THE PHOENIX MANIFESTO

EST. 15-18 JULY 2021

NORTH AMERICAN CONSULTATION: CHILDREN'S RIGHTS TO A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT

Introduction

From July 15-18, 2021, children, young people, adults, and elders from across Turtle Island / North America (Mexico, US, and Canada) came together at The Phoenix Consultation: The Right of Children and Youth to a Healthy Environment: Building an Agenda for Justice, Equity, and Empowerment to share their insights with one another and to co-create our key demands for climate justice, environmental rights, and children’s human rights.

Our Collective Demands

Address the following demands through the lens of Intersectionality.

  • Recognize that intersectionality clarifies the need for justice: “La interseccionalidad nos permite tener clara la necesidad de justicia”;

  • Understand that Intersectionality is a tool for understanding how some identities are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis and how just like in the ecosystem, our differences are a strength and resource for climate justice and are necessary for the co-generation of life;

  • Promote and enact eco-social empathy across differences, identities, species, and nations;

  • Recognize that privilege can be leveraged to benefit oppressed communities;

Commit to the rights to health & wellbeing of both people and nature.

  • Hold the health of children and ecosystems at the core of decision-making to ensure best practice policy for all (human and nature) & harm reduction;

  • Recognize that environmental justice is foundational to securing the rights of youth and children; there can be no rights for children and youth - or any human - if there are no rights for nature;

  • Shift the language of “rights” from being about individuals or humans, to the language of justice for the collective - human and nature - in all of our diversity;

Shift economic metrics of success from GDP to eco-psycho social well-being of people and nature.

  • Transform our current capitalist economy, which generates inequities and legitimizes unsustainable resource and human exploitation that has created and fueled the climate crisis;

  • Promote circular economies, gift economies and well being economies as practiced by many Indigenous nations here on these lands for millennia.

Strengthen and broaden environmental education.

  • Prioritize proactive environmental education for all ages, bringing the global population into a stronger understanding of our current realities in a way that fosters innovation and creativity;

  • Commit to implementing early environmental education that must equip humans to transform the self, institutions and ways of being in ways that ensure rights for all humans and nature. Emotional development must be prioritized in K-12 schooling;

  • Make respect for the environment a habit;

Use proactive, preventative policymaking.

  • Mitigate future harm through clearly defined, effective policies and procedures around challenges such as electronic waste (e-waste), ecosystem loss, and natural habitat destruction;

  • Limit the decision-making power of corporations and extractive industries proactively, so as to prevent against future abuses of the Earth;

Defend the sacred through ecocentric & ecofeminist policy.

  • Center an ethic of care in all forms of policy and governance, shifting away from anthropocentric models and towards ecocentric ways of being;

  • Reintegrate ecocentric perspectives into societal frameworks, honoring the Earth as an animate and generative life force that cares for us and that we must care for in return;

  • Prioritize the wellbeing of mothers and children as a key intervention for sustainable policymaking;

Acknowledge eco-anxiety as an emergent mental health crisis and create adequate systems of support.

  • Create support networks for processing the complexity of emotions that the climate crisis produces in all generations across all identities and communities;

Decolonize policymaking, societal institutions, and respected diverse forms of knowledge.

  • Ensure policies are informed by Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (ITK) and governance systems, which are rooted in ecocentric ways of being;

  • Approach modern climate issues through a decolonial perspective, including understanding and actively disrupting the legacy of historical colonialism, refusing ongoing present-day colonialism, and respecting the sovereignty of Indigenous nations;

  • Move away from extractivist, exploitative, colonial methods of engaging with the earth and its resources, and partnering with the earth as an animate agent for change;

Support self-determination of Indigenous peoples & center Indigenous knowledge.

  • Support Indigenous communities to practice their traditional ways of being and in their pursuit of self determination;

  • Center Indigenous voices in systems. Indigenous-led discourse on local, national, and international environmental policy is key to co-creating systems grounded in a reciprocal relationship with nature and long term sustainable change;

Support the flourishing and diversity of localized social and environmental ecosystems.

  • Ground national and international decision-making in local community structures and economies of scale; Prioritize local food systems, community care structures, accessibility, and sustainability of urban planning;

Call for accountability for harm against both ecosystems and communities.

  • Create systems of legal accountability at all levels of governance for ecocide and environmental health harms; Hold high-income countries and multinational

  • corporations that drive consumption and overexploitation of natural and human capital to a high standard of responsibility;

  • Protect communities forced to migrate due to climate change, including both preventative strategies and support for current climate refugees;

Prioritize youth empowerment and meaningful, sustained intergenerational partnership.

  • Create partnerships across generations, with meaningful inclusion of children and youth in all decisions and actions. This includes not only empowerment of children and young people in these spaces, but also education for adults on how to listen to and respect young people as equal partners in creating lasting change;

  • Include young people in decision-making processes;

Protect Activists.

  • Create safety for intergenerational activists, particularly Indigenous land defenders and abolitionists who face ongoing threats to their safety and wellbeing;

  • Ensure safety for activists who are women and girls; Promote physical and virtual networks, platforms and spaces where activists have access to protection, support, outreach, and amplification of their cause;

Ensure accessibility for all.

  • Center disabled communities in decision making, creating a just and accessible world for people who have disabilities;

  • Address current ableist culture that limits equal participation and further threatens the rights of those with disabilities;

  • Integrate the needs for disabled communities into climate emergency responses and planning;

Reframe reform as reimagination.

  • Dare to dream up the world we want to live in from the ground up;

  • Create spaces for young people and older generations alike to reimagine our systems and societies to most adequately protect both people and the planet;

We demand these actions, to be taken at the local, national, and international level, to address the threats to the air, water, and forests and the realities of climate change, the local experiences of flooding, wildfires, heatwaves, drought, sea level rise that impact us all globally. We need to address the colonial, hetero-patriarchal, and consumerist cultures that fuel climate change and its disproportionate effects on low income countries and post-colonial communities.

We remain committed to actualizing and embodying the above demands in order to co-create the just, sustainable, resilient future we deserve.

- Participants of the Phoenix Consultation

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