Filipino Climate Artist on COP 21: If World Leaders Really Cared, Agreement Would Not Take 20 Years
Filipino Climate Artist on COP 21: If World Leaders Really Cared, Agreement Would Not Take 20 Years
In 2013, Yeb Saño’s brother A.G. Saño was in the city of Tacloban, which was leveled by Typhoon Haiyan. A.G. Saño, a street artist, didn’t have credentials to enter the highly fortified U.N. climate summit, but Democracy Now! interviewed him offsite. “We painted murals that depict pilgrims walking around the world and leading towards Paris,” he said of the 900-mile journey to the climate summit. “And each one of those murals had a mythical figure, like a fairy godmother looking over nature, or Mother Nature herself looking over the world, and pilgrims walking on the earth towards the Eiffel Tower. It is a message that says, we’re willing to travel the world, we’re Filipinos, victims of the disastrous effects of climate change, but we’re willing to walk the world, even to go through snow, even if we have not seen snow before, just to get the message across.”
AMY GOODMAN: Yeb Saño’s brother, A.G. Saño, was in the city of Tacloban, which was leveled by typhoon Haiyan. Since A.G. doesn’t have credentials to enter this highly fortified U.N. Climate Summit, early this morning we talked to A.G. off grounds. He is a street artist who’d been a landscape architect. And together with his brother, Yeb Saño, the former chief climate negotiator, has been on this peace — People’s Pilgrimage. He has been creating murals as part of the People’s Pilgrimage across Europe. So I started by asking him to describe those days back in 2013, in Tacloban, the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan.
A.G. SAÑO: If I would have to give details about my experience, it would take eight hours because that’s how long the horrors that we experienced in Tacloban, um — and if I would have to sum it in two words, it is about helplessness and hopelessness, and devastated would be the perfect way to describe what I saw. When I got out of the building in which I sheltered, which is one block away from Labay [sp] in the downtown area of Tacloban.
Comments (0)