Explore how our relationships with cities, parks, and the more-than-human world can shape our future. Inspired by Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City, the 2026 One City One Book selection, this conversation brings together local community leaders working on place-based environmental justice to consider what it means to be an ancestor and how the places we inhabit become part of our collective legacy.
Drawing on five years of the Parks as Ancestors series, inspired by the book, What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?, the discussion expands the conversation beyond protected parklands to consider urban spaces as living legacies. The panel will take place during the convergence of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Día de los Muertos, and Diwali, and invites us to reflect on memory, loss, connection, and responsibility across generations and cultures.
This interactive program invites participants to consider what we inherit from the places and people who came before us—and what we will leave behind for those who come after. Attendees are welcome to bring a photograph or a sentimental object honoring someone they have lost, if they wish to incorporate it into the program.
Moderator Yakuta Poonawalla of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has designed, initiated and led the Parks as Ancestors series. Poonawalla was born and raised in India. Her deep love for nature began as a teenager during her first trek in the Himalayas. Since that initiation, she has worked as an environmentalist, writer and storyteller to inspire and cultivate love and respect for all beings. In her role with the Parks Conservancy, she develops community programs and partnerships that bring a vision of Parks For All to life. Yakuta serves on the Board of TOGETHER Bay Area, SF Children & Nature’s steering committee and volunteers with the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action.
Tere Almaguer is the Environmental Justice Organizer for PODER, a San Francisco based organization that focuses on locally based, community-led, and environmentally just improvements in Latinx immigrant communities. Tere is working on urban farming in San Francisco. She wants to bring traditional plants back into the community, both for food and traditional medicine.
Kieran Tran is the Healthy Homes Organizer at APEN. They work on electrifying low-income households to prevent displacement and energy price hikes as fossil fuels are phased out while improving home health. Prior to APEN, they worked in affordable housing and community development and environmental funding campaigns.
Barnali Ghosh is a landscape architect, artist, and public transit advocate working at the intersection of climate, activism, and South Asian America. In 2009-2010, she spent a year interviewing sixty climate activists across twelve countries as part of her Year of No Flying project. She co-curates the Berkeley and San Francisco South Asian Radical History Walking Tours, and serves on the BART Board of Directors, representing District 3, which runs from Berkeley to Richmond, and beyond.