Divestment Generation Mini Series - Intro

This episode is the Introduction to our “Divestment Generation” mini series, a five episode series exploring the 9 year campaign to win fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto! This  “Intro to the Series” is a conversation between the creators and co-hosts  of the Divestment Generation mini-series, Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva. Here, Amanda and Julia  introduce you to the scope and motivations of the “Divestment Generation” mini-series and some of the key actors and events that come up in later episodes. You may find it helpful to return to this Introduction as you listen to episodes 1-5 of the series, as well as the linked resources below!
This episode was first aired on CJRU’s Radio Everywhere program, which works in “collaboration with community organizations to produce pieces that showcase the work they’re doing, and to provide a platform for them to tell their own stories”. You can find out more about CJRU here: https://www.cjru.ca/project/radio-everywhere/ 
This mini-series emerges from Amanda’s doctoral research with CJTO, a two-year ethnographic community-based participatory research project tentatively entitled “Actualizing Everything: Affective Activism, Effective Politics, and the Future of Climate Justice Organizing in Canada”. Cite as: Harvey-Sánchez, A. & DaSilva, J. (2022). “Divestment Generation Mini Series, Intro to the Series”. Climate Justice Toronto. 


EPISODE RESOURCES

Land Story Toolkit

UofT Fossil Fuel Divestment Timeline 

Divestment and Beyond, Briarpatch Magazine Article (by Amanda Harvey-Sánchez & Sydney Lang) 

Climate101 (the 2016 civil disobedience action that brought Amanda and Julia together) 

Discovering University Worlds 

SOCIAL MEDIA & CONTACT INFO 

Amanda Harvey-Sánchez: Twitter, Instagram, email

Julia DaSilva: julia.dasilva713@gmail.com

Climate Justice Toronto (CJTO): Instagram, Twitter 

CJUofT (formerly LeapUofT): Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
2185 Art Collective: Instagram

CLIMATE JUSTICE TORONTO 

This podcast is brought to you by Climate Justice Toronto: a youth-led collective building an irresistible movement to confront the climate crisis by addressing its root causes: capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy. Find us at climatejusticeto.com

CREDITS

Editing: Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Stefan Hegerat 

Original Music: Stefan Hegerat

Hosts: Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva

Producer: Climate Justice Toronto

Transcript

Amanda: This is Climate Justice Radio 

Amanda: Hello and welcome back to Climate Justice Radio, a podcast by Climate Justice Toronto. Climate Justice Radio is a podcast that covers a wide range of issues connected to climate justice. My name is Amanda Harvey-Sanchez  and I use she/her pronouns

Julia: and my name is Julia DaSilva and I use she/her pronouns

Amanda: and we’ll be your hosts for the episode!

Julia: You’re listening to our “Divestment Generation” mini series, a five episode series exploring the 9 year campaign to win fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto! This is our “Intro to the Series”, where we’re going to  introduce you to the scope and motivations of the “Divestment Generation” mini-series, and some of the key actors and events that come up in later episodes. You may find it helpful to return to this Introduction as you listen to episodes 1-5, as well as the linked resources in the show notes! 

Amanda: First, Julia and I would both like to introduce ourselves with our “land stories”. Land stories are a practice used in CJTO meetings to reflect on our personal relationship to the lands where we reside and how this informs our organizing work. 

Amanda: So, I’ve lived in Toronto all of my life but my sense of place here is something that has often felt disjointed. 

My father was born in Toronto, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Wendat, and most recently the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.  He grew up with adopted parents of Scottish and English descent. My father only found his birth-mother later in life, and never looked for his birth-father, but both are (to my knowledge) of white European ancestry. My father is estranged from much of his family, and so I grew up with limited contact with my paternal grandparents and extended family in Canada. I often wonder how a more collectively-oriented culture in so-called Canadian society might have differently shaped this outcome for me. 

My mother was born in Mexico City, the traditional territory of multiple Nahua Indigenous groups and a city built by Spanish colonizers atop the ruins of Tenochtitlán, the former capital of the Aztec Empire. My mother immigrated to Toronto, Canada in 1981. She is the second youngest of four sisters and the only one in the family to begin a new life in another country. The history of colonization in Mexico is both similar and different to other parts of North America. Dark-skinned people like my mother face colourism and racism within Mexico and other countries including Canada and the US. Still, non-Indigenous and non-Black Mexicans like my mother also benefit from the nation-building political project of “mestizaje”, which sought to erase Indigenous and Black presence in Mexico and forge the image of a unified “mixed” or “mestizo” political subject. 

As the daughter of a “mestiza” Mexican-born woman and a white Canadian-born man, I am “mixed race” through multiple trajectories of colonization across Turtle Island. I am often perceived differently in different parts of the continent and regions of the world. Sometimes the way I am received and treated by others is also shaped in part by which colonial language I speak (English, Spanish, or French). I am also a beneficiary of white privilege, the freedom of movement across colonial borders granted by my Canadian citizenship, and access to stolen land in Toronto where I was born and have lived as a settler my entire life.

I grew up with access to urban green spaces in the city of Toronto and the economic resources to travel and explore Canada’s vast natural beauty on family trips with my parents as a child. An avid environmentalist, my father fostered in me from a young age a sense of curiosity, playfulness, and responsibility towards the natural world. These are positive attributes I developed, however, without any understanding of the intertwining histories of settler-colonialism, white environmentalism, and Indigenous dispossession on the same lands I explored freely as a child. It was my mother’s profound empathy and generosity, exhibited equally in her care for relatives in Mexico and strangers she encountered in Canada, that predisposed me towards an interest in social justice causes. 

Growing up as an only-child and the child of an immigrant, I often found myself feeling lonely and struggling with a sense of belonging and rootedness in the world. That changed dramatically after I joined the fossil fuel divestment campaign at the University of Toronto in January of 2015 - when I was 18 years old.  For the first time in my life, I had a political home and family, a sense of belonging, and a community of people who taught me how to think of the climate crisis in new and creative ways. Because of those formative experiences in my adolescence and childhood, I am now a climate justice organizer, activist researcher, and educator. My deep love and gratitude for the people who brought me to this point inspired me to make this podcast. 

Julia’s land story: 

So, My maternal grandparents settled on unceded Algonquin, Anishinabeg territory, in Ottawa, in the fifties, after moving from Portugal.  And my ancestors on my fathers side immigrated from Ireland and France in the nineteenth century, and settled on the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaw Nation in so-called Nova Scotia, governed by the peace and friendship treaties made between the British, Mi’kmaw, and Maliseet. Before I was born, my mother and father had both moved to this area known as Tkaronto or Toronto.  Tkaronto is the traditional sovereign territory of many Indigenous Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Huron-Wendat, and any others other Nations, recorded and unrecorded; the current treaty holders are the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation.  This territory is subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee that binds them to peaceably share and care for the Great Lakes region.  As settlers we come to this land by Treaty 13 also known as the Toronto “Purchase” between the Crown and Mississaugas.

My maternal grandfather worked for the Canadian mint, and my paternal grandfather, from a coal mining town in Cape Breton, worked in a coal mine all his life, and sometimes I think about those as almost two ends of the project of extractivism that defines how the Canadian state is structured.  I had very little of a general sense of family history growing up, and since both my parents lived away from our extended family, little connection to a geographically-centred community and any sense of connection to land that that might bring.  And It wasn’t really until I went back to stay with my relatives in Portugal after high school, and happened, this was in 2016, to be there the summer of the worst forest fires in living memory, which have been getting worse every year, and in the small town where my cousins live felt for the first time the visceral sense of destruction, that wasn’t abstract, that was intricately bound up in our experience of being on the land in the place that we are.  And my existence as a settler without that sense of connection up until that point had largely sheltered me from what that destruction felt like, how it was embodied.

I began organizing with the divestment campaign very shortly after, in the fall of 2016, when I started at UofT—I actually met Amanda at the Toronto meetup for a 350 action in Ottawa called Climate 101, which was a youth civil disobedience action against the Transmountain pipeline, then Kinder Morgan. UofT350 at that point had largely disbanded, and that fall I founded  Leap UofT, which eventually took up the campaign.

Thinking about how land stories like this relate to the focus of this series, the divestment campaign: one thing that I’ve always found powerful to highlight is this conception of the university as a very particular nexus of colonial extraction: materially supported by extraction (eg. through investments in the fossil fuel industry, as well as existence on stolen land), as a site where students are trained within those relationships, perpetuating them, and as site of extraction themselves, knowledge extraction for use by the capitalist economy.  So divestment organizing became this place-based entry point where a lot of students/young organizers, including myself, first started grappling with those material realities, the power dynamics/extractive relationships that define the place we’re living in. 

I am currently located in so-called Vancouver, on the territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, so now very close to where the Canadian state is still, six years later,  working to push the Transmountain pipeline through unceded territory (which is just one of many destructive projects taking place in this immediate area). 

And I think of the meaningful land story or land acknowledgement as part of a refusal to allow that state to define the terms on which we relate to others, while recognizing its reality and the violence it continues to perpetrate.  And when we refuse those terms, we take on the responsibility for re-defining those relationships—which implies a commitment to working in solidarity towards liberation, in our climate justice work and all the other work we do on stolen land.

Julia: So Amanda, why this mini-series, and how did this idea come about?

Amanda: So this idea for this podcast is actually something  I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and it’s the result of a constellation of events. I started my PhD program in 2020 and I was taking a course called “genealogies of anthropological thought”. And in that course ee were reading and thinking about the lineages of different philosophical traditions,  interventions, and modes of resistance and how all of that shapes the present. So this got me thinking about activist genealogies, and the lines of convergence and descent out of which present-day movements emerge. Concurrently, I was also getting back into community organizing in Toronto  after having lived abroad for almost a year. And I was meeting so many new organizers who came into the climate justice movement post-2019 after the global climate strike. Many of them had so much promise, so much joy, so much potential, but also very few role models and mentors that they could turn to for advice, guidance, and personal growth. At this time, some folks in Climate Justice Toronto  were also talking about what some people call “movement elders”, and so I was wondering “what does a movement elder look like in the youth-wing of the climate justice movement?” 

Then of course Meric Gertler, the President of UofT, announced that UofT was divesting from fossil fuels in October 2021. So we actually won the campaign! At this time, I was working with my PhD supervisor as an RA on this interdisciplinary research project called “Discovering University Worlds”. So my supervisor knew that I had been a leading organizer on the  fossil fuel divestment campaign at UofT during my undergrad and so she asked me if I would be interested in creating a timeline of the campaign, as a kind of public archive of student activism on divestment and climate justice  more broadly. I very hesitantly said yes. Truthfully, I actually procrastinated for a long time because I was afraid of revisiting some painful memories from some of the more painful or more difficult moments in the campaign. When I finally pushed past that fear and began working on the timeline, that’s when I was able to revisit the campaign with fresh eyes, and I could actually see just how much we accomplished and also how personally transformative this campaign was in terms of my own life trajectory. 

So having  insider knowledge of the campaign was invaluable in making the timeline, but I still couldn’t do it by myself. I needed to consult with other people I had worked with at the time, in 2015-2016, but more importantly I also had to consult with people who worked on the campaign before and after me. So filling in the timeline was a deeply collaborative and humbling process. Seeing everyone’s comments in the google doc, links to pictures, emails in my inbox with private meeting minutes and other resources, as well as messages from former and current divestment organizers thanking me for developing the timeline, all of this made me want to take it to the next level. That’s when I reached out to you, Julia, and asked if you would be interested in collaborating with me on a podcast, which I was calling  “Divestment Generation”. 

So I guess that kind of gives me a question for you, Julia, which is, why did you say yes? Why did you want to take part in making this podcast with me?

Julia: So divestment organizing was in a lot of ways the core organizing principle of my undergrad—the thing that kind of rooted everything else I was doing during those four years. I was involved in a number of organizing spaces and campaigns, but everything I did I had a mindset of, how can I relate this to divestment strategy, how do we build this. It’s where I made most of my friends and built my strongest relationships.   But by the time the 2021 announcement came along I had graduated well over a year before, and I was also pretty disillusioned in the sense of, not that I didn’t think that divestment work was still really important, but  I don’t think any part of me actually believed that there could ever be a win, or that I would ever hear news from the UofT administration that was anything other than kind of abhorrent. So I had come to see divestment organizing as a useful tool or starting place for doing campus climate justice work more broadly, and was really relieved not to have my life centred on campus organizing anymore.  And then we found out that we had won—and I started to feel—like I especially remember that first day—these just wells of joy that I had never expected to feel about anything the UofT administration ever did, including this.  So it seemed important to start unpacking  everything we spent those years doing. Something was producing this deep joy, that I didn’t know how to account for.

Yeah, so, why call it “Divestment Generation”?

Amanda: So for me, I view  “Divestment Generation” as the group of people who grew up already aware of climate change, we’re past the climate denialism, we grew up hearing about this, maybe we saw the Al Gore documentary or whatever. But we really became politicized and organized through campus fossil fuel divestment campaigns. So that’s the Divestment Generation. Within the “Divestment Generation” there are several sub-generations, and that’s because turnover is high in youth and student movements but institutional change is really slow, so that means that there are often multiple successive groups of students that work on any single campaign, like fossil fuel divestment at UofT.

Julia: Right, and so at first we were thinking of two divestment “generations” for the UofT campaign, one when the campaign was led by UofT350 when you were actively involved, and then another when the campaign was led by LeapUofT, when I was actively involved. But then once we started developing that plan more thoroughly we both realized that each of those generations could be subdivided further. There were a lot of people, current organizers, who I didn’t know at all, and were in a whole kind of different era from me, just in terms of their political development, and there were people who worked on the campaign before you were even a student, Amanda.

Amanda: Yes, and the funny thing too is most of the people in these generations don’t even know each other! The students in the “fourth generation” have no idea of what was happening in the “first generation”, and sometimes even generations that followed afterwards. So part of the idea with “divestment generation” is also that these are generations that are super compressed and oftentimes disconnected. 

Julia: It was really eye-opening for me to see just how fast that happens, because nine years is just not that long. And of course the university administration and people in power more broadly benefit from this lack of institutional memory on the part of activists, specifically student activists who are working on this very compressed schedule. And if we’re having to reinvent the wheel every 3 or 4 years, we waste a lot of time and resources and it’s difficult to build long term power. 

Amanda: So, with that context  in mind, I can give us an idea of how this mini-series is organized. So episodes 1-4 are conversations with divestment organizers in each of the “four” divestment generations at UofT. So, generation 1 we’re treating loosely as folks involved during the campaign from its inception in 2012 until around 2014, with the People’s Climate March in New York City being a significant end-marker for that generation. Generation 2 is broadly folks involved in the campaign from 2014 to 2016, or post-People’s Climate March until President Gertler’s rejection of divestment and its immediate aftermath. And that’s also the generation I fall in.

Julia: Generation 3, in which I fall, includes folks involved in the campaign from 2016 until 2019, ending around just before the start of the pandemic. Generation 4 is folks involved from 2019 until the big win in October 2021 and its immediate aftermath. And then finally, episode 5 is an “intergenerational” conversation, where we invite a couple of people from each of the prior episodes to meet one another and talk about key themes from the podcast, where they are now, and next steps for the climate justice movement. 

Amanda: Right, so, for the best listening experience and to ensure you’re able to follow along easily, we have two recommended readings before listening to episode 1. First is the timeline of the campaign that I was telling you about, and second is a short article in Briarpatch magazine, co-authored by myself, Amanda, and Sydney Lang, another former divestment organizer. And both of these readings are linked in the show notes. But for a shortened overview of the key dates and actors, I’m going to read out a condensed timeline I wrote,  as it was published in the Briarpatch piece. 

2012–2015: Set the agenda, understand the system, and take the bull by its horns

The University of Toronto fossil fuel divestment campaign began in June 2012 when a group of U of T students and community members founded the grassroots group Toronto350.org and later, UofT350, the campus branch of the group. U of T already had a “Policy on Social and Political Issues With Respect to University Divestment,” a set of procedures that prescribed how and when activists could raise issues about the university’s harmful investments, and how and when the university would respond. UofT350 had to learn to navigate the institutional and bureaucratic channels set out in the policy. This included writing a “brief” to make the case for divestment, communicating with the president’s ad hoc committee on divestment, and following the proceedings of the governing council. Alongside this, UofT350 worked with campus groups, student unions, and alumni to build broad support for fossil fuel divestment through letter writing, art builds, panel discussions, movie screenings, marches, and rallies.

December 2015–March 2016: When you think you’ve won, fight on! 

On December 15, 2015, the president’s ad hoc committee on fossil fuel divestment published the “Report of the President’s Advisory Committee on Divestment from Fossil Fuels,” recommending “targeted” fossil fuel divestment. The announcement garnered widespread media attention and came to be known as the “Toronto Principle.” This was a huge win for the campaign!

Following a brief meeting with the president in February, UofT350 published a “Community Response.” The response pushed to expand and refine the recommendations in the ad hoc committee’s report and proposed new criteria to screen investments that account for Indigenous Rights. In the lead up to “decision day,” March 30, 2016, UofT350 staged banner drops across campus with messages such as “Divestment is Coming.” 

March 2016: Naïveté and betrayal 

On March 30, 2016, president Gertler rejected his own ad hoc committee’s recommendation for targeted divestment in a report entitled “Beyond Divestment: Taking Decisive Action on Climate Change.” While UofT350 knew that this outcome was possible, it was still shocking. UofT350 staged public demonstrations throughout April, including an emergency rally for divestment outside a governing council meeting while a UofT350 member addressed the president directly inside. Students and supporters were indignant, but they struggled to channel that anger into effective organizing. Struggling with burnout, internal ideological disagreements, and the graduation of many long-time organizers, UofT350 fizzled out as a group.

Fall 2016–2021: New groups emerge and pick up the mantle

That fall, a new cohort of students founded Leap UofT as the U of T campus branch of the international non-profit The Leap. Leap UofT set out to relaunch the U of T fossil fuel divestment campaign with a more explicit focus on the connections between climate justice and economic, social, and environmental justice. Leap UofT broadened its focus to include parallel campaigns targeting the federated colleges at U of T. In the fall of 2019, a group of students, faculty, and staff founded the Divestment and Beyond coalition.  

October 2021: Playing the long game – U of T divests

On October 27, 2021, in a letter to the U of T community, president Gertler announced that the University of Toronto was committing to divest from investments in fossil fuel companies in its endowment fund beginning immediately. It was a surprising but hard-won victory for the generations of students, faculty, and staff who had poured their hearts into striving for divestment.

Julia: So in the next few episodes, we’ll be talking to organizers from each of these key moments. We hope you enjoy listening to the Divestment Generation mini-series! 

OUTRO - Julia 

Stay tuned for Episode 1  of the Divestment Generation mini-series, where we’ll be speaking with divestment organizers who were active during the campaign from its inception in 2012 until 2014, around the time of the People’s Climate March in New York City. 

Climate Justice Radio is brought to you by Climate Justice Toronto. This mini-series  features original music by Stefan Hegerat, and editing by Stefan, Amanda, and Julia. The creators and co-hosts of the series are Amanda and Julia. Special thanks to CJRU radio and 2185 Art Collective for use of recording space and equipment. You can find all our socials, and a link to sign up to join CJTO at our website: climatejusticeto.com. The transcript for this episode, as well as other information and  links mentioned in the podcast will be in our episode description. 

Thanks for tuning in! Remember to hit subscribe to be the first to be notified when we drop a new episode, and if you have been enjoying this podcast, feel free to leave a friendly review! 

This episode was first aired on CJRU’s Radio Everywhere program, which works in collaboration with community organizations to produce pieces that showcase the work they’re doing, and to provide a platform for them to tell their own stories.  

You can find out more about CJRU through the link in the show notes [https://www.cjru.ca/project/radio-everywhere/]

In solidarity, Climate Justice Radio.