the Coordinating Committee of Grassroots Global Justice.

Jihan will speak about the impacts of climate change and fossil fuels on poor communities and communities of color in the U.S.; and about the intersection between the financial and climate crises and the links with the struggle for environmental justice in the U.S.  She will speak in the industrial Midwest on a tour beginning in Pittsburgh during the G-20 and ending in Detroit one week later.

For more on Jihan, click here

Faith Gemmill is a Pit River/ Wintu and Neets’aii Gwich’in Athabascan from Arctic Village, Alaska,  and is an organizer for REDOIL (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands).   Faith worked on behalf of the Gwich’in Nation for over ten years as a representative, public spokesperson and Steering Committee staff member to address human health and cultural impacts of proposed oil development, as well as protection of the birthplace and nursery of the Porcupine Caribou Herd, located in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She is now a public spokesperson, press and tribal liaison and human rights advocate with the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC).

Faith will tour mountaintop removal coal mining country in the Appalachians to build bridges between communities suffering from coal mining and oil extraction.

For more on Faith, click here

Camila Moreno is a lawyer and researcher with Terra de Direitos, a Brazilian NGO working on peasant and indigenous land rights.  She has worked for years in support of the struggles of indigenous and peasant movements in Brazil.

Camila will speak about the links between deforestation and climate change and the impacts on forest dependent indigenous communities, as well as the impacts of monoculture tree plantations (including GE tree plantations) developed for the production of agrofuels.  She and I will tour the southeast U.S. in November to speak to communities where genetically engineered eucalyptus tree plantations have been proposed for the manufacture of cellulosic ethanol.

For more on Camila, click here:

For more information, or to book a tour date, contact Hallie Boas, New Voices on Climate Change Coordinator, at ha****@gj******.local