PROJECTS
Climate week 2024
Quito Ziegler, Paloma Lara, Tomie Arai & Anna Ozbek
Climate resistance has never been a simple problem of ‘not damaging‘ the planet, but rather – a complex struggle against the fundamental harms of colonial and capitalist projects. We understand that in order to decouple our communities from these systems of justice and world-building that reinforce exploitation and instability, we must create accountable relationships and mediation among ourselves.
In September 2024, Dandelions, BILM, Legaia and many others came together in a local autonomous abolitionist space in Chinatown to learn from indigenous and queer leaders who have been practicing justice in community, to strengthen our autonomous practices and build together towards a collective future.
Over two weeks at the Borough Based Liberation Project, we wove together our struggle for climate justice and indigenous sovereignty with abolitionist futures through deep discussions about conflict resolution within our networks, communities and movements. We collectively organized 14 events, gathering dozens of networks and organizers together to create art that represented our struggles, look inward at the contradictions within ourselves, mediate conflict within our communities and share ceremonies together.
As we connected we began to untangle how our individual histories inform our current relationships with each other and how that informs our collective conflicts. We felt how the harm in ourselves creates danger which we react to with the tools we are most practiced with, often including overpowering others, or avoidance instead of engaging with care and a curiosity of how we might best bring life to our relationships. Together we unearthed the death within ourselves to foster new life in our collective justice system.
At the end, we came together with the Borough Based Liberation Project to celebrate all the work that took place in that space in September to imagine and craft our own abolitionist futures. We staged an action against the mega-jail being built in Chinatown, and threw seeds of the new world we hope to create into the ruin created there.
