Manifest— Oh!

 Listen!

This is my life— My only life— And with my only life, I aspire to be kind and live in a fashion that demonstrates the virtue of a beautiful life for the world and all. My name is Ryan Andrew Sendejas— Today, I write this letter to you whether I know you or not, with all my love and more. Last night, I sat amongst the stars reflecting upon my experience here at Humboldt State University in the Environmental Studies program and senior capstone project. Two years ago I was living in Southern California, I accepted to leave the comfort of my childhood town, where I was rooted deeply in my community where I had invested time and energy. I was afraid— I did not want to travel and lose everything I had and built, I did not want to be alone. Yet, at the same time, I yearned to develop knowledge and skills that would allow me to become an effective leader in building a more resilient community— unfortunately I knew that I would not be able to achieve this  in Southern California, and felt that HSU would be a place where I could work on becoming an agent of change working on projects that allow me enrich the community.

For the past six years, I have been engaged in invoking knowledge of food sovereignty and how to live on the planet with a lighter footprint. Through my experience, I believe I have earned the persona of one that is an agent of change. What’s an agent of social change? To me, it means one who observes social, environmental, and/or economic (ESE) disparities in the world and feels inspired to act in manifesting equity in the lives of beings and community at large. Such change could occur in small acts, such as listening to those who are experiencing turbulent times or feeding someone in need. In a macro sense, such acts could be acting as a facilitator in community organizing or fostering knowledge in minds of your community by being a teacher/professor. Through our ENST capstone I had the privilege of applying what I’ve learned from our program to positively impact our community by working with the Campus Center for Appropriate Technology(CCAT) as the community garden coordinator. My role was to teach resilience through appropriate technology and food sovereignty with students and community members, while also managing projects that took place over the course of the semester.

Through this process, I taught students not only how to build things, but how to work— they learned what tools were required, how to use them, and why. Together we learned how to build earthen walls made out of superadobe; how to mix and apply of lime-based plasters and natural paints; developed woodworking skills to build a deer fence and garden beds; earthworks to contour rainwater on landscapes; and fundamentals of soil building and gardening. I also organized with the volunteers to work together in crews to complete elements of a larger project. I would work with a student to understood the concept or had experience and delegate them to work with other students. The culmination of this, and the aforementioned is developing skills through hands-on resilience knowledge to utilize in their own lives and communities.

On top of working with students, I also worked with CCAT and the HSU institution to improve the overall structure of the student organization. In the fall of 2016, when I first started working at CCAT the organization as a whole was experiencing a rough period. Much of the structural integrity of the grounds was corroding, various technologies we demonstrated were not functioning properly and the students working with the organization had a lack of cohesion and direction. It was highly discouraging and there were many moments where I was on the brink of a madness and wanted to snap on people who made my experience bitter. At the beginning of the semester, I was invited to give input on what goals CCAT was to achieve and how the employees were to work with one another. I feel that my inclusion within this process was a key element to the organization's success, this past semester we had an amazing crew of C-Kittens that meshed well, communicated effectively and were able complete more projects in this one semester than the past three semesters combined. The merits of working within this structure allowed me to be apart of a group that changed the CCAT as a whole and helped me refine my leadership skills.

Overall, I was happy with my capstone project! I can look back and say that I was instrumental in the foundation of two community gardens, one at each education institution I attended and inspired many students to become involved in their community, all culminating to the enrichment of themselves through living lighter on the planet and resisting capitalist structures. There were a few hardships with my experience, but in the grand scheme of things, it did not hinder me from achieving my goals of this class. I am grateful for this experience. I am grateful for all my friends in this program. I am thankful Sarah Ray. And I am thankful for CCAT for all they have given me.

 

“Run from what's comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I'll be mad.” ― Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi - مولوی

“Run from what's comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I'll be mad.” ― Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi - مولوی

On the Horizon

I do see myself as a social change agent because I understand how the core foundations of communal structure portrays itself to Society. The Environmental Issues in todays world are based upon allocation of financial gain to large corporations however I have become educated by validating certain aspects of environment justice to help combat the on-going issues on the Environment. With my skills I would hope to preserver the techniques I have learned to help save some resources for the future generation can enjoy. 

I want to focus on giving back to my community on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation located north eastern of Humboldt county. I would help with the local struggles by giving my service to help protect the tribes culture and way of life. To define one of the tribe’s problem would have to be food sovereignty. Identifying traditional foods and medicines through the concept of traditional ecological knowledge will help with land management to secure traditions for future generation use. 

Experience is what I have obtain from capstone. Learning to find an organization with the same passions as for the love of the land can enhance my goal into becoming a great steward of the land.

The capstone has shaped my goals by defining what I hold dear in my heart, the life of the river because water is life. Helping restore the watershed has encouraged me to understand the dynamics of a specific biodiversity and habitat and why the niche is important for individual organisms for an example riparian zones. These areas have a high concentration of ferns which some of them are used for basket material for local tribe’s. These baskets are essential into cooking, gathering, and ceremonial caps for women conducting into prayer.

The skill that I have obtain is the experience to gather data in the field that can help persuade arguments into the position of natural resource management. The change would be better for the environment by providing restoration and conservation practices by identifying potential hazards, and cultural significant resources. The idea became manifested by wanting to save my homeland.  

Surveying Campbell Creek watershed located in north eastern Humboldt county. The Campbell creek watershed is a major tributary to the Trinity River. Implementing mitigation plans for conservation and restoration. There are many environmental impacts that are potential hazards to the water runoffs and aquifers such as legal/illegal cannabis grows, illegal solid waste dumping, and sedimentation from old logging roads. Using ARCpro to locate these potential hazards using mobile devices in the Campbell Creek Watershed, and by interpreting aerial imagery can provide a baseline of information for measuring activity that can be harmful to the ecosystem that provides an abundance of resources for a complex bio-diversity and cultural resources for the Hupa Tribe.

ENST vision is to promote TEK; traditional ecological knowledge and how its important to the environment.

The capstone expectations were exceeded this semester because I gained the experience to increase my skill in geospatial science.

By identifying the hazards and to promote policies through the county to ensure the right qualifications were needed to ensure a productive allocation for restoration.

The limitations are going through a rigorous process through the state and federal levels to ensure an act gets done properly.

The reading help gave the foundation of an ENST lens to help promote a collective ontology to identify the issues the environmental is facing when taking action in the capstone project. 

The next steps will to be focus on my minor/ emphasis. Having the skills in geospatial science have given my opportunities to increase my experience in multiple fields. The summer of 2018 is going to be fulfilling and rewarding. I gained a paid internship focusing on Elk habitat on the Yurok Indian Reservation. I am thrilled to advance my studies on the prairie systems and how important they are to the indigenous tribe. My goal is to acquire more skills in mobile mapping by focusing on drones and how they can be used in the field by providing better imagery. Overall, I am on a productive path.

                                                                                                              

Next Chapter

As we begin this next chapter, I mustn't forget my previous voyage that got me here today. The jaw dropping shock when faced with the realities of power and privilege. The obsession with "saving the world", only to be replaced by realistic yet concentrated efforts and endeavors. And of course ENST jargon that repeatedly flipped my world upside down. But all of these encounters filled my toolbox with powerful lenses, skills and passions that will empower me as I write my next chapters.

As I look forward into this next chapter, I remind myself of how I want my metaphorical book to be written. By the time my last chapter is finished and my book is closed, what sort of book will I have written? One day, I will join my family and finally truly become one with this earth. All that will remain is the legacy that I leave behind. I don't need to be in a history book for validation of my legacy, no, I don't need that sentimental shit. Instead, all I want is to pass knowing full well that I made decisions and efforts that left a positive impact on this earth and it's people. I want my metaphorical book to be impactful, empowering, and leave behind tangible impacts that bettered someone or somethings life.

I believe that I am up to the task, but as I turn the page and begin this new chapter, I must remind myself of the values that empower me to make these impacts. I must tend to the peoples environmental struggles with opened, modest, and curious senses. I must harness the tools I have gained to contribute to the momentum of justice and peace here, and everywhere.

from mope to hope

• This is my last assignment to do before I get my undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies. Where the heck does time go? This semester was so busy for me that I often wondered how the days went by so fast, a week often felt like an hour. It was a difficult semester for both my mental health and personal relationships were not doing so well. There were days I moped around my house, not being able to get out of bed on sunny Saturdays in Humboldt. Mope is a weird word not only to say but to spell as well. Moping around also feels weird because I such an energetic human. I needed change so I began to ask those around me to help me get out of my funk and that is probably the number one thing I am most proud of this semester. Not the play I was in, not the grades I received, not the countless hours of working to improve my personal relationships, or even pushing myself to go to therapy. I am proud of myself for asking for help from those around me. Because of this, I feel myself ready to be a social change agent, for when we begin to allow those around us to help, we can start working on creating social change in our communities. I began to feel hope in my body, hope that one day I will be the woman I always wanted to become. Looking back on lazy days, overthinking, and a depressive state of mind, I wouldn't change those moments or eliminate them. In those moments, hope emerged through the people I trust and look to. People who are social change agents for they seek to empower those around them. One of these people is my best friend Kayla. She was a reason hope began to emerge in my life. She got me back on my feet as an empowered, social advocate for change in not only our communities but my personal being. She has a bright light to her, one that can really spark change among this planet. She's also a beautiful poet.
  One way I seek to intervene in this world is to make peoples feel welcome and brilliant through modes of art. I felt I accomplished a little bit of that this semester through my service learning capstone. Through working with the North Coast Arts Integration Project, I was able to assist at teaching first and second graders musical theatre. Rather than sitting for hours and reading about tide pools, we were able to integrate environmental discourses on the importance in tide pools as an ecosystem into movement based activities. I saw brilliance through this project because kids who cannot conform to institutionalized education can now feel empowered and able to learn. This was some students time to finally shine in the school system. When I was a kid, I was seen as having difficulties in learning math. But what if I learned math through the arts? For, the arts have always made sense to me. Creativity and expression fuel arts integration for those who may seem bad at math can allow themselves to shine through learning something like geometry through dance methods. I think as we realize the power in arts integration for the inclusion of all skills and knowledges present in institutionalized education, kids can feel empowered to grow and become social change agents.
  
  I'm so grateful for Environmental Studies at HSU. I'm so happy that I was able to immerse myself into a service learning project within my senior capstone. Everyone in the class, Loren, and Sarah all rooted each other on. If that doesn't show merits for people who can reshape the world we live in, I don't know what does. I love you all, thank you for showing me a new light of environmental discourses in my life.
  
  Next, I'm moving back home. I seek to bring about the knowledge I learned within capstone and integrate it into the community I was raised in. Thank you. I am so empowered, so ready to take on new projects, realize more about myself, fall in love with what makes me happy in life, and use it as a spark to be an ever-growing social change agent. Still I rise among my obstacles that make me feel small. I rise to become an energy that cannot be pushed down, I rise above the moping, to meet hope as face to face, hand in hand.
  
  Thank you everyone for being you. ENST family, you are so lovely.
  
  

  
  

Beautiful, Excruciating Friction: All You Change, Changes You

I owe so much of my politicized outlook to Environmental Studies, whose rigor challenged me to ask the big WHY...again and again and again. Not only did it require digging into the why of our planet's laundry list of oppressive structures and environmental crimes (why is our world so broken? How have historical processes shaped contemporary power relations? Why are those power relations so complicated to untangle?) Environmental Studies also ask me to reflect on why our world can't look, sound, taste and feel different. Because it can, and it turns out revolutionary acts happen everywhere, everyday (thank god).

Over the last two years I've stepped in and out of advocacy shoes and I feel I've finally found ones that fit. The presentation work I did originally with Shanti Belaustegui Pockell and Anais Southard around 'white privilege and the environment' for the Campus Dialogue on Race was pivotal for me. Shanti and I have carried the torch with additional facilitation since then, shaping and reshaping the presentation as we gain feedback and continue to evolve our collective politics. This type of facilitation work marks the first time I felt I could meaningfully contribute to anti-racist struggle in a manner that utilized both my positionally an skillset. The experience of crafting this work and delivering it in a way that feels transformative has helped me embody my role as an advocate. I have, and always will be moved by the vulnerable, round-table style of sharing truths. I believe that creating spaces which incorporate interactive facilitation in an almost collective therapy manner has powerful potential for traversing difficult, intersectional issues across lines of difference.

This semester I explored a particular passion for alternative food systems. the definition of 'food sovereignty,' as defined by La Via Campesina, gives me all the fuzzy feels. The politics of food - how/where food is cultivated, sold, eaten and by whom - are entangled with every facet of society. The alternative food movement, in brief, seeks to redefine our relationship to food and agriculture while contesting the dominant, agribusiness food model. I wanted to find out more about local initiatives for 'alternative food' and how those efforts may or may not be propelling us towards a food soveriegn future. So, how better to educate myself on Arcata's food network than to intern with the North Coast Growers Association, who run the farmers' markets?

My volunteer work with NCGA revolved around rebuffing their compost program, but it was my close observations of Arcata's farmers’ market paired with outside food politics research that led me to question and analyze the white cultural codings embedded within alternative food discourse and spaces. I found that white hegemony and colonialism are perpetuated (often in subconscious, nuanced ways largely invisible to white food advocates) as well as contested across California's farmers' markets and within Arcata.

As with the White Privilege and the Environment workshops, I felt as though my particular positionally, as a white person who participates in the alternative food movement, called me into this work. It picked me, and I responded with my critical environmental studies lens.

Writing a research paper on this topic was liberating as hell. The alternative food movement is dear to me and I had this new 'insider' perspective to use. The slow process of writing gave me the chance to articulate what came to feel like the constellation of my justice politics, with food being the north star.

Much of my research was critical of the 'relational process' of whiteness which defines ‘issues' and 'solutions' as such with an explicitly white lens. This cyclical process begins in the white imaginary, is verbalized within alternative food organizations, and is then perpetuated in farmers' market saces as well as in the colonialist-type initiatives which continue to prescribe whitewashed food solutions to communities of color. Conversely, moving toward a just, alternative food system require identifying the need to work towards creating systemic change. It necessitates expressions of solidarity and the implementation of local projects to nourish ongoing collaborations and alliances with diverse coalitions.

Similar to the lessons I've learned from facilitating white privilege workshops, I feel it's the responsibility of white alternative food actors to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. In other words, reaching towards a just, inclusive politics requires collaborating across difference, and the processes of deconstructing and redefining value systems which have previously been foundational to one's identity and politics can be distressing, for sure. Nonetheless, friction is an essential part in this process. Rachel Slocum, a food politics scholar I've come to read a lot of, writes about friction as the "awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference." It is through this friction, I believe, that new arrangements of culture and power can emerge.

“Another world is not only possible. She is on her way.

On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”

-Arundhati Roy

Eggplant & zucchini for the grill

i don’t expect anyone aside from Sarah, or any other lurking human that is either doing this last minute as i, or enjoys what we write, to read this, but i’ll declare my intentions, motives, and views. Proper english isn’t proper, nor correct; being influenced by writers who push the boundaries like Adrienne Marie Brown or bell hooks, about using ‘i” capitalized, syntax flow, etc., entice my brain. So i plan to do the same, but don’t worry Sarah, for you, my apostrophes will be on point (to the best of my ability).

i’ve been fortunate to work with Every Body Humboldt (EBH) for my capstone project. Sarah Matik is already aware of systemic injustice, structural violence, and power dynamics with different identity markers (positionality for you keyword savvy readers). EBH gave me the flexibility to experiment with the vision i held, the intersections of art and activism to create an influence irresistible as to entice folks into joining in (Jordans, artivism). i quickly learned that graphic design wasn’t my niche. It pays well, but it didn’t feel right being behind a computer to create zines, flyers, pamphlets, website design, prop-o-ganda, etc.. It’s a skill i’ve harnessed and will probably continue to use, but the scale and function in which i apply this will differ than originally planned. But isn’t that the beauty with thoughtful, or not, experimentation? We get to try something out. How much of a privilege is that? Ah, yes, like a sip of fancy espresso drink, refreshing. Although i started doing this for EBH, this doesn’t mean i’ll stop completely either.

i’ve been enticed by folks living “outside” the system even though i’ve been going to community college for 4 years, and HSU for 2. What was to be gained from either choice of dropping out to live the romanticized lifestyle, or become somewhat institutionalized to gain important information towards “saving the world”?
Didn’t know until i tried.

i feel more confident in my decision making now; bell hooks makes it clear that theory informs action, and that revolution is a process; Paulo Freire declared that we cannot enter the revolution as objects, those who have reality defined for them; The ethnic-nationalist movements of the 1970’s showed the power of redefining ourselves from objects to subjects, paving the road to exercising self-determination; Adrienne Marie Brown and Octavia Butler show the power of visionary fiction, taking the risk theory on utopia/dystopia narratives, and flipping the scripts in various ways--fractals that spiral outward; Theatre of the Oppressed showed how powerful art can be, not only empowering folks targeted by systemic violence but creating alternative models for conflict resolution.

All of these thinkers, actors, and revolutionaries have most inspired my goals, seeded self-reflexivity, and allowed me to deconstruct frames held around my vision and thinking. Because of these humans, and many others, i’m hoping to take up the trauma-based teaching offered by EBH in October to learn the methods in hopes of maybe one day becoming a teacher-facilitator-student for folks considered “at-risk”. My positionality is apart of this, being considered “at-risk” myself, i believe i have the empathy, understanding, and now the knowledge to work with different youth. Using theatre of the oppressed to explore structural issues without the jargon; using mindful movement to release stored bodily, mental, and emotional traumas, while allowing for better absorption of knowledge; giving folks a chance to explore learning that isn’t the way school traditionally provides; and to be a mentor-facilitator-role model of some sorts.
i'm thankful, grateful, enchanted, by the people i've co-created with, by the knowledge and skills gained, the privilege and ability to attend HSU and the ENST program. i believe i'm a social agent of change, but so are many others, if not all. We all have an effect, and affect, on those we interact with, directly or indirectly. We are constantly changing, influx, and producing different scales of change everywhere we go.

“An artist can choose to bring a creative work into existence, or to work on bringing themselves into existence through creativity. Not by producing works of art, but by living creatively - life as art. The world is not simply happening to us - it is up to use to ensure that we create situations where we are happening to the world.” - Tameka Careen (NBD).

I read through a few sections of the book The Impossible Will Take a Little While, a book that is composed of many brilliant authors. As I was reading I stumbled upon a few excerpts that resonated with me. I pieced together a common theme in the different essays of, owning up to the power we each hold and staying resilient to obstacles that life throws our way. Resilience is the key in playing the role as an individual social change agent. Along your journey you may face many self inflicted obstacles such as fear of not doing enough, feelings of being overwhelmed and thoughts of frustration will sink in time in time again. This idea of powerlessness is brought up in Danusha Veronica’s essay, “Political Paralysis”. She reiterates that I am strong as an individual and possess the power to make changes that will grow and generate even more momentum when collective individuals with no power all come together. Veronica claims, “The problem is not that we have so little power. The problem is that we don’t use the power that we have”. I couldn’t agree more I personally feel that change starts with the individual pursuing their passion, I for one am still finding what that passion is, but having that passion is what brings out the drive in an individual giving them power. Power comes within one's own self determination but, when many individuals come together change can be met by resilience. Resilience can and will shift the balance from no power to power. I to sum it all up, I believe staying true to oneself is the most power conducive thing one can do.