Answering the Call: Iranian Americans & The Climate Crisis

Please join us on April 11, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. PST, as we bring together Iranian American experts on climate and the environment in celebration of the Earth Day.

While we have suffered through the health and economic consequences of the pandemic, that other crisis--climate change--looms over us. Join us for a conversation with Iranian-American climate change leaders and activists as we endeavor to engage our community and the larger Iranian diaspora in addressing steps to make an impact on this crisis. Join us for an afternoon with Atossa Soltani (founder of Amazon Watch), Farhad Ebrahimi (Chorus Foundation), and Mona Shomali (Earth Island Institute).

About our guests:

Atossa Soltani has been a global campaigner for tropical rainforests and indigenous rights, now going on three decades. She is founder and board president of Amazon Watch and served as the organization’s first executive director for eighteen years. Currently Atossa is the director of global strategy for Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative working in alliance with 30 indigenous nations to protect 86 million acres in the most biologically diverse ecosystem on Earth. She is the Hillary Institute 2013 Global Laureate for Climate Leadership and is a producer of The Flow, a feature-length documentary currently in production about learning from nature’s genius.

Mona Shomali has been working at the intersection of environmental policy and social justice for over 20 years. As an adjunct faculty member, she taught international environmental policy and environmental justice courses at The New School, Pace University and New York University. Mona has also been a case researcher for the case Sarayaku vs. Ecuador in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, she has been a policy analyst for an NGO that lobbied the United Nations on behalf of small island states who face sea level rise, and she has also served as an assistant researcher for a World Bank Report on Climate change and water distribution in Senegal. Mona is currently the Director of the New Leaders Initiative, a youth environmental leadership program based in Berkeley, California.

Farhad Ebrahimi is the Founder and President of the Chorus Foundation, which works for a just transition to a regenerative economy in the United States. The Chorus Foundation supports communities on the front lines of the old, extractive economy to build new bases of political, economic, and cultural power for systemic change. Farhad is also a musician, a lover of film and literature, and a lapsed bicycle snob. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics with Computer Science, and he currently lives in Brooklyn.

E-mail: iraniandiasporastudies@sfsu.edu