Healing the Border, Healing our Communities

Healing the Border, Healing our Communities: Faith-based Climate Leadership in America’s Deep South and the Desert Borderlands

February 18, 2021 | 7 p.m. | Register

Rev. Malcom will speak about mobilizing faith communities around climate action:
The role of faith communities in the energy justice movement offers a rich resource of inspiration and influence. The message of energy justice is shaped around the shared themes of justice and equity. We have the expertise to make the argument for a just transition that places people and planet over profit while correcting many of the effects of historic systemic racism. In our discussion, we will learn ways of engaging in faith advocacy around energy.

Gary Nabhan will speak about his work with the “Healing the Border” project:
Over the last two years intertribal and interfaith groups living along the US/Mexico border have united in the Healing the Border alliance to offer a prayerful, contemplative action-based means of sealing with the border wall intruding upon the homelands. Their concerns were violations of religious liberties, damage to burial grounds, destruction of ceremonial plants and depletion of water that feed sacred springs. First Nations spiritual leaders coined our strategies ceremonial or sacred activism.

About the Speakers

Reverend Michael Malcom

Executive Director of The People’s Justice Council
www.thepeoplesjusticecouncil.org/about-us

The Reverend Michael Malcom is the Founder and Executive Director of The People’s Justice Council and Alabama Interfaith Power and Light and a licensed and ordained United Church of Christ Minister. Rev Malcom is the former Senior Pastor of Rush Memorial Congregational UCC in Atlanta, GA. He is also the Environmental Justice Representative for the Southeast Conference of the United Church of Christ. He is currently the co-chair of the Building Power from the Grassroots Task Force with Climate Action Network International, and the co-chair of the Environmental Justice working group for the Southeast Climate and Energy Network. He currently serves as the International Liaison for the US Climate Action Network and co-chair of the Faith Working Group for the Climate Strike Coalition. Rev Malcom’s academic journey began at Beulah Heights University where he graduated May 2008 with an undergraduate in Biblical Education and Leadership. He was accepted to and began attending The Interdenominational Theological Center where he earned a Master of Divinity Degree in 2011. Due to his understanding of the role of a pastor he completed five units of Clinical Pastoral Education at The Atlanta VA Medical Center and AnMed Health Hospital in Anderson, SC. In May of 2016 Rev Malcom graduated from Terry School of Business MBA program at the University of Georgia. In October of 2017 he completed a post master’s human resource management course at Cornell University.  In 2019 he completed the Convergence Leader Project with the Center for Progressive Renewal and the Just Energy Academy with Partnership for Southern Equity. Michael’s varied experience is coalescing in a powerful way to create an unparalleled opportunity for faith communities throughout Alabama to unite and raise their voice against environmental racism, economic oppression, environmental injustice and climate change.

Gary Nabhan 

Gary Nabhan is an ecumenical Franciscan Brother, an agricultural ecologist, and a pioneer in the local food movement and heirloom seed saving movement. He is a graduate of The Living School at Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation. The recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant, Nabhan has written, co-written or edited over 39 volumes of nonfiction, poetry, conservation science and children’s literature that has been translated into eight languages. He is the co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a non-profit conservation organization that works to preserve place-based Southwestern agricultural plants as well as knowledge of their uses. He now serves as the Kellogg Endowed Chair in Southwestern Borderlands Food and Water Security. There, he founded the Center for Regional Food Studies and catalyzed the initiative to have UNESCO designate Tucson as the first City of Gastronomy in the U.S. He is currently married to cultural ecologist and indigenous health activist Laurie Monti (formerly of the Christensen Fund and four universities) and lives in Patagonia, Arizona on a five-acre homestead southwest of Tucson. He farms a diverse set of heirloom fruit and nut varieties from the Spanish Mission era and from the Middle Eastern homelands of his Lebanese ancestors, as well as heritage grains and beans adapted to arid climates