Environmental Update Main Global Population Main Population Overview Family Planning Around the World and in the U.S. Sustainable Development, Poverty and Gender Youth Action for the Global Environment Campaign Ecological Footprint Activist Resources Take Action! Contact Us Environmental news, green living tips, and ways to take action: Subscribe to the Sierra Club Insider!

Population Report Edition II, Spring 2008   Inspirational Youth Activist Stories Read below about two amazing youth leaders with our Campus Campaign! Jen Crick, a freshman at Swarthmore College in PA, attended our One Voice Summit in 2007 as an essay-contest winner. This March, she was selected through an application process to attend our PHE Study Tour to the Philippines, where she learned first hand how integrated projects that address the complex connections between humans, their health, and their environment are more cost-effective, sustainable, and successful! Christina James, a junior at Oberlin College in OH, was active in 2007 with both our Campus Campaign and Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom (SYRF), a program of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC). She organized a series of events on her campus to unite issues of faith, reproductive justice and environmental protection, and attended our 2008 One Voice Summit to further refine her skills. Read about how both youth leaders will be continuing to work with our Campus Campaign next year, speaking out for holistic solutions that recognize the links among health, access to voluntary family planning information and services, faith, and stewardship of our bodies and the natural world. By uniting our visions, our voices, and our movements, we CAN overcome the challenges we face today! Discovering Population, Health and the Environment in the Philippines By Jen Crick, Freshman at Swarthmore College, PA This spring, I took a week off from classes at my small liberal arts college for a Study Tour to the Philippines coordinated by the Sierra Club, Audubon, and the Izaak Walton League of America, to learn about PHE initiatives - projects that connect population, health and environmental issues to effectively meet community needs and protect the environment. Prior to this trip, my experience with poverty issues facing developing countries was limited to specials on the Travel Channel. Watching camera crews venture out to explore beautiful, pristine jungles didn't prepare me for the realities of a country like the Philippines. Untouched wilderness is the exception, not the rule, which makes the PHE projects that we visited vital to those few pristine areas left, and the many people we met that depend on them. Arrival in Manila felt like plunging into a bustling alien world, with many people walking the streets, noisy and smoggy traffic, stray animals and refuse. At 2%, the Philippines has the fastest growing population in Southeast Asia, but it's not just the claustrophobic conditions of Manila's streets that make it feel like you can't breathe.(1) Even though 9.9 million people live in Manila, it has some of the worst air quality in the world.(2)(3) After a day in Manila, we headed for some of the remaining wilderness to meet with the Aetas tribe. The Aetas are subsistence farmers that were relocated to government-owned land after their original home on Mount Pinatubo erupted. The tribe is now in debt and confined to work in share cropping. They don't have access to health care, safe drinking water or school for the seventy children in the tribe. One of the women said that the happiest moment in her life was selling something, because that meant she would be able to feed her family that day. The people that we spoke with understood their situation very well, but felt they didn't have the means or power to change it. Fortunately they are partnering with the Haribon Foundation, an organization dedicated to Philippine biodiversity, which employs a community organizer to implement a program of bio-intensive growing (BIG). This organic planting method that include legumes, fruits, and root crops aims to address food security and nutrition concerns, and serves as a source of hope for everyone involved. The Aetas wanted to participate in a Population Health and Environment project because they understood that sustainability is deeply connected with their livelihoods, those of their children, and a way out of poverty. When we returned to Manila we visited another project site along the Pasig River. This was a poor community, but because they were in an urban area, they had better access to basic health care services. At the Pasig River Project, community members came together to clean the polluted river, provide a school and health care for everyone, and to integrate environmental stewardship into the community's plans for the future. The most encouraging aspect was that everyone we met greeted us with genuine smiles. Their pride in their community mobilization efforts and the awesome hope that they shared for their future was apparent even without the dance performances they had planned for our group. The next stops on the tour were to actual PHE project sites where we saw US and global funds in action. In Quezon City, one of the major cities that makes up Metro Manila, we met with a midwife who was receiving business training to professionalize her private health clinic through a USAID funded program. After flying to the island of Palawan and driving north from the capitol to a city called Roxas, we had the opportunity to visit with the community leaders that maintained a Marine Protected Area and advanced awareness of family planning. The Roxas visit was a great way to end the study tour because it was a victory for PHE - the project was so successful at managing the community's marine resources, and at meeting the community's expressed needs for accessible family planning, that the local governments were taking over and using their own budgets to sustain it. Even though the trip is over, I'm going to continue to learn and advocate for PHE. I hope to gain a different angle by studying abroad in Madagascar, to share my experiences by talking with groups on my college campus and local chapters of the Sierra Club, and to keep advocating for increased and unrestricted funding for programs like these. Even with all of the obstacles facing family planning and environmental stewardship, my trip to the Philippines really makes me believe that with a lot of work, we can help people the world over like the Pasig River, Roxas, and even Aetas communities achieve our mutual goals of a healthy earth and better lives. Sources: (1)PRB Fact Sheet - Breaking New Ground (2)Phillipine Information Agency (3)ADB.org   Intersectional Solutions to Global Problems: My Involvement in Activism By Christina James Like many other young activists, I was oblivious to the connection between reproductive justice and the environment. As a Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies major, sexual and reproductive health and rights issues are extremely important to me, to students at Oberlin College, and to youth in the Oberlin community. But I didn't see the connection between healthy sexual choices and responsible choices to cut down on personal resource consumption, until I became involved with the Sierra Club's Youth Action for the Global Environment Campaign. This is my story of how I came to host events on my campus that incorporate issues of faith, reproductive justice, and environmental protection. While these issues may seem disconnected to others, coalition work came naturally to me, because my focus as an activist and a college student was on the intersection of faith and reproductive choice. I work with a youth program called SYRF (Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom) whose mission is to merge issues of reproductive justice and faith in order to incorporate people of faith in the discussion on reproductive choice, to dispel the myth that religious people are anti-choice and conservative (and vice versa), and to educate others about intersectional solutions to complex problems. My first encounter with the Sierra Club and the notion that family planning has a huge impact on environmental protection occurred when my group hosted an event called "Sex and the Environment." Adriana Varillas of GoJoven, a Youth Leadership in Sexual and Reproductive Health Program implemented by International Health Programs (IHP) of the Public Health Institute (PHI), traveled from Cancun, Mexico to discuss how access to voluntary family planning directly impacts her community. Ty Dawson came from Ohio State to speak about his experiences with mountain-top removal, and Cassie Gardener, Campus Organizer with the Global Population and Environment Program, spoke about how international family planning protects the environment in Madagascar and globally. This event led me to attend the One Voice Summit this past April, a National Student Training cosponsored by Sierra Club, Advocates for Youth, SIECUS and the Feminist Majority Foundation, where I learned more about ways I could take action on these interconnected issues. In my work with SYRF, I've been very active in engaging my community in discussion about the relationship between reproductive rights and faith. Oberlin is challenging for SYRF organizing because of students' apathy towards any discussions of faith or religion. In spite of these challenges, two panels that we hosted were particularly successful on campus. The first panel included religious leaders from surrounding communities (including Reverend Tony Minor, Reverend Hill, and Rabbi Shimon Brand) who spoke about their involvement with the reproductive justice movement. It was a great way to introduce Oberlin to the interrelatedness of faith and issues of reproductive choice and the need to collectively address social justice issues, including environmental degradation. This past May we hosted the second panel, "Enabling Men to Enable Women: Men's Role in the Reproductive Justice Movement." There were three panelists: Reverend David Hill, who spoke about his involvement with All-Options Clergy Counseling; Colin Dean, a sexual health educator in the community around Kent State University; and Joshua Curtis of the Oberlin ACLU Chapter who is a clinic escort in Cleveland. We wanted to engage the audience about the ways in which men can support their female partners and why male involvement benefits the larger fight for reproductive justice. My future plans involve organizing a coalition of student organizations that will combine their passions of faith, reproductive justice and environmental protection. I think it will be a challenging leap for people to make the connections, but I hope that starting this project will bring Oberlin students closer together to brainstorm intersectional solutions and that in this process we will realize that our groups do not have to compete for attention because the same problems are at the core of our issues. It is my hope that we will inspire other groups to do more coalition work as well, and that our collective message will be more effective than our individual voices. Activism in coalitions, combined with individual activism such as making healthy sexual choices or cutting down on personal consumption of resources, is one of the key ways that we can realize that we're all connected in our desires for healthy bodies and a healthy planet. Tell at least five friends about the Population Report and get them involved with Sierra Club's Global Population and Environment Program.   In this edition: News from Capitol Hill Program Updates Inspirational Youth Activist Stories Tools and Resources   Printer-friendly version of this page   Up to Top HOME | Email Signup | About Us | Contact Us | Terms of Use | © 2008 Sierra Club