Training 18 New Community Leaders in a Resilience Hot Spot

On the morning of June 7, the air inside the Joseph Nelson Community Center in Suisun City filled with the sound of finger snaps and an occasional “Hallelujah.”

On stage, panelists and the young climate advocates gathered for the Resilient Roots Climate Leaders Summit, an event to inspire grassroots climate action in Solano County.

Dr. Kerby Lynch, a panelist and scholar of critical Black studies, said something that resonated with the crowd.

“Data alone won’t save us,” Lynch said. “We have to think about how we’re creating opportunities for truth-telling. That’s the power we have as a people.”

The data says Suisun City is especially vulnerable to sea level rise. Two centuries of burning fuels have heated the planet, melting polar ice and expanding the oceans. Since the beginning of the 20th century, sea levels have risen seven inches — three of them in the last 30 years — and the pace is accelerating. Southern Suisun City, especially areas south of Highway 12, is expected to face regular extreme flooding by 2050. And by 2100, much of the city could be submerged under five feet of water. 

Recognizing that threat, Greenbelt Alliance, a Bay Area climate and conservation nonprofit, chose Suisun City as one of its regional “resilience hotspots.” They then joined Sustainable Solano, a grassroots organization dedicated to building resilient communities across Solano County, to launch the Resilient Roots fellowship program. This 10-month program was designed to train local leaders on the environmental challenges the region is facing and the strategies needed to meet them. This far-sighted effort was funded under a grant from the US EPA. 

The 18 fellows who graduated on June 7 presented their projects to a room filled with neighbors, advocates, artists, and city leaders. The fellows came from many walks of life in local communities, and ranged in age from elders to teens. Their projects tackled everything from air quality and community seed library to urban greenspace and extreme flooding.

“Here in Suisun, we expect that we’re going to see significant flooding in the coming years,” said Willa Gruver, Sustainable Solano’s program manager of resilient communities. “So, we saw this program as an opportunity to equip Solano County, and more specifically to equip Fairfield and Suisun, with the resources to face these challenges.”

Suisun City’s strongest defense against sea level rise lies to its south: 85,000 acres of marshland, the largest tidal marsh on the West Coast. Home to more than 300 species, the Suisun Marsh acts as a natural sponge that can soak floodwaters. It also slows erosion and can work as a natural levee. Even if emissions stopped today, the seas would inexorably rise for years due to the heat already trapped in the atmosphere. Under that looming threat, the marsh’s grasses and thistles offer the ability to adapt and hold the line.

“It’s the living shield of the San Francisco Bay Estuary,” said Resilient Roots fellow Shannon Ramirez. “It’s our protector.”

For her final project, fellow Ayushi Akhani focused on preserving the marsh’s endemic species, as a vital part of protecting the ecosystem from the impacts of sea level rise.

“We should focus on removing invasive species because they are very dangerous and impact all the native species around them,” she said. “They could worsen native species’ health, which in the bigger scheme of things makes our ecosystem worse.”

More than a discussion of adaptation strategies, the summit centered on sparking action, on transforming research into resilience and facts into feeling. State Senator Christopher Cabaldon told the audience that climate leadership isn’t abstract; it’s “not opinion, but action.” 

“Climate leadership is all the actions,” Cabaldon said. “It’s the protests, the letter writing, holding accountable elected officials like me. But it is also the imagining, the singing, the joy and the love for the neighbor on the street.”

Film producer and ​​Executive Director of Intersectional Environmentalist Air Copeland echoed that sentiment. For Copeland, storytelling is the bridge between science and movement-building. He noted how the civil rights movement of the sixties “didn’t rise on policy alone — it rose on song. The labor movement didn’t spread through white papers — it spread through poetry and protests.”

The climate movement, according to Copeland, should do the same.

“You can talk about projections and forecasts, and reports and EVs and solar panels, but people don’t move because of facts alone,” he said. “People move because of feeling, because of story, because something touches them, personally, deeply, soulfully. Because someone says, ‘I see you, and I’ve been there too.’ That’s what storytelling does. That’s what art does.”

Watch for KneeDeep’s upcoming video interviews with several Resilient Roots fellows.