Five environmental innovators and activists of Asian heritage who are working to make the world a better place
From food crops to solar energy and youth-led movements, each of these leaders has been honoured by American online magazine Grist for their efforts towards building a more sustainable future.
Each year, Grist, an American online magazine that has been publishing environmental news and commentary since 1999, compiles a list of 50 “emerging leaders from across the United States who are working on fresh, real-world solutions to our world’s biggest challenges”. The list recognises those who can see what a more just, sustainable future might look like and have the drive to pursue that vision. This year’s 50 Fixers list includes the following five innovators of Asian heritage.
As the world emerges from its coronavirus lockdowns and – we must hope – begins to seriously contemplate the more existential threat posed to mankind by climate breakdown, we are going to need visionaries such as these more than ever.
Shane Bernardo, co-founder, Food as Healing
Descended from Philippine farmers, fisherfolk and craftspeople, Shane Bernardo saw no novelty in working the family’s garden when he was growing up in Detroit.
“When I got big enough, it was my responsibility to break the soil, to remove the sods, to expand the garden, prune the plants, harvest them, cultivate them,” he tells Post Magazine.
Bernardo is still gardening but now does more with the earth’s bounty. For years, he has, as part of a variety of grass-roots movements, used food as a medium through which to mitigate climate breakdown and affect social justice in the city of his birth.
“My parents moved [from the Philippines to the United States] in the late 1960s, after the National Immigration Act of 1965.” Bernardo’s mother had graduated with a degree in nursing and his father followed soon after, with a degree in engineering. Later, the family ran a small grocery store on the west side of Detroit in which Shane and his three siblings worked.
“I found out through working there that the staples we sold, like coconuts, bananas, plantains, yams, pineapple, taro and tropical fruits, we shared with other communities and cultures. I started to see not just a connection through our culinary traditions,” he says, of the family’s Southeast Asian, West African and African Caribbean customers, “but also the part that colonisation has played throughout the centuries, which has connected all of our stories and struggles.