Episode 1 - Redefining Environmentalism
Season 1, Episode 1 - Redefining Environmentalism with Chúk Odenigbo
About this Episode
How do we redefine environmentalism so that it includes everyone? How do we embed justice and belonging into our relationship to the natural world? How can we include cities and modernity in our definition of nature? What is the role of our ancestors in environmentalism and activism?
These questions are explored in a conversation between Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker and Chúk Odenigbo, a Founding Director of Future Ancestors. Chúk is an expert in climate justice, oceans, anti-racism, public health, and decolonization.
This beautiful conversation about big ideas and complex intersections delves into using one’s power and influence to dismantle oppressive systems, while planting seeds that grow a vibrant, fair way of life.
Show Notes
Speaking of Nature by Robin Wall Kimmerer - Orion Magazine
Study links biodiversity and language loss - BBC
The Forces of Nature - by Chúk Odenigbo (free book)
Ocean Bridge Diaries - Canadian Geographic
Future Ancestors: Chúk Odenigbo
Tenth anniversary changemaker of the month: Chúk Odenigbo - The Starfish
Voices of Change: Twelve Visions for How to Change the Climate Crisis (book)
World Circular Economy Forum: Circularity at Home (video)
Transcript
Alice Irene Whittaker (intro): Welcome to Reseed, a podcast about repairing our relationship to nature. Reseed tells the stories of a RE generation: the people embracing repair, redesign, reuse, and reduction. The people who are uprooting the extractive status quo and rooting the future in justice, wellbeing, resilience, and care. This is a podcast for those of us who are re-imagining our relationship to the natural world and to each other. I am Alice Irene Whittaker, the host of Reseed. Together, let's plant the seeds that transform us from being takers to caretakers.
Alice Irene: Welcome to the first episode of Reseed. Thank you for being here. Today I speak with Chúk Odenigbo, Founding Director of Future Ancestors, and expert on climate justice, oceans, anti-racism, public health, and decolonization. Together, we talk about reading books under trees as children, and how health, culture, and climate intersect. We talk about our oceans, our ancestors, and really about redefining who belongs in the environmental movement.
Chúk Odenigbo: Where do you hold power? Where do you hold strength? Where do you hold influence? And what can you do to change those legacies and change those power structures? And ideally dismantle them, if you're able to. And in doing all of that, you're doing your part.
Alice Irene: As this is episode one, I'll introduce the podcast and myself, and then we'll begin our conversation. Reseed is a podcast about people who are repairing our relationship with nature and creating a world rooted in justice, wellbeing, and care. Guests may be farmers, builders, designers, artists, makers, or writers. Each episode we'll delve into their stories and how they meet the grief, fear, and despair of our moment with heartfelt handmade solutions.
Alice Irene: A bit about me. I am a writer and mother of three. I'm an environmental communications leader and storyteller. Over 10 years ago, I founded and led Mother Nature Partnership, an organization that worked to improve access with marginalized women and girls while also reducing waste. I've had the privilege to be a communicator for organizations focused on gender equality, transformative systemic change, environmental action, and redesigning the economy. Three years ago, I was exhausted and depleted living a commuter life outside a big city. And I decided to make the leap to move to a cabin in the woods where I now live with my family. The intersection of gender justice and environmental care is where I root my life's work.
Alice Irene: In my writing, I've spent the past few years working on a book about regeneration care and the circular economy. My research has led me to interview farmers designers, repair cafe leaders, builders, and writers in their barns, eco homes, studios, and fashion runways. When I feel defeated by ecological breakdown, their stories have moved me to tears and heartened me, and I now feel moved to share their stories here on Reseed.
Alice Irene: So, with that introduction, let's now have our first conversation of many together. Chúk is proudly Franco-Albertan, with a passion for interactions between culture, health, and the environment. Outside of his work with Future Ancestors, he is the Co-Founder of The Poison and the Apple, a bilingual nonprofit that seeks to diversify outdoor spaces and make nature truly for all. He is completing his PhD in medical geography. Chúk says he is your typical urbanite in love with technology and fashion all the while retaining a connection with nature and integrating green and blue spaces into his everyday. His vision is to reconnect humanity with nature in a way that accommodates modernity sparking that green revolution without decimation of the present. Chúk is a contributing author to the book, Voices of Change: Twelve Visions for How to Solve the Climate Crisis. He's been celebrated on numerous Top 30 Under 30 lists, and you'll soon hear why. I hope you have a hot tea or a glass of wine, and you're able to slow down and listen wherever you are. Here is my conversation with Chúk.
Alice Irene: Allo, Chúk, how are you?
Chúk: I’m good, how are you?
Alice Irene: I'm good. It's so nice to see you. And I feel like I might end up laughing a lot in this interview.
Chúk: I don't know why that is. I'm such a serious person.
Alice Irene: You bring so much joy. I've only known you briefly - for the last couple of months. To anyone listening, Chúk and I met at the World Circular Economy Forum, and I had the pleasure of moderating a session together. He suggested - I thought jokingly - that we would wear bathrobes in our televised live session in front of thousands of people. And it was not a joke. And I dressed up in my fanciest secondhand dress and Chúk wore a bathrobe and pulled it off.
Chúk:I just want the audience to know it was a Yukata from Japan. It was the moment to wear it. It was this beautiful long flowing black garment. Environmentalism, but make it sexy.
Alice Irene: There you go. That's how you have to bring people into the movement, right?
Chúk: Absolutely.
Alice Irene: I so appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. First, I wanted to start looking backwards, asking you about your childhood and what your relationship was like with the natural world when you were in.
Chúk: Ooh, deep question. I will say, uh, I have always been drawn towards green spaces and nature. Always, always, always, but I have never been a very active kid. As far as I can remember, I like moving slowly. I liked relaxing. I elected to do activities that did not require a lot of physical effort. I didn't like doing a lot of strenuous activities. So my most vivid images of when I was most content or when I'm sitting down underneath a tree reading a massive book, and every time I was in the nature space, I'd always have a book with me. I'd set out to find a little niche, a little corner, settle myself down, make myself comfortable, open up the book, crack it open and quite literally get lost in the world of adventures and words and magic and fairytale.
Alice Irene: You really brought me into a world there. I can feel it and see it. And I would think that you were just speaking to your audience with reading a book under a tree, because those are basically my two favorite things on this planet, trees and books. But I did read it online as well. So I know it's true. I understand that you're passionate about intersections in particular around health and the environment and culture. I'd love to hear more about this. How does culture play into health in the environment and how do they all intertwine?
Chúk: I've always had the love of nature. I'm always, always, always, but it was only when I started getting older that I really sort of started feeling distanced from nature, this pull away from the environment as if the environment was not for me. As if nature was not for me.
Chúk: This was based around multiple things. I remember very distinctly when I was in, when I was a tween. So I was like 11, 12 ish. The high school was great, but the school I was going through at the time was like, we're going to organize a camping trip, and who wants to go? And I had never been camping. So I was like, Ooh. And you had to obviously get your parents' permission. So I go home, I ask my parents, I'm like, “Hey, I want to get permission to go.” And my parents were like, “No, if you wanted you to be sleeping under the stars and sleeping on the ground, we would’ve left you in a village in Africa. Why would you try and do that to yourself? Camping's not for us. That's a white person thing.” I had moments like that. And then, as I got older and reached university, my attraction for nature turned into an intellectual curiosity. So I ended up majoring in environmental science in my undergrad as one of my degrees.
Chúk: My other degree was biology. And I find it truly fascinating, right? Environmental science is one of those topics that's covered by everything. I had to take a religion course and talk about the impacts that religion has on the environment. I had to take policy courses. I had to take a course in wild law, which is this idea of giving nature the same rights as human beings. And so allowing a river to be able to sue a company, if a company pollutes the river. All of these really interesting concepts and these variables. It really just highlighted to me just how fascinating, truly integrated nature is with every single thing that we do, because I basically had to take a course in every department. There was a business and sustainability course, there was a philosophy and environment course, and a moral philosophy course, and sociology. I had to get this full spectrum of skills because of the major I picked, and I thought that was absolutely fascinating. Absolutely interesting.
Chúk: Even though I was really in environmental science and loving learning once again, I still thought, “Oh, but being out there in nature is not really for me. The environmental movement is not for me.” And the reason why I didn't think the environmental movement was for me, even though I love nature and I was so intellectually stimulated by it, was the custom messaging at the time. And it's messaging that we still see today, but a little bit less. It was very white. And not white in the sense of just mainly white faces, but white in the sense of trying to erase every other way of being. Because for listeners who may not be aware, whiteness is not a cultural identity. You can be culturally British, you can be culturally Scottish, you can be culturally from Saskatchewan. You're not culturally white. Whiteness is a consolidation of power seeking to erase other identities as it absorbs people into whiteness.
Chúk:When you look at a lot of predominant messaging from that time period, a lot of things like overpopulation are depicted as the causes of environmental issues. When in reality, that is inherently racist actually, because when they talk about overpopulation, they never talk about Canada or the USA. No, no, no, no, no. Or Europe. They're talking about Africa, they're talking about South America, they're talking about parts of Asia. But then once again, the carbon footprint of the people in each of these quote-unquote overpopulated countries - they are doing nothing to the climate. Absolutely not. I need to look at the carbon footprint of one person up in here, up here in Canada, or down in the States or across the pond in Europe. If we all lived like we are living here, the planet would already be dead. So it's clearly not overpopulation. So you had messaging like that, that didn't sit right with me at that time period. But I didn't have the words to articulate it. And it felt like that messaging was subtly targeting me, you know, in a negative way. That cannot be a slogan or a message you've got, you know, Greenpeace and the WWF, trying to like push for people to almost go backwards in time. In terms of, like, let go of a couple of luxuries and, you know, live in a certain way and follow a certain lifestyle, which once again is not accessible to everyone financially or geographically.
Chúk: But in addition to all of that, even when it is accessible to people, it ignores the fact that it's stealing knowledge from other cultures, without labeling and naming those cultures that it's learning from. It is once again erasing history. It's harmful for those cultures. It's, you know, colonizing that knowledge in the sense that we're not attributing that credit to the people who created that knowledge. But in addition to all of that, it is also ignoring that people get certain groups of people who are inherently harmed by some of those messages. So for example, going back to my parents not letting me go camping. Black people are seen as almost less evolved in terms of our humanity, and as a method of trying to cope with that, and to sort of prove to the world that we're human, that we're civilized, we tend to be very highly urbanized. And so in Canada, for example, 94% of black people live in highly urban centers, 94%. So Black people are the most urbanized population in Canada, and we are also the least likely to be found in green spaces. And some messaging that's like, “Oh, go do more camping, go do more hiking, connect with nature in that very specific way,” is ignorant.
Chúk: So back to this story. So I wasn't involved in the random movement because I didn't think it was for me. And they wouldn't go into nature because I didn't think that was for me. And then in third year university, I did a course on sustainability and the professor was very avant-garde. This was one of those very hippy profs, for lack of better wording. And so he was like, “I want you to change the world”. At the time, I was modeling. I have a love of fashion. Alice Irene and I were just chatting about this love of fashion right before we started the recording. And at that time I was modeling and I wanted to bring that into my love of nature. And also it's like, you know what, let me try and do something interesting. Let me try to do something authentic to me, because why not? And so I got a bunch of my model friends - and I double checked municipal bylaws first, by the way, side note - and we went to the public park in the morning and we were all undressed and we all had the computers and books and things with us.
Chúk:And had a photographer take pictures of us, and I call it My Green Dream. This idea of reconnecting humanity with nature without decimating the present, without losing modernity, because this is now the best time to be a person of color. Because for the last couple of centuries, you know, people of color have been persecuted for XYZ reasons. And so while nothing is perfect today, it is still much better than it was yesterday. And so I want to avoid romanticizing the past in my environmentalism, which is something that you don't see a lot of. What you hear is, “Oh, it's like America is back in the good old days. The kids were able to just walk to school and free play in nature.” And it's like, no, white boys were able to do that. White girls were told you're not allowed to run around and play. And kids of color were told they were not allowed to run and play. Well, we're scared of being lynched out in nature playing. So really, I don't like romanticizing the past. That was not for people like me.
Alice Irene: And then it’s erasing so many people's experiences, right?
Chúk: Yes, exactly. Absolutely. And so I wanted to value the present, but look to the future as like, we need to reconnect humanity with nature. And so it does an Adam and Eve style photo shoot. That whole idea of like Adam and Eve, one with nature naked in the garden of Eden, but with computers and books and things that we consider modern, And so then I sent a collage of the photos to the United Nations, because they were having the Rio 20 conference in Brazil that year. So this was 2012 and the United Nations published naked photos of me on their website.
Alice Irene: How many people can say that!
Chúk: Right. When I look back on it, I'm just like, my God.
Alice Irene: But are the photos still available? That's the question.
Chúk: The website was taken down because it was just a website for the conference. So the photos are available, but other places. I can send them to you potentially?
Alice Irene: So don't look for the link in the show notes is what you're saying.
Chúk: Don't worry, if I ever get into politics, I'm sure they would surface again.
Alice Irene: Oh, I think so.
Chúk: What was really cool is like, obviously I got an A on that project, but then the other piece which was really exciting was that I was named one of the top twenty-five environmentalists under 25 in Canada. And that hit me really hard, because until then it never occurred to me that there were other people that thought like me and other people that would resonate with my messaging. And that my voice was necessary in this. A voice saying something different, other than, “Have less babies and don't fly”, right? That surprised me. It also empowered me, because that was that motivation, that was the clincher that brought me into the movement, realizing that I'm not the only one who doesn't feel comfortable with the current messaging out there. And that I can provide an alternative messaging. That I can reach people who the mainstream messaging is not reaching.
Chúk: So that cumulates into the intersectionality piece that you're talking about. On one level, nature and environment is integrated into everything. Yet we, as a society, have tried to silo it out, right? Nature is important for human health. Nature is a key component of learning, right? We need to be able to learn what it means to be in our environment, you know, in sort of every facet of life. You know, food. So you've got all of these different elements of needs, that are being siloed out to a sense that we almost feel like, “Oh yes, no nature. That is these people's business. I work in XYZ and I have nothing to do with the environment.” And that's actually not true. I mean, fashion and environment are intimately linked. Everything and the environment are intimately linked. And then the other piece of it is we, as human beings, are incredibly complicated in terms of our identities and the societies we've structured around us, and we place expectations on those identities. So we often in Canada use the term racialized and marginalized people. In the US, they use the term BIPOC. In the UK, they have a different term. We tend to use racialized and marginalized, because it recognizes that you don't racialize yourself, but society gives you a race, and then you deal with the implications of what the racist society has given to you.
Chúk: You are marginalized for a certain aspect of your identity that, most of the time, you probably cannot change. And we talk about socialization, right? So, I identify as male. But I also say to people that I am socialized as male, which means that the blind spots that men have, I have to actively work to overcome, if I recognize it, because sometimes I won't recognize it, because I’ve been socialized in that manner. And so that socialization also creates the barriers that sometimes I face as a man where it's like, oh, boys don't do this. Men don't do that. Right. So I talk about that. I talk about normalization - things about my identity that are normalized, that I don't think about. Society calls them normal, you know, being cisgender, not being disabled. That's considered so normal, that I forget about those elements of my identity and my experience in this world, because if I were disabled or if I were transgender, my entire life experience would be incredibly different because that's not normalized in our society.
Chúk: All of these intersections, in such interesting and diverse ways. And because it's so societaly based, this is why those words are important. Racialized, marginalized, socialized, normalized. Because it's so society based, it means they're also based on the land. Because our society is intimately tied to the lands that they are on. And so our relationship with the environment is also incredibly influenced by society. And the society is very strongly influenced by the environment that surrounds us, in the lands that we are on. And so it's incredibly complicated. And mainstream environmental efforts try to sort of simplify and ignore these elements, and in doing so, they inherently harm people. They also ensure that the movement will not be successful, because if your movement is harming people, there's also an element of it which will never actually truly ever succeed.
Alice Irene: Right. And it tells people, you know, “Your experience of being marginalized and being racialized is not important enough to be a part of this environmental movement”. This other environmental issue or climate change or whatever aspect we're looking at is more urgent than the issues you face on a daily basis, as someone that is not normalized or that is racialized or marginalized by our society.
Chúk: Exactly. You know, learning about the oceans, we went to Haida Gwaii to learn about the oceans from the Haida people. This is a culture that's inherently centered around the ocean. And so it's a nice way to integrate traditional ecological knowledge into what most of us are coming with, which is scientific understanding and knowledge of the ocean. And I’m learning about the ocean and growing in my knowledge and looking for ways to be an ocean advocate, right. So really sort of doing environmental work. I remember I was chatting with one of my colleagues there, who is also a Francophone, and white, and we were both chatting. And this lady who's driving the bus turns to me while driving this bus and say, “Speak English”. When we’re in Canada, but what really hits me with that is a) I was not the first person to speak French, but the only Black person to speak French. And so she had somehow outwardly ignored all the white folk speaking French, until I came and used my voice. And then when I came and used my voice, she felt brave enough to talk to me, to then tell me to go back to wherever I come from. You know, that's just one experience.
Chúk:I mean, one of my other sort of major experiences was that I used to work in the oil and gas sector in Alberta, as an environmental assessment scientist, where I'd go to oil and gas wells that have been drilled, and I’d do environmental site assessments. Assessment is different from an environmental impact. With the impact assessment, you do that before anything's happened to sort of evaluate what the land is like and how you can mitigate any inventory issues we've had. For the site assessment, you show up after everything's done to see what the damage has been and how you can reclaim that land. A lot of oil sites on private land, private farmland, all that fun stuff. So whenever I was supposed to go to one of these sites, that's on private farm land, my white boss would always come with me because he would be the person to go to people's doors and say, “Hi, we're here to evaluate the environmental assessment on the oil well that's on your property. I just wanted to let you know that it is a Black person during it. Please do not shoot him.”
Chúk: And, you know, not only was I the youngest person in this company, but I was also the only Black person. It stressed me out because I felt like I was a burden. I was the only one who had to have his boss almost babysit him to make sure that he wasn't being shot. You know, I worked 60 to 70 hours a week above the standard 40, to prove that it was worth having me on board despite the added burden that I bring of my Blackness. Or like in Haida Gwaii when my Blackness brought attention when I'm just trying to do ocean work. I don't get the option to put aside every other issue, social justice, racial justice, discrimination, whatever. I don't get the choice of putting aside all those other issues to focus on, because when I try and do that - and I've tried multiple times - somehow my race comes in as a barrier. My language comes in as a barrier. Something comes in and acts like a barrier for me being able to do that work.
Alice Irene: And you're taking on extra work, these additional burdens, and then being told, no, you should focus more on climate, and put your humanity at the door and we can care about that later.
Chúk: Right?
Alice Irene: And you mentioned something about this earlier, too, about how this movement to repair the relationship with the natural world - and to greet and meet, and hopefully avert these crises that we face - we can't move ahead without everyone repairing relationships to each other, as well as to the planet. Separating them out is, you know, leading us nowhere. We need to look at our relationships as a whole and the types of relationships we have. Something I'm really passionate about is care. So not segmenting out our care for the environment, which as you put it out is intricately connected to everything, but also care for each other. And community care.
Chúk: Siloing everything out and seeing us as individuals - some who are more than, some who are less than. And, you know, to even take it a step further, and just also help the listeners visualize this. We as human beings have a habit of personifying things, right? We, you know, you can name a pen, Bob, break it in front of someone, and someone will cry because like, oh, you killed Bob. It's one of our greatest strengths. And also, weirdly enough, one of our greatest weaknesses, is that ability to empathize with anything and everything, once we have humanized it. And so with nature, we've absolutely humanized nature, right? With nature, we use a lot of feminized terminology in English and in French to refer to the environment, right? It's always Mother Nature. It's always she and her pronouns. We’ve really feminized the environment, feminized the earth, we feminized nature. And so if we've done that, do we actually think it's in any way at all possible that a society that's struggling with gender will somehow miraculously be able to fully embrace and accept nature? When we are struggling to fully embrace and accept the people that we use to personify nature in a society - struggling to fully embrace Indigenous folk, struggling to fully respect Black folk - do we truly think we can get this exact same society to then respect the earth and fight for the earth, when we can’t respect and fight for the people who we have coded as to the people who we use to represent the earth?
Chúk: Eco-feminism states that the relationship between human beings and the environment should be like the same relationship that a mother has with their child. The mother is not the child. The child is not the mother, but the mother's wellbeing is very strongly dependent on the child. The child's wellbeing is very strongly dependent on the mother. And so it's a symbiotic relationship. And so the mother does not need to say, “I am you” to care about our child. In situations where parents do actually sort of try to equate themselves with their children, we see a lot of misery, because the children aren't allowed to be themselves. It's sort of almost reliving a life that the parents wish they had, or something along those lines. And that is inherently harmful.
Alice Irene: It exists for its own intrinsic value.
Chúk: Exactly, exactly.
Alice Irene: What you're saying resonates with me. In fact, that's part of the system too. Look down on women, use Brown and Black people in a system and exploit them to further that system. Like, it's not just a coincidence, it's actually part of the design. So that we’re disrespecting, de-valuing, and exploiting so much of our humanity, so many of our people, but then that allows this exploitive system to continue. It's part of the design.
Chúk: Absolutely. And so it's obviously difficult to undo because there's so many things involved in it, right? Like something that isn't often talked about, for example, it's linguistic justice. And so a lot of people who may be listening may be like, “Why is language important? I mean, it's much better if we all speak the same language, it’s easy to communicate”, stuff like that. But the thing about language is, as much as a tool of communication, it's great to have communication, but that's not just what language is.
Chúk: Language is a vehicle for culture. It's a vehicle for worldviews, and it's also a vehicle for knowledge production. What that effectively means is, when we only do things in one language and really produce knowledge in one language, and you only have some conversations in one language, we have automatically constricted and limited the scope of the conversation and our ability to come up with solutions that are interesting and integrative. So in the past, our societies were inherently multilingual. And so you had a lot of pidgins and creoles form. So a pidgin and a creole is basically when two languages meet, or four languages meet, and each language group learns certain words from the other language group, and mixes them in with their own words, to create a mutually intelligible language that they can use to communicate with one another, rather than one language dominating. This sustains communication while allowing each group to maintain that stuff called cultural and ethnic background. And also that worldview. What English did - and you know, I'm saying English because we're in Canada, but this obviously happened with French and Spanish and Portuguese and any of those languages where they came around and said, no, everyone must speak this language, we're going to force this language apart. So you have many countries - Canada included - where people were beaten, where people were killed, for speaking a language that wasn't the colonial language. And you're back to the linguistic piece, and the relationship with the environment.
Chúk: To use an example, there was this really interesting study done, and the study mentioned how, when we see things as animate, there's a part of our brain that lights up, that does not light up when you see something that's inanimate. And in English, when we were talking about trees, animals, and plants, we tend to use language in a way that devalues the environment, and promotes a certain worldview where human beings are above the environment, because we see human beings as animals and everything else as inanimate. I have recently been learning Michif, and one of the things that really stands out to me is the nature of a language that does not really use pronouns for I. Wild. So when you, you know, say a sentence in English, your sentence structure is subject-verb-object. Michif most of the time is object-verb-no subject. So the language automatically humbles me because I cannot talk about me.
Chúk: But then the other piece that's really interesting when it comes to talking about nature is the certain words have a pronoun, and the way the teacher described it, is it is whatever has a soul. So what's really fascinating is then the class was followed by a conversation about what does, and doesn't, have a soul. So everyone was kind of in agreement that trees and animals have souls. But what about the rocks? And it's like, well, I can just recall the teachings, the mountains, the Rockies have souls, but then that's when they can go to teaching differently to other people.But then someone else is like, my sash, because it is the language of the Métis and the Métis have a sash. So there's someone else who was like my sash, it has so much meaning and value for me that I think it has a soul.
Chúk: In this little description of different languages, we see just how each language takes such a different worldview. Each of these languages used in that discussion about nature, and the language itself, raises these questions, right?
Alice Irene: Two pieces on language stood out for me. One was a study I saw that mapped biodiversity and loss of language. And if you map the two over each other, places where language diversity goes down, often through colonization, you also see biodiversity going down, with this correlation between the two. The other one was Robin Wall Kimmerer, speaking really beautifully around the word kin and using the word kin for, I think she was using the example of geese. You know, when you see a flock of geese and talk about them as kin. That to me connects with what you were saying about the mother and child relationship. It's not saying we are the same and this animal only has value when it's the same as me, or has quote value, but you actually just can see it as separate, but related to you and part of your family.
Alice Irene: I have so many threads throughout what you've said. I want to pick up on one around outdoor spaces and belonging. I'm interested to hear more about what you're doing with engaging other young people in outdoor spaces and people that have been excluded from outdoor spaces. Can you tell me more about that and how a sense of belonging factors into that?
Chúk: Absolutely. People are more likely to care about nature and protect nature, if they feel a personal connection with the environment. There's so many health benefits that come with being in nature, but there are studies that demonstrate that kids who have unstructured time in nature are less likely to engage in acts of bullying. There's studies that demonstrate that people who are in a workplace, if they go outside to eat their lunch, they come back a lot less stressed and a lot more productive for the afternoon session. There are studies that show that communities that live by the ocean, are closest socially to one another because the ocean gives them this feeling of it, this feeling of awe and this feeling of being small and insignificant. And so they're more likely to be kinder to their fellow humans and form those social bonds. The problem then being that so many people don't have access to those benefits because nature has been used as a tool of harm to the community. And may still be used today as a tool of harm to that community.
Chúk: You couple that with the fact that we've also branded nature, right? We've branded what it means to be outside in nature. Not only are we branded the faces we see in nature, but also the activities that we're supposed to do in nature. So in 2016, I think it was 2016, Mountain Equipment Co-op, the largest outdoor retailer in Canada - the most multicultural country in the world - got called out by a Black hiker because she had never seen a person of color. Not a Black person, but she had never seen a person of color on MECs website, or in any of the documentaries or magazines that MEC releases. Never. And this isn't, you know, the late two thousands. This is, once again, the most multicultural country in the world. So that on its own is what we call a lack of a visible welcome centre - visible, welcome signs, the things that let people know that they're welcome without having to explicitly tell people that they are.
Chúk: But then you couple that with the activities that are promoted - you have to disconnect to go outdoors, which then has you lose an entire generation of young people because you've grown up with technology as part of our regular life. And so then the idea of disconnecting is something you do for holiday break. “I'm going to disconnect for two weeks”, which means you are integrating nature into your daily life, but you'll maybe go out once a year for two weeks in this idea that to really truly like be in nature, you have to go camping. You have to go hiking. If you go camping, for example, it’s not an easy thing to do, It's not intuitive. The equipment's expensive. And unless you did it as a child, you feel kind of dumb when you're trying to learn how to do it as an adult. And once again, the most multicultural country in the world, but we didn't all grow up with access to the same kind of skills, right?
Chúk: If your parents are coming in from Sudan, which is essentially a country surrounded by the Sahara desert in a desert country, what nature means to you is incredibly different than what nature is going to mean to someone else. So if your parents are coming from Sudan, how are they going to take you hiking? First of all, when are they going to have the time to cause then they're having to adapt to a new language, new culture, new societies, create social bonds, create links, all that fun stuff. So you're there. You're the child. You're not going to your parents, who are unfortunately not going to be the people who are going to take you out into nature. You're not going to be the people who are going to be able to connect you to the invite.
Chúk: And so you're probably going to be the one to figure that connection out on your own, right? Because that's almost, that's a burden that first gen people have. We tend to have to be the ones to form our own bond with the environment in our new country, because this is the land that we know. And the land that our parents know, the land that our ancestors know is not the same as this land. And so if you're told these are the only ways you can engage with nature, well, then you're like, well, I guess nature is not for me. And you keep your distance. The notion of belonging is incredibly important and it goes back to that, throwing up these barriers to entry and saying, you can only participate in this if you follow certain rules, do it a certain way. Already know the decided upon way in which you engage with nature or the land. And otherwise you're not welcome. That is exactly it. And they know people who would hear that be like, okay, I guess this is just not for me to take a step back. This is not my, this is not my place.
Chúk: So why are we allowing other human beings to influence the way we interact with nature? And, you know, because we are social creatures and fortunately we do, we do impact one another and it can be incredibly harmful and, you know, hurt someone's sense of belonging.
Alice Irene: I have many more questions, but I'm going to ask one more. You are a Founding Director of Future Ancestors, which as I understand it is an Indigenous and Black owned youth-led professional services, social enterprise, and startup that advances climate justice and equity with the lens of anti-racism and ancestral accountability. I always like closing these conversations on the topic of ancestry and ancestors, both looking backwards at our ancestors and how they affect us and also looking forward to our descendants and the type of ancestors that we want to be. I'd like to ask you about Future Ancestors, and also if there's anything in your own ancestry that has impacted you in this path that you've chosen.
Chúk: This is an interesting question. You know, the Francophones that come before me, the Black folk that came before me, the Africans that came before me, it all sort of influenced the realities that I live in and what I feel are like my responsibilities moving forward. Because whenever I go through anything difficult, whenever I go through what I perceive to be a barrier, the thing that breaks my heart the most is not myself - it’s that I’ve got all of these privileges that allow me to get over and break through a lot of barriers, and the only thing that breaks my heart is the idea that someone else who may not have the same levels of privileges that I have, may have that same barrier come up and that barrier would actually stop them. And that barrier would actually actively limit them in a way that they cannot get over it. And that hurts my soul.
Chúk: And so I'm always trying to change things for the future and change things for the future generation. And when I try to change things for a future generation, I'm inherently making myself an ancestor to that generation. I'm inherently saying that I am the ancestor to look over you, even though you're not here yet. And I hope that I'm making things better. For we are the future of our ancestors. And so while we recognize that that our ancestors gave us so much strength, so much knowledge, so many teachings, cultures, foods, whatever it is, we also recognize that our ancestors made some mistakes and it is up to us as the future generation to fix those mistakes, such that the next generation no longer has to do the consequences of those mistakes.
Chúk: You know, it's not an easy thing to do. It's actually not an easy thing to do. And you know, as a society, we have this habit of being like, oh, that happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that’s my grandparents' generation. I have nothing to do with that. But in reality, we all have something to do with that, in the sense that, you know, if your great-grandparents owned slaves or your great-grandparents did nothing about the residential school system. You know, it's not your fault. You can't go back in time and control your great grandparents, but you still benefit from it in the sense that either you have wealth in your family or was passed down to you and you don't even have to be wealth in the form of money, you can be wealthy in the form of inheriting a house. It could be wealth in the form of, “Every generation in my family, since whenever, has been fully educated, and so I will not be the first of my generation to go to university”. Wealth shows up in many different ways, but you're benefiting from that. And so if you're benefiting from that wealth, then you have a responsibility, frankly, to make sure that the people who are harmed by that legacy can also benefit from your wealth in some way, shape or form. And you know, that can take many different forms, that can take many different formats. It can be through volunteering. It can be through donating money. It can be through donating land. It can be through sharing the mic, you know, like really sort of making sure that you understand the privileges.
Chúk: Then turn those privileges into responsibilities, but then also don't turn those responsibilities into guilt. Right? Don't put it along the lines of sacrificing yourself, but it's recognizing that our collective liberation is dependent on all of us, because there's very few people in our current society who have perfect power, right? Every single one of us tends to be marginalized or ostracized for one reason or another in recognizing that upholding the power structures that oppress other people is also upholding the power structures that oppress you in some way, shape or form. And that you may not feel it actively now, but if push comes to shove, it will come to light in recognizing that the system collectively oppresses.
Chúk: You know, when we do things to undo the mistakes of our ancestors, we’re not just doing them for other people. We're doing it for ourselves because the same systems that oppress other people are the same systems that oppress us. And maybe they don't oppress us in ways that we recognize just yet. But if someone can suffer in a current society because of XYZ reason, you can too.
Chúk: When you look back on your ancestry, you look back at all the things that make you proud of it, whether it is the food, whether it is your grandparents or great-grandparents, or wherever came here with $10 in their pocket. And they made it, you know, no matter what, what it is, feel that pride feel that joy, you know, be proud of them. But don't turn a blind eye to the bad parts, you know, recognize the bad parts happen to the, the bad parts, absolutely they'd happen. And recognizing the bad parts happen, ask yourself how do I benefit from these negative things? Because people aren't often evil for the sake of being evil, often they are evil for some sort of gain. So what did they gain from these bad things and how do you benefit from these gains? Even if it's not direct, but indirect. And based off of all of that, where do you hold power? Where do you hold strength? Where do you hold influence? And what can you do to change those legacies and change those power structures, and ideally, dismantle them, if you're able to? And in doing all of that, you're doing your part. And if we all do our part, then even if things are not likely to be perfect - because we are inherently flawed creatures, we're never going to be perfect - things will be better and things will be more interesting and things will be more fun and colorful and vibrant. I think we owe it to the next generation to leave them a world where things are more colorful, fun, and fabric. Right?
Alice Irene: Thanks for listening to my conversation with Chúk. I hope you enjoyed it. If our conversation resonated with you, please subscribe, review, and share. For show notes and a transcription, or to tell me what you thought, visit reseed.ca. Reseed is created on unceded Algonquin land. Thank you to this place. Thank you to Rebecca Ryvola for podcast cover art, and Teghan Acres for being an outside eye. And thank you for listening. Together, let's plant the seeds that transform us from being takers to caretakers.