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Before they knew her as the ice siren, long before she won three Guinness awards and became the first South American person to complete the Oceans’7 swimming challenge, when she was just a girl, Barbara Hernández Huerta plan Colorful flowers and dry leaves where animals were hidden. That same imagination with which the sea sponsored to the other side of the mountain range or the vegetation where there was no use to write one of the 30 Micro -stories of activists, peasants and policies of Latin America and the Caribbean that describe a future in which the climatic crisis is combined in the past.
When they proposed to Hernández to participate in this initiative, he knew perfectly what the scene of the narration would be: the San Rafael glacier, one of the largest in the north ice fields, located in Chilean Patagonia, and where his mother always wanted to go. “It was from my first glaciers and having taken my mother several times made her become a very familiar place, very ours. This corner tells my story,” this extreme swimmer explains by video calling. Oriana Mendoza He glimpsed him between mangroves in Cartagena, Colombia; Isaura Manzo Alfaro built a world where gender roles are not taught in the schools of Guatemala and the Brazilian Thaiane Maciel wanted a planet in which the norm was recycling and bartering.
Singers, climbers, ministers or activists … The future they all want is very similar. The project united the voices of 30 women from 17 countries in the continent. “We cannot create a better future if we cannot imagine it,” summarizes Nasha Cuvelier, co -founder of sustainability without borders, an NGO in charge of the project. “Currently, scientific predictions can result in a lot One fine day, The invitation is to imagine with the feet on the ground and hands in the heart, ”he adds. Every week, one of these 30 microfiction will be published here to invite reflection and debate about the future.
In San Rafael, Hernández trained before visiting Antarctica, where he has seen how the ice blocks are reduced “by kilometers, not by meters” and where the Leoparda seals watch their young dead by the thaw. “The young need a firm ice block where to stay, while moms feed them. Already later, they start swimming. But since ice is melting faster, they can’t stand and die drowned. See that year after year I leave my soul,” he acknowledges excitedly. “For me, it is as if they die friends who live far away, it is horrible.”
Therefore, in his futuristic story, Thanks to ice. Agreement between countries to take care of Antarctic; The return of the fauna and color of the glaciersLeopard seals swim in lots. “An immense family, a true colony. I get excited to tears because I remember well when they were eleven and we had them monitored,” he reads in the story. “We are not aware of what really implies this climatic crisis. Everything we consume finds it in the sea. It is like that,” ditch. The swimmer has used her voice to make environmental activism. “What really matters to me is that more women dare and that, in a few years, they can continue to admire the nature that I have the privilege of seeing me now. We do not end with this planet.”
Oriana Mendoza is also stirring his stomach when he discovered the increasingly emblanqueted Cartagena marine background. Thus, in his Letter from the sea. Living with corals, manta and turtlescross again with animals that at some point swam on their coasts and not anymore. Like seahorses. “Or do you believe me if I tell you what I saw, not one, but as two hundred and eighty -five thousand seahors? I saw them with my eyes. The only time he has seen them in real life, he says, was on a trip to Egypt. “I feel very sad to think that we have to go so far to see something that was part of our ecosystems. It makes me want to raise my voice more …”, says the co -founder of Sea, a sustainable diving school.
That will became activism and for a five years, it has been dedicated to organizing the community of Puerto Colombia, near Barranquilla, to clean the beaches, raise awareness of childhood and use art so that society understands that “we are part of nature”. In the municipality in which it lives, mass tourism is one of the main factors by which ecosystems are so affected: “We have a sick coral, in crisis,” he laments. “But although I know that I can’t change the world alone, I know I am not the only droplet, that one and the other make a river,” he explains.
Why women authors? For Cuvelier, the reason is overwhelming: “Women and girls are the main ones harmed by climate change, mainly because they are the greatest number of people in poverty. But, on the other hand, they can be the best agents of change and are already promoting solutions.”
Hernández continues to work on it tireless. In meetings in the Chamber of Deputies of Chile, in interviews with international media and at direct work with communities. Mendoza is preparing a new artistic project with which to continue implying the youngest in conservation and roots to the territory. “I don’t want to leave my land, that’s why we are raising my voice,” he adds. For this thirty women, the future they want and described on paper, it’s time to make it happen.
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