Azi Khalili (the International Liberation Reference Person for South, Central, and West Asian-Heritage People) and Diane Balser (the International Liberation Reference Person for Women) recently led a workshop on women and care of the environment.


Azi shared information about the climate crisis and how it exacerbates already challenging conditions for females. She pushed hard on the fact that our female minds are needed to solve this crisis. She asked us to discharge about the world we want to create and figure out what it would take [require] to get there. 


I had known that female minds are important, but I hadn’t thought that I needed to fully engage my mind with the climate crisis. Like many females, I have preferred to be in the background, working there to make things go better. 


Azi asked us to look at what gets in our way of knowing what we want and thinking about economic systems. She asked us to work systematically on the distress that keeps us from having our minds front and center. 


Because of the nature of sexism, hurts connected to being female don’t easily get challenged. They are often put on the back burner of [not prioritized in] our re-emergence, resulting in a world and a movement that are fraught with male domination—that are organized by males, and ideas generated by males (many of which are carried out by females).


It seemed that the question both Azi and Diane were asking was, “How can we go after [pursue] the biggest crisis facing human beings without facing the biggest hurts in our lives?” 


Having had to rely on men for our existence throughout the history of class society, females have been left with heavy chronic distress about our existence. And in Western society, in which some females have been given access to capital resource, there is pretense that the distress has already been discharged. Therefore, we in the West must discharge on quasi-women’s liberation—on where we have been lied to, betrayed, and used—and also challenge ourselves to see ourselves as key leaders, specifically in the fight against climate change.