Editor’s Note: Over the past year, Fresh Energy has partnered with Change Narrative founder Jothsna Harris to help our staff explore and articulate their personal climate stories through guided workshops and reflective writing exercises. The following post is the first in a series in which Fresh Energy staff share their individual climate stories, providing an intimate, personal look into our staff’s diverse experiences, passions, and connections to place that shape our dedication to building a carbon-free economy that works for all Minnesotans. Janiece wrote this in December 2024. –Isak Kvam
The place is my Grandma Laura’s house in Carson, Mississippi, the place where my dad Alvin and his siblings grew up in Jim Crow South. The air is hot, it’s always hot. The red clay dirt blows around you while you walk, making you a little dusty as you leave a trail. There are woods with swamps deep in them that surround her small home, old chicken coop, pig pen, and fruit trees that remain long after my family farmed them for a living, feeding our family and my future.
Coming here as a child I learned that there were different environments, different than what I was used to in Minnesota. Those different environments were natural, social, and political, and based on where you live and what you look like. Your relationship with nature may be different than your friends’ or your relatives’. Why is that? This wondering would become a guiding light for me as I explored what the environment meant to me.
I explored my own relationship to nature, and that led me to understand the power of my voice. A time when my voice felt powerful was the one and only time I led a rally for environmental justice.
It was a sunny and windy day in the spring of 2017 when I and comrades in the movement to shut down Northern Metals gathered to march across the Lowry Bridge over the Mississippi River toward the facility that had been found to be spewing tiny flakes of heavy metals into the air and water of North and Northeast Minneapolis.
I held the megaphone as community members held signs and carried banners calling for the end of environmental racism, for the health and safety of our communities and the Mississippi River. I felt the power of community activated by the injustice they were experiencing, and I felt my voice amplifying those rallying cries for justice.
I felt powerful but not because I held the megaphone; in fact, having the megaphone made me realize leading the rally is not what made me powerful. I learned that there are many roles in the movement, and rally leader isn’t the one for me. That is a full role, let me say! But it was in amplifying the issues and cocreating space for all that day to be powerful in taking action.
It helped me know that there are many ways to be a part of the movement, that you can connect with many people and make change. To know that there is so much worth fighting for, because there are many experiences that will change you.
I experience climate change when I see a bug in the garden that I’ve never seen before. I experience climate change when the algae blooms on Balsam Lake, where my family has spent time the last few years, seem to come earlier than before. I experience climate change when in 2021 it seemed like a good idea to wear a face mask outside, not just because of a global pandemic of COVID-19 — which is a consequence of climate change, too — but because the air quality was so bad from the smoky haze of wildfires in Minnesota, the western U.S., and Canada. Something I had never experienced before.
I knew long ago that the media, and even some environmental spaces, talked about climate change like it was something that would affect someone, somewhere far away, sometime far from now. This is untrue. A tactic to delay, distract, and discredit what was already happening and what was to come. I knew I needed to know this now, for every possible future is at stake.
When I think of the future, what I hope I see are my babies — not such babies anymore, but still my smiling, giggling, curious and funny beautiful babies picking the cherry tomatoes in the garden for a quick bite as they run by, or checking out the flowers blooming, maybe some that we’ve never seen before. Breathing the air that is ok, not an air quality alert from smoky haze to be aware of today.
I’ll try not to turn on the news in that moment, because I’ll know somewhere, someone else won’t have that moment of peace, and it’ll make my heart ache.
But I will be hopeful that there is always something that I can do to reach environmental justice, and that I am teaching my family that we are nature, that we have a relationship and a role, and we must take care to find out what that is for ourselves, and know that they may change throughout your life like seasons, showing us that there is a time for everything.
What is the season now? Time to prepare for a long but perhaps warm winter?
