José Luis Zambrano Flores has pulled plastic six-pack rings off the necks of seabirds. He has freed sea turtles tangled in fishing nets. In the open ocean, the professional diver from Tabasco was horrified to see plastic bags with fish swimming inside them, trapped.
Zambrano wasn’t a scheduled speaker at Sunday’s Green Action Week workshop in Parque La Calma; he didn’t even know the organizers. He had simply shown up to learn about plastic packaging. But as he stood to share what he’d witnessed beneath the waves – “mountains of plastic, floating islands of waste” – the afternoon transformed from a scheduled workshop into something rawer and more urgent.
This is exactly what the Colectivo Ecologista Jalisco designs their workshops to achieve: creating space where citizens’ lived experiences collide with environmental data, where frustration transforms into action. Over nearly 40 years, CEJ has learned that the most powerful moments in environmental organizing aren’t scripted. They bring the framework – post-it notes for sharing experiences, product packaging with messaging to decode, an Instagram campaign to launch. But it’s the unexpected voices from the audience that bring the urgency, turning abstract statistics about plastic waste into visceral, personal stakes.
Structured spontaneity
Sunday’s workshop, part of the international Green Action Week funded by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation and replicated in countries from Lebanon to Bhutan, drew about 50 participants to the weekly Tianguis del Recicle. CEJ facilitators arrived armed with stickers, markers, and a deceptively simple question: “¿De quién son los residuos?” (Whose waste is it?).
“We buy the product, not the packaging,” explained facilitator Saúl, holding up a disposable water bottle to demonstrate the three different types of plastic in a single container – the bottle, the cap, and the label. “So why does the responsibility for disposal fall entirely on us?”
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