4 months ago
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The Friends of the Earth Asia Pacific (FoE APac) Campaigners Meeting, or the workshop on “Friends of the Earth Asia Pacific Regional Workshop” on “Environmental Advocacy and Strategic Engagement in the National and Global Platforms” brought together 27 campaigners from across Asia Pacific region from 12 countries – all FoE APAC countries except South Korea. The event had gender parity with half the participants being female. The cohort of campaigners skewed quite young, with 75% of attendees under 35 years of age, and approximately half were under the age of 30 years old. This aligned with the intention to engage more youth in FoE activities.
The workshop intended to bring together environmental justice campaigners from across the Asia Pacific region to share stories, skills and strategies to deepen their anti-oppression analysis to improve solidarity with communities fighting for environmental injustice as well as to build solidarity with each other across the Asia Pacific region. Mobilizing campaigners to find links between our shared struggles, and use these to build regional strategies for structural changes to enable environmental justice for peoples across the Asia Pacific and the world was another intention of the workshop.
It was also proved that this event helped campaigners to increase their understanding on anti-oppression (class, racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, colonialism, imperialism), corporate power and inclusive organizing and attempt to incorporate it as part of their national and regional programs/campaigning and to identify joint environmental justice campaign priorities and strategies, responding to national, regional and international socio-political contexts/issues and in line with FoEI’s five-year plan.
“I think the meeting nailed the purpose of deepening our anti-oppression analysis so we can work better in solidarity with communities fighting environmental justice, and better in solidarity with each other’. This is the core problem, cause and effect discussion, which went down excellently”, Poorani Kannan.
Reflecting on the workshop Poorani Kannan, the Communication and Research Officer of Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM)/ Friends of the Earth Malaysia said, “It was such a pleasure to meet people from all around the Asia Pacific region, who campaign in similar areas of work with one another, holding fighting spirits of their own to achieve justice as a whole. Meeting people who are in the same battlefield, provided a communal support that is needed to boost my morale and confidence to continue campaigning, especially in a justice field such as ours.
The meeting was indeed a great one to experience. I enjoyed every bit of it, both in the sense of learning about the issues and having fun. Perhaps, having this combination was key to building the communal support mentioned above. The meeting started from the basics, and built up from there. This gave me an opportunity to understand the context first, before diving into the discussion on the issues that happened on consequent days.
I experienced being able to listen and learn from others across the Asia Pacific region, lending us an opportunity to compare and contrast issues, and consequently made us see the similarities and differences among the regional issues. I was glad to have my horizons and capacity widened for my campaign, being boosted by all the people in the meeting with their cooperation to share stories, skills and strategies and all of us could continue the discussion in tackling issues together as a region after the meeting is over.”
“The Campaigner Meeting in Sri Lanka was an eye-opening experience for young campaigners like me” Hiroki Osada
Hiroki Osada, the Development Finance and Environment Campaigner of Friends of the Earth Japan shared his experience saying, “There was a nice mixture of seasoned campaigners and new ones, yet there was a quite welcoming atmosphere for input from anyone, which was helpful for young participants to engage in the conversations. The ideal of popular education was in place during the meeting the whole time, encouraging all to share and create new ideas. Even a shy Japanese guy like me could eventually speak up and share my view, thanks to this.
Another thing that struck out a lot for me was the diversity not only of the nationality, but also of the fields of expertise. Whereas I work on fossil fuel finance and that was my whole universe, this meeting let me discover other universes thanks to participants working on other issues, such as forest, plastic, food sovereignty, and mining, among other things. But regardless of this diversity, our discussion revealed nothing but the same structure we are facing: the patriarchy and colonialism, exacerbated and maintained by neoliberalism. It was great to know that each participant shares this view and I felt we are working all together to bring a system change to this system of oppression. To me, the most important of all was the strong bonds with new friends, formed by singing, dancing, swimming, joking, and gossiping together. This makes me miss these wonderful friends a lot, and keeps me going in this fight against climate change.”
