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Dual Perspectives on Climate Advocacy
Everyone has a ‘climate story’—the tale of one’s personal experience with climate change. Often, these are the stories that compel individuals to become active in the climate movement. For the Indian-American community, multiple climate stories are common, as experiences are drawn from across continents and cultures.
Below are the stories of two Indian-American youth climate activists. Like many Indian-Americans, these young women have multiple climate stories informing their actions. Stories that reflect both their personal westernized experience and the other drawn from their Indian roots and the lived experiences of their close family members.
Family Tradition & Tragedy
Padma Balaji is a rising Senior at Mission San Jose High School, and her climate story starts with her mother. “My mom, me, and her are the climate champions of our household. She is very conscious of waste, and mindful of what we use,” she says. “We don’t waste food. We try not to buy a lot or consume more than we use. I think that’s a big part of our culture, dating back so many 1000s of years.” This awareness of scarcity and climate change brought with it anxiety about the future. “I felt this sense of impending doom, such a strong sense of anxiety and hopelessness,” she tells me. And she isn’t alone; a recent article in The Lancet showed that almost 75% of the youth in the United States are moderately or extremely worried about climate change.
Her family in India has had a starkly different experience of climate change. “My family in India, they’re so much more vulnerable to climate change than I am… My aunt lives in Chennai, and a couple of years ago they were hit with these huge floods. Their house was flooded, they didn’t have access to clean water or enough food. That, to me, was very impactful. They are going through something horrible, and this is very obviously influenced, caused, and worsened by climate change.”
It was a combination of these experiences that led Padma towards advocacy, first with the Bay Area Youth Climate Summit (BAYCS) and then with Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action (SVYCA). Here, she found a like-minded community, “The fact that I got to meet and connect with people all across the Bay Area, people who were so different from me, but also still cared deeply about climate change, was so empowering,” Padma recalls. “While climate change is a huge, vast thing, I realized I could make a difference with other young people as a team and as a community.”
Padma is currently the Co-Lead of the SVYCA’s Fremont City Action team, a mentor for the SVYCA Youth Summer Academy, and active in the Bay Area Youth Climate Summit. As a key to addressing climate change, she is driven to build a community of young people to tackle this challenge together. “The idea of collective effort was life-changing for me; it led me to finally be able to feel the sense of hope for a better future and that we could do something about it.”
Indian Dance & Wildfires
“My journey of environmentalism,” says Sarah Adkar, another Indian American Youth Environmentalist, “starts from a place of healthcare.” Sarah’s parents come from Pune, in the Indian State of Maharashtra, which experiences many climate stressors. She is currently a rising senior at Washington High School in Fremont.
In 2022, Sarah began to struggle with dry eyes. The symptoms were bad enough to impact her vision and send her to first an optometrist and then a series of ophthalmologists. She was surprised to learn that the origin of her problem wasn’t her eyes, but her environment. Smoke from local wildfires, combined with the microplastics in the eye makeup she used for Indian Kathak dance, was causing the trouble with her vision.
Sarah’s experience pushed her to explore the connection between climate change and health. “Rising temperatures, toxins, and policy failures manifest not just in melting ice or statistics, but in human lungs, skin, and minds,” she tells me. “Too many still believe climate change is external, when in truth, it is already inside us.” Sarah recently became the first youth advocate at the Global Consortium on Climate and Health’s ‘Neuro-Climate Working Group’, researching the budding field of ‘environmental neuroscience’.
After last year’s SVYCA Youth Leadership Summit, both Sarah and Padma chose to join SVYCA to advocate for climate action. Since then, they have established the Fremont Climate Action team. The team already has 25 youth members and is expanding to Newark and Union City to become the Tri-City Action team. As a City Action team, they have worked to develop climate resource lists for educators and advocated for the incorporation of climate justice into the mandated ethnic studies curriculum.
Silicon Valley Youth Climate IMPACT Summit
Sarah was recently appointed Youth Director at SVYCA, and this year she is organizing the Climate IMPACT Summit. The goal of the Summit is to empower youth to act on climate change in a way that is effective and suits their interests. Action can take many forms, and the Summit will host a diversity of presenters and panels from electrification and nature-based solutions to policy advocacy and green careers. “Something I really want to get across with the Summit, especially to Indian Americans,” says Sarah, “is that every career can be a green career and there is always a way to tie sustainability into your work.”
This year’s SVYCA IMPACT Summit will be held on August 9th, from 9:30-3:00 at the Campbell Heritage Theatre in Campbell. Registration is open now, and the day-long event is free for youth.
More information can be found here.
