Each week Global Justice Ecology Project teams up with Margaret Prescod and KPFK Radio’s Sojourner Truth Program to deliver interviews for their weekly segment on the environment with experts from around the world. This week our own Communications Director, Jeff Conant, discussed GJEP’s recent trip to Chiapas, Mexico investigating the California-Chiapas Climate Deal and documenting the impacts of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and other development plans on the Indigenous peoples and jungle of Chiapas.
Jeff Conant is a writer, and social justice activist with a focus on international development and ecology. As the coordinator and 
lead author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health (Hesperian Foundation, 2008), he spent most of a decade collaborating with grassroots development initiatives in many countries to develop popular education materials addressed to the needs of under-resourced communities. As a researcher and independent journalist he has published articles and contributed to reports on water privatization, resource colonization, food sovereignty, ecological sanitation, environmental injustice, climate crisis, and related issues. He won a 2010 Project Censored Award for his coverage of the World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey.
His book, A Poetics of Resistance: the Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency (AK Press, 2010) examines the cultural politics of the Zapatista movement of Chiapas, Mexico, focusing on the Zapatistas’ persuasive use of symbolic language and colorful imagery to bring their struggle to the world’s attention.
He is a Fellow with the Oakland Institute, a coordinating committee member of La Red VIDA (the InterAmerican Network for the Defense of the Right to Water), a permaculturalist, and sits on advisory boards of several non-profit organizations. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and daughter.
For more information check out these recent blog posts:
A Broken Bridge to the Jungle: The California-Chiapas Climate Agreement Opens Old Wounds
Medical Services in Amador Hernández, Chiapas Withdrawn in Advance of REDD+
