Jewish Youth Climate Movement Fellows Attend U.N. Climate Change Conference in Egypt

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Eli Anderson says he’s always thrived in the outdoors. So when a board member at his synagogue suggested three years ago he apply to become a founder of Hazon’s Jewish Youth Climate Movement, Anderson, a Tulsa native, jumped at the chance

“I understand it is our job, our role in this world, to create change, to leave it better than we found it,” he said. “Tikkun olam. That’s one of our key pillars in JYCM.”

Eli Anderson
Eli Anderson (Provided photo)

A sophomore at Colorado’s Fort Lewis College majoring in environmental conservation and management and adventure education, Anderson was part of a delegation of 10 JYCM college fellows that attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference – known as COP27 — Nov. 6-18 in the Egyptian city of Sharm El Sheikh.

The student participants were accompanied by JYCM director Liana Rothman and Jakir Manela, CEO of the Reisterstown-based Pearlstone Center and Hazon. The two organizations — which announced merger plans in July of 2021 and are now headquartered at Pearlstone — are part of the Jewish Outdoor, Food, Farming & Environmental Education movement.

Prior to COP27, the fellows spent two days at Israel’s Arava Institute for Environmental Studies on Kibbutz Ketura near Eilat, and met with young Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian climate activists.  

“Our youth are going to deal with the impacts of this crisis more than any other generation,” said Manela, who served on a panel representing North American Jewry at COP27. “As a matter of justice, their perspectives should be weighted more heavily than older folks who just won’t be around to deal with the consequences of their mistakes over the past 30 years when we knew this crisis was coming but did nothing. The very least the older generations can do is to respect and elevate the voices of young people who now have to navigate a much more unstable world moving forward.”

University of Michigan freshman Naomi Parr is a founding member of JYCM. A Detroit area native, she said she has been concerned about the environment almost all her life.

Jakir Manela
Jakir Manela, CEO of Pearlstone and Hazon (File photo)

Having the opportunity to attend COP27, she said, was “an unimaginable treat. We were there for three days, and each of those days had a theme. The first day was youth and science. The second day was about carbon capture and carbon emissions. That day, we also attended an ocean summit specifically about marine life, ocean travel, all sorts of ocean-related topics. The third day was food and agriculture day. I was really personally excited.”

In particular, Anderson and Parr said they were intrigued by a panel discussion featuring indigenous women from Colombia, Kenya and the historic Mesoamerica region comprising southern North America and most of Central America.

“They were all speaking in different languages, which was sort of amazing because technology has progressed so much that we had immediate translation going in our ears,” said Parr. “The topic of the panel was ancestral knowledge, that indigenous women are kind of the caretakers of the land.

“We find ourselves in this hopeless spiral of how can we know what to do about the climate crisis. It’s such an existential, overwhelming threat,” she said. “There is no perfect option. [But] indigenous communities, and specifically Indigenous women, have the ancestral knowledge of how we are supposed to live with their land, how we’re supposed to interact with the Earth sustainably for centuries. All we have to do is listen and give them the platform to teach us. … As an 18-year-old girl, that was super-interesting to me.”

Anderson said he appreciated the JYCM group’s visit to the Arava Institute where “they create all their energy. It’s insane to me that there are places like that because in America, there’s not really anywhere like that. It’s place-based environmental education – hands-on doing, hands-on learning, which is why I’m studying adventure education. Pairing that with the environmental conservation and management environmental science piece, I want to really focus on teaching about how amazing the different flora and fauna are there, and how you can actually do better in that specific area to make sure that in 10, 20, 50 years it’ll still be there.”

Despite their enthusiasm about the trip, Anderson and Parr said there were some aspects of the conference that disturbed them. Both said they were disappointed that the fellows were relegated to the “green zone” and unable hear all the speakers at COP27.

“It was covered in beautiful art installations of supposedly sustainable art,” Parr said of the green zone. “Art is a wonderful thing. … But the use of these super-visual structures and art pieces, light shows, fountains — it looked like a theme park. And there were diesel generators running these things. There was the Coca-Cola brand label and the Nestlé label on water stations. I’m from Michigan. I have seen firsthand what Nestlé can do to a community when they come take people’s water and then sell it right back to them. It’s not a sustainable company.

“I think to experience this sort of ‘greenwash,’ this false idea of projecting sustainability without the accountability to follow through on those values, was really upsetting,” she said. “Especially as youth climate activists, it was a harsh reality check. It didn’t seem like a genuine effort for change. It seemed like a beautiful effort for a photo op.”

Naomi Parr
Naomi Parr (Provided photo)

Anderson agreed. “It felt wrong to fly to this place, to use all of these carbon emissions to get to this place, and then get there and find [the setting was] doing more harm than good,” he said. “It felt like a mix between a climate conference, the Olympics and Coachella. There was one tiny section in the ‘blue zone’ where you could protest. That was better than I expected because learning about this trip, we were told it is illegal [in Egypt] to protest in the streets, illegal to hold signs up in protest.”

Parr said the trip also provided the JYCM fellows with insight into what it is like to live in a country without democratic values and civil rights.
“Homosexuality there is punishable by seven years of hard labor,” she said. “One of the boys on the trip who is gay got a notification from a dating app the second night we were there that said, ‘Hey, we noticed you’re in an unsafe place. Please delete this app immediately and turn off your location services.’ And there was a Cop27 app that had all the maps and schedules of the conference, any sort of conference information. And we were told, do not download that. It will download all of your information. It’s for the purpose of scanning emails and proving your intentions in the Egyptian port.”

In addition, Parr said some fellows experienced harassment while in Egypt. “I think we all can recognize that there are issues in the U.S., but in Egypt you just bite your tongue,” she said. “The abuse of power was so rampant and so disheartening.”

Other members of the JYCM delegation at COP27 included Anna Dubey of Brown University, Bella Weksler of the University of California, Berkeley, Elijah Harris of Brown University, Emily Renetzky of Colorado College, Isaac Ostrow of Wesleyan University, Michael Pincus of the University of Southern California, Madeline Canfield of Brown University, Sophie Raskin of the University of Vermont, and Benjamin Kline of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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