Thousands of climate justice advocates, community organizers and Bay Area residents took to the streets Saturday in a two-mile march from Embarcadero Plaza to the Civic Center as part of a worldwide demonstration known as the Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice.
The march mirrored more t
han 800 demonstrations in roughly 90 countries around the world, with protesters demanding that political leaders shift away from using fossil fuels and make the transition to renewable energy.
“The health of the land reflects the health of the people, and right now we’re not in a good place,” said Sheridan Noelani Enomoto, 41. “Me being indigenous is synonymous with taking care of the Earth.”
Enomoto, a Native Hawaiian who now lives in the Bay Area, joined other indigenous leaders and Pacific Islander climate advocates in clutching signs with slogans like, “We are not drowning, we are fighting.”
Indigenous leaders from as far as Hawaii and the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador led demonstrators down Market Street, where leaders chanted in multiple languages as hundreds of people lined the sidewalks and climbed on top of newsstands and shaky trashcans to watch the procession.
Traditional Aztec dancers swayed, the chachayotes around their ankles rattled with every step and their feathered headdresses lifted smoky clouds of incense from bowls in their hands into the crammed crowd. Meanwhile, hundreds of other demonstrators chanted, “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” which roughly translates as, “The people united will never be defeated.”
Chants broke out in various languages throughout the march, with messages ranging from demanding that officials “Keep California oil in the ground,” to calling for the release of undocumented immigrants from federal custody. There were even two people dressed up as dinosaurs holding signs critiquing fossil fuel extraction.
The march came just days before Wednesday’s opening of Gov. Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, where officials and business leaders from across the world will discuss accelerating climate programs on the heels of President Trump’s 2017 decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
Rev. Ambrose Carroll, senior pastor of the Church by the Side of the Road in Berkeley, told the crowd of thousands before the 11 a.m. march that faith leaders must hold lawmakers accountable for ensuring environmental justice for all people living in the United States.
Low-income indigenous groups and communities of color face disproportionate environmental impacts and health disparities because of their lack of access to resources to avoid pollution exposure, or because they often live near contaminated sites, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Carroll’s ten-year-old son, Ambrose Jr., has asthma and plays on a youth football team. Carroll said he monitors his son’s oxygen consumption religiously, especially when he’s on the field.
Leila Salazar-Lopez, executive director of Amazon Watch, based in Oakland, said her organization helped fly out members of the Kichwa people of Sarayaku in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador so they could share their fears of losing their native land to mass deforestation.
“They are the true climate leaders, who stand up to the fossil fuel and industrial extraction industries plundering our planet,” Salazar-Lopez said.
Mirian Cisneros, the president of the Kichwa group, was one of the indigenous leaders who made the trek to San Francisco for the march. Her plea to the United States was simple: respect indigenous people’s rights and stop extracting fuels from their land.
“We must leave fossil fuels underground, both in the Amazon forest and the whole world,” Cisneros said.
