Frontline Communities of Forest Fires
Para ler em português, clica aqui.
If you landed on this page, you were probably approached by one of our organizers at some point. This might have happened on the street, in a public event or in a meeting. Hopefully the conversation left you intrigued, inspired or curious. Perhaps you might be left with some questions that we didn’t have time to clarify. So here we are to give you more context and more details.
We are an informal climate justice collective based mostly in Lisbon. We exist for ten years. We did a lot of different things, including reports, climate marches, gatherings, presentations in schools, civil disobedience actions, just transition campaigns, and action camps. We gave you the link to this page so that you can explore the entire website on your own.
We are moved by injustices, we hold solidarity as a core value, and we are anxious about the climate emergency.
In these organizing efforts around forest fires, not everyone involved is part of Climáximo nor do they need to be.
No one other than the actual human beings you met. We are an informal collective. We are all volunteers. We all have jobs other than our militancy. We don’t earn anything from this, other than a sense of solidarity. (In fact, we spend money from our pockets for the expenses.)
Forest fires are killing people and destroying livelihoods in Portugal and around the world. So does the climate crisis, and in an ever-increasing impact and speed. The governments have made the choice to let the business-as-usual run its course. This means disaster after disaster for us. Only the communities affected by the climate crisis, in solidarity and for global justice, can solve this problem.
So, we need to organize. Organizing means people coming together to solve the problems that they are facing. As simple as that. How it looks like will be shaped by the people who are doing the organizing.
The person who talked to you is offering you support and also inviting you to organize your community to tackle this catastrophe.
On the one hand, you don’t have to trust us. You need to trust yourself and your community, holding solidarity as our guiding star. We are not recruiting anyone to Climáximo. (We are based in Lisbon so even if we wanted to, it wouldn’t make practical sense.) We will be there to support you to organize your community.
On the other hand, we are the people who put their bodies on the line to warn the public about the climate emergency and the atrocities that the governments and the corporations designed for humanity. Besides climate marches, alliance building and campaigning, we did high-risk actions. We had hundred of arrests and face dozens of court cases for taking non-violent direct action for the climate. We are very scared and extremely worried about the climate crisis. We have very little time to pull the emergency break. We are serious. We are committed to the cause of climate justice. We are in this to win, i.e. to halt forest fires and to stop climate and social collapse.
The plan is that we build the plan together.
We carry with us ten years of experience. We also have lessons from past movements as well as experiences we gathered from international movements.
We value the specificity of each context and we value strategic unity. We will have to figure out together.
If you have the direct contact of the person whom you met, please simply reach out to them. Otherwise, probably the best option is to send us an email.
In either case, we are very much interested in keeping in touch with you.
We have access to a lot of resources and trainings on community organizing, which we are happy to share with local organizers.
We can accompany you as you prepare meetings or have one-on-one conversations with your friends, neighbors or family members.
We can assist you in organizing public events or talking to people you don’t know yet.
We can support you with strategy tools as you build your plan.
We can connect you with people who do similar work in Portugal and elsewhere.
In all of these, please bear in mind that we are all working people doing this in the time we spare from our other commitments. So it is important for us that you take the initiative and leadership in this process. This is in fact the only way we can have a chance to win.
The best first step is to organize a meeting with your friends, family member and neighbours about the topic.
We are happy to accompany you in preparing the meeting, holding it, and following up. We can also connect you with other people who are doing similar work. Just drop us a message or an email, and we will pick it up from there.