Full Transcript

INTRO 

This is The Climate Story Project— where we share real stories about how climate change is shaping our lives. Stories that connect us. Stories that move us to act. This is a project of the New York Climate Exchange, a non-profit organization that’s accelerating climate solutions through a unique partnership model and climate campus on Governors Island. In each episode, you’ll hear voices from different places and walks of life in our growing archive of personal climate stories, so that we can remember, reflect, and respond together.

The story you’re about to hear is from Isabel Avina. Isabel is a Youth Leadership Program Manager at Solar One, a partner of the New York Climate Exchange.

ISABEL

It's really hard to pinpoint my first memories of starting to care about climate change.

My grandma was the most frugal woman in the world and she would keep everything like plastic bags and egg cartons and try to reuse all of the materials she had because she grew up extremely poor. She lived on an island, Lopez Island in the San Juans in Washington, and water was really scarce there. Whenever I would go visit her in the summertime, I remember her timing my showers, giving me one minute for my shower, and we kept a bucket in the sink whenever we did dishes and just kind of washed all the dishes with this one bucket of water. She didn't need to do these things, but she chose to because she had a love of the environment that she was around and I think I sort of inherited a lot of those values from her. 

I also inherited those values from my parents. My mom was an outdoor educator and went to ranger school and like was very passionate about showing me the natural world around me. I've talked to my mom a lot about the climate crisis and she's apologized many times to me for like the state of the world her generation has handed to me. I was really angry as a teenager with her and with people her age. 

I grew up in New York City, I witnessed many different environmental justice issues come to life before my eyes, especially being the age that I am. I'm 29 and so I feel like people around my age were some of the first to notice the real day to day impacts of climate change. If they were paying attention, we kind of started to notice them in like middle and high school.

Knowing that I wanted to work in the environmental field in middle school, I was really passionate about it up until I started college and I studied environmental studies. And I experienced like an extreme disillusionment with climate and environmental issues while I was in college. I entered this like extreme depression where I was just like in classes every day being inundated with all of this really scary doom and gloom information about how the world is ending. And I left college feeling like there was nothing I could do. I stayed in the field because that's what my degree was in, and I've come in and out of disillusionment with the field over time. But I'm glad that I've stayed true to it because as we know, it is only getting worse. 

I've been battling my mental health through my neurodivergence and also through this eyes wide open kind of experience with the world and with climate change. Being on the spectrum, having sensory processing issues, I feel so much more at peace when I'm in green spaces, when I'm around trees and nature. And I can literally feel my mental health improving when I'm able to access those public green spaces. So the visceral sensory experience for me of being able to access the trees and the woods and things like that is like crucial to my health. Mental health is something that my students always talk to me about every year. People who are thinking about this topic tend to have mental health issues.

I've been a climate educator for the last 10 years. In my role at Solar One, I facilitate the Youth Advisory Council, which is a group of seven high school age climate organizers, all from New York. I want to empower my students to see the world around them in truth and in honesty, and give them the skills to think critically, talk to their peers, care about their communities, care about the world around them, and hope that they decide that they feel like inspired enough to do something about it. 

We talk a lot about how climate change is an intersectional issue and for many young people, climate change can be a great starting point for their political education. We talk about capitalism, and colonization, and those being the root causes of climate change. And then how those issues also connect to all the other systemic issues that we notice in this world that they've been handed. I really try to persuade my students to see the bigger picture with the goal of trying to alleviate some of that climate guilt that I think especially younger generations are feeling these days. And then in turn is trying to alleviate some of like the mental health issues that they're experiencing, just by being forced to live in the society they were handed. 

I was speaking to someone yesterday who told me. In their work in climate, they try to bring their humanity, not their position. And I think like working in climate and working with people every day, I have to recognize that I am a whole human and I'm interacting with whole humans. So in those interactions, I need to see like the world in which people come from. Every person is a world in and of themselves, and I am too. I'm queer and I'm on the autism spectrum and I'm non-binary. Like, I come with all these different parts about myself that influence everything that I do every day. And I feel honored to be able to have real conversations with people. And I see climate as a tool for us to gather together and something to really organize and create change around, but it’s also a way to form community and relationships.

OUTRO 

This story is part of The Climate Story Project. To find more stories and learn more about The New York Climate Exchange, visit nyclimateexchange.org and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. This episode was produced by Kylie Miller. Thanks for listening.