Dear John,

We just held our first in person retreat since 2023! We gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico: greeted by the beautiful mountains, vibrant culture, and biting wind. Our team has grown a lot since our last time together, so we spent three days deepening our understanding of the work we have been tasked with by the movement, strengthening our relationships, and laying the foundation for how we're going to work through this new era together. 

At the end of the week, some of our team was able to join our members at New Mexico No False Solutions for an event at the state capitol. We added our bodies and voices to their demand that false climate solutions be kept out of New Mexico, heard from movement elders and up-and-coming youth, and joined in Indigenous songs and dance.

Enjoy this issue of CJA's Frontline Temp Check and learn more!

On March 7th, amid wind, fire, and power outages, the NM No False Solutions Coalition held a "No False Solutions Day" inside the New Mexico State Legislature to counter corporate approaches to climate change making their way through the state’s 2025 legislative session. Their aim is simple: to protect the elements of life. The event included a drum circle, poetry, speakers, and musicians.

New Mexico No False Solutions is a Coalition of climate and environmental justice organizations working across the state to demand climate action through a Just Transition, not harmful industry backed approaches like nuclear or hydrogen that don’t reduce emissions at the source, and often times deplete water, polluting it along with the air we have to breathe and the land we call home. 

The Coalition's main goal is to raise awareness of market-based false solutions that greenwash the climate crisis, while proactively changing the political conversation at the local, state, and regional levels.

This week, CJA’s executive director joined many community leaders for the Centering Justice Symposium, organized by the Tishman Center and the Indigenous Resilience Center at the University of Arizona in Tuscon, Arizona. Multiple CJA members shared their wisdom on plenaries and our Executive Director KD Chavez was invited to moderate the plenary on building and protecting wins. With everything going on across the country, coming together to build cohesion and trust is more important than ever. 

This was an amazing follow up to the inaugural Centering Justice Symposium in 2024, and we can't wait for the next one.

Alongside CJA members, Indigenous Environmental Network, Urban Tilth, Just Transition Alliance, Sunflower Alliance and more, CJA staff participated in the Hands Off Mother Earth Alliance (HOME)'s Marine Geoengineering Conference in Alameda, California.

Marine geoengineering is a fancy way of saying: manipulating the Earth's ocean in order to attempt to remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or to reduce the symptoms of climate change (like the GHG effect). 

These kinds of projects propose different ways of manipulating the oceans, from increasing the entire oceans' alkalinity through adding Alkaline materials like sodium hydroxide (lye) to it, to capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and industrial facilities and injecting it into geological formations. No matter what method is being used, marine geoengineering poses serious threats by risking the health of marine ecosystems and/or altering ocean sediment creating seismic risks.

Marine geoengineering is another false solution like Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) or Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), that puts off implementing real solutions to the climate crisis that decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Rather than deal with the root cause of climate change, geoengineering projects only deal with the symptoms and have note even been proven to work. Unsurprisingly, many marine geoengineering projects are funded by superpowers and wealthy corporations whose only concern is perpetuating the existing extractive economy for capital gain.

As more and more geoengineering projects pop up, it's important to be aware of them and the language project proponents may use to get and exploit community buy-in. For those on the frontlines of exposure to, or gearing up for, a potential fight against a geoengineering project, it's critical to know our voices matter in shaping policy and public discourse. 

Communities and organizations are actively organizing against and successfully stopping geoengineering projects that threaten to disrupt Earth’s natural ecosystems. The Arctic Ice Project, a project to cover parts of the Arctic with silica microspheres to make the ice more reflective therefore reducing heat, was shut down this year thanks to efforts by Indigenous organizers. The project posed serious risk to the Arctic food chain and health of the ice that had been cared for for generations. In 2024, HOME organizers were crucial in stopping a geoengineering project in Alameda, California that was spraying sea water at clouds to make them more reflective. While this may seem benign, this process would actually cause harm to the local community by potentially disrupting the hydrological cycle and changing precipitation patterns. After the alliance submitted a 200-page dossier to the City Council laying out the facts and their concerns, the Council unanimously decided to stop the project.  

To look at geoengineering projects that may be located near you, check out: https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/.

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• Campaign offers ways to advocate for farmworkers

• State officials take ‘Toxic Tour’ through Nubian Square’s environmental justice history

• Stories Rooted in Nature: A conversation with Joey Certeza on spirituality, art in CHamoru heritage