When Maureen Lupo Lilanda visited the countryside as a child, her family would return with armfuls of flavorful fruits and vegetables.

“Everything was plentiful,” she says. “Now with lack of rainfall, you go to the village and there's nothing to harvest.”

The Zambian village had no irrigation system; for decades they had relied only on the naturally occurring rain cycle to bring life to their soil. In the past 20 years, Lilanda estimates, those rains have stopped falling.

“It occurred to me that things were changing,” she says. “Once I understood it, it felt imperative that I change the mindset.”

Lilanda wanted people to understand how deforestation and charcoal burning could be permanently changing their homes. As a singer she has one of