Yessenia Funes:

As this episode comes out, the International Climate Negotiations known as COP will have happened many months ago back in November. COP27, the most recent summit in Egypt, was a pretty notable one, because world leaders finally agreed to establish a fund to provide financial support for low-income nations that are suffering the effects of climate change despite doing very little, if anything, to have created the crisis. This is climate justice in action. I share all this because in this episode, we'll hear from youth climate activist Ayisha Siddiqa, who attended COP27. We spoke not long after she returned from Egypt, so COP is a big focus of our discussion, especially because a lot of Ayisha's climate activism focuses on kicking polluters, like big oil, out of these negotiation spaces.

The design of spaces like COP is why we're still here talking about climate change 27 years after they began. But COP is not all we talked about during our conversation. Ayisha is also a poet, she's from Pakistan, and she writes from a place of grief and heartbreak for her people, for our planet. Her identity and lived experience guide her activism. She draws connections between the powerful and the vulnerable, reminding us of our collective responsibility to address climate change, especially given how little our elected leaders are doing. Ayisha's not afraid to remind a room full of powerful people that her people didn't create this mess. She's always creating and sharing tools to help us clean this up by holding the powerful accountable.

This is The Architectures of Planetary Well-being podcast. I'm your host, Yessenia Funes.

Hello, hello, hello everyone. I am here today with Ayisha Siddiqa, who is a climate justice activist based in Coney Island, New York, where Superstorm Sandy tore through 10 years ago. Since then, she's focused her energy on climate justice. She's the co-founder of Polluters Out, a group focused on removing fossil fuel interests from climate negotiations. Ayisha is also a poet, and a damn good one.

Welcome, Ayisha.

Ayisha Siddiqa:

Hello. Good morning and thank you for having me.

YF:

Thank you for joining us, for making the time. I know you're a very busy person and that you've had a long last couple of weeks, so I really appreciate you coming through.

AS:

When Yessenia asks, I show up.

YF:

Thank you, Ayisha. As you all can probably hear, Ayisha and I are both a little under the weather, so just bear with us. We're giving you our sexy, raspy voices today. Well, really excited to introduce you to our listeners and to talk a lot about your work with Polluters Out, your journey. We've been in touch now for—it's been a few years now. I don't know if it's been three or four years. Or maybe it's only been like two. I'm trying to… I can't quite put my finger on it.

AS:

No, I think it's been longer. I think it's been... I was still in school when I first started speaking with you on the phone or on the train.

YF:

Always bugging you for those interviews.

AS:

Yeah, yeah.

YF:

And the first time we spoke, it was about Polluters Out, which you had just kicked off. You co-founded this organization with other climate activists, Isabella Fallahi and Helena Gualinga, with the hopes of making COPs—these are the climate negotiations that happen once a year—you're hoping to make them free of polluting industries. Can you introduce Polluters Out to our listeners, let them know what triggered its launch and where it's come so far?

AS:

Yeah, so Polluters Out was triggered, I suppose, because the year prior, my friends and I—internationally, within Fridays for Future—had organized massive protests. And those protests accumulated in a grand, old nothing. And they were followed by the conference in Spain, and that conference was also full of fossil fuel lobbyists. In fact, it was sponsored by Iberdrola and Endesa, Spanish oil companies. And in 2019, due to the lobbying influence, much of Article 6 within Paris, that focuses on autonomy of Indigenous peoples—it was edited and rights were taken from them. And so the COP that unfolded in 2019 was one of anything but equity, I suppose. And the reason why we formed Polluters Out was A, it was so obvious to us—as somebody who had been working internationally, maybe for five, six months only—it was so obvious to me that the problem was where the money was coming from. If you followed the money all the way back to 1992, the same people who had caused a problem were sponsoring this annual Coachella to solve it.

YF:

I love that. I love that description that y'all have as like, COP as this Coachella-sponsored, like, festival where climate people come together, but nothing happens. Nothing really changes. I mean, this year, perhaps, folks might differ a little bit there. And I'm curious to hear how COP27 went for you. I know that you had just gotten back, and it sounds like it was an exhausting and intense two weeks for the people who were there, given the political climate in Egypt but also given the political climate of the negotiations. Curious to hear how that went and whether you think things have improved since the years that you launched Polluters Out. I'm curious about the trends that you've been seeing and the overall culture at COP.

AS:

Yeah, so Polluters Out, we were quite successful last year in ensuring that fossil fuel interests did not sponsor the conference at the very least. By “sponsor,” means money that pays for the tables and the chairs and the pavilions. And that didn't happen last year and the names of the oil companies were not plastered all over the walls. This year was a completely different story. COP27 was… If the year before was a Coachella, this was a circus, frankly. Not only did you have... The second you landed in the airport, to when you got off the plane, was there greenwashing. And in the airport, at least, the greenwashing was coming from banks—Siemens Energy Company, Coca-Cola, Nestle, you name it. And then inside the conference, it was just like, polluters galore. There were more polluting lobbyists or representatives of polluting companies at this COP than there were last COP, than there were last COP. There were like 623, I think.

And our campaign of pushing the finance out has really... It came to a halt last year. And we weren't able to be as vocal [of] activists this year. But also, I think the campaign has began merging in with a larger campaign for fossil fuel non-proliferation with adult organizations and also seasoned activists. And so, it is not just calling for formally… It was calling for a conflict of interest policy within the UNFCCC, the nations who make the UN and then the fossil fuel companies. So, a conflict of interest policy that would ensure that their money didn't sponsor the event. Now, we are calling for a full-out Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation—not just money, not just the representatives, but the investments. And it's really, really going forward. Tuvalu has signed onto it. I think Vanuatu has signed onto it. Nation states are really… Those that are island nations specifically, those for whom their life is on the line, are signing on to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. And one of the clauses that we're pushing for within the treaty is what Polluters Out was asking for, which was conflict of interest. But to your question about how COP27 was, in addition to it being polluters galore, I was in Egypt for a month, so I was there from October 20th to November 20th.

YF:

Wow, that's a long time.

AS:

And a lot of criticisms have come out of play. Why was the event held in Egypt? What about protest? What about the outcomes? And I think everything that we say has to be acknowledged with nuance.

YF:

Yes, I love nuance.

AS:

So formally, the COPs have been in Europe and in Global North countries, or democracies, if you would. And people have come and they've protested and they've made a lot of noise. And what that protest and noise was met with was applause in the media. It was met with acknowledgements of bravery. I think it gets really complicated when you are in a nation with an authoritative government, but most of the world lives like this. And it was a reality check for the negotiators, it was a reality check for all of the Global North activists, it was a reality check for the politicians. Because this is a reality of so many countries, of so many people who are on the front lines of the climate crisis. See, we categorize vulnerability as proximity to, maybe, disaster, as percentages of how likely you are to be affected by said disaster. What we leave out, time and time again, is the vulnerability of citizens of unstable governments.

And, on top of that, the fact that those unstable governments do not care. And I think that COP needed to be held in a place like this, where if you walked out in the streets with four people—which happened—and you stood in a place with a camera out, you were threatened with arrest, which happened to me and my friends. That these negotiations that are happening in rooms that are so closed from reality, that don't understand the complicated, complicated political context of the nations that many people come from need to. And if we are going to try to save life on planet, we need to work with, and those governments too. There was a victory of loss and damage finance fund for the first time in 30 years.

YF:

It's a big deal.

AS:

It's a big deal. And I think that big deal needs to be a little bit emphasized. So the way that negotiations happen, the way voting happens, the way policy happens is: 192 governments have to agree.

YF:

That's right.

AS:

That's crazy. That means each word, each line, each stance in a 600-page document needs to be agreed upon. And then, and only then, is it established. That's why for the past 30 years, it's been a fight. There was always one country or two countries or three countries who vetoed it.

YF:

We know who those are.

AS:

But for... Yeah, yeah, I'm sitting in one of them right now. But that changed, and that changed because of the pressure and allegiance and working together of the Global South, the island nations against the most developed countries. And I applaud, I really applaud, the activists, the negotiators from the island states, and the adults who worked night in and out for this victory. And yeah, people were up every night until 4:00 AM. Young people watching the negotiations would go home, go to sleep, maybe get three hours in, then wake up at 7:00 AM again, do a summary, and then do a day plan, action plan, for the next day. Sit in meetings, sit in panels, go speak to the negotiators, go do campaigns, go do actions, and then it would start all over again.

YF:

I mean, essentially, what y'all are doing is lobbying. Y'all are lobbying in these spaces, trying to push what you want to see happen. That shit's work.

AS:

It's work, it's hard. It's like, I know the World Cup is being played right now, and there's so many games happening. You are watching all of them. You're watching the scoreboard of all of them, all of the major gameplays. You're returning, telling your team about it, because you’re against all of them. You have to play against all of them simultaneously. And life is on the line. So, that was a victory. That said, I think it wasn't a full victory. And because we're doing a COP summary, it should also be acknowledged. For the past 30 years, the words “fossil fuel,” “coal,” and “oil” have not made it into the final text, time and time again. And what that means is, essentially, nations are not acknowledging that investing more in them is causing the climate crisis. And lack of said acknowledgement paves way for them not reducing their carbon emissions fast enough.

And so losses and damages just accumulate when you emit more carbon, when you keep pumping out oil. And right now, the finance facility is supposed to be home to 100 billion dollars. If the way that we are going is left unchecked and uncharted for another five years, that 100 billion will become 400 billion, will become 600 billion. And there will come a time where they will have no money to stop or put an end to the loss and damages, if we don't put an end to the emission of fossil fuel in the first place. I think an analogy I can share to understand this problem is, basically, we were given an empty bucket in a flood. One empty bucket. And the tap is still wide open and water is being pumped out, and we're given a bucket to start taking that water out. We need to close the tap.

YF:

And we need a lot more than a single bucket.

AS:

A lot more than a single bucket.

YF:

It's not going to be enough. And I want to make sure that we contextualize, quickly, for the listeners who might not be familiar with loss and damage. This is the financial mechanism by which wealthy countries that have largely contributed to the climate crisis—their emissions, our lifestyle here in the US, Canada, European nations, the ones that actually created the climate crisis—are paying funds into an account that will help support low-income countries that have contributed very little, if anything, to the climate crisis, so that they can respond to disaster, adapt to prevent disaster, and overall have a safety net to prevent such loss and damage in their communities. And so it's been a really key mechanism to climate justice. People have called this “climate reparations,” a form of climate reparations. There's many different ways of looking at climate reparations within the space, but this is one clear avenue there.

And so the fund has been established out of COP27, though the specifics of that are still quite unclear. And my understanding is also that no country is going to be legally liable toward this. And so it's not as though they're actually required to put money into this. So we'll see who actually will. Denmark has already pledged money; they were the first, so kudos to Denmark. But unfortunately, we haven't seen these types of explicit pledges anywhere else yet. So we'll have to see how that plays out. And you were talking a lot just now, Ayisha, about the different lived experiences of folks, like in Egypt, the reality that people experience in different parts of the world, and ensuring that people are being met where they're at, and that we have an understanding and a lens on that. And I think, in general, lived experiences and this embodied knowledge is a big part of your practice. I think it's a big part of your advocacy.

How has this translated in your work with Fossil Fuel University's educational practice? Could you briefly introduce that part of Polluters Out to our listeners and make those connections between lived experience and this educational practice?

AS:

Yeah, so Fossil Fuel University is so close to my heart because it was a project that came out of not being able to mobilize in person during the pandemic. And me and some amazing lawyers came together and were like, “what would be the one-on-one tools that you would need if you were a young person trying to take on big old oil?” And we put together this free resource platform that has lectures from former negotiators within the UNFCCC, the EDs of major NGOs that we all know of, like Amnesty and Greenpeace, lawyers who have been working in and against their governments or the law to change the course of climate change as we know it. And so many wonderful experts.

And then also people who have on-ground experience, as you were saying, Yessenia—people who have fought pipelines with their bodies. And Fossil Free University is an amalgamation of all of that, on lived experience and the importance of that. I cannot highlight that enough. I think that when people hear that an activist uses storytelling or their lived experience or advocacy from a point of their lineage and their heritage, it is taken as these anecdotes and perhaps these empty platitudes that don't translate into policy or change. And oftentimes I'm asked, “why are youth voices important?” and “why are Indigenous voices important?” Because I think from an empirical point of view, people don't think we can solve the problem with our stories.

YF:

But stories change hearts.

AS:

Yeah. Not only stories change hearts, but lived experience. And the urgency of that is the reason why we have a 1.5-degree mark; is the reason why we have the words “loss” and “damage,” and then they were developed into a facility, and that facility had work done on it for 20-something years; is the reason why we have a Rights of Nature. And there's just…. I can start listing so many policies, but that is all due to the experience of the island states, the experience of Indigenous people and also their advocacy. The language that we are taking for granted, the policies that we are taking for granted, did not come without people fighting to the tooth and nail to keep their stories alive.

YF:

And I know that a lot of your work focuses specifically on the stories of you and your people, Ayisha. Your own roots are in a tribal and native community in Pakistan called Moochiwala. Am I pronouncing that right?

AS:

Mm-hmm.

YF:

And Pakistan in particular played a major role at COP. I know that it was leading some of the delegations there, after its devastating floods this year—I mean, record-breaking, unprecedented; 30 million people affected in Pakistan this year. I don't know that we've seen anything like this thus far. And scientists have already attributed this to climate change. You have a personal and a familial connection back home to polluted waterways. And you currently live here in Coney Island, Brooklyn, which has experienced its own severe flooding. Talk to me about water systems and, in general, just your connection to water, how you see this playing a role in your fight for climate justice. But I'm also thinking about the terrifying, violent nature that water can have in the face of climate change. There's this yin and yang, I think, that comes out of water. I’m really curious to hear your relationship and your perspective on that.

AS:

It's interesting to me, because I moved oceans away from an area that was being affected by water pollution, and I still found myself in proximity to disaster. And if that can tell you that anything, it's that vulnerable communities in the Global North and vulnerable communities in the Global South, especially when they're marginalized within their own country's political landscapes, live very similar realities. And it is because of race, class, and gender. So, Pakistan is a young nation. It has made a mark worldwide and its development has had to do a lot with it, especially our rivers. So, we are home to one of the oldest rivers on planet Earth, the Indus. It is also home to one of the first civilizations on planet Earth, the Indus people. Indigenous peoples that live alongside the Indus River are still alive. And it's one of the misnomers and miscommunications that they're dead and they're gone. They're still alive. They're as old as the ancient Egyptians, as old as the Mayans and the Aztecs in the Americas.

And Pakistan's waterways—I think if you want to understand this country's landscape and all of the potential issues around equity, take a look at its rivers and its waterways. So, all of the major rivers in Pakistan actually come through India. And history is important here because there was a separation. It was a bloody separation, and land was divided by colonizers; land was divided by the British and handed over. So because our waterways are not only connected, there is no land barrier between those countries. It is controlled, oftentimes, by the Indian state.

And we experienced flooding this year, we experienced an abundance of rain, but the country has gone through a dry spell before that. So the heat waves that predated the flooding, I think, were not given as much tension, and also they are 70% of the equation. And that kind of suffering paved way for this disaster of a flood. But we went through heat waves of unprecedented scale, as well: 122 degrees Fahrenheit, wet-bulb temperatures of 104 degrees, 107 degrees, lasting for seven hours, eight hours, 14 hours.

YF:

Even the nighttime, there's no escape.

AS:

There's no escape. And when you live in a rural community like my family does, and you still depend on wells for water, you have one generator for your whole house that brings electricity, and then there's load shedding, which is another major problem in the country. And there's no electricity for 16 hours, you don't have a fan, you don't have an air conditioning, you don't even have running water to combat the insane heat. On top of that, I began talking to you about the waterways, why that is important. Because we are a young nation, because we industrialized, what we ended up depending on were dams. Dams are a use and source of energy. But in the context of Pakistan, you are damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. Reason being, the dams that were built in the early ’70s and then ’80s were coal-powered, in the ’90s were coal-powered. Only recently, they're like a combination of hydraulic energy and fossil fuel.

But for my community specifically, they polluted our water and caused illnesses that we could not come back from. So there was a dam built in ’93, and then I think there was a dam built in 2005, or the beginning of a dam being built in 2005, around the River Chenab in Punjab, around my village in Moochiwala. And it released chemical toxins into the water. It caused polio and appendicitis and blood cancer and you name it. And illnesses that had not reached or touched this part of the community are now running rampant. And I lost one family member after another. Neighboring tribes not only lost their land to the creation of the dams, they also got ill; there were kidney diseases. And this is very much the reality of so many rural communities in the country that are still, to this day, undeveloped, underdeveloped, underfunded, undereducated, you name it. And the thing that is supposed to bring energy to them are the creation of these dams. And then the earlier fact that I was alluding to, our water is controlled by India. Sometimes, our rivers start running dry and Pakistan is having, after these floods, we're having a dry spell all over again. Our freshwater sources are running dry and then the dams don't work in full capacity, and it creates a whole ’nother mess.

YF:

And I'm assuming after all the monsoon rains and the severe floods, there's also water contamination going on. All these waterways went into people's homes, sewage, animals—just thinking of all of the mixing that goes on during any type of flooding event and how harmful that can be for groundwater, freshwater, and the time that takes to make its way out of the system.

AS:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And now—

YF:

Then there's of course the disease, that also breeds in the water.

AS:

And take—if we want to narrow down from an aerial view—take a rural community, like mine, for example. There's no sewage ways. They've been destroyed. There's no pathways. They've been destroyed. So the water has nowhere to go. And all the feces, all the animals that have been, like, rotting inside the water, the mosquitoes that have sat accumulated—there's no removing that. And if you do start process of removing, you toss it back into the river. And it just corrupts and pollutes the waterway, too. And the government or the army or the police has not come. They haven't come in months. They came in the very beginning, helped people get out, got them to safety, but they haven't come to get rid of the water. And in areas where you've been lucky and water has evaporated, after it's sat on the soil for weeks on end–let's say you're a farmer, your crop is destroyed, but worse than that, your soil is destroyed.

YF:

People forget soil is a living organism as well, or full of living organisms.

AS:

Absolutely. And the country—30% of its GDP relies on agriculture. We are an agricultural country. We provide cotton, rice, grain, and sugar. Those are our main exports. And the soil is now concentrated with nitrogen, phosphorus, magnesium at the very top. The animals in it have been killed, and those that are still surviving are not all conducive to an environment that's going to allow you to grow crop. So you have to pillage and revitalize the soil, and you have nothing. That is a reality of so many farmers and people and rural and tribal people in the country.

And disease, Yessenia—it is harrowing. When I was at COP, I met with two doctors, both who are in Pakistan on-ground in the region of Sindh. And both of them broke down, explaining to me how horrific it has been for young women and women in general because… So, we had an expectancy of 65,000 women who were supposed to give birth during the flooding, and many died on the bed because their bodies didn't have enough hemoglobin to support the childbirth of their babies, and babies died. And that was like stage one, because poverty, hunger, flooding, then no food for days at an end and being stranded. Then you give birth in a tense, tense environment; you pass away or a child passes away, and then give it three more weeks. And now dengue has spread like wildfire, malaria has spread, cholera has spread, and it's spread to children whose immune systems cannot fight it. Newborns in these hospitals, that were just created out of sheer necessity at the very last minute—they are too tense and the babies have cholera and it is… We don't have beds, we don't have drips, we don't have blood.

Food is getting more and more expensive. Pakistan just went through an inflation like never before. IRP, if 100 was equivalent to $1, now it's at like 200 something or 300 something. And the front line is no longer firefighters. It's no longer, like, police officers or the military. The front line are doctors. They are fighting every single day to keep people alive.

YF:

And I think it's easy to put this stuff out of your mind when the stories stop circulating in the headlines. But it's important for folks to remember. Even January, February, when people will hear this episode— there's still suffering happening in places like Pakistan that experienced these climate disasters months ago. The disaster doesn't go away after the rains stop or after the floods recede. The disaster continues. And I think that's almost what's the scariest thing about climate change. It doesn't just go away when the weather calms down. The sun can be shining and things can feel fine again, in that sense, but there's all the aftermath and the years-long impacts.

Poetry—I think it's quite fitting to talk a little bit about your poetry work, because I understand it's been a big part of your processing and healing, a big way to grapple and communicate and process all of this grief and all of this emotion. Talk to me about poetry as a tool, both as an individual, as understanding the collective and processing this loss. How has poetry helped you navigate all this?

AS:

Yeah. Poetry has been my personal bandage, I suppose, some solace. And it's deeply important to me because I came from a rural tribal community, in metropolitan New York, and I, for the longest time, didn't know how to communicate. Learning English was… English is my fifth language. It was a whole process and I was a reader as a kid—fantasy fiction. And I stumbled upon poetry and I felt very intimately connected to it. Intimately, because it feels like a connection back home, back to my people. We are an oral storytelling tradition. I was raised with stories, on songs. The importance of protecting the river and the water and land was embedded in my nursery rhymes. And my education really was… It was also why I had a lot of trouble in the US, because I grew up with so many elders and family and just constantly learning from them.

So I use it to… In times of extreme climate anxiety or stress, I use it to find my way back home. And also I use it to express all of the frustration, because using this... I write poetry in English, I use a colonial language. But it's my way of piercing that colonial language and trying to get at the heart of things. It's my way of breaking the structures of the English grammar and trying to communicate a truth that is universal. I write with broken grammar on purpose. I write like I would be speaking Saraiki, my dialect. And I translate it into English often, and it comes from a place of making up for a language barrier that I've had forever—in the US, in colonial structures, all across climate work.

YF:

I've been asking everyone to come to the show with a quote they want to share to wrap up every episode. But I'd really love for you, Ayisha, if you're willing to share a piece of one of your poems, just because your writing is so beautiful and it's so visceral. Would love for you to share some of that with our listeners today, if you'd be so generous.

AS:

Thank you. I would be happy to. I wrote this for my sister and my cousins and also for so many young, native, tribal, aboriginal women who are trying to reconnect to their histories that have been erased. And it's called “Two Little Feet and Big Uprisings.”

"If you find yourself waiting for the birds to go quiet, if your legs dangle like sunflower heads every morning after you wake, if September doesn't make you want to coddle the day with both of your hands, if you've taken more hits to your name than you can hide, if tomorrow comes and goes, comes and goes, and your heart is sick, I've still got some best of me left for you. You can always find me where the skies are blue."

YF:

Wow. I love that. It's like a love letter, of sorts. Thank you so much for sharing that, Ayisha. Well, with that, we will wrap up today. But Ayisha, thank you so much for your vulnerability, for your poetry and your words, and for this education and keeping it so real, always schooling everybody. I think that we all need to hear these hard truths; we don't talk about it enough. It's so easy to shy away from death and grief and the way that you're so willing to confront these hard things—it’s necessary. It's necessary that we talk about the hard things and talk about the bad guys and point our fingers and do something about it. No, but for real. So thank you so much for doing that work. We need more of it.

AS:

Thank you so much, Yessenia. After all this time, still hearing me go on tangents and letting me go on tangents.

YF:

It's the best part. Alright, Ayisha, thank you. Talk to you soon.

AUDIO:

Architectures of Planetary Well-Being is a podcast of revisions, a media initiative supported by re:arc institute, a philanthropic organization committed to supporting architectures of planetary well-being. For more information on re:arc, please visit www.rearc.institute. This season is hosted by Yessenia Funes. For more information on her work, you can follow her online at @yessfun, Y-E-S-S-F-U-N, and in her work, The Frontline at Atmos magazine. This podcast is produced by Minah Kwon and Andi Kristins. Music by In Atlas.