Presentation by Denise Moreno, PhD, MS, President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Zuckerman College of Public Health

In this presentation, Dr. Moreno will discuss a community-based oral history project (Voices Unheard: Arizona's Environmental History) that informs a new creative climate communications project (Climate Heritage ILLuminated in Arizona or CHILL AZ) focusing on forgotten people and landscapes of the Sky Island regions in southern Arizona. The Principles of Community Engagement, the method of oral history, and the discipline of medical anthropology are the basis. CHILL AZ partners with Arizona's rural museums, transforming them into hubs of climate justice information. Landscapes in the Sky Island regions are sustained through the collective intergenerational resilience of people. These people are immersed in the environment daily and consistently make empirical observations that add to the local knowledge of the environment. They are also the future leaders in these spaces who can narrate the solutions that have sustained their cultures and people. These rural spaces are now ghost towns in the faded memory of Arizona's Mining History, but the descendants live today and can be stewards of this land. Future climate research will depend on this knowledge of weather and climate from the communities' vantage points.

Technological solutions meant to model the environment's complexity result in predictions that are off the mark. Current climate solutions suggested by institutions are making communities face a new era of environmental injustices (e.g., sacrifice zones). Government representatives and university scientists are scrambling. Humanities and social science scholars suggest methods that center local or traditional knowledge can make the cultural change needed to sustain Earth in the face of a changing climate.