ONLINE: Uprooting Racism, Seeding Sovereignty

press release: Sierra Club Wisconsin collaborative event with partner organizations.

“Uprooting Racism, Seeing Sovereignty” features a riveting keynote address delivered by Soul Fire Farm’s Co-Founder and Farm Manager, Leah Penniman, and closes with a performance by world-renowned poet, Soul Fire Farm’s Program Manager, Naima Penniman. The storytelling weaves the history and structural realities of racial injustice in the food system, with movement strategies past and present of frontlines communities mobilizing for food and land sovereignty. This keynote screening will be followed by a short panel discussion of Wisconsinites working in this field.

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From accessibility of public lands to health impacts of burning fossil fuels, examples of environmental injustice are deeply woven into each of the issues that we organize around. To examine these connections, many parts of the Sierra Club in Wisconsin are coming together to organize an Environmental Justice Event Series beginning this fall. 

We hope that these events can provide an opportunity to explore the inequities rooted within these issues and help shine a light on the critical environmental justice components that exist in our work. 

We will kick off the fall leg of the series in September with an event with a documentary screening of Family, which discusses the connection between wolves and indigenous nations. Following events will include a virtual visit from Emily Ford, the first Black woman to thru-hike the Ice-Age Trail; panel discussions; and a pre-recorded keynote from Leah Penniman, the author of Farming while Black.

This series follows several environmental justice events our teams hosted in the spring. If you need a refresher on those events, make sure to check out the recordings of our webinar on the impacts of the expansion of I94 in Milwaukee hosted by the Transportation Team, the release of the Energy Burden report, and the LN3 Documentary, which was screened by the Tar Sands team.

We hope these events help bring a greater perspective and meaning to the important work our teams do. You will not want to miss them!