AMELIA TELFORD
As the national co-director of Seed, Australia’s first Indigenous youth climate network, and a Bundjalung woman, Amelia Telford is helping young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people take action on climate change and protect land, culture and commu
CLIMATE CHANGE IS UNFAIR and that’s what drives me. There are people who benefit from it – big business, government and individuals – and the people who are facing the worst impact are those who have done the least to cause it and have benefitted the least as well.
THE WORLD WE LIVE IN CAN BE FILLED WITH A LOT OF DOOM AND GLOOM, but in my job I get to work with so many amazing young people who are leading change in their communities across the country. They give me hope every day that we can and will build a more just and sustainable future.
SOMETIMES I JUST HAVE TO TAKE A DEEP BREATH and remind myself why I’m doing this work, because I have the cultural responsibility... When you break down the issues and go back to basics, climate change threatens our ability to have access to clean air, clean drinking water, food – the basic things we need to survive. If you can get agreement that we need those things, then there’s somewhere you can go from there. You can’t eat money and you can’t drink gas is what we say.
WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS ROOT CAUSES, you can see a connection with the way women are treated in the world. We’re often treated like less than men. The rates of domestic violence and sexual abuse and all the ways women are poorly treated, you can see reflected in the way we treat our land, which for us is like our mother. We need to respect and protect her because she provides for us and we couldn’t live without her.
THERE’S A QUOTE BY JOHN LEWIS, a civil rights leader in the US, that we often talk about: “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” You can’t just say, “Oh, someone else will fix it.” That mentality is what got us here in the first place.