Isidora Liliana Muñoz Segovia | Rural Youth Organizer: Hancock County
Social change does not happen overnight.
Community does not get built in the blink of an eye.
Peoples’ empowerment take trust and carving out intentional space.
Intergenerational culture emerges from long-brewed relationships.
Behavioral modification is not achieved in an hour-long exercise.
These processes take time to consolidate and so does our understanding of what a specific community might need from us as changemakers – or Rural Youth Organizers. Yet sometimes we frustrate ourselves speeding things up and needing to see immediate results when we might be missing out on long-lasting, slow, and steady progress.
This past February, 2024, I accomplished 1 year of working with JMJU and, sometime this upcoming fall, 9 years doing environmental advocacy/activist work. On this journey I have, and continue to, learn a lot about the intrinsic ways our communities work and how they thrive. My educational background as a Human Ecologist focuses on Environmental Politics, Indigenous Knowledge, and Food Systems (agroecology). When weaving my academic interests with my desire to create positive change in my community, I started to learn about the connections across the ‘multi-crises’ that the world face nowadays: environmental degradation, inflation, food prices, supply chain disruption, species extinction, and others.
During my studies, I came across a design theory and practice that aims to bring justice and the Earth to the forefront of our capacities to create worlds. Arturo Escobar uses different ontologies* and epistemologies,* especially from Indigenous and Afro-descent people in Latin America. An example of what a ‘pluriversal’ perspective is could be found when addressing Indigenous People’s voices regarding their version of the colonization of the Americas. A key component of the Pluriverse is the concept of creating “a world where many worlds fit.” This concept was developed by thinkers and philosophers from the Global South, specifically from the Zapatista movement in Mexico. Contemporary anthropologists, thinkers, designers, geographers, activists, and changemakers have drawn their inspiration from this concept as it challenges the ways in which our world conventionally operates and seeks a more radical, inclusive, just, and sustainable alternative. The concept of “a world where many worlds fit” came as a result of the local history of Chiapas, Mexico, and the uprise of the Zapatista movement – which was a revolution against the norms imposed by the “Western” world that was oppressing Indigenous local people, and their practices. They revolted against the oppression from the state and the church, both entities that aimed to erase their ancient culture and subdue them to follow a “Western” lifestyle and belief system.
*ontologies: the philosophical study of being in general, or of what applies neutrally to everything that is real (britannica.org)
*epistemologies: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion (oxford languages)
“El mundo que queremos es uno donde quepan muchos mundos.
“The world we want is one where many worlds fit.
La patria que construimos es una donde quepan todos los pueblos
The country we build is one where all peoples fit
y sus lenguas, que todos los pasos la caminen, que todos la rían,
and their tongues, let all the steps walk it, let everyone laugh at it,
que la amanezcan todos”
let everyone wake up.”
––––– Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena,
January 2nd, 1996
The Pluriverse is a complex yet simple approach to understanding the world we collectively inhabit and, as I continue to learn more about it, I am very excited to find ways to incorporate it into my daily work and practice as an organizer here in Maine.
For the past two years, one as a senior at College of the Atlantic, and the second one working with JustME for JustUS, I have been focusing my activist work on uplifting voices and discussing the ‘pluriverse’ by bringing different perspectives into conversation and exploring resilience building within a specific geographical area. Weaving these realities together under the larger scope of our interconnected social ecologies has been in some ways easier than I thought and more challenging in others.
How does a Latin American approach to climate justice resonate in Maine? To gain a closer understanding of what “environmental protection” means outside of the Western discourse, I focused my environmental politics studies on learning about Indigenous knowledge and practices. On this academic journey, I learned about the historic injustices of genocide, cultural assimilation, discrimination, and more. Unfortunately, I have also found a lot of contemporary prejudices widely practiced today. This urged me to work to uplift these voices and stories.
When I shifted my environmental work from international spaces like the UN Conference of the Parties to a more localized approach, looking at what voices were missing in the Maine climate change policy sphere, I found that, in Maine, unfortunately and unsurprisingly, Wabanaki nations are still fighting for their sovereignty. Finding ways to support and uplift their fight has been part of my work, yet, to my surprise, what I also realized was that there is a lack of representation from the fishing communities in the environmental movement and policy spaces throughout the coast of Maine. I decided to start working to uplift the voices and perspectives of fishing communities in the environmental and political sphere in Maine so that we could also connect this fight of protecting ‘livelihoods’ to the Wabanaki fight for their livelihood too. On this process, the prejudices that I had seen before with Indigenous Peoples in Latin America were somehow present here between the scientific world and non-Indigenous yet rural areas of Downeast Maine.
In the scientific and academic realm, there has been a long-coming contempt towards non-empirical ways of knowing. Intergenerational knowledge from fishing communities across the coast of Maine, or Traditional Ecological Knowledge, are some of the examples of ‘alternative’ ways of knowing that have been and, to some extent, continue to be disregarded. In Maine, fishermen, scientists, and policymakers have been, more often than not for more than 50 years, in an ongoing socio-cultural clash. This lack of cooperation could be seen as a result of class differences, academic exclusivity/eliteness, and socio-political differences. In recent years, one of the most pressing challenges that fishing communities are facing is the North Atlantic Right Whale protection regulation that is preventing them from continuing to use their practices as the Right North Atlantic Whales have increasingly been found dead, stuck on ropes, or at shore (more information at https://rightwhalesandmainelobster.com).
To provide some context, Maine is considered the most rural state in the nation, with 50% of Maine's land area almost completely uninhabited (Maine.gov). We also have the oldest population of all the states. Even though we have a small population, we are the 8th most environmentally friendly state as ranked by WalletHub. However, I think that one of the challenges that we see in Maine is the inclusion of a diverse spectrum of voices and opinions like the ones from the waterfront working communities like fishermen to Indigenous sovereignty and the minority groups like Black, Indigenous, and other People Of Color (BIPOC).
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In Maine, our communities feel closely connected with our natural spaces, as hunting, fishing and other outdoor recreation and livelihood practices are widely spread throughout the state. A Mainer’s identity is closely connected with the environment. However, this connection does not come without much disparity of opinion and action regarding climate change advocacy and policy-making. Therefore, finding a way to implement a pluriversal approach to our local issues is fundamental for the strengthening of all the environmental advances that we are seeing emerge, and is key to incorporate a more holistic approach to the social justice part of climate change.
A pluriversal approach to connecting all of these seemingly sparse ontologies and epistemologies happens when a larger picture shows our seemingly faint paths of intersection. How is Wabanaki sovereignty aligned with the protection of our natural spaces? Where does the access and stewardship of our coasts fit into a conversation about sustainable energy, livelihood, and heritage security? How is the changing climate affecting our local food systems and what can we do to secure them?
Community Resilience Envisioning events aimed to cover these conversations at a localized level by bringing together different local organizations and changemakers to discuss the opportunities and challenges of their work in their communities; from local environmental groups like A Climate To Thrive to student groups like Earth In Brackets and waterfront Seaweed Companies like Atlantic Holdfast Seaweed Company. We have hosted two very successful events this past year, one in Bar Harbor and the other one in Blue Hill. We were invited to host a third one in the Deer Isle and Stonington area. However, after a whole 4 months of constant outreach and attempts to coordinate our efforts, this event did not happen.
This felt like a huge failure to my expertise as a Rural Youth Organizer and even to my own work ethos, as I felt that I could have done much more. And that is true. You can always do more, you can always be more insistent and push things forward. However, wouldn’t that bring some narrow self-centered vision? Would I be truly listening to where the community that I am working with is? What do they need and what are their priorities? How can I find the common ground of interests instead of imposing my dreams and visions?
Much of the frustration came from my expectations and feelings of disappointment for not delivering what I was hoping to create: a space where community gathers, bonds, and envisions resilience together.
‘Slow down and allow people to connect with each other and our more-than-human relatives.’ That’s what I had to remind myself. Changes take time, trust needs to build up and relationships must be fostered before we can start talking about conversations on climate change threats that, in honesty, can be very intimate and vulnerable conversations. I had seemingly forgotten this important part of my work, and yet I found a way to take a step back and reevaluate. I was lucky to connect with Andrew Simons, a local artist and resilience builder, who has been working with this community closely and who was stoked about the idea of organizing an event like the Community Resilience Envisioning. We found that each other’s work could uplift the power behind what we were trying to achieve: strengthening communities’ abilities to thrive. Now, six months after I started devoting myself to organizing this ‘failed’ event, we are in the process of continuing conversations and planning with key community members like the high school Director, the theater teacher, and the extracurricular coordinator at the Deer Isle and Stonington High School; without key community members a community focused event simply could not succeed.
When looking inside for what is the real reason for me to create the amazing work that I am doing, I recognized the intentions behind my actions and took time to acknowledge every person or group that I was collaborating with and sincerely listen to their hopes, dreams, and shared truthful intentions. Meanwhile, I put my own wishes and visions in second place. To work together we need to be able to accommodate needs and, specially when working with communities, as organizers we need to be able to meet people where they are at. There is no need to rush, but rather enjoy the slow and steady progress of the collective work.
Earth moves at its own pace, not rushing any processes. Each process has its own rhythm. In right place, a field can take thousands of years to become a forest, and therefore to adapt to support strong deeply rooted complex ecosystems, bringing and holding ecological biodiversity, supporting not only itself but the larger complex web of other beings on Earth. There is truly no need to not fall into the fast-paced track that these days seems to be the norm. How can we learn from more-than-human practices to allow ourselves to slow down and celebrate the rootedness of our progress?