Spring Celebrations with Kicking Gas!
Happy Spring! We’re pleased to announce that our team has grown and we have three new bilingual program associates who joined us this month! Alan, Roshaé, and Claudia are helping Kicking Gas expand our resources to reach Spanish-speaking communities and deepen relationships with new partners across the region.
Welcome, Alan, Claudia, and Roshaé!
Before kicking off this newsletter, we want to highlight this week: National Farmworkers Awareness Week (NFAW) - a week to spur ongoing action for communities and honor the contributions that farmworkers make to our daily lives, year-round.
Kicking Gas has a team of multicultural members who bring many different experiences and backgrounds. In honor of farmworkers, one of our team members wrote this piece:
“As a child of farmworkers, I would like to highlight the importance of recognizing NFAW, and share my gratitude and appreciation to my parents, relatives, friends, and the farmworker community.
Thank you, farmworker community, for your dedication to the land and for nurturing local and nation-wide communities. I will forever be grateful for the countless hours you devote to this art of connecting with Mother Earth every day to feed her numerous children. Through your daily work, I have seen you talk about the changes in seasons and climate and how that impacts the harvest and your capacity to work.
I want to highlight the importance of non-farmworkers standing up for the rights of the farmworker community, a community primarily made up of immigrants.”
This story is continued at the end of our newsletter!
Earth Month Events with Kicking Gas
April is Earth Month - a reminder for our collective responsibility towards the environment, sustainability, and conscious consumption. Organizations across the world utilize this Earth Month to engage communities in environmental awareness opportunities and foster long-term changes for mitigation of the climate crisis.
We are hosting and co-sponsoring multiple events in April!
Please keep reading to hear about our events and how you can attend or support!
🌷Earth Day Celebration: April 18th (11am - 3pm)
Join us to celebrate Earth Day at YMCA Camp Casey (1276 Engle Rd, Coupeville)!
Kicking Gas will be tabling alongside 20+ environmental organizations to offer activities, immersive experiences, volunteer opportunities, and more. Read more about the event HERE.
🪻rePurpose Day: April 22nd (12pm - 4pm)
Celebrate Earth Day and the grand opening of rePurpose Whidbey at the new, permanent location 724 Camano Ave. in Langley. Try the Drop Off program for free this day - bring up to 3 grocery bags of reusable and hard to recycle materials from the accepted item list! Family friendly food and drinks, live music by Sage Haze and zero waste activities. Learn more on the rePurpose website.
🌻Kicking Gas “Seed Bomb” Making Drop-In Event: April 23rd (2pm - 5:30pm)
Kicking Gas is hosting a drop-in/drop-out seed bomb making event to open our new space in Langley to the public, celebrate Earth Month, and cultivate native seed distribution. Come to make your own seed bombs to take home or share with others! This is a family-friendly event.
Stop by anytime during the event to join in on the fun!
724 Camano Ave, Langley
🌹 Film Screening of Earth’s Greatest Enemy: April 25th (2pm - 4pm)
We are excited to be co-hosting a film screening of Earth’s Greatest Enemy with the Sound Defense Alliance at The Clyde Theatre in Langley!
Earth’s Greatest Enemy is a documentary exposé of the world’s biggest - and most unaccountable - polluter: the U.S. military.
Exempt from international climate agreements and rarely scrutinized in mainstream reporting, the Pentagon is the world’s single largest institutional polluter - spewing carbon, contaminating water, and scarring landscapes across the globe. Combining investigative journalism, striking visuals, and stories from impacted communities, this film challenges audiences to rethink the hidden costs of a global military empire and its planetary consequences. Provocative, urgent, and eye-opening, this is a documentary that will change how you see both the military and environmentalism.
The film will be followed by a 45-minute Q&A with the director, Abby Martin, who will join virtually!
Please come if you are able, and spread the word! Tickets at $10/person - please bring your ticket confirmation at the door so we can scan you in. Proceeds will support the work of Sound Defense Alliance to advocate against harmful Navy Growler jet training pollution in our region.
Get your tickets HERE.
🌱 April Info Sessions:
We’re offering the choice of online and in-person Info Sessions in April! If you haven’t attended your Info Session yet, be sure to register for an upcoming session to hear all about our program, get all your questions answered, and start Kicking Gas out of your home!
April 2, 5:30 - 7pm, ONLINE
April 15, 6 - 7:30pm, Lynnwood Sno-Isle Library
Register for your Info Session HERE!
Farmworkers Story Continued…
Farmwork is an occupation that provides little rights to workers who work long hours in the heat. As the climate crisis continues to raise temperatures, increase forest fires, and worsen air quality in Washington and beyond, our farmworker community is more at risk than ever. Farmworkers are 35x more likely to die from heat in the U.S. than other workers, and it is predicted that the climate crisis will almost double the number of dangerously hot workdays by 2050.
As we all endure the record shattering heat-waves that now come every year, we must fight for the rights of everyone to breathe clean air, access resources to cool their homes, and rely on community for support. At Kicking Gas, we work under the framework of the Just Transition to protect workers’ rights and livelihoods as economies shift from extractive practices to sustainable production.
In 2022, Sarah Sax, a journalist from High Country News interviewed Edgar Franks, the policy director of the farmworkers’ union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, in Burlington, WA.
She wrote, “While the impact of climate change on individual farmworkers is critical, Franks sees the union’s work as part of a much larger struggle. ‘We also need to be part of this larger transition away from dirty energy to regenerative.’
This framework — a just transition — is the idea that when coal, oil and gas extraction are necessarily phased out to avoid catastrophic global warming, workers in the fossil fuel industry and communities whose health has often been impacted by fossil fuel production should not get left behind. Instead, they deserve to benefit from the green economy through retraining and inclusion in policymaking. Agriculture, Franks said, as a main driver of climate change, needs a just transition of its own — one guided by farmworkers.”
We encourage you to learn about the impacts of the climate crisis to farmworkers and read more about the Just Transition HERE.
Hope to see you at one or several of our upcoming events!