children & family

Youth Activists 15 Years Later

BenTestani — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 19:41:53 +0000

Youth Activists 15 Years Later

08/04/2023

From the climate movement’s earliest days, young people have been actively pushing older people in power to own up to their failings and work for a better future. But activists who spend their youth fighting to change big systems frequently feel burdened by unrealistic expectations. Some succumb to depression and burnout.

Alec Loorz was a celebrated youth climate activist years before anyone heard of Greta Thunberg. Starting from the time he was 12 years old, he dedicated his life to traveling all across the country educating other young people on the climate crisis and inspiring them to take action through his organization, Kids vs. Global Warming. But at the age of 18, he fell into a deep depression and withdrew from the movement.

“It was just exhausting and so difficult … and the cynicism about the movement was part of it too,” he says. So he decided to try something else. “And for me what that looked like was just stepping aside, taking a big step back.”

His story is not uncommon. Many activists burn out, frustrated by participating in actions that very rarely lead to meaningful and lasting change. The emotional cost of seeing so little payoff for years spent fighting can be agonizing at any age, but perhaps more so for young people who put so much of themselves into the effort.

Slater Jewell-Kemker was another young climate activist who documented the work of her peers for a decade in her film, “Youth Unstoppable.” She says being a youth activist at international climate negotiations often felt limited and dehumanizing, especially as the real impacts of climate disruption grow greater each year.

“It feels like the people in charge who have the power to make real change are in a completely different reality. And it's very difficult. It's very hard. And then you come home and most people have never heard of a COP [Conference of Parties] or the UN climate change conferences and you feel like you're in this weird sense of, ‘am I just screaming at a wall? Am I screaming into the void? Like, can no one else see this? Am I insane?’”

She says only a fraction of her peers avoided burnout and remained involved in climate action. Like Alec Loorz, who is her now husband, she decided to step back from direct activism. The two of them now live in rural Ontario, focused on permaculture and sustainable living close to the land.

“I look back at it now and there is a part of me that is angry that the narrative encouraged me as a child to believe that I could fix the world's problems.”

Still, some youth climate activists manage to remain involved while keeping despair at bay. Abrar Anwar says becoming a father helped him stay focused.

“Giving up … is not an option. The next generation is here. We were the youth climate activists. There is a new generation of them now. We've got kids of our own that are inheriting the world next.”

Guests

Alec Loorz

Former youth climate activist

Victoria Loorz

Founder, Center for Wild Spirituality; Author, “Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred”

Slater Jewell-Kemker

Producer of “Youth Unstoppable;” former youth climate activist

Kyle Gracey

Strategy Consultant, Future Matters; former youth climate activist

Abrar Anwar

Chief Technology Officer, Rebel Force Tech Solutions; former youth climate activist

Youth Unstoppable (youthunstoppable.com)

Following the Wild Edge (followingthewildedge.com)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton.

Ariana Brocious: And I’m Ariana Brocious.

Greg Dalton: Human-caused climate disruption is a collective crisis, and one that compounds the longer we don’t address the root causes of it.

Ariana Brocious: But for so long we’ve thought of it as a future problem – one that the next generation will solve.

Greg Dalton: I’ve been covering climate for close to two decades and it’s only the fires, floods and heat of the last few years that have caused climate to be perceived as a problem now, not off in the future.

Ariana Brocious: And let’s face it– laying our hope for climate solutions at the feet of young people is unrealistic, and completely unfair.

Greg Dalton: From its earliest days, children and youth have been active in the climate movement, pushing older people in positions of power to admit they caused the problem and work to fix it.

Ariana Brocious: No one has made this point better than young activist Greta Thunberg, who calls out older generations for failing hers and not owning up to the problem they created, while actively worsening the climate crisis through their inaction.

Greg Dalton: Greta’s frank, impassioned critiques and weekly climate protests made her famous. She was preceded by other youth activists like Slater Jewell-Kemker.

Slater Jewell-Kemker: We need to address, as human beings, our sense of responsibility. And we need to address our selfishness. We need to rethink how we actually live and engage with each other and live with this planet because this is how we've gotten into this monumental problem.

Greg Dalton: As we’ll hear about on today’s show, years of tireless effort fighting for change frequently leads to unrealistic expectations, depression and burnout.

Slater Jewell-Kemker: I look back at it now and there is a part of me that is angry that the narrative encouraged me as a child to believe that I could fix the world's problems.

Greg Dalton: Alec Loorz was a celebrated youth climate activist years before anyone heard of Greta Thunberg, starting from the time he was 12 years old. He dedicated his life to traveling all across the United States educating young people on the climate crisis and inspiring them to take action through his organization, Kids vs. Global Warming. But at the age of 18, he fell into a deep depression and withdrew from the movement.

Ariana Brocious: His story is not uncommon. So many activists have burned out along the way, frustrated by participating in actions that very rarely lead to meaningful and lasting change. The emotional cost of seeing so little payoff for years spent fighting can be agonizing at any age, but perhaps more for young people who put so much of themselves into the effort. That said, some youth activists developed strategies for pushing through the burnout – or avoiding it altogether. We’ll talk to a couple of them later in the show.

Greg Dalton: I met Alec Loorz in 2011, when I interviewed him on the Climate One stage. I often wondered what had happened to him after he dropped out of the public eye. So I looked him up and asked him to come back on the program to share the journey he’s been on since that time, and how he views the climate movement today.

Greg Dalton: So Alec, thanks for coming back. When you were 12 years old, you watched An Inconvenient Truth with your mom. Of course, you are both profoundly impacted. She went up to bed. What happened for you?

Alec Loorz: Well, I was blown away. I watched the whole movie again and all the special features and everything. I have never felt something like that where I felt almost like a sense of calling to participate in raising awareness around this issue. And I felt the need to communicate with young people because we are the ones most affected. I do still say “we” even though I’m almost 30. But that was my initial spark. I saw the movie, ended up doing more research. Started getting invited to speak at events and it kind of took off that was when I was 12. By the time I was 14 I was trained by Al Gore's program to give a version of his slideshow. The youngest person ever at that point which that title is now been usurped several times which I'm very glad about. And then, yeah, through my teens I had this really crazy lifestyle of traveling and speaking at conferences and doing interviews and all of this stuff which was not what I expected. I didn't start out trying to be a well-known public speaker or anything. I just wanted to share the news with members of my generation.

Greg Dalton: Well, you had a calling after watching the movie you kind of launched into this. And at the age of 12 you did become something of a rock star in a then very small climate movement. Here's a clip of you at age 13.

Alec Loorz: I went to a big environmental conference. And while everyone was listening to all these important people speak, they set up a youth pit for all the youth to go. But that’s not what we want, is it? It’s not enough to be saying, “Yay, let’s ride bikes and change lightbulbs.” No. We got to be in there with everyone else.

Greg Dalton: What it’s like to hear your 12-year-old self today?

Alec Loorz: Man, it’s a bit of a trip. That was early, that was one of my first big speeches. And it’s wild because I still agree with that point. Everyone wants like a top 10 list of what are the simple actions we can take to stop global warming, and it's never gonna be that simple. It’s even a tactic of the fossil fuel industry to put the onus on consumers saying that it's our consumption that’s problem. When really our entire society is addicted to fossil fuels at every scale. And going to be worse and worse for us the longer we take to actually start easing away from that.

Greg Dalton: Most 12-year-olds don't build their own PowerPoints and take to the national stage as you did. What was driving you then and what kept you going during those years when many people are just figuring out their identity doing school.

Alec Loorz: Yeah. I mean it definitely was interesting to be engaged in this through my adolescence. I think it sort of took its toll on the way my identity was developing. And at the same time, I did it because I felt like I needed to, almost, that there was a need within the world for people to be having this conversation and for a young person to be the one bringing the science back again. And I really, I guess I will go back to that sense of calling. It’s something that stuck with me throughout the entire time and I still feel that, and that’s not something where I'm trying to say that I specifically have a calling to engage in, the solution to climate change, or whatever. And my point is that everyone is called to participate in this transition in some way in their own way. And that feeling is powerful. It’s something where I just felt like I couldn't not do something. And still feel like that. I haven't quite been out there on stage in at least 10 years but my activism has taken a different form.

Greg Dalton: And we’ll get to that. But that level of notoriety and fame, and this is for people, and remember, this is kind of social media was in a very different place at that time. And a lot of, you know, child actors, they get famous young, they have real difficulty navigating beyond that like young cute phase of their life and adolescence and what’s next. And what was it like for you to kind of navigate that notoriety?

Alec Loorz: It was difficult. Especially in my later teens by the I was 17, 18 I started feeling a sense of like there was a rift within my identity. There was the version of me that went on stage and spoke to an audience and was the climate change kid. And then I felt like my real self was something else that people didn’t see and I wasn't invited to share on stage. And I would like, post things about music on my Facebook and get people saying, hey, what are you doing posting about music? This is not important. You’re a climate change kid.

Greg Dalton: They wanted you to be a certain way, right?

Alec Loorz: Exactly.

Greg Dalton: Expectations of you that they put on you.

Alec Loorz: For sure. And I think that even taps into our culture’s obsession with the hero's journey as an archetype of story, where a single individual hero goes out and discovers something and brings it back and is a hero. I think the culture is shifting away from that. I don't believe that that is the predominant myth for us right now. Or at least it's falling apart and something else is emerging, which has to do with collectivity. The fact that we’re all in this together. It's not ever going to be one person coming to save the world that we have to save the world together. We have to work towards that. Some of the articles written about me back in the day were very much just sort of like he's the next Al Gore. He's going to save us. Which my ego loved to hear but at a certain point it started feeling like, that’s not what this is about.

Greg Dalton: That’s got to be quite a burden to have that trust on you. you preceded Greta by a decade and she put it right back. Like, no, no, don’t put that on me. You boomers, you know, right back at you. When you and I last talked you were 16. You said then that when you were 12 you jumped right into action that dread and despair of climate was just starting to hit you. Let’s listen back to that moment from 12 years ago.

Alec Loorz: When I first heard about climate change when I first heard about this stuff, I just went straight to kind of doing something about it and taking action. And I skipped over despair and denial and stuff. And it’s just kind of taken until the last couple months to kind of hit that space and been struggling with it a little bit.

Greg Dalton: So what was that going on? What was your struggle then?

Alec Loorz: Yeah, last couple of months that is interesting to hear. 16. I think that was the point when I started maybe becoming a little bit cynical about the tactics of the mainstream climate movement. And I’d only been engaged for several years but just talking to people who’d been part of this movement for decades leading up to then. And just this realization of like my god what are we doing we’re trying the same tactics over and over and over again expecting different results. And at the same time, I realize that it's, what else are we going to do? i think a lot of people within the climate space know that continuing to do marches and writing petitions and writing a letter to your congressmen and stuff it’s like, if that was going to work it would have worked by now.

Greg Dalton: Sure. So, yeah, since we last talked, you know, I’ve learned from Renee Lertzman who’s a psychologist who works on eco-anxiety that people try to push their feelings aside and then act because they feel the urgency of climate. Those feelings don't go away. They just grow and fester and then come back and grab you by the ankles or the throat sometime later. But a lot of people I think what you were talking about there is, you know, don't feel, just jump in, do. Because you know, the planet is, our home is on fire, do something. And some people think that that activity will make the despair go away. But it sounds like it did a little bit for you.

Alec Loorz: I was able to not go there I think for the first several years. Even though I knew how treacherous of a situation it was. I just sort of was able to focus in on okay. Doing what I can and it’s going to be okay. I think definitely in the years since then as I’ve reflected it’s, my perspective now is probably a little bit different. I feel like those emotions are extremely important to express and to work with. And the fact that eco-anxiety is like a term now I think speaks to the fact that so many people are feeling the sense of dread. Especially right now this is a poignant time to be having this conversation because the climate has been in the news this last couple weeks. I’m in Ontario right now and up here in Canada the wildfires have been on another level. 23 million acres have burned this year and the previous record was 13 million acres. And the season really is still picking up steam. So it's clear that the type of stuff that we were warning about 15 years ago are starting to arrive and they will keep getting worse. And this is depressing and scary. And I think we need to be talking about that because it's, we’re going to go just crazy, we're going to lose our sanity if we don’t.

Greg Dalton: And by the time you are 18 you wanted a new identity. You said you started to kind of get cynical about the movement. You got depressed that progress wasn't happening, same tactics being tried. You moved to a new school in British Columbia. Tell us about that kind to step away and reinvent yourself.

Alec Loorz: Yeah, I reached a point when I was 18, where I was kind of just done with that world. It was just exhausting and so difficult for my internal self to be mostly just the travel was so intense. Certain months, I was traveling for three weeks out of the month. There was one Earth Day where I spoke in 11 different cities. Took a flight in between each one within a single week. And there are always film crews coming into our house and just sort of always another event to prepare for. So that was part of it and the cynicism about the movement was part of it too. This sort of sense of okay this isn’t working I don't know if it's worth trying to convince everyone else that we should try something else. So I'm gonna just try something else. And for me what that looked like was just stepping aside taking a big step back. I’ve moved to Canada, went to school in BC. made a new Facebook page that I invited new friends to and didn't mention anything about my climate background. I felt wounded by that. And so I kind of just wanted to let it go.

Greg Dalton: It’s like you shedded a skin.

Alec Loorz: Yeah, a little bit. And that became its own sort of difficulty of just connecting with friends and then only like never telling them about the thing. And someone would randomly like come across an old TEDx talk that I did and be like, what you did this? And just this feeling of like that sense of calling never actually went away. The feeling that I needed to do something about this maybe even intensified. And that sort of came to a head in 2014 after I’ve been at that school for two years. The campus was up in the mountains in British Columbia, north of Vancouver, surrounded by like old-growth forests with a river running through and waterfall and just gorgeous. And that spring, 2014, the gravel company that owned the land came in and started clearcutting the forest in a really brutal way. And like I went out there and watched it and was just heartbroken. And just as bad was the fact that none of the other people at the school really seemed to care that much. There wasn't really any sort of a sense that this wasn't okay. Well for me it was like gut wrenchingly not okay. And just the realization that like my God, now that I've witnessed it I could visualize so much more vividly what's going on in the Amazon, what’s going on throughout Canada. The last remaining forests are being cut for profit. So anyway, that was really intense. That sort of one of the things that kicked off my summer of the deepest depression. I sort of ended up taking another step back that year. Went and traveled across the country, worked on organic farms as a way to just connect with the land. And that ended up becoming my main focus. By 2016, I settled in Olympia, Washington. Over the next couple years, I started spending more and more time with shorelines and parks and places that were wild and alive. In 2018 I discovered a stretch of shoreline in Olympia, Washington that I literally fell in love with. I went out there with my cameras doing time-lapse photography, and I would be I would stay out there for eight hours straight or 12 hours some days. I would go early in the morning and stay till dusk, time-lapsing and writing and being there and witnessing birds and animals and watching the tide lower and rise. And had some really significant encounters with wild creatures that I'm working on writing out the stories. Because my sense throughout that whole time was that it's not just for me, I'm not just trying to go and have fun at a pretty place. This is an act of reconnecting with the wildness that has been so devastated by human civilization. And trying to learn how to listen how to hear those voices. How to see these places of being so inhabit them as alive and intelligent and worthy of being valued. And even entering into conversation with. They don't speak in words but they're still speaking.

Greg Dalton: So nature healed you. You connected with nature and that healed you.

Alec Loorz: Yes. And I deeply believe that that is the only way we are going to get out of this mess is by returning to the greater world. And realizing that all the answers are out there. The earth knows how to stay in balance. We just need to find a way to align with that balance.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation with youth climate activists. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods.

FOR POD: Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. On our new website you can create and share playlists focused on topics including food, energy, EVs, activism.

Coming up, Alec Loorz on the value of connection he’s learned living close to nature and how it applies to the climate crisis:

Alec Loorz: Something that's giving me a lot of hope for the future is the idea of permaculture the idea that we can build a human presence that is enduring and that is integrated with the wider landscape

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. Youth climate activist Alec Loorz wasn’t alone in his efforts; he had his mother, Victoria Loorz, with him the whole way. She recalls how passionate her son became after watching An Inconvenient Truth.

Victoria Loorz: The next day he was on fire. He had built his own little presentation. He was gonna go to his class. He’s in sixth, seventh grade. And he was gonna tell them we’re gonna stop global warming.

Greg Dalton: Victoria supported her son’s conviction. She ended up quitting her corporate job to travel with him, handling organizing and fundraising while he gave his climate presentations. They did that full time for seven years.

Victoria Loorz: And parents would ask me like how did you get your kid to do this? I’m like you obviously don't have a teenager because you don't get teenagers to do things like you support what they are already passionate about. And so it was his passion that I was supporting all along.

Greg Dalton: They had to navigate the stardom and the pressure that came with it. Which could be tough for a teenager.

Victoria Loorz: You know, and sometimes his ego would get in the way and we talk about it and go, you know, this isn’t about you. And he got that.

Greg Dalton: Victoria recalls some leaders tried to protect her son and other youth activists from the full picture of the climate emergency, even as they welcomed their role in the movement. During the Earth Day 40th anniversary celebration on the National Mall, she was backstage, and overheard three people talking, including climate scientist Jim Hansen and Bobby Kennedy Jr. They were discussing how the planet had passed a critical tipping point.

Victoria Loorz: And as they were talking about it Alec walked up and all three of them stopped talking. And you know change the subject completely waited till Alec was gone and then I heard them, you know, just kind of say the young people, you know, they were protecting him from what is real. And I understand that, wanting to do that, I understand that as a parent wanting to protect ourselves, our own hearts, our children from the reality that is coming that is here that we are in. But I'm not sure I'm not sure how helpful that is.

Greg Dalton: Along the way Victoria and Alec formed an organization to help inspire and activate more youth in the climate movement, youth like the young Swede Greta Thunberg, who rose to prominence years later by calling out hypocrisy and inaction at the UN.

Greta Thunberg: This is all wrong… I shouldn’t be up here, I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the middle of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

Victoria Loorz: Alec was never like Greta, where she’ll just name it and just say you know you guys screwed up and we’re stuck with it. Like he would never say that. That’s just not his heart. His heart is much more collaborative and understanding where people are coming from.

Greg Dalton: But those same feelings resonated for Alec, Victoria says, after he started to become disillusioned with the lack of progress on climate and the scale of the crisis.

Victoria Loorz: When he went to Iceland and actually saw how much the glaciers had receded. He could feel it in his body and the grief began. That was really I think a turning point for him when he could actually feel it and it wasn't just a message.

Greg Dalton: Victoria went on to found the Center for Wild Spirituality and write a book entitled, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred. She has this advice for parents of other youth activists:

Victoria Loorz: I would say listen, honor them, almost makes me cry. They know why they're here. They know this is important. You can support them. You know diminishing this doesn't help. Exaggerating it doesn't help. Giving them ways to be active, you know, learning from them in a way that they're closer to the earth they haven't forgotten as much as we have. So that's what I would say, be present with them. They're going to need you.

Greg Dalton: In talking with adult Alec Loorz, I asked him if he felt any guilt after stepping back from the climate movement when he was younger.

Alec Loorz: A little bit. It’s sort of complicated within myself because I was just so ready to be done with it when I initially stepped back. But I guess you could call it guilt. There's this sense that started building of like the longer that I stayed away it sort of is like. Yeah, I guess there was a bit of a disappointment in myself. And at the same time there was a sense of I'm still searching for what the actual answers are. And I haven’t actually stepped back really, I’ve stepped back from public speaking and doing interviews and stuff. But it's still almost obsessively what I think about all the time is climate change.

Greg Dalton: Do you miss this public spotlight in any way?

Alec Loorz: I don't miss being put on a pedestal and talked about as the hero. What I do miss is being on stage speaking to an audience who is vibing with what I'm saying. To feel that sense of connection with people who are getting something for the first time that I recently got for the first time. And just being able to share it with people and feeling that connection with people in the audience.

Greg Dalton: When you were 12 the world was on track for maybe five or 6° of Celsius of warming. You are really affected by NASA scientist James Hansen saying that we had only five years to make significant progress. And a lot of progress has been made. We’re now on track for 2 1/2 maybe more degrees of warming since the Industrial Revolution. Still bad but not as bad as it was, say, a decade ago. How do you think about the progress that has been made, the good news?

Alec Loorz: Yeah, it is good news. I'm trying to hold back my cynicism. I don't know if I truly believe that we’re on track for 2 1/2 to 3°C. But even if we are, that’s still a really scary world. And I think we have to be prepared for the types of weather disasters that we've been seeing just to intensify and become more common and more prolonged and more intense.But I am trying to find a way to hold both, of feeling the sense of progress is being made. The right types of conversations are happening at a high level at least the beginning stages of those conversations. And there does seem to be a commitment within countries to actually address this problem. I don't know if the actual tactics that are being discussed are actually going to fully get us out of this mess. And it's also one thing to commit to something and it's a whole other thing to actually do it. Nations have been committing to climate targets for at least 20 years and consistently not reaching them. So something still has to kick into gear at that higher political level. And probably my perspective now is that we shouldn't wait until the politicians and UN people figure this out for us, that it takes addressing this in all of our own ways.

Greg Dalton: And so how do you describe your life now?

Alec Loorz: Well at this point I'm living on a former farm in southern Ontario. In 2021 I moved out here from Washington state to be with Slater Jewell-Kemker, who is now my wife. We got married last year. She was involved in the climate movement back when I was and we almost met so many times back in the day, but we only connected in 2019. So we’ve been living together for the last two years and we like planted a food forest with some friends who live close by. We've got probably 20 different garden spaces doing a lot of work generating the soil, building up biomass. I think as I’ve learned more agriculture is a huge part of the difficulty of the situation we’re in. I think the longer that we stick to the modern sort of monocrop industrial agriculture the more difficult it’s gonna be to actually feed everyone properly. And I think so many people are longing to return to the land in this way to grow our own food, to make our own energy, to be in community. So that's what we’re striving for here. And actually something that's giving me a lot of hope for the future is the idea of permaculture, the idea that we can build a human presence that is enduring and that is integrated with the wider landscape rather than making a farm by clearing away what's there and planting a bunch of corn. We’re past the phase of individual people being the solution. And I think it doesn't have to be the other extreme of like mass movement type stuff. I do still think there's a space for that especially if it can be coordinated in a higher-level way rather than like this group is gonna do a march and then it’s over. This group does a march and then it’s done. Like I think we as a movement need to be having this conversation of how do we integrate our efforts and find like an overarching strategy that is common but then decentralized organizing within that. I think that's the type of thing that’s gonna be really powerful as it’s explored more and more throughout the next few years.

Greg Dalton: Alec Loorz is a climate activist, writer and photographer. I’ve interviewed more than a decade ago when you're 12. Thank you for coming back and sharing your story so candidly and openly and vulnerably, Alec. I think a lot of people can relate. And thank you for sharing that.

Alec Loorz: Well, thank you so much for having me back on. It’s a pleasure.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about youth climate activists. This is Climate One. Coming up, how one young person found her place in the climate movement by documenting it:

Slater Jewell-Kemker: Okay, I'm not gonna be the kid necessarily who goes and chains himself to a reactor fence. I'm not gonna be the kid who goes and stages some crazy publicity stunt, but I can be the person who goes and films them because no one was paying attention to kids at that time. No one was taking them seriously. (:22)

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Ariana Brocious: This is Climate One. I’m Ariana Brocious. A powerful way to experience the life of a youth climate activist is to watch the documentary “Youth Unstoppable.” It was produced by Slater Jewell-Kemker, who spent more than a decade filming and documenting the work of youth climate activists while being one herself. Like her now-husband Alec Loorz, Slater stepped away from the movement and has found a new sense of peace investing in her life focused on permaculture and sustainable living in rural Ontario.

Slater Jewell-Kemker: I grew up in Los Angeles, California, and my parents were in the film industry and most of their friends, and the people in our life were involved in media or arts. But with a very specific bent of wanting to make the world a better place. One of our dear friends, Jeannie Meyers, started this organization called the My Hero Project, in the very kind of infancy of the internet cause she wanted her kids to have somewhere to go online that was safe and inspiring and made humanity feel a little bit more worth saving even at that time. And when I was little a friend of ours, Kathy Elden, she was gonna go interview the peace activist Ron Kovic for My Hero. And I went along with my mom and he would only give an interview to me. So I was five years old and holding this camera and he put me on his lap and wheeled me around his apartment and showed me all of his anti-war, pro-peace artworks and, and told me about his experiences and I think it just clicked. Something in my brain clicked at that young age of, oh, this is normal. I can talk to anyone I want. I can ask them questions because it's always no until you ask. And it just felt like that was something that I could do in my life. No one had told me yet that, oh, you're five years old. You can't just go and interview people. So I think that just stuck with me.

Ariana Brocious: So you had an early interest in filmmaking, you had role models in your life that were filmmakers, but why choose to do something documenting climate activists?

Slater Jewell-Kemker: When I was about nine years old, I moved up with my family to a farm in Southern Ontario in Canada and going from a very small house and yard in the valley in Los Angeles to fields and woods and rivers and fireflies and animals. And just this magic sense of wonder really reprogrammed my brain as to what joy was in my life, as to what safety felt. And this made me get more and more interested in the environment because it was something that people were talking about, and writing articles about. And something was going wrong. And through the My Hero Project and my parents and my love of filmmaking and newfound interest in the environment, I was given the opportunity to interview Jean-Michel Cousteau, the son of Jacques Cousteau, the renowned marine biologist. And it was the first time in my life that I spoke to an adult of that level, of that immense wisdom and knowledge and like social standing in the world who fully communicated with me even though I was a kid, even though I wasn't anywhere near his level of knowledge on the subject. He spoke to me as a fellow human being and I felt like my questions to him mattered that he genuinely wanted to interact with me and, and he was so kind and lovely and was really the one who I guess, kind of inspired me to go on this journey. He literally passed me a baton and said, it's your job now. And I feel like a lot of kids would say, I maybe wouldn't run with that, maybe wouldn't take it seriously, but I took it very seriously because this person respected me and I respected them, and I felt like I could do something. No one had told me at that point yet that I couldn't. So I started getting more involved and that led me to representing Canada as a youth delegate at the environmental G8 Summit in Japan in 2008.

Ariana Brocious: I'd like to jump in there because there's a moment in your film where you talk about this, where you felt like for the first time kids weren't being taken seriously. And I wanna hear this moment from you. You're 15 years old you’re at the G8 Summit in Japan. This is in 2008.

Slater Jewell-Kemker: It was just really surreal going on the stage cause I felt like we were acts and when they called out the country's names, some of the ministers cheered and stuff and it made me feel like they were just doing that to seem like they were buddy-buddy with the youth of tomorrow. I felt like we were just like the photo op kids.

Ariana Brocious: So what were you feeling in that moment? Explain that feeling of sort of being used as props and was that something that became common as you continued to be a youth climate activist?

Slater Jewell-Kemker: Wow. It's been a, it's been a minute since I've heard that scene. I was 15 years old. I was. I was in this very like small intense period of time where there were about a hundred other young people from around the world, and we were all in this space working together because we were there under the impression that we would be actually collaborating and working with our environmental ministers and with our leaders, and that we would have a say in our own lives that we would be able to actually influence policy and participate in a meaningful way. And some of the stuff that I, when I think about it now that we were talking about even now, is still, I guess, kind of radical but hits right to the point of this climate crisis of this, this existential crisis of, okay, we need to address as human beings, our sense of responsibility. And we need to address our selfishness. We need to rethink how we actually live and engage with each other and, and live with this planet because this is how we've gotten into this monumental problem. This is what is killing people every year and impacting all of our lives. And I was so proud and so inspired by, you know, these other kids who were also my friends. We became such fast friends, my friend Abrar from Bangladesh. And I remember him telling me about how, you know, the floods in his country had been getting worse every year, every year. And that he would be walking through the city streets waist deep or higher in water and how you'd have to just keep going about your day and trying to be okay. And, when this, this moment happened when we were finally were going to be interacting with our ministers, it really was just a photo op. And, you know, at the time, it was the first time of my realizing that, oh, these leaders, these ministers aren't necessarily these gods of morality who want to make everything okay and have our best interests at heart, that they, they too are human beings with flaws and with preconceived notions, and very much only viewed us as eye candy to be used for their benefit. Our words were stripped down. They were made stupid. It was incredibly shocking. I couldn't believe it. And it was only the kids from the G8 countries who actually got to go and interact with their ministers. So Abrar didn't go. My friend from Indonesia didn't go. My friend from Nepal didn't go. So basically all the countries from the global south were not represented or there at all. And it just felt gross to me. And I, I think I've become a little bit more slightly jaded with time because that just kept happening again and again, and again and again. And that was what got me on this journey of this documentary. That's what got me on this journey of being a climate activist, was that I felt like, okay, I'm not gonna be the kid necessarily who goes and, you know, chains himself to a reactor fence. I'm not gonna be the kid who goes and stages some crazy publicity stunt, but I can be the person who goes and filmed them because no one was paying attention to kids at that time. No one was taking them seriously. And, and I felt like, you know, I'm here. I'm willing, I'm gonna just do it.

Ariana Brocious: And that must have been frustrating to feel that sort of lack of power, lack of agency, especially after having this really, you know, profound interaction with Cousteau who had sort of given you the license to pursue question asking and, you know, pursuit of the truth. And I'm wondering how you sort of handled that feeling in the moment, and how much that inspired you to continue this project, of this evolving documentary that you had started.

Slater Jewell-Kemker: Being in that moment in Japan of seeing my new friends who were, even though they were young, were the smartest people in the room, were the most empathetic, kind, and thoughtful people in the room, not being listened to made me extremely angry. At first, I was very depressed and sad, but it then changed into this, this deep anger and this sense of astonishment that these kids who are going to be inheriting this world from our leaders we're not being taken seriously. They weren't even listening to them. And, and I, I took that anger and I, I decided that I needed to go find these other kids who were as impassioned as I was because even though this was such a meaningful experience, pretty much my friend Abrar and I were maybe the, some of the only ones who kept going because it was so unsettling, um, to go and put your heart and soul into something and work so hard and then to not be taken seriously. So many kids just backed away. And that became a cycle that I saw again and again over the years, going to UN climate talks of, of kids going in wholehearted and optimistic and young and happy and not being able to deal with it, with the rejection.

Ariana Brocious: Roughly what percentage would you say of the people within that cohort that you started in, in, with, in the early two thousands? 2000 tens are still activists today.

Slater Jewell-Kemker: Maybe 10%, 15%.

Ariana Brocious: So what does that say, that there's a high rate of burnout?

Slater Jewell-Kemker: It definitely says that there's a high rate of burnout, because when you, when you take a step back and you look at what we're actually dealing with, we've been having these climate change conferences since, you know, the first one took place three days before I was born. And there is this overwhelming sense of urgency and need that has been there, but maybe kicked to the side over the decades. And young people feel it more, I think, than a lot of other parties feel it more than their leaders because this is very much going to be. Impacting their world and their future and their life. Maybe we thought at the time it was going to impact our kids or our grandkids more, and we're now very well aware that it's impacting our lives too. But when you go to these spaces, usually they take place, where all of the leaders and presidents and whatnot are, it's opulent and separate and, and refined and until Paris, all of the youth climate activists and NGOs and other parties were kind of relegated to a random warehouse type environment that was nearby but not too close. And it could be really dehumanizing to be in those spaces, where you're talking about the very fundamentals of life, of what it means to be a human, of what it means to have a community, to have an identity that is being threatened by climate change. Particularly if you're in the global south of having ancestors who are buried in this place and have been for centuries and you won't be able to live there anymore. You'll have to leave. The US or powerful countries coming in with 300 negotiators who can be at every single meeting they wanna be at. And then you have the real stakeholders only have one negotiator cause that's all they can afford and they get easily overwhelmed and can only go to certain ones. And so they aren't really there with the voice. And so it's incredibly depressing to see that year after year without failThe one thing that you can count on is that the climate crisis is getting worse. That we're seeing it more and more, that people are dying, that people are losing their livelihoods. And it feels like the people in charge who have the power to make real change are in a completely different reality. And, it's very difficult. It's very hard. And then you come home and most people have never heard of a COP or the UN climate change conferences and, and you feel like you're in this weird sense of, of like, am I just screaming at a wall? Am I screaming into the void? Like, can no one else see this? Am I insane? It's hard when the people that you love don't necessarily understand what you're doing. It's hard to see how everything that you thought was gonna happen is coming to pass, like some horrible prophecy and people are still coming up with the same ideologies and ideas and ways forward and solutions as they were 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. That is why there's a huge rate of burnout.

Ariana Brocious: What is your relationship with climate activism now?

Slater Jewell-Kemker: I like to think that I can be a person who can go to the current kind of crop of youth climate activists and, and help them in this, in this hard time and, and remind them of where they came from that it really truly is another example of, of you're able to do what you're doing because of 30 years of other youth climate activists fighting to even be able to be allowed to speak at the UN of, of being in these positions of being the first one to sue the US government of being like all these kids have been fighting this fight. All. Like, I always think of Severn Cullis-Suzuki at 12 years old in 1992 saying in Rio, you know, you tell us to be. Good people and you tell us to pick up after ourselves and to to be nice to other people, and then you do the exactly that. So how can we trust you?

Severn Cullis-Suzuki: You teach us not to fight with others, to work things out. To respect others. To clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures. To share, not to be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? Do not forget why you are attending these conferences. Who you are doing this for. We are your own children. You are deciding what kind of a world we are growing up in. (:36)

Slater Jewell-Kemker: And I still get that video sent to me like, oh wow, look at this girl. We have to support her. And it's like, this is from 30 years ago. So I think particularly with this documentary and my experiences of way too many burnt out nights of the soul. I feel like I have something to offer when I meet with, when I meet with young people and I meet with kids who are starting out at the same age I did, and, and telling them that it's okay to not be a crazy activist robot, that you are going to be burnt out. When I was a youth climate activist, like I was embarrassed that I felt burnt out. I was embarrassed that I was feeling overwhelmed when really what I should have been doing was, was looking towards my friends and my community and, and talking to them about it. But I felt like, If I took a step away, I was letting down the movement, and then I realized years later that everyone else felt the same way.

Ariana Brocious: What would you say to the younger you in this climate activism space?

Slater Jewell-Kemker: Oh wow. I think if I was to talk to the younger me, one of the most important things that I could say would be to, and I understand saying this, that there is a certain degree of privilege, but to say, to not be so hard on myself. I look back at it now and there is a part of me that is angry that the narrative encouraged me as a child to believe that I could fix the world's problems. And that led to years of struggling with anxiety and depression and perfectionism and wondering, you know, I was putting my all in, why wasn't, why weren't things getting better? I was just not working hard enough. And I grieve for my child self, thinking that I could make it all better. But it is a fallacy to think that a child can fix this problem when we're looking at hundreds of years of systemic injustice and hundreds of years of convenience and consumerism over the health of people in the planet and money. I think there needs to be a lot more kindness. There needs to be a lot more empathy and compassion and listening, and I think we need to acknowledge that maybe we can't win the climate battle the way that we thought we could, the way that we were told that we could. It actually is really meaningful to try to change your community and where you live and where you are, that does make a difference, I think, even if it's just for people to feel like they are maybe living in a better way. I've really come to this place in my life where I feel like that is also important.

Ariana Brocious: Slater Jewell-Kemker is a filmmaker and climate activist. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us on Climate One.

Slater Jewell-Kemker: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Ariana Brocious: Abrar Anwar has experienced the impacts of climate disruption his whole life. A U.S. citizen, he grew up in Bangladesh, a country he describes as unbelievably beautiful but beset by climate-induced severe storms, flooding, tidal surges and more.

Abrar Anwar: I was around 11 or 12 years old and we were going to renew my passport. And the top of our car went underwater as we approached the embassy. We had to get out, we had to wade through almost hip high water and get there. And right next to the U.S. embassy, like say the end of the same street at that time, there was one of the largest slums in the area, and you saw the, like you got to the embassy and you saw all these cars pulling up into this lovely dry space, and you would look around. And you would see people having to pull their belongings, their clothes onto floating pieces of wood and pull it out of the slum uphill towards somewhere where it's drier. (:42)

Ariana Brocious: He got into the climate movement when he was 16, thanks to his involvement in his school’s debate team.

Abrar Anwar: I love to debate. and then there was a debate competition about the environment. and so to prep for this debate, I started doing my research on environmental problems in Bangladesh and what I found shocked and horrified me to my core. From then on, I've been trying to get my voice heard in as many places as possible. And luckily I got to go to the G8 Climate Summit by the time I was almost 18, And actually saw how vast and amazing the youth climate movement was and how dedicated these children were, me being a child myself at the time. And it really gave me hope and pushed me a lot further into becoming a climate activist. So I returned from Japan, very inspired, and I participated in two or three environmental groups here. To help in cleanups and in organizing some more sustainable electricity sources for people in the villages. I then went, uh, and met later in Nepal again, as you saw in the documentary, and that trip inspired me so much. I, I came back and helped my friend start the BU foundation. Which to this day they're heavy into the environmental activism scene here, doing cleanups, road cleanups, tree planting, marches, conferences and everything, and it's entirely youth led. So we phase out as we grow older.

Ariana Brocious: Those of us that live in industrialized wealthy countries know sort of, uh, intellectually that there are people in developing nations that are being hit now, have been hit, first and worst by climate disasters, but it's still another thing to actually see it and then yet another to live it or experience it personally. Because we can't all travel and experience it personally. How, how do you make this crisis real for people who aren't living it the way you are?

Abrar Anwar: We're a more interconnected society today than we were 20 years ago. We saw in the war in Ukraine for the first time that people could go live on the ground in affected areas and show us what their lives are like. And it really woke a lot of people up. People who had no investment or stake started helping out. The climate movement, while it has been leveraging that, I think people in affected areas themselves need to be reaching out more. instead of news channels broadcasting it for their audience, there need to be live streams from our government. There need to be people going into affected areas across the world to show everyone exactly what's happening here. And I think a look at the ground level view of how people are living through these climate disasters, would actually open a lot of other people's eyes.

Ariana Brocious: So you transitioned from climate activism to working in sustainable tech. Do you think you've avoided the burnout that so many of your peers experienced being youth climate activists?

Abrar Anwar: To an extent, yes. Now there are times I, I'm still on the ground, especially because I'm in a country where this kind of disasters are happening regularly, so you can never really count yourself out. But I have definitely seen the burnout from not being heard screaming and speaking to the same policymakers over and over again, the transition from being youth to being an adult and still not being heard, and still fighting in the same movement and not knowing whether you've gained an inch or not, has, it's been a really big burnout on a lot of my friends that I know.

Ariana Brocious: How do you think you avoided that?

Abrar Anwar: I'm not saying I did, but to an extent. Being a father helps 'cause giving up at that point is not an option. The next generation is here. Like we were the youth climate activists. There is a new generation of them now. We've got kids of our own that are inheriting the world next. I think that really helped with me staying focused, but I wouldn't say I've avoided the burnout. I've felt the depression, I've felt the crash. I've seen my friends get arrested and hosed down and taken away by cops and have had to bail some of them out. Or shelter some of them through issues like that. And it's definitely taken a toll. There were days where getting up and working didn't seem like an option. And I have to say maybe it's just taking a deep breath and realizing the world is still incredibly beautiful. Like we have not lost everything we're fighting to save. And there's very beautiful people out there who're trying to make it a better place even now. I think eventually when you see what everyone else is doing, you yourself come back into it and it helps you get back on your feet and go, no, every little bit still does count. Everyone's still trying.

Ariana Brocious: Abrar Anwar is a former youth climate activist and chief technology officer at Rebel Force Tech Solutions.

Greg Dalton: We also spoke to Kyle Gracey, another youth activist highlighted in Slater Jewell-Kemker’s film, “Youth Unstoppable.”

Kyle Gracey: I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania that was sort of coal country and my family had worked in coal, so that was my first exposure to fossil fuels. But what happened in, I think it was around high school, is they started building wind turbines. In the county next to me. And so those started becoming a thing that people were talking about.

And there were literally places up in the hills in Pennsylvania where you could look one direction and see wind turbines and look behind you and see, uh, coal mines. So it was just this kind of wild visual of sort of the past and the future, uh, of energy. And so around that time I, as I was learning about that, I was also learning about this thing called climate change and just making the connections between those two and getting concerned about it.

Ariana Brocious: I'd like to play a clip, uh, from you. this was filmed at COP 15, the United Nations Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, uh, when you were 24.

Kyle Gracey (playback): So right here we’re trying to make sure that a really strong deal comes out of the climate negotiations working with a lot of international youth from around the world in solidarity on the same issues and trying to push for strong climate action. I just want to share the passion of youth and understand that we’re here, we’re ready, we’re involved and we’re just going to get bigger. We’re not just here to say that when we get older, we tried. We think that we can have an impact and we won’t stop until we see the clean energy future that we all want.

Ariana Brocious: So that was nearly 15 years ago, and that particular COP was notoriously a bit of a bust. There was not a strong deal that resulted from those negotiations. What is it like to hear that now?

Kyle Gracey: I think it still tracks for me, you know, the focus on not just being there. Either as a spectator like some people were, or just wanting to try, but actually really being focused and believing that, that we could have an impact. Copenhagen wasn't much of a success, but over the longer period of time, we have had successes. Young people around the world have been successful in moving the needle, uh, on climate action. What I aspired to do at that moment, is what we actually went on to do: to bring the power of young people to the climate negotiations, to influence decision makers, to be more future focused and future generations focused, and to take the entire issue more seriously with their actions and their words than I think they otherwise would have.

Ariana Brocious: You said in that clip. We won't stop until we see the clean energy feature that we want. Did you stop? Did you face burnout?

Kyle Gracey: I did not stop. I continued to work in climate. I still work in climate for at least part of my work today. I didn't personally experience burnout, but I was definitely around lots of folks who went through different periods of burnout. Many of them actually because of Copenhagen. There was a lot of burnout right after Copenhagen. Um, but fortunately I was able to avoid that and keep the momentum going for myself. Long after that.

Ariana Brocious: So tell me what tools and strategies you use to help yourself cope and not maybe experience the same level that some of your peers did.

Kyle Gracey: One is, I tried to be realistic about what the potential outcomes could be. So some of the reasons that people got burned out in Copenhagen was because there was this big narrative built out that it was gonna be the solution to the climate crisis. And so then when that didn't happen and, and when it failed so spectacularly, people were just disillusioned because they had expected that that was gonna be everything. And I never expected it. I expected that it would be at best, Incremental progress and at worst, no progress. Uh, and it was some ended up being somewhere in between. I try to have kind of a healthy level of, of making change, but recognizing that change can take a long time. So that's been the biggest one. And then, you know, just taking care of myself, good self care, you know, eating well, exercising, sleeping, all the things that people talk about for maintaining good resilience. And then just thinking carefully about why I got into this in the first place and being focused on that action, uh, orientation, being focused on creating change and remembering that, that's why I'm here and that I'm planning to do that my whole life. And so if I have to focus on this issue my whole life to get there, that's fine. And if I get there sooner than that, that's great. There's lots of other challenges in the world that I can work on too.

Ariana Brocious:Kyle Gracey is a strategy consultant with Future Matters.

We’ve heard a range of perspectives today from youth climate activists who are now young adults. We asked each of them to share their advice to the youth getting involved in climate today.

Abrar Anwar: My advice would be to be a little more radical than we have been. Try and shake up the system. Governments don't like disruption. Shut down the road in front of your parliament, organize marches, but not just that. Get yourself into positions of power. Aim for places where you can stand toe to toe with lobbyists, with policymakers, with people who are influencing big oil, big energy. Get yourself in a position to be heard and making sure once you're in that position you don't back down and you don't change your opinions based on the pressure you will be feeling from your peers at the time.

Slater Jewell-Kemker: You are going to feel depressed, you are going to feel overwhelmed, and it's okay to take a step back and to heal because you won't be able to continue this work if you just keep pushing on.

Kyle Gracey: My biggest advice is to build community. We are not going to solve any of these problems by ourselves. These are complex, interconnected challenges and we need an entire society of people to do that effectively. So creating connections among other people, working together on this and what we sort of call never worrying alone, never being stuck thinking that you're the only person who's taking on this challenge and recognizing that the reason it feels hard is because it is hard. It's a big complex thing that we're trying to shift in the world, but it can be done. People have changed the world before and young people have changed the world before and they can do it again.

Alec Loorz: Trust your authority as a young person who will be impacted by this crisis. And remember that it's not about you. That this is something collective. We are tapping into something that's bigger than us with having these conversations and engaging in this work.

Ariana Brocious: That was Abrar Anwar, Slater Jewell-Kemker, Kyle Gracey and Alec

Greg Dalton: Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. On our new website you can create and share playlists focused on topics including food, energy, EVs, activism. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Ariana Brocious is co-host, editor and producer. Austin Colón is producer and editor. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Wency Shaida [Shey-duh] (rhymes with play) is our development manager, Ben Testani is our communications manager. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

3:30 Alec Loorz on feeling a sense of calling to the climate crisis
9:00 Alec Loorz on jumping over dread straight into action
12:45 Alec Loorz on hitting burnout and depression
15:31 Alec Loorz on reconnecting with nature and the wild
18:00 Victoria Loorz on supporting her son’s passion for climate activism
24:30 Alec Loorz on our current place in the climate crisis
33:30 Slater Jewell-Kemker on youth not being taken seriously at G8 summit
38:40 Slater Jewell-Kemker on experiencing burnout and anger at climate inactio
48:10 Abrar Anwar looking back on his youth climate activism
54:00 Kyle Gracey looking back on his youth climate activism
59:00 Advice for today’s youth climate activists

Play

Killer Heat: Confronting Disproportionate Impacts on Women and Girls

BenTestani — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 22:29:49 +0000

Killer Heat: Confronting Disproportionate Impacts on Women and Girls

06/09/2023

Extreme heat kills more people per year than any other climate disaster. It preys on the poor, exacerbates racial inequalities, and there is a growing body of evidence that shows women and girls are increasingly susceptible to heat-health effects. Globally, women and girls represent 80% of climate refugees. They are more likely to be displaced, suffer violence and die in natural disasters. As temperatures rise, children’s test scores decrease, gender violence increases, and miscarriage rates go up. But preventing heat deaths is possible. From Europe to Africa, Chief Heat Officers throughout the world are implementing projects to make cities more climate-adaptive.

Guests

Eugenia Kargbo

Chief Heat Officer, Freetown, Sierra Leone

Kathy Baughman-McLeod

Director, Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center; Senior VP, Atlantic Council

Eleni Myrivili

Global Chief Heat Officer, UN Habitat

REPORT: The Scorching Divide: How Extreme Heat Inflames Gender Inequalities in Health and Income (onebillionresilient.org)

Adrienne Arsht – Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (atlanticcouncil.org)

Building Extreme Heat Resilience (onebillionresilient.org)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton.

Ariana Brocious: And I’m Ariana Brocious.

Greg Dalton: Extreme heat kills more people per year than any other climate disaster.

Ariana Brocious: And it’s a hidden threat–practically invisible compared to the torrential rain of a hurricane or drama of climate-fueled wildfires.

Greg Dalton: Soaring heat caused by burning fossil fuels preys on the poor and exacerbates racial inequalities – revealing vulnerabilities in its wake.

Ariana Brocious: And there’s a growing body of evidence that shows women and girls are disproportionately susceptible to heat-health effects.

Greg Dalton: Globally, women and girls represent 80% of climate refugees. They’re more likely to be displaced, suffer violence and die from natural disasters.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: Women get the short end of the stick, in every way. And extreme heat is exacerbating and adding fuel to this profound inequality.

Ariana Brocious: That’s Kathy Baughman-McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. As temperatures rise, gender violence increases and miscarriage rates go up. But Kathy says preventing heat deaths is possible.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: This is one of the most beautiful things about addressing this climate risk: you can solve this; people don’t have to die from heat.

Greg Dalton: The Arsht-Rockefeller Center has been funding Chief Heat Officers throughout the world – people implementing projects to make cities more climate-adaptive. People like Eleni Myrivili of Athens:

Eleni Myrivili: We have to start designing cities and transportation and kind of hospitals in special ways. And make sure that we have the right type of infrastructure that can support women as well as men in our modern cities.

Ariana Brocious: After we hear from Kathy, we’ll travel to a few different places dealing with heat, and hear about ways to mitigate it. From reviving an ancient aqueduct in Greece, to building mud-wattle houses in Uganda and putting shade and solar lights over an outdoor market in Sierra Leone. That’s all coming up.

Greg Dalton: One note about language before we begin. Extreme temperatures are commonly called heat waves. But the word wave implies we can just wait it out and it will pass. That’s true, AND those waves are becoming bigger and longer. I got a problem with that word “wave.”

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, and our brains are sort of hard-wired to forget about these kinds of episodic difficulties, which means that we need better systems to talk about heat. And one thing that Kathy and others are really advocating for is to have a naming system for naming heat events similar to what we do for hurricanes and other kinds of natural disasters, because it not only helps us to think about them in the moment, but also refer back to them and compare different events over time.

Greg Dalton: I also got a problem with the term “natural disasters” cuz they’re not really natural anymore. But let’s get on with it.

Ariana Brocious: Climate amplified.

Greg Dalton: There you go. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association just upped its odds of an El Niño event, which, for the first time, could put us over 1.5°of global warming set by the Paris Accord. I asked Kathy how she reconciles this news with her work.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: I hate to say it but I knew it already and it's validation of our work. And it's also sad because we know exactly what to do and we know how to do it and we have the capital to do it, and the policies. We don't have the political leadership to do it. And that’s sad. The upside is that on the issue of addressing extreme heat. We do have solutions and things that we can do to protect ourselves. And so, this is a mixed emotions story.

Greg Dalton: And extreme heat kills more people per year than any other climate disaster more than floods, fires, hurricanes that grab the headlines. And I kind of knew that but didn't quite realize that deaths from severe heat increased 56% in the US between 2018 and 2021. I wasn't aware of that before studying up for this episode. So, how else does extreme heat affect people?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: Well, it affects the human body in profound ways, and it affects people disproportionately. And that's one of the biggest elements of addressing climate impacts is it is an issue of climate justice that the story of extreme heat is a story of race and a story of discrimination. And when you think about the neighborhoods that or the environments in which people live many of them are leafy and green in wealthy areas. And many of them are covered in black asphalt with very little bits of nature. And that makes a big difference on our health and exposure to extreme heat increases asthma. It means that you have to run the air conditioner more. And if you don't have air conditioning that heat exacerbates underlying conditions that people have. And people in food deserts with little access to health and healthy food and healthcare end up having their conditions like diabetes or heart disease exacerbated by heat. And the scary part is, a lot of times these deaths and illnesses are masked. You know it's called the silent killer for a reason. We don't hear it. We can't see it. And we don't have a lot of data that tells us. And so, our numbers that you just cited that’s the best we can do. Oftentimes we have to model those numbers because we don't have the data to record it.

Greg Dalton: Right. And we've learned recently from studies that those neighborhoods with lots of asphalt in urban heat islands are those neighborhoods that were redlined by banks and there were not loans given and that there is a direct link between racism and heat in urban america.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: I have a good friend, Adam Freed, who is an adjunct professor at Columbia. And in his class, he talks about the fact that these treeless neighborhoods with lots of asphalt it's racism that you can see from space. And that’s such a dramatic imagery that that brings I find that helpful.

Greg Dalton: I talked to a urologist once who said, yeah, he sees an uptick in patients during high heat because people are not hydrating. And think about all the people who don't get to see a urologist or a doctor during an extreme heat event. What else happens, workplace injuries, lost income. I think I remember one-time Sol Hsiang from UC Berkeley saying every day over say 90° is like putting a $20 bill on fire per person because of lost productivity, etc.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: Well, at the macro level we work with Vivid Economics and we calculated the worker productivity losses for the US economy at $100 billion in 2020 as a baseline, so that's growing. And 18% of that loss is disproportionally borne by Black and Hispanic workers in the South. But we also looked at cities across the world and found that in New Delhi, a worker loses a quarter of their income every single day when they work outside. So, they're losing a full quarter has evaporated, and in Dhaka 8% of their GDP of the city is lost to heat. And in Miami-Dade County, completely different setting, you know, their annual budget is $10 billion. The cost of heat to their economy, just that one dimension, you know, that's not business interruption or healthcare or infrastructure just worker productivity is $10 billion. The same amount as their entire annual budget. And all of this is silent and unfortunately a bit of a secret which is why I’m thrilled to be on your podcast today.

Greg Dalton: In addition to disproportionate impacts due to race. Extreme heat also has disproportionate impacts on women and girls around the world, often because they're the ones fetching water, working outdoors. Tell us more about that, how heat disproportionally affects women and girls.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: We work really closely with an organization called the Self-Employed Women's Association and they're based in India and they have 2.5 million women in the informal sector in 110 different trades. So, think about waste recyclers or market traders or construction workers. And we have learned very well their impacts which mean they even have blisters on their hands from using tools that are not made for the conditions they’re being used in. They have urinary tract infections, miscarriages, a rash that used to be a few months out of the year is now 12 months out of the year, headaches. It’s profound and most of the time they’re the primary breadwinner for their family. With these extreme temperatures. Work is shifted to different times of the day to try to find cooler times. And so, when there's a break, men can go back to work and women go home to take care of their kids, make dinner, clean up, put them to bed and they can't go out again and work. So, they're missing an entire shift and they're missing all the money that comes with that shift.

Greg Dalton: There is also research that shows across the board bad things happen when humans get exceptionally hot. Violence increases on all scales. There’s more domestic violence in the home, there's more people honking in the streets. There are more fights. There's even more interstate conflict. How does all of that affect women in their position of relative power in society?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: Those are all absolutely true, and exacerbating the physiological the cultural. Women get the short end of the stick in every way. Culturally domestic violence, eating last, being responsible for getting water, clothes that cover their bodies fully. Being seen in many cultures as second- or third-class citizens. And extreme heat is exacerbating and adding fuel to this profound inequality. And we want to address that.

Greg Dalton: And you mention investing in women and girls. We know that all sorts of good things happen when girls stay in school and women are empowered. What are some solutions, particularly for heat in India or elsewhere that can really to address this disproportionate heat impact?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: One thing we know is that women reinvest 90% of what they make back into their community. So, all boats rise when you invest in women and their economic viability and sustainability. And so, in India with the Self-Employed Women's Association we are testing a micro insurance product that pays to their bank accounts when their health is threatened by extreme heat. And it's called the extreme heat income micro insurance. And we’ve partnered with Self-Employed Women’s Association and Blue Marble, which is a private-sector micro insurance company, and we’ve developed this insurance. And the key thing is, it pays right to their bank accounts. And we've combined it though, you know, when you think about these insurance approaches, their risk sharing or risk transferring you also need to reduce the risk. And so, we've included in the program physical things that can help protect the women. And they choose what these things are including coolers to keep their water and their food and their produce from spoiling. Cement water tanks that keep the water temperature and the quality as it should be. Tarps that cover their crops to keep them from roasting in the sun. Gloves to protect their hands from the blisters that what I described that the ship breakers, the construction workers and the waste recyclers experience. And then thinking about early warnings they don't have access to good early warnings about heatwaves. And so, we're combining early warning system to the WhatsApp groups that they use to communicate with their grassroots leaders. And then lastly, there’s an element of financial inclusion. Thousands of the women are new to having their own bank accounts. They’re not banking through their father or their brother or their uncle. They have their own bank account. And so, there are lots of things happening within this one initiative. And so, we’re putting a lot of stock into it and it’s just been underway for about 10 days.

Greg Dalton: And that sounds really important because as part of this trend in insurance called parametric insurance, which is to release money before the bad thing happens rather than after the hurricane hits. And so, on the basis of a forecast of a heat or an extreme weather event to try to get money into people's hands beforehand rather than after something we knew was going to happen, but they couldn't get help until the damage was done.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: Yes, a slight adjustment to that. So, the parametric is something that pays out when an event happens and a forecast based parametric again, I'm sorry about the jargon but something that’s gonna give you money three or four days before the bad things happens is what we want. And I was just in Ahmedabad and we met with several of the grassroots leaders that represent the women in the different trades. And these women themselves were in those trades and some still are. We asked we want to move this to a forecast based product, meaning you get notice and you get paid beforehand. How would that change your decision-making. And that was so informative because we saw wild excitement about changing when they might work thinking about arranging their childcare differently. Thinking about their food differently. Lots of solutions they had, of how they would handle if they got paid in advance of that heat. And much better than waiting for the time that it happens or shortly after. And so, the parametric pays when the heatwave is triggered and the forecast base means we can use a forecast to pay them. And so, where our next round of the pilot will be that which is testing the forecast based of the parametric. And so, we’re trying to get in front of it as much as we can.

Greg Dalton: Insurance can be a real powerful lever here. One of your initiatives that started a couple years ago has been naming heatwaves the way hurricanes are named. Beyond elevating the issue in the public consciousness, what does that do?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: So, as we know heatwaves are invisible and they’re silent. And they’re called the silent killer. If heatwaves are silent. How can we solve it? How can we prevent people getting sick and dying from heat? And every death from heat is preventable. This is one of the most beautiful things about addressing this climate risk you can solve this; people don't have to die from heat. We need awareness. We need actual guidance. We need understanding of our own health, how to recognize signs of heat illness and stress in other people. And we believe and now have some early evidence that supports this that giving heat events a name gives them the branding and the identity that they need. Other climate hazards are so telegenic they’re dramatic, you know, the palm tree is sideways in the hurricane and a car is floating down a street, you know full of water in a flood, a landslide, tornado. I mean, they’re just grabbing your attention. And heat, you know, any aerial photo from one day to the next doesn't look any different. And it needs PR and people pay attention to human names. And now I’m excited to say that soon we’ll release our manuscript that shows the evidence that naming heatwave Zoe in Seville last summer was very successful in getting people to change their behavior and to think about the heat event differently.

Greg Dalton: Right. There was an infamous heatwave. And I don’t like to call it a wave because a wave has this idea that it comes and it goes, and this is more inexorable than that. But there was a heatwave in Europe, what 15, 20 years ago that killed tens of thousands of people and I don’t have a name for it, right. I have to describe it as that heatwave in Europe has no name that we can attach to it like we can Katrina or Ike or Sandy.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: And there's an archival purpose to that too. Because you remember what happened during Katrina or you remember what happened during Sandy. And so, you know, we have the heat dome heatwave of the Pacific Northwest from 2021 or the Labor Day heatwave in California. I mean we need to name them. We need to keep them organized. We need to reference what happened. And so, it's quite logical. And we don't name heatwaves alone. We also what we’re doing is pairing it with a health-based heat warning system that projects the impact of a heat event on a specific community. So, taking that data from that community combined with an algorithm that we've built with our chief heat science advisor and a science panel that takes nighttime temperatures which are incredibly predictive of health events. So, when you don't rest at night, when you don't get the sleep that you need for your brain to clean out you wake up and you make mistakes. Whether you're at a computer or you are working with machinery, your hand eye coordination is off, you’re tired you make mistakes. Oftentimes, people, you know, there are lots of deaths associated with this sort of phenomenon. And there's maybe year ago, a study that looked at the worker's comp data from the state of California that came to some very eye-popping conclusions about heat and worker injuries. And so, the labor heat nexus is really strong. And so, we're really leaning into understanding the economics of that because the worker loses money and the company’s losing money. And these are just big opportunity for investing in better outcomes and protecting people.

Greg Dalton: Right. And a lot of warehouses are not built or air conditioned for this. Of course, building resiliency heat often means installing more air-conditioning which uses a lot of power. it can destabilize the grid. California's address that by bringing grid scale storage online and perhaps using electric vehicles. But what about this vicious cycle of more heat and more air-conditioning which makes the whole thing worse.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: So, there’s a big movement for low emissions / no emissions mechanical cooling. And it’s not just the air-conditioners, you know, we need there's the cold chain is what it's called for food and medicine. Lots of medicines need to be kept at certain temperatures. We need to preserve and extend the shelf life of fresh fruits and vegetables; all sorts of health and well-being are depending on the cold chain in addition to the thermal comfort of our own bodies. We do have advancements in the machines themselves to make them lower emissions. They do have waste heat also so it’s not just emissions but they have heat. But the other pieces the passive cooling which is what we call things that without needing power things that can cool. And that means nature is one of the biggest ways that we can do it and one of the most cost-effective, trees, can make the difference. You know, there’s this concept of tree equity that American forests has coined and is looking at tree equity scores in cities around the US that thinks about the difference in a neighborhood with no trees and the same city, not very far away can be as much is 15°F cooler because of the trees. So, when you think about passive cooling, you have trees, you have lighter surfaces, you know, when we paint roofs and streets white. They reflect and don't absorb. There are green roofs so you put nature on the roof. And there are ways to design buildings for airflow. There are lots of ways to use water creatively so that you cool the air because it moves over the water. These very shallow little almost looks like a puddle, but it's designed and engineered specifically for cooling a community. So, we're looking at the combination of the passive cooling and the active cooling or mechanical cooling to try to bring down the demand. And then of course we want the power source for that mechanical cooling to be renewable. We need solar and wind to be powering it. And so, yes, we’re gonna need a lot more air-conditioning but we’re gonna try to do it in the very best way we can.

Greg Dalton: Kathy Baughman-McLeod is Director of the Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center and Senior Vice President at the Atlantic Council. Kathy, thank you for sharing again, the impacts of heat on women.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: My pleasure. Thank you very much, Greg. And thanks for doing the show. May it be the silent killer no more.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about extreme heat. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods.

Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. Or send a friend a link to this episode–or even a whole playlist. Check out our new and improved website, climate one dot org, which has new tools for sharing your favorite episodes.

Coming up, how the city of Athens is employing ancient infrastructure to help mitigate extreme heat:

Eleni Myrivili: It really can make a difference between life and death. It’s a very significant lowering of temperatures.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about extreme heat’s deadly impacts–particularly on women and girls. Eleni Myrivili is the Global Chief Heat Officer for UN Habitat. In the summer of 2021 she was appointed as Chief Heat Officer for Athens, and not a moment too soon. A few days later the city experienced a very significant heat event, with temperatures up to 45 degrees celsius – around 113 degrees fahrenheit. Myrivili says that hot and dry summer also led to intense wildfires around the city.

Eleni Myrivili: So, it becomes kind of a vicious circle, right. So, you have extreme heat and then you start having wildfires and the wildfires increase the heat. And not only increase the heat but they also increase the pollution and real difficulty in breathing. So, what I experienced was a kind of a post-apocalyptic scene where the skies were red and gray and brown because of the fires nearby, and where ash was falling everywhere. And where we couldn't breathe, I remember I had to wear my COVID mask to go to sleep because breathing was actually painful. It felt like it was hurting my lungs when I would breathe. So, and the Ministry of Health asked us not to leave the house for a few days because of these really high levels of microparticle pollution that is extremely dangerous for our health. But the main thing was that it was extremely hot. It was extremely hot. And the streets were empty, and people had withdrawn inside. And it lasted for three weeks. And months later we found out that several thousand people had died because of it. And what is interesting also is that the media was talking about the fires very, very little about the heat. And also, the media never, in Greece, never actually mentions the number of deaths. It was actually through politico.eu and a particular research that Politico did independently that measured different levels of mortality in different countries during that summer that we actually found out what the numbers were.

Ariana Brocious: Well, I think you're hitting on some really important things that we've talked about on past episodes of Climate One regarding heat, which is that there is not the same awareness publicly about the dangers of heat as there are for things like hurricanes or tsunamis or, you know, other kind of major natural disasters. And, yeah, there is not as good of accounting for the deaths. I live in the southwestern part of the US and there are excess heat deaths here as well, especially in cities like Phoenix. the data is not very good, even from the morgues, you know, what are the causes of deaths. And we know there are really harmful effects of heat on human bodies, especially when nighttime temperatures stay elevated. There's data for this because, especially big cities that have a lot of concrete and asphalt tend to absorb heat during the day, radiate it back out at night and then they don't cool off the ways to be some more rural or smaller cities do. What kinds of architectural and design solutions have been tried in Athens and other cities in the region to combat some of these effects?

Eleni Myrivili: Athens is particularly densely built and densely populated. It's one of the most densely populated parts of Europe. And it has tons of cement and asphalt and not very many green areas or rivers or any kind of natural water exposed in its surfaces. And that kind of city is not a good city for heat. It's a deathtrap. Because it absorbs heat in those types of materials, those mineralized kinds of surfaces which is the asphalt the cement, concrete, glass, steel, all these like really hard surfaces that are not water permeable and do not have any natural aspects about them. They absorb heat and then they radiate heat at night. And as you said that's the danger, that's the most dangerous type of heat. And we also know that nights temperatures are becoming hotter in the Mediterranean as well, more hot than, they are rising faster than the day temperatures some reports show. So, the night heat is really dangerous because the body never actually relaxes and never manages to adjust its core temperatures to lower its core temperatures and to sleep. So you’re less able to cope with the heat of the next day. So, you go to work particularly fatigued, but also your body and your organs, your internal organs have not managed to kind of lower their temperatures. So, that becomes particularly dangerous, So, in cities that are like this we immediately know that the neighborhoods that are the poorest neighborhoods, the most kind of vulnerable socioeconomically neighborhoods, which are the neighborhoods that almost everyone in the world have less green parks have worse quality in their infrastructure and worse quality in their buildings, those neighborhoods are the ones that will first of all kind of take the burden of heat. And those people that live there are the people that we have to make sure to protect.

Ariana Brocious: You’ve said that we need to move away from the logic of carbon modernity. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Eleni Myrivili: The industrial revolution brought together a kind of aesthetics and the kind of logic that created our modern cities with efficiency. And in a way a kind of democratization of resources. So, you know, we had these buildings that suddenly had central heating and we had electricity. But at the same time, it was based at this crazy idea of unlimited resources and most of all, it was based on the idea of unlimited fossil fuels that we can just use and abuse to do whatever we want. This type of cities the type of city that exists almost in a vacuum like we don't think any more of what are the climate conditions that these cities exist in. And we build the same city more or less whether we are in the South or whether we are in the North and just depend on fossil fuels to heat or cool them. And this is crazy because we've actually kicked a bucket full of knowledge from centuries of how people had learned how to what kind of materials to use, and how to build to deal with the local climate conditions in amazingly effective ways. We have to kind of get rid of the type of logic and aesthetics of modernity and start looking to other types of logics and bring other types of aesthetics into play when we design our cities from this point onward.

Ariana Brocious: The ancient Roman aqueduct that runs through Athens was reactivated. Can you explain what it was originally designed to do and what it's going to do now.

Eleni Myrivili: So, this ancient Roman aqueduct that was built in 150 after Christ to bring water to the center of ancient Athens during the Roman times, which at the time had a lot of demands on their bathing and spa. It was a big part of their social life and it continued to be used for many centuries. Water that run underground in this man-made extraordinary engineering feat, which is unbelievable to think about it. They would dig wells and connect the spaces between the wells and they manage for 24 km to keep it in a perfect type of inclination so that the water doesn't go too fast or too slow and continues kind of running for all these kilometers. And it's non-visible, it’s underground. It stopped being used for several decades now since there were centralized water supply for the whole of Athens. And recently we decided that we needed all types of backups for water supplies for Athens. And this was an incredible amount of water that is not being used and today is thrown into the sewage which is good quality and it needs very little further filtering to be used for irrigating green areas and for bringing water aspects to the surface of the city so that in both cases bring temperatures down.

Ariana Brocious: So, essentially, you're re-activating this pipe system. And that itself has a cooling effect on the city?

Eleni Myrivili: Exactly. So, if you use water either to help plants grow or to bring it to the surface through any kind of open water source. Be it, you know, misting or be it water spouts. All of these, especially in combination with green aspects with trees and other types of plants can bring temperatures down up to six or 7°C. It really can make a difference between life and death. It’s a very significant lowering of temperatures. The more you have heat, the more you need water, right. And we know that this is an important aspect for evapotranspiration which is this function that trees have which lower temperature. So, trees don't just help us deal with heat because they provide shade, but because also, they they release little water droplets that evaporate and cool our surrounding areas. So, trees are these amazing natural cooling entities.

Ariana Brocious: One of the threads we’re untangling in this episode is heat’s disproportionate impact on women and girls. What are you seeing related to this in Greece and elsewhere in Europe?

Eleni Myrivili: So, in cities like Athens and in cities in Europe and North America women tend to be more exposed to heat for several reasons. One of them is that we know through different reports that women end up working more than men. And also women end up taking more public transportation than men. And they also have to do more trips than men often because they have to go shopping and they have to pick up the kids and they have to go and take care of the elderly and all that. So, all of these things of caring, especially during times of crises like, you know, if you have a heatwave make women much more exposed to the heatwave and to conditions that can bring them to having physical problems, health problems. So, we also know that women that are pregnant are particularly vulnerable. And not just them but also the babies that they are carrying and the babies when they are first born are very vulnerable as well. So, this whole kind of thing means that we have to start designing cities and transportation and hospitals and particularly places that deal with very young children and women that are pregnant in special ways. And make sure that we have the right type of infrastructure that can support women as well as men in our modern cities. And to turn it back, Arianna, to your question. I just have to remind everyone that women are the ones that take care of every time that we have some vulnerable person in the family or in the extended family. It's the women that will have to stay back that will have to find the ways and the solutions and the resources to support these particular members of the family. And to take it a step further, that is why women are better at finding solutions for adaptation for heat. And we see them actually being in the forefront of solutions, because they are the ones that have to deal with this much more than to quickly kind of escape it or find other ways of dealing with it. They have to create the conditions that will protect their loved ones and the ones that are the most vulnerable.

Ariana Brocious: Eleni Myrivili is the Global Chief Heat Officer for the UN-Habitat. Thank you so much for joining us on Climate One.

Eleni Myrivili: Thank you for having me.

Ariana Brocious: Northern Uganda is facing increasingly frequent and severe heat events due to climate change, with temperatures reaching above 100 degrees fahrenheit. The periods of high heat particularly affect those who live in poverty and lack access to cooling technologies. However, there is an affordable, low-tech housing solution that has been used for generations. Contributor Hellen Kabahukya [kah-bah-huuk-yah] brings us this story.

Hellen Kabahukya: Imagine a place where the sun blazes overhead, and the air feels heavy and suffocating. Where the sun burns your skin and you sweat as early as 10am. This is the reality faced by the people of the northern part of Uganda. Especially during the peak of summer when temperatures reach triple digits. Local residents Anna Ochaya and Achiro Rose say the high temperatures have many impacts.

Anna Ochaya: The sunshine has been too much, and our things are drying up. Nothing we have planted is progressing because the whole place is drying up. This is making the situation very hard because you can hardly even find food for the children

Achiro Rose: The weather is hot and there are a lot of diseases. We suspect that it is this hot weather that might be causing us some of these illnesses.

Hellen Kabahukya: The scorching heat affects women and children significantly. They are responsible for various household tasks and farming activities that expose them to the sun for hours. The region is still recovering from the 20 year civil war. Those returning home have worsened deforestation to make way for development and farming, contributing to the heat waves. But Hellen Ojara of the Acholi culture says the ancestors knew better, and the knowledge passed down generations has been pivotal in safeguarding people against the unforgiving heat through the construction of mud-wattle houses.

Helen Ojara: The advantage of this house structure is that once built it is very comfortable for living.

Hellen Kabahukya: Now imagine a huge tree, the shade and the breeze it provides. As we step into one of the traditional mud-wattle houses, we are greeted by the same feeling. Anna Ochaya, a resident of Paicho village in Gulu district explains the benefits of traditional mud-wattle houses over more modern iron-roofed homes.

Anna Ochaya: It's always cool and fresh, even if it's hot outside, the grass makes the house cool because when you put grasses together, it doesn't heat up.

Hellen Kabahukya: Most houses have no windows or fans, but the wind gently passes through intentional air gaps in the thatched roof and the wall of the house, bringing a cool breeze inside and providing much-needed relief from the heat. As modern structures begin to shoot up in the town areas, it's not uncommon to see one or two mud wattle houses in the same compound. Even though modern structures built of cement and burnt bricks with corrugated iron roofs are seen as a form of wealth, people still rely on grass thatched houses as spaces to cool off and store produce.

Anna Ochaya: In our knowledge as occupants of a grass thatched house we feel the temperature in our house is better especially during this current situation of constant sunshine. Unlike a permanent house which would be too hot to even sleep, a grass thatched house is cooler and a fresh breeze at night allows the house to remain constantly cool.

Hellen Kabahukya: This low-tech solution is affordable even to the poorest of communities. The materials used are readily available in nature and for those in the peri-urban areas, the grass comes as cheap as 1$ per bundle. The unique construction techniques and choice of materials used in these houses have been passed down through generations. Asaba Morris explains the process:

Asaba Morris: You first dig some soil, you mix it with water into mud. The mud should be thick and not too wet. Then you lay bricks. We use mud for stomping the floor and laying foundation to prevent running water from entering the house and to avoid the floor from being too hard.

Hellen Kabahukya: There is specific grass and techniques used in the roofing. The pampas grass is laid down while the marram or elephant grass is laid on top. This type of grass can last for over 10 years if maintained well. When the construction is done, cow dung is mixed with ash or soil to make a paste to carpet the walls and floors of the house. Achiro Rose says this provides insulation to the house and keeps dust from rising up in the house which protects them from dust related diseases.

Achiro Rose: It’s as if it has been cemented. It remains neat and nice.

Hellen Kabahukya: These houses, with their ingenious design and natural materials, offer a sanctuary from the relentless heat, reminding us of the resilience and wisdom of the local communities in the face of changing climates. For Climate One, I’m Hellen Kabahukya in northern Uganda.

Ariana Brocious: This is Climate One. Coming up, why it’s important to center women when building heat resilience:

Eugenia Kargbo: We are in the market, we are in the schools, we are in the playground. When disaster strikes, women as caregivers suffer the most.

Ariana Brocious: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Ariana Brocious: This is Climate One. I’m Ariana Brocious. Just before the break we heard about the natural cooling effects of traditional mud-wattle houses in Uganda. Now we’ll travel to western Africa to hear my conversation with Eugenia Kargbo, Chief Heat Officer for Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Eugenia Kargbo: So I was born and raised in Freetown. All my life, I have my family here, I have my kids here. And growing up in Freetown, Freetown used to be very, very green with lots of green spaces, trees and flowers and, and plants just full of life and, and nature. And I remember I used to pluck fruit from the back of my compound cause we have lots of fruit trees around us. But in recent years we've seen that beauty goes away. This is mainly due to migration, urban, rural migration, which is as a result of climate impact, but also the uncontrolled development that we've seen. We've seen the city expand and the population more than double. A lot of the areas in the city where we've seen this expansion happening were mapped by the World Bank as disaster-prone areas. So Freetown is located geographically between steep hills, mountains and the sea. So as the city expands, it expands into the forest areas and into the coastal line, which has led to massive deforestation of the forest areas and the position of the coastal areas.

Ariana Brocious: And we'll talk in a minute about also some of the informal settlements that have resulted, I think from that same migration. But when you think about heat affecting your city, why are women maybe more vulnerable to heat than men?

Eugenia Kargbo: So in Freetown, everyone is exposed to extreme heat, but there are certain population groups and certain neighborhoods that are battling heat than others. So people even in the informal settlements, which are low income earning communities, people who outdoor workers are also badly affected by extreme heat, the elderlies people who are disabled, but more so women. We’re seeing women badly affected by extreme heat. Majority of the people who are now living in these informal communities were once farmers from the rural areas, who are mainly women and we've seen extreme heat and climate change badly affect the agricultural sector. And because of the lack of productivity in crop production, a lot of these women left to find greener pasture and livelihood. And in Freetown, most of where they are now are disaster-prone areas, and the housing condition is also a major challenge as majority of the houses within these informal settlements are built from corrugated iron sheets, which are called, commonly called zinc. Most of the structures do not have any ceiling, so these women also suffer from indoor temperature, directly by the sun’s radiation. A lot of these women also are informal workers and they're outdoor workers and mainly most of what they do is trading, they’re traders. And because of the increase in population and the lack of resources to manage this growth, we've also seen a lot of open air markets emerge, so areas or markets where there are no structures, there are no shade. So these women sell in the street of Freetown every single day exposed to the impact of extreme heat. And we know that prolonged exposure to heat causes several health implications and leads to productivity loss and economic loss.

Ariana Brocious: Are you saying a lot of the informal settlements where people live, they're, they're like zinc walled, but there's no roof structure? And I would imagine that the metal wall also retains heat and probably reflects it or radiates that, so it probably makes those structures even warmer, uh, in some cases. Is that true?

Eugenia Kargbo: Yeah. So in Freetown, 90% of the houses are built from either zinc or cement. And these are heat trapping materials that absorb the heat throughout the day and during the night, these materials and these structures radiate the heat. So a lot of people are also suffering from this. A lot of them, a lot of people in Freetown are talking about how they couldn't sleep because of the level of heat that they're also experiencing during the night. And we know that it is very important for our bodies to rest. And this just shows you the level of complexity and the level of the issues that this has on the human body when you talk about mental health and when you talk about wellbeing. So inasmuch as people are suffering outdoors, they're also suffering indoors.

Ariana Brocious: One of your main goals as Chief Heat Officer is supporting the implementation of long-term heat risk reduction in cooling projects, and one of these is the Freetown Market Shade cover project. Can you explain that project and how it's been helping the community?

Eugenia Kargbo: So the Market Shade Cover Project is an initiative that is supported by the Arsht-Rock Resilience Center in partnership with the city of Freetown. The project was co-designed and co-created with local residents and Freetown community people, but also the market women themselves based on an assessment that we did to understand the level of impact of heat exposure to women in the marketplace. And so the market shade cover project is our simple project that made use of a material that is called a Danpalon material. The Danpalon material is a micro cell polycarbonate panel, they are very lightweight and they are also reflective and semi translucent. So it allows light and air to flow through. The panels are installed on poles that are holding the sheets together, and these sheets have been in installed in three of Freetown’s major open air markets, providing shade and and protection to these women. We've seen a lot of benefits through the single effort and simple solution. When we talked to the women, they talked about how their goods and their products that they were selling are being badly affected by extreme heat because most of what they sell are fruit and vegetables. And when exposed to the sun, they perish. They also talk about how they've been affected by heat stress and how they couldn't stay in the areas where they're selling. They have to leave their market and, and run for shade because of the heat they're been experiencing. And they also talk about how they suffer during the rainy season from the rain. And so these shade covers do not only protect the women from the heat, it also helps to reduce the economic loss and increase productivity, but also helps to protect them during the rains. In addition to the shades, we also installed solar light underneath the cover to make use of the sun heat during the day and produce light for the women. This also has helped to expand the market hours of the women and create a safety net and serve as a safety net for the women.

Ariana Brocious: It's amazing to get so many benefits from that structure. So you have shade, reduced temperatures, increased economic benefit from not losing produce. And then the solar lights so you have more security and longer hours. That's really a lot. Can you share a specific story of an individual woman whose life has changed because of these shade covers?

Eugenia Kargbo: So I spoke to the market chair lady. Her name is Yel Amami and Yel Amami was the one that explained to us some of the issues that they faced in terms of the losses and she told me that she finds herself always very far away from the market area seeking shade cover. She feels as if she wants to bathe like 10 times in the day she talked about her head was always pain in her because of the exposure to the sun. And she also talked about how relief they feel right now and the relief that the shade covers are providing not only to her, but for all the market women. And my own personal testimony was when some of the women came to me and told me, we need this to be extended. We need this to be expanded cause there are lots of other women who didn't benefit from the project because the project is a pilot and we're only able to cover a certain portion of the market. And so they came to me and said, we are forming a committee and we are putting funding together to see how best these covers can be expanded to other areas so that other women can benefit from this.

Ariana Brocious: What do you hope to change as you begin to scale it?

Eugenia Kargbo: So after we implemented the project, we went back to the communities and to the market women to see what we can do to improve the living condition of women and to help reduce the impact of extreme heat. And whilst we are looking at the outdoor space, we are also looking at the indoor space. So for the outdoor market, we are looking at improving the design of the market to cover much more bigger and larger area. So instead of the rectangular design that we have now, we are looking at the toenail shape design where both vendors and shoppers can be covered and protected from the heat. We're also looking at indoor spaces as you also have a lot of structural markets, but because of the type of materials that we use and the way that the market are designed, women also in those spaces suffer from extreme heat. So we are looking at how do we design a climate smart market, one that we can make use of, or transform the waste from the market into biomass which can be used to power the structure of the market. We are looking at redesigning where we replace some of the windows and the doors with larger windows and doors to increase ventilation flow. We're also looking at the possibility to roll out, a green roof where you can have vegetables being grown at the top of the market and even the waste from the market can be used as a compost. And, as I said, biomass can also power the market and have market storage facility to further protect the goods that the women are selling. 60% of the waste that we produce in Freetown are organic waste. And so they produce a lot of methane. By converting the waste into biomass it helps to reduce the level of methane and the green infrastructure will help to reduce temperature and reduce heat stress for the women in the market, and this can also serve as the blueprint for other African cities in different countries.

Ariana Brocious: That's really a powerful vision of a market that's so integrated like that recycling itself. Let's talk a minute about disease. How do heat and mosquito borne illness compound each other?

Eugenia Kargbo: So studies have shown that heat exacerbates several disease burdens. And one of the major health issues we have in Freetown is malaria. A lot of people dying from malaria, especially pregnant women, and studies have shown that when temperatures are extremely high, people get angry and agitated easily, and that's the same for mosquitoes. So they tend to bite more when the temperatures are hot. And they tend to bite more people. So we've seen a lot of issues and increase in vector-borne diseases such as malaria. And this is really affecting the health of women and children.

Ariana Brocious: Uh, I did not know that about it increasing, like the likelihood of them to bite. That's interesting. Disheartening. So as we wrap up here, I'm curious if you think there's anything in particular about being a woman that makes you a good Chief Heat Officer, given that there are some of these disproportionate effects we've been talking about.

Eugenia Kargbo: Yes. So I think that this is very important and critical to have the voice of women, cause we understand the issues. I usually say that we are everywhere. We are in the market, we are in the schools, we are in the playground. When disaster strikes, women as caregivers suffer the most. They have to take care of the kids, they have to take care of their husband, they have to take care of several other members of the family. So it's important that we also have a voice.

Ariana Brocious: Eugenia Kargbo is Chief Heat Officer for Freetown.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about confronting disproportionate impacts of extreme heat on women and girls.

empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. On our new website you can create and share playlists focused on topics including food, energy, EVs, activism. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Ariana Brocious Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Austin Colón is producer and editor. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Wency Shaida is our development manager, Ben Testani is our communications manager. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Ariana Brocious.

4:15 – Extreme heat impacts are tied to race and discrimination
8:00 – How heat disproportionately affects women and girls
11:00 – Testing out “Extreme Heat Income Micro Insurance”
15:20 – Why we need to give heat events a name
25:00 – Athens is a “death trap” during severe heat
29:00 – Reactivating the ancient Roman aqueduct
32:30 – How heat impacts women differently
35:00 – Low-tech climate resilience in mud-wattle homes in Uganda
47:00 – How the Freetown Market Shade cover project is helping women

Play

Two Heroes Challenging the Powerful

BenTestani — Thu, 18 May 2023 23:14:59 +0000

Two Heroes Challenging the Powerful

05/19/2023

Making the necessary changes to address climate disruption will take massive collective action. But sometimes, a single individual can make an extraordinary difference. At age nine, Nalleli Cobo, suffering headaches, heart palpitations, nosebleeds, and body spasms, became an activist, driven to fighting to shut down the local oil in Los Angeles well responsible for her ailments. Separately, Marjan Minnesma brought a historic lawsuit holding the Dutch government accountable for its failure to protect its citizens from climate change. For these activists, addressing climate disruption isn’t just about preventing future harm, it’s about instigating change now.

Guests

Nalleli Cobo

Cofounder, People Not Pozos

Marjan Minnesma

Founder, Urgenda Foundation

Our Neighborhood vs. Big Oil (greenamerica.org)

Nalleli Cobo Goldman Environmental Prize (goldmanprize.org)

Marjan Minnesma Goldman Environmental Prize (goldmanprize.org)

The Dutch Climate Case (thegreeninterview.com)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

Ariana Brocious: And I’m Ariana Brocious.

Greg Dalton: We know that making the necessary changes to address the climate crisis will take massive collective action. But sometimes, individuals can make an extraordinary difference.

Ariana Brocious: In this episode we’ll hear from two people who stood up to very powerful entrenched interests and won.

Marjan Minnesma: It's really remarkable to see within a few years, how many court cases all over the world sparked off and were inspired by our case.

Greg Dalton: That’s Marjan Minnesma, who spearheaded a groundbreaking legal victory holding the Dutch government accountable for its failure to protect its citizens from climate disruption. We’ll hear my conversation with Marjan later in this episode.

Ariana Brocious: But first we’ll hear my conversation with Nalleli Cobo, Cofounder of People Not Pozos, which translates to People Not Oil Wells, and describes itself as a grassroots campaign dedicated to the prioritization of people over corporate profits.

Greg Dalton: Nalleli grew up in Los Angeles, which has the dubious distinction of having the largest urban oil field in the nation.

Ariana Brocious: And she successfully led an effort to shut down the oil well that took a devastating toll on both her and the community. She won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her work when she was just 20 years old – work that began when she was nine.

Nalleli Cobo: I didn't realize what I was up against. I just thought I was fighting grown-ups. I did not understand that I was fighting big oil.

Greg Dalton: Her efforts didn’t just get that one local well shut down; they led to the phase down of oil extraction in all of Los Angeles, the most populated county in the country.

Ariana Brocious: She really is inspiring and has a remarkable story. We started the conversation with Nalleli’s personal journey.

Nalleli Cobo: So, at the age of nine, I started getting really sick out of nowhere and I was always a healthy girl, so that was a cause for concern. It all started with a nosebleed and the first nosebleed we didn't think much, you know, I probably didn't drink enough water that day it was probably too hot outside. But the nosebleed came back three times that week. And every time they came by it was more and more intense. It got to the point where the nosebleeds got so intense, I couldn't sleep in my own bed anymore. I would have to sleep in a chair to prevent choking on my own blood. I developed asthma and that’s something I’m always gonna have to live with now. I had heart palpitations and I had to use a heart monitor for several weeks. I got body spasms that were so intense I couldn't walk. My mom would have to carry me from one place to the other. Unfortunately, the list goes on and on and it wasn't just me. My mom developed asthma at 40 which is really rare, and my grandma developed it at 70 which is unheard of. It was a common conversation starter for a parent to stop each other in the streets and say, my son is in the hospital from an asthma attack. How's your daughter’s asthma? Or my son is in the ER. Can you help me pick up my other kids from school? And that's not normal.

Ariana Brocious: It shouldn't be normal. Sounds like though that you were obviously not alone in experiencing this. Though maybe your case, your symptoms were more severe than some other people. How did you connect the health symptoms that you just described with the oil well in your neighborhood?

Nalleli Cobo: So, when drilling for oil there are a lot of toxic emissions that are released into the air and it typically smells like rotten eggs, just really gross. Something the oil well in my community did was add even more chemicals to mask the smell. So then, my community would smell of guava, chocolate, cherry, citrus. And the smell was constant. It was a smell that just as soon as you took a breath and inhaled you were sick to your stomach. And the smell became more and more common. And out of nowhere this smell started occurring. We originally thought that something was wrong within the building that we were living in, you know, a leak, plumbing issues or some sort. And we started contacting the executive director of the organization that owns the affordable housing building. And we started calling them and they said, no, I assure you the building is okay, it's most likely the oil well across the street. And we said, the what? And it was up to us to become the experts and start learning what was going on in our community. So, we started calling the South Coast Air Quality Management District and filing complaints. And then it was we’re very fortunate to have Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles, PSR-LA, sent a toxicologist to come speak to my community. And that’s when we officially connected the dots and said, oh, this chemical use during oil extraction causes X, Y, and Z symptoms and that's what we're experiencing.

Ariana Brocious: So, you didn't know there was an oil well that close to your house?

Nalleli Cobo: I didn't.

Ariana Brocious: Did your parents know, did your family know?

Nalleli Cobo: The well wasn't operating because oil prices were low before. But then with the spike in 2010, 2009 they started resuming operations. But they didn’t alert the surrounding community that they restarted operations.

Ariana Brocious: Okay. So, it had been dormant maybe when you were even younger and then they restarted the activity. Wow. Okay. So, you’ve mentioned, you know, that you began to kind of or your mom began to draw attention to this try to get some awareness. And frankly oil companies can be kind of intimidating and I'm kind of curious where you and your mom got the momentum and the courage to challenge them.

Nalleli Cobo: It's funny because the night I found out that we were living next to an oil well. My mom had said, oh, the smell that's been going on is from an oil well. And I was like, oh, that make sense. And I was like, wait, what’s an oil well? Actually, that does not make sense. And I had to learn what an oil well was at the age of nine. And the night we found out the next morning, oh my God, I cry just thinking about it. The next morning my mom and I crossed the street and we started reading every single sign that was on that oil well wall. And the sign that has stuck with me the most is the sign that says dangerous chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects and reproductive harm. And I'm aware that’s Prop 65 and it’s everywhere. But this isn't on the wrapper of a candy bag that I just got. This isn’t on a label for the new laptop, you know, this is on an oil well wall 30-feet from people's homes. This oil well operates with nine surrounding schools in the area. And when I started my work, I never thought I think it was also because I was so young, I didn't realize what I was up against. I just thought I was fighting grown-ups. And for me it was I can challenge a few grown-ups, but I did not understand that I was fighting big oil, multibillion-dollar corporation. And I think it helped a lot not to know that at the age of nine.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah. Ignorance is bliss in a sense. The well in your neighborhood was actually on land owned and leased to the oil company by the archdiocese. And you attended Catholic school in your younger years. So, what was it like for you to speak out against that given maybe whatever cultural pressure or just sort of school environment you are in as a Catholic school student?

Nalleli Cobo: It was very interesting. I remember during recess playing kickball or anything. The smell would travel to my school and teachers would start saying, oh, I have a headache or what that’s smell. And that was my cue to give them the full rundown. I was like I got you guys, don't you worry, I was like smell is coming from an oil well two blocks from school. They produce 60 to 80 barrels of crude oil a day, and I'd go on my spiel. It got to the point where the principal pulled me aside, and was like you cannot speak against the archdiocese on land that is owned by the archdiocese. She was like you go to a Catholic school. She’s like you are essentially speaking against the school’s boss. And I was like, oh well, I don't know what to tell you I’m still gonna talk about this. I was in the principal’s office pretty often growing up because it was how can I not talk about this just because I went to a Catholic school. And it's because of the beliefs and morals that my Catholic school has instilled in me that I feel like it is my job to call them out on being hypocrites. And something I always point out is just because it's on land leased by the archdiocese it does not make them holy emissions. And it is unfortunately another way that the church is abusing children.

Ariana Brocious: That’s pretty powerful. So, one of your main tools as an activist is telling your story your personal story. What other tactics have you tried in the last decade and more and what works and what doesn't?

Nalleli Cobo: I tried a lot. I’ve done a lot of door-to-door knocking, phonebanking, textbanking. City Hall hearings, town hall meetings. Organizing a rally, organizing strikes, organizing rallies and all sorts. And I think there is a special energy when it comes to taking the streets. It's that, oh my God I smile just thinking about it because it's, oh my God and I’m crying now, wow! It’s powerful beyond words. It's that feeling when you're at a strike and you are bumping shoulders with a stranger and you’re like, oh, I like your sign and they’re like, I like your sign and then you switch signs for a bit. And you find community amongst people you would never talk to in your day-to-day life crossing the street. We’re so focused on what we have to do that we forgot to look up from our phones and socialize with each other as humans. And when you take the streets you really show that community you show the people power. You show the love that we have as humans for our planet for our communities for change. And it's that very unique type of energy where it's palpable and it reignites your fire in your belly for activism for a change. And I think that's extremely important because activism can be very taxing. It can affect your mental health. It is so many things and it's important to recharge. It's important to remember why you're fighting. It's important to take a break and say you know what I have done a lot for the past three weeks. I need a day to myself. We need to be breathing to put on somebody else’s oxygen mask on the plane. You know, that’s something I’ve never understood when I was growing up. I was like how do you think I’m gonna put mine on before I put on my mom’s. And it’s important to set up boundaries and to take breaks -- something I think of is when Jane Fonda says, this isn’t a sprint this isn’t a relay race, it’s a marathon and you need to pace yourself at times.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about two women who challenged power and won. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods.

Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. We have a new website where you can create playlists and share them with friends.

Coming up, how a community dealing with the devastating effects of oil emissions made its voice heard.

Nalleli Cobo: It's really powerful to know that a community that was viewed as invisible, as disposable, created historical change.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

Ariana Brocious: And I’m Ariana Brocious.

Greg Dalton: Activism is necessary to bring attention to many issues, but we often forget about the toll it takes on the activists themselves.

Ariana Brocious: It takes time and resources to participate, and doing that can prevent people from being able to lead “normal” lives. Let’s get back to my conversation with Nalleli Cobo. She shares her experience being a kid and an activist.

Nalleli Cobo: I feel like a big one for me was as growing up it was really hard to be able to find the balance between being an activist and being a normal kid. It was difficult to be in high school and have all my friends go to this really cool event, this really cool party, this really cool dance and I couldn't go. And while I was fully aware of the decisions I was making, I would weigh the options as if okay what will serve my community better going to this conference or going to this dance. And I would always choose the conference. But it is difficult when I remember this really cute guy asked me to his prom and I said yes. And a week later I got an opportunity to go to a conference and I said, I'm so sorry I will help you find another date. And it's those decisions that I know that will serve me in the long run, but it's hard in the moment as well.

Ariana Brocious: You know in asking that question I expected you to tell me about a particular media event or, you know, oil company challenge to your activism or something. And to hear you give such a personal example of just being like a high school student who wants to balance wants to have a life like you’re saying a normal life and go to prom and having to sort of sacrifice some of those experiences in favor of your activism is really powerful. So, you fought for years to get media attention. Then the LA Times article caught the attention of Senator Barbara Boxer and she then got EPA inspectors to conduct an investigation. So, tell us about that experience and what you are able to accomplish.

Nalleli Cobo: It was very surreal. It was powerful to know that a senator was coming to my community and was gonna fight with us against big oil. And I remember the day that the EPA investigators and Senator Barbara Boxer came to my community, the EPA officials went inside of the oil wells to conduct an investigation. Within five minutes of being inside of the well they had to evacuate because they got sick.

Ariana Brocious: Wow. Was it leaking or was it just a highly emitting well, do you know?

Nalleli Cobo: It's been both. There have been times where the oil well would have leaks and in one time the leak was a week long. And no one in my community was evacuated. We were living there breathing in these crazy emissions. But at that time, it was just they weren't up to regulation and complying with certain orders within the oil well. And the article that captured the attention of Senator Barbara Boxer before that it was us advocating for four years before we captured attention. So, that felt like we were screaming to a wall screaming in silence for four years before someone heard us.

Ariana Brocious: And what happened when she got involved. What did that do to change it?

Nalleli Cobo: So, she had a press conference in front of my apartment building and she pleaded Allenco the oil well to cease operations. And I’m very proud to say shortly thereafter, the oil well temporarily closed, which was, that was in November 2013. And the day that we got the call that they closed we were having a family dinner because my sister was getting married the next day. And we are having a great time being with family and my mom got a call and she excused herself and she started crying. Being the nosy kid I am, I started poking her and I was like, what’s wrong? Who was calling like why are you crying? And she hung up the phone and she told me they’re closing. And I had so much energy and joy and I didn't know what to do. I asked for permission to scream. And I was like mom, can I scream? And she’s like, yeah. And I started screaming and I ran to the window and I opened it. Which is something we weren't able to do in our very own homes for years in fear of letting in more emissions. I closed it after like 20 or 30 seconds because it was November and it's under 70° it's too cold. But the fact that now I could open that window.

Ariana Brocious: Wow. Well, that's one success and then in 2020, the LA City Council voted to phase out drilling in the city over a 20-year period. So, I would imagine that this is another success in your mind. But give us your perspective on that timeframe that 20-year window.

Nalleli Cobo: So, much can happen in 20 years. In my personal experience when I was first started getting sick, I was nine. And at the age of 19 the 10-year span I was diagnosed with cancer stage II reproductive cancer, as a matter of fact. This is a historical change. It's amazing and phenomenal. And I know that because of that no future 19-year-old will have to choose between her reproductive system or her life the way I did. Because of that, no future 9-year-old will become an activist out of survival the way I did. But 20 years is a long time and we've seen what 10 years can do. So, why would we want to allow this to continue for another 10 years, 20 years. We need to start shutting them down today. As a matter of fact, we just started shutting them down yesterday. Lives are on the line. In the state of California there are over 4 million Californians living a mile or less to an active or idle oil and gas well. That's 4 million. And I know that's a ridiculously large number unfortunately, but think of one person you know. Think of your mom, think of your grandma, your niece, your nephew because these are human lives. Oftentimes we get distracted by the big number or the dots on the map. And we forget that every dot represents a human. And for me I felt like at the age of nine someone could look at me in the eyes and say you don't deserve to breathe clean air. But what they didn't know was that I was a nine-year-old who was probably still is obsessed with Justin Bieber, that I love dance. I love music that I love eating that I love hanging out with family. That makes me who I am. And I'm not the speck on the dot that deserves to be poisoned in her own home.

Ariana Brocious: Well, the well that was in your community was the first in the nation to be permanently shut down. You told us a little about the reaction you guys had when you first heard that news. How has your community changed since then?

Nalleli Cobo: Whenever I hear that we are the first one to shut down just sparks tears all the time. It's really powerful to know that a community that was viewed as invisible as disposable created historical change. You know we said enough is enough. We are not invisible. We're humans and we deserve to live a sustainable life. We deserve to live without being in fear of what we’re breathing in. We definitely have a sense of power. We know what we are capable of and what is possible. And that's what also inspired STAND L.A. to be born when we realized that we were not the only community being affected by oil extraction. Well, like you mention Los Angeles is the largest urban oilfield in the nation. So, we saw what was made possible in our community that inspired us to start fighting for surrounding communities like ours.

Ariana Brocious: So how do you see the relationship between individual action and societal change?

Nalleli Cobo: We all have a big part to play when it comes to reversing the climate crisis and our individual actions play a huge role. I think of it as when people say my vote doesn't count and then 30 people start screaming your vote counts what do you mean? It’s exactly that it's your everyday actions. You are choosing to use a reusable water bottle makes a difference. You're choosing to eat a plant-based meal makes a difference. Our individual day-to-day actions carry a huge impact on our planet. And by implementing things into our day-to-day lives by changing things by investing in other products., it makes a huge difference on our planet. And individual activism and societal activism go hand-in-hand, but they also feel very different as well. And I find that interesting, because sometimes when we start posting that we’re doing changes sometimes society doesn't react well to it. And it's difficult and sometimes it's, what’s the word, I can think of it in Spanish.

Ariana Brocious: You can say it in Spanish.

Nalleli Cobo: Desanimado. Like --

Ariana Brocious: Well, uninspiring or --

Nalleli Cobo: Yeah. You feel uninspired to continue with that change because nobody else picked up on it. You can feel uninspired when you're the only one doing it and you've been the only one doing it for so long. And that's why sometimes activism can be so taxing because sometimes it is isolating as well when you're the only one who feels like you care about that issue. And sometimes you just have to push through that because you know why you're fighting. You know why you started and you know why you will continue to fight. But it is difficult sometimes.

Ariana Brocious: You earlier talked about balancing kind of your own childhood in life with your activism. And you had mentioned elsewhere that you occasionally do clothing swaps with friends and this is like a really fun thing. I've done these myself they are really fun. And we did an episode recently on Climate One about how happiness can be part of climate action. So, how does that idea resonate with you that these actions personally that you can take don't necessarily have to be what some might consider sacrifices, right. They can actually be fun things that bring us joy.

Nalleli Cobo: Yeah. Activism can be very fun and it should be fun. It’s not always this negative thing that's taxing and well, it can be taxing but it's not only taxing and it's not only isolating. It brings so much joy, it brings community, it brings change. And it should be fun, you know, finding ways to implement activism or to implement sustainability into your day-to-day life doesn't always have to be boring. It doesn't have to be eating a plate of green beans with something. You know like it's fun it can be very healthy and it can be -- I don’t know why I thought of green beans but I don’t like green beans, that’s why. Doing clothing swaps buying a matching reusable water bottle with your besties. Having a totebag painting night, you know, there’s options and it’s fun. And I think it is very important to find ways to make your activism fun and to implement something that makes it joyous for you.

Ariana Brocious: You have a real success in LA in terms of your activism and others contributing to this ban and phasing out of oil drilling. But oil companies around the world and in the US continue to drill. And I'm curious what is next for you whether you plan to continue this activism, you know, in your 20s and 30s and beyond. Or if you need a break if you're thinking of doing a different, a change of career maybe change of -- a career that you started when you were nine.

Nalleli Cobo: As long as I am able, I will use my voice to fight for justice. It's hard to walk away from something when you’ve lived it. It’s something that because I know how horrible it is to not be able to open the windows in your home because I know how intense the nosebleeds get. Because I have those lived experiences and honestly trauma in a way, I can't stop fighting. And sometimes that's what we need. It's always to have that persistence to continue fighting. But also, to know when to set up a boundary and say I need a break. And I really learned that when I was diagnosed with cancer because it was, I cannot fathom the idea that I cannot work. I cannot wrap my head around the fact that I wasn't going be able to go to that strike or to show up to the meeting. And it’s funny this cancer taught me a lot. And it taught me to know when to set up those boundaries and that it doesn't make me less of an activist because I said no. But that makes me stronger that makes me, I don’t know it’s so weird thing. But it is important to have the balance.

Ariana Brocious: Nalleli Cobo is winner of the 2022 Goldman Environmental Prize. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us on Climate One.

Nalleli Cobo: Thank you so much for having me.

Greg Dalton: Now let’s hear my conversation with Marjan Minnesma, Founder of the Netherlands-based Urgenda Foundation. Marjan also won the Goldman Environmental Prize for her groundbreaking legal victory holding the Dutch government accountable for its failure to protect its citizens from climate disruption.

Greg Dalton: The Netherlands is often considered an environmentally friendly country, with windmills dotting farmland, and the popularity of bicycles. But that doesn’t paint the whole picture.

Marjan Minnesma: We have the image of ourselves that we are quite green and we recycle a lot of paper and glass and so on. And we have a bike or we have two or three bikes. But we have the largest gas hub of Europe. We have two very big harbors. Rotterdam Harbor is an enormous big oil-oriented harbor and therefore we have a lot of chemical industry over there. And Amsterdam has the largest coal harbor of this part of Europe. Therefore we have used a lot of fossil fuels and we have built a lot of economics on it. We have become rich by using it. But we have also emitted a lot of CO2 and other fossil fuel gasses. So, we did not really do well on climate.

Greg Dalton: And a third of the Netherlands is below sea level. How do you compare the climate impact on the Netherlands with island nations that we hear so much about?

Marjan Minnesma: Yeah, one third of the Netherlands is below sea level. Half of it will have a serious problem if we would not have all the dikes and so on. I think we are relatively good and we are known for that in the world by building dikes and complete new water systems and therefore we are relatively safe. Much safer than a lot of small island states. But also, the Netherlands will have a serious problem if we go on with emitting CO2 and we will have a temperature rise of 2 to 3° which we’re still heading for. Then we will also have a serious problem in time, not the next 20 or 30 years, but maybe at the end of century surely halfway next century. And you can't keep building dikes for 5, 6, 7 meters at a certain point of time. So, we better make sure that we stop emitting greenhouse gasses.

Greg Dalton: You studied law and attended the first conference of parties or COP under the UN framework convention on climate change. When you were there were you scared, were you angry and how did your feelings change over the years and later as you became apparent from that very first COP?

Marjan Minnesma: Yeah, I studied in the 90s and I graduated on the climate change convention. It was from 1992 and I think the first official COP 1 was in Berlin, I think around 1995. And at that time, I was somewhere in my 20s having a lot of fun and I thought, we have a problem and we are going to solve it. It was not really something that you thought about as emotional or you are not very angry or very scared. It was more a problem that we could solve. And I was there and I spoke to a lot of people. I thought it was very interesting. We had great parties afterward. So, it was completely different from what evolves over the years. And I've worked for 10 years in universities with the best climate change professionals in the world. And you could see that the best people were the most worried ones and that already made me worry. And then at the beginning of the century I had three children. And then you suddenly realize they might live until 2100. And then it starts to become much more serious and emotional, and so on. So, it has changed me over time from a problem that I thought we’re going to solve and something that you only thought about with your brain and not with your heart or with your emotions and afterwards it changed a lot. And if you know too much, which I do, then you get much, much more worried. And I think we really have to do a lot this century to make it to keep it a livable planet.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, that’s also my journey from the head to the heart. From intellectual to something that's in the heart and in the gut. In 2013 your organization, Urgenda, filed a lawsuit against the government of the Netherlands demanding a 40% reduction in greenhouse gasses by 2020. Even many of your friends said the odds of winning were slim at best. So, you developed a tactic called crowd pleading. What did that entail?

Marjan Minnesma: Yeah, of course people at that time knew the concept of crowdfunding, that you would ask people around you please help me I want to start a new activity or a new company and you don't get the money from the bank so you try to get it from people around you. And in this case, I thought we want to start a court case that nobody believes in. Let's see if there are any people in the world that know of any court case that could be helpful and let's see if we can go to court with as many people as possible so, co-plaintiffs. So, we invited people help us and join us and we call that crowd pleading.And in the end, almost a thousand people joined us as co-plaintiffs and they were with us all the almost 8 years that we were in this different courts that we had to go to. And they went every step along the way and that was very special because every time we had to show up in court for our story there were hundreds of people behind me sitting there looking at the judges. And I think that makes it a different case than if you are in a court with the case with only a few lawyers from the one and from the other and nobody else.

Greg Dalton: Quite powerful. Just the optics and power dynamics there what sounds like in America what we called a class-action lawsuit perhaps. Then in 2019 the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the government had a legal obligation to protect its citizens from climate change, and it required the country cut emissions by 25% below 1990 levels by the end of 2020,not quite what you ask for, still pretty ambitious. How much had already been done and how easy was this at that moment?

Marjan Minnesma: Well, our first ask was 40% but the lowest level that we asked was 25%. And the judge said, well, maybe 40 is necessary, but that's up to politics. But the lowest level is something that I got because it's so important and you have a duty of care as a government to protect your citizens so you have to do to 25%. And when we won there was still 16 1/2 megaton to be done. And to give you a comparison if we make hundred thousand houses energy neutral this is only 0.2 megaton. So, if you have to do 16 1/2 it's quite a lot. On the other hand, if you would close down Tata Steel, it would be 12 and half megaton. So, then you would be very far already. But we knew that the government would not be prepared to close down such a large factory. And we thought will the Supreme Court let us win if they have the idea that it's impossible what they demand from the government. So, we made a plan which we call the 54 solutions plan together with 800 different organizations which all adopted one or more of those solutions and we offered it to the government. We said, look, this is a plan, you can still do more than 17 megatons if you want to within one year. If you carry out this plan and we are prepared with all the 800 organizations to help you. So, we are not in this courtroom for a fight. We want to help, because we know that it's necessary to do this and that it's very difficult to do it within one year, but it is still possible.

Greg Dalton: You mentioned duty of care is the kind of the legal basis for this case. What is a duty of care and where does it come from?

Marjan Minnesma: Well, in the Dutch law, you have something that says well as a government you have to take care of your citizens that is a duty of care. The Dutch government itself has declared that climate change is a major problem already dissented. So, they have said it it’s very dangerous that was important. And all the eight years that we were in court they have never said that that was not correct. So, they have admitted climate change is a major problem with enormous risks this century. And then on top of that they had already signed numerous documents in which they said we have to decrease the emissions between 25 and 40%. So, there was also a so-called standard of care. So, there was this duty and there was the standard that they had admitted and that's 200 countries in the world had admitted. So, then as a judge if you know there is a duty of care and there's also standards then you can say well if it's so dangerous that it will cost lives and so on and so on. Then I can ask as a judge from the government to do what’s necessary to protect the citizens. If it would not have been so dangerous it would not be possible. And if there would not have been this commitment amongst 200 countries and the standard of care it would also have been very, very difficult. But because all this was in place this was something that we could do, but afterwards it sounds very simple. But to correctly draft this in a court case is very difficult.

Greg Dalton: This was a really big deal. So, there's a responsibility and then there’s this quantification of that responsibility into numbers that a court can say we got to do this much. Michael Gerrard, Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, called the ruling “The strongest decision ever issued by any court in the world on climate change. And the only one that has actually ordered reductions in greenhouse gas emissions based on constitutional grounds." So, what ripple effects are you seeing?

Marjan Minnesma: Well, at the time that we won for the first time at the first court was in 2015. And then it was indeed the very first time that a court in the world would say there is an obligation to protect your citizens. And somehow that never had been done before but the court rules and they wrote a verdict in two languages, both in Dutch and in English, which is not normal in the Netherlands. And because it was in English it was around the world within half an hour after it had been issued. And so, many people got inspired by it, but also had suddenly the idea, yes, this is what we still can do because a lot of people had already given up or were depressed who had been working on climate for 30 years. And now suddenly they thought this is a new tool and it's really remarkable to see within a few years, how many court cases all over the world sparked off and were inspired by our case and now you also have cases that have a goal in 2030. Our goal was in 2020, of course, because we started already in 2012, even before Paris. So, young people in France and Germany won their court cases for 2030 based on what we had done. So, it was in some extent copy and paste but then for 2030. So, we are really very happy and we had never expected anything like this, absolutely not focused on the rest of the world. We were very focused on let's try to win this case and then suddenly it opens up and it's all over the place. It's really special.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about two heroes who stood up to power and won. Coming up, Marjan didn’t just change the legal landscape for climate cases, she also helped accelerate the solar market in the Netherlands.

Marjan Minnesma: I heard that there were more than 30,000 people that had wanted solar panels but were too late. And I thought what if I join all these people and I jointly buy them, in this case, in China, can I get an enormous discount?

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

Let’s get back to my conversation with Marjan Minnesma, Founder of the Urgenda Foundation. The London School of Economics estimates that as of last year there were 73 different framework cases challenging the climate responses of governments around the world. Many other lawsuits target fossil fuel companies for knowingly selling a product that provides needed energy and harms people and the planet. I asked Marjan why she chose to sue governments not corporations.

Marjan Minnesma: Well, we had been thinking about that in 2012 and we thought who is the one really responsible for protecting its citizens. Who is the one who was party at the climate change convention? And that's not companies, that's states. So, we thought that the government of countries like the Netherlands is the real party that has set climate change as the problem and we want to change that. They have signed all those different documents, agreements, etc. etc. framework convention, blah, blah, blah. So, if a government wants a company to change or says a company is not doing the right thing a country can make a law to say you're not allowed to sell oil and gas anymore. So, we think that the government is the first actor that should change. And then on top of that, I'm of course pleasantly surprised that there were also court cases against Shell and others that have been won. So, the big companies are also forced to make a change. But in 2012 when nobody believed a court case like this could be win anyways. We thought that the best actor to target was the government because that's the one who has signed the climate change convention and the Paris agreement and so on and so on. And that's also the actor that should protect its citizens.

Greg Dalton: One of Urgenda’s projects is the climate litigation network. What are you doing to support citizen suits against governments and other countries?

Marjan Minnesma: Yeah, we have set up this climate litigation network after we won because we got so many questions from small groups, particularly and citizens all around the world that said, we also want to start a climate case but how do we do this. And it's special to see that it's not the big NGOs that started to follow us first. It was the smaller group. So, for example, in Ireland a small group that wanted to do this, they did not even have a website. So, we help them with the website and we helped them to explain how you set up a campaign and how you could do this court case. And we went back and forth and help them with a lot of different parts of setting up such a campaign and a court case. And one of my colleagues went to all the court cases in Ireland and they also won up to the Supreme Court. And we are now helping a court case of people who live on an island close to Australia, Australian court case. And we help a very small NGO in Italy that also became big through the court case, not big in the sense with a lot of people, but they are now a well-known name and before they started the court case they were hardly known. So, you see that the small ones dare to try something that seems to be impossible, and that could be the end of their NGO because often in other countries if you lose, you have to pay the cost of the lawyers and then you are bankrupt. So, it's you have to have courage to do that and a lot of big NGOs think it's more problematic because if they would have to pay millions then they would maybe have a serious problem of survival.

Greg Dalton: Sure. And one example of sort of those small actors having a big impact there’s law students in Vanuatu have convinced the United Nations to seek an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice based in The Hague. That plea was supported by 120 industrialized countries including Britain, France and Germany. I was kind of surprised to see that. What do you think of that effort to clarify the legal obligations of rich countries for their high emissions?

Marjan Minnesma: I think that's very much necessary because that has been a quarrel between say poor and rich countries since the very beginning of the climate change convention because the smaller and the poorer country said we have hardly caused any of the problem and we now face as first ones to the problems. Because if you live on an island state if it's 2° warmer you have to leave you can't stay there. So, 1.5 was really the maximum for them. They have very much campaigned in Paris for that in 2015 too. But they see that a lot of richer countries who are the largest emitters talk a lot and they have nice words but they don't act and they also promised very often to poor countries we will give you money but they often didn't do what they promised. So, I think the fact that the rich countries can protect themselves the best but they have caused most of the problem also gives in a moral obligation to help the poor countries who will face the problems as the first and who also cannot do much about the problem. And after more than 30 years of declarations and talks it’s clear that it won't happen that way. So, may be then through a judge like we did you can force the richer countries to do what actually they should have done already of course, it's actually it's a poor thing that it’s needed to do such a court case that we don't simply use our brains and help those countries and do what we I think should morally do.

Greg Dalton: Sure. In fact, just recently as we’re recording this President Biden pledged $1 billion toward the Green Climate Fund, which the US hasn't given any money to for the last seven years and that’s still short of the 3 billion I think that President Obama pledged about a decade ago. So, the U.S. is not closing the gap, but it's not --

Marjan Minnesma: No, and that's the same for a lot of other rich countries. So, we promise a lot and I can imagine that those poor countries are fed up like the young people who are also fed up with the older people who promise, promise, promise but don't deliver.

Greg Dalton: Yeah. Before your organization took the lead on suing the Dutch government you focused more on an entrepreneurial approach. You have both business and law degrees. Tell us the story of the 50,000 solar panels from China and working around banks who wouldn't give you a loan.

Marjan Minnesma: Yeah, that was around 2010. I was looking around here in the Netherlands and I saw hardly any solar panels. And we did have a subsidy scheme but that was not very well developed. So, that was a scheme that sets first come first serve and clever entrepreneurs put hundred students in a room and when the subsidy scheme would open up within five minutes it would be all sold out. And if you, as a citizen the next morning thought I want 10 solar panels it was already gone. And I heard that there were more than 30,000 people that had wanted solar panels but were too late. And I thought what if I join all these people and I jointly buy them in this case in China, can we get an enormous discount? So, I asked people that I knew in China. Can you do the talk for me in Chinese because I don't speak the language and how many do I need to buy hundred thousands, a million, I had no clue. So, they came back after a few months and they said, we have it all settled. If you buy 50,000 solar panels and inverters, we can bring the price down with one third compared to the prices now on the market. And then I spoke with newspapers in the Netherlands because I was in the kind of contest on the most sustainable person of the Netherlands. And they said, what are you going to do? And I said, well I'm busy with the solar panels and they put it on the front page. And then suddenly we got thousands of phone calls of all kinds of people that said, I want solar panels, I want solar panels. So, within a month we had collected enough people to buy 50,000 solar panels, which at that time was 10 megawatts with everything that needs to put it on the roof and to install it. But normally if you buy something in China you have to pay immediately then it goes on a boat for five weeks and then six weeks later you give it to your client and then they pay you. So, you need for six weeks, a bank that gives you a loan. And no bank in the Netherlands wanted to give me a loan even though I had sold it already and those people have paid upfront 20%. So, I had a completely new bank account with €5 million and they didn't want to give me the loan. So, I went to China and asked them really, I have already sold it but I can't get the loan and then the people in China decided to help me. And they said okay, you don't have to pay it immediately you pay it when the solar panels are in Europe and we give you a little bit of discount additionally, and then you do your thing. Because we think this is a new business model because we see everywhere the subsidy schemes go down and maybe this joint buying is a new way of doing it and we want to support you. So, then we sent an email to all those thousands of people and said, yeah, we made it and you can get a discount if you pay me now instead of over five weeks. And then all people paid. So, I had 20 million in new bank account and a good pay everybody in China I didn't need any bank for that. No loan no subsidy. And that in the Netherlands really created enormous opening up of the market and all kinds of other people then said, oh, joint buying, that's a nice idea. And they started all kinds of joint buying initiatives. So, since then you can see in the Netherlands there’s an exponential curve on solar panels. But at that time in 2010 that was really new and it was also a big news in the Netherlands.

Greg Dalton: Very clever. Cut out the bank, yeah, you don’t get that letter of credit that usually bridges that financing from manufacture to delivery. So, you’re thinking about business and law. You have degrees in both. When you opt for pulling the levers of the legal system versus working more business-oriented in market approaches.

Marjan Minnesma: Well, when we started with Urgenda around 2007 I started with a lot of these type of projects. I also imported the first electric vehicles that were made in series and sold them to big cities. And we started off energy cooperation. So, say community-oriented energy companies. But after five years I looked around and I thought, are we moving quickly enough? And my conclusion was no. If the government is not going to help with this acceleration, we are not going to make it. So, the first five years of Urgenda I tried to avoid government because I don't really like the way they work and they’re not very quick, and so on. So, I really thought I can do it without. But after five years I thought no, they need to put certain laws in place, they need to give certain subsidies, they have to forbid certain things and so on and so on. So, that was how the court case came into my mind. I read a book from someone on our think tank Revolution Justified that analyzed governments won't do it. The problem is enormous. So, the only thing left which is still democratic is asking the judges to force the government to do what they themselves have declared is necessary. And that was what I then thought, well, let's try and see if we can get the government on board in this acceleration that we need so much.

Greg Dalton: Well, You’ve had quite an impact affecting legal cases around the world changing the solar market in the Netherlands. You've been recognized for your work with The Goldman Environmental Prize. What's your next goal? What's your next ambition?

Marjan Minnesma: Well, the past few years we have been working also more on biodiversity because what we saw here in the Netherlands was that the energy transition was worked on with so much kind of fierceness that it was sometimes against biodiversity. People wanted to put wind turbines and solar panels everywhere. And we made a book how the Netherlands could get hundred percent sustainable energy within 10 years. In a way that it was still acceptable for the people. And then we also thought we need to do more on the green side. So, the past few years we had a project that was called more trees now. There's a lot of places where you have trees underneath big tree that can't grow bigger or you have trees in the park that will be mowed by the owner or along the rail tracks where you don't want trees and so on. And we collected with by now 15,000 volunteers. All those trees that were in places where they were not allowed and by now is 1.5 million in a few years’ time. And we give them to people who want trees and that's 500,000 trees for farmers that wanted them along their lands and 500,000 trees for all kinds of projects wanting to start a new hood or whatever. And 500,000 for citizens that just wanted a few trees in their garden. And most of the trees have survived and we now after the official governmental body for forest. We are now the number two in the country of planting trees. So, we have grown enormously in three years and that generates a lot of active citizens that really want to do something and it gives people hope that they still have a possibility to do something. And we did the same for farmers. In the Netherlands a lot of farmers use one type of grass which is not very good for biodiversity. And they also use it they use fertilizer on it and a lot of things that are not very good. And you rather have so called herb-rich grass but that's much more expensive. So, we organized a fund-raising and we said to citizens, please give us money that we can buy this grass seed for farmers, for a price that is lower than this grass that we don't want. And then we got funds from all over the place and we have now realized 4000 hectares of herb-rich grass for those farmers. And they see that it might be a bit more expensive to buy it. But because you don't need fertilizer on it and you don't put pesticides on it the costs are not higher. So, in the end they have now found out that this is better for the cows, better for the milk and actually not worse for themselves. So, you see that they go on with it even after we have stopped giving them this enormous discount of 50%. So, we tried to find solutions along the way both for biodiversity and for climate. And I think both things need to be done.

Greg Dalton: Well, Marjan Minnesma, thank you so much for sharing your insights and all your accomplishments. Thank you so much.

Marjan Minnesma: Thank you.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about successfully challenging government and corporate power with activists Nalleli Cobo and Marjan Minnesma.

Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Ariana Brocious is co-host, editor and producer. Austin Colón is producer and editor. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Wency Shaida [Shey-duh] (rhymes with play) is our development manager, Ben Testani is our communications manager. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

1:46 Nalleli Cobo on her personal story

6:44 Nalleli Cobo on the beginning of her activism

12:32 Nalleli Cobo on balancing her personal life and activism

13:57 Nalleli Cobo on getting Senator Senator Barbra Boxer’s attention

27:18 Marjan Minnesma on the reality of Dutch emissions

31:21 Marjan Minnesma on developing crowd pleading as a legal tactic

36:40 Marjan Minnesma on the ripple effects of the court case

39:11 Marjan Minnesma on the choice to sue governments not corporations

45:12 Marjan Minnesma on influencing the solar market

Play

REWIND: Should We Have Children in a Climate Emergency?

Otto Pilot — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 08:01:00 +0000

REWIND: Should We Have Children in a Climate Emergency?

02/04/2022

Climate disruption features in the headlines nearly every day, moving deeper into our personal lives. In these uncertain times, how do we weigh the decision of whether or not to bring more children into the world?

Author and climate activist Daniel Sherrell wrestles with intergenerational angst in his new book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. In the book, he refers to climate disruption as the “Problem,” rather than by more conventional climate terms.

“For a long time I felt sort of dissatisfied with climate discourse in this country. And when the phrase ‘climate change’ was evoked, it was immediately shunted into this pigeonhole my brain, as I think it is for many lay people paying attention to this problem, that's like, ‘it's the purview of scientists, it's a very bad current event that is sort of happening up there in the ether, in the headlines,’” Sherrell says. “And by choosing never to name it in the book I wanted desperately to break it out of its little narrow environmentalist pigeonhole as if it were just like one more issue on the long bucket list of issues...but was, in fact, a massive force that was going to change everything about how we live on this planet drastically over the coming centuries.”

Sherrell writes about how his father, an oceanographic researcher who worked in the Antarctic, struggled to discuss climate change when Daniel was younger. In subsequent years, Sherrell says they’ve been able to discuss it with more emotional honesty.

“And I think figuring out how to do that metabolism of this crisis into something you can hold in your hand and examine and actually establish your own relationship with is an incredibly difficult task, and I also think one of the chief ethical and political responsibilities of what it means to live in the Anthropocene, especially as a young person,” Sherrell says.

Sherrell’s book is written to an unborn future child of his, and follows his struggle to consider whether or not to conceive a child in the climate crisis. He’s not the only one struggling with this decision.

In summer 2021, Climate One talked with three people deciding whether or not to have biological children in the climate emergency about their reasons and process. Virginie Le Masson is a climate change researcher at the University College London.

“On the emotional side I know I want to have children, I always wanted [to], but on the rational side, I don't know,” she says. Her concerns include environmental degradation and the moral implications of bringing a child into a world who may suffer.

Physics teacher Seb Gould says he and his partner have decided not to have biological children, for reasons including climate change, environmental resource use and unfair systems around child-rearing, like the fact that women get more paid leave and are thus expected to do more of the work.

Pediatrician Irène Mathieu recently had her first child after a couple years of weighing the pros and cons. “I think for me really following my intuition for a choice this big made more sense than trying to settle a rational or ethical debate because I think that it's kind of an impossible question,” she says. “I'm more interested at this point in shifting my energy and my focus to bigger policy issues rather than my own individual decisions, which are really kind of small fish when it comes to the actual impact.”

Guests

Daniel Sherrell

Movement Organizer; Author

Virginie Le Masson

Co-Director of the Centre for Gender and Disaster, University College London

Seb Gould

Physics Teacher

Irène P. Mathieu

Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, University of Virginia

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Climate disruption is in the headlines nearly every day, penetrating deeper into our personal lives. How do we process the meaning of that?

Daniel Sherrell: I actually think what the climate crisis demands of us is holding to each other tighter and gripping faster in solidarity and love rather than saying goodbye to each other in death or in emotional isolation.

Greg Dalton: And in these uncertain times, how are we weighing the decision of whether or not to bring more children into the world?

Virginie Le Masson: On the emotional side I know I want to have children, I always wanted but on the rational side, I don't know.

Irene Mathieu: You know, maybe there is no answer right answer to this ethical debate. But maybe just your certainty and your deep feeling that you are meant to mother in this way is enough to answer the question and then it's about how you do it.

Greg Dalton: Should we have children in a climate emergency? That’s up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: How do we plan for the next generation to inherit a society destabilized by our addiction to fossil fuels? This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton. The climate crisis seems to be unfolding faster than ever – with catastrophic floods, winter wildfires, and last summer’s killer heat. Climate disruption is here, growing more intrusive every day. How do we bear the weight of these stressors, and process our fear for what is coming for us, and our children? Author and climate activist Daniel Sherrell wrestles with this intergenerational angst in his book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. A warning to listeners, the next few minutes include discussion of suicide. Sherrell opens with the story of prominent civil rights lawyer David Buckel, who he says became a “titan of composting” in and around Brooklyn, sequestering tons of carbon every year.

Daniel Sherrell: And then out of the blue several years ago he killed himself by setting himself on fire in Prospect Park in the wee hours of the morning before most people were around. If you read his notes and his writings before he took his own life, which are scant, the sense you get is of a man who was increasingly despairing around climate change and cared about it passionately and was doing his little part by sequestering all this carbon and sort of a Herculean effort when it came to local composting and still saw that as a drop in the bucket. Suicide is a very difficult topic and there are many reasons that contribute to an individual’s choice to take their own life. But the sense I got when I found out about his death was first of all, in a sort of strange way it gave voice to some of my own anguish about the climate crisis. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t considered myself you know, suicide as a political act. You know in my most despairing moments when I felt like my God like what tactics are there left to us what cards do we still have left on our sleeves, I had contemplated this thing. Not seriously, never seriously, never actually making plans, but it was a thought that had crossed my mind as I sort of grappled desperately to figure out, to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Greg Dalton: And your mother said, don’t do it because you would only -- right? Your mother implored you not to do it.

Daniel Sherrell: Yeah. And my mother was deeply right and she said, she is a wise and wonderful woman and it’s never something I would do. And I don't I actually think what the climate crisis demands of us is holding to each other tighter and gripping faster in solidarity and love rather than saying goodbye to each other in death or in emotional isolation. So, the first reaction to his death was like oh my God, somebody has actually done it, you know. And the second reaction was God, he must have been so lonely, you know, and I felt that myself you know this feeling of real heaviness around the climate crisis and not seeing cultural avenues around me to process it. And like climate grief still being a sort of illegible emotion in the public sphere and when we talked about this thing called climate change which I never refer to by name in the book for very deliberate reasons it was often in the language of parts per million in the atmosphere or the IPCC reports or the COP conferences.

Greg Dalton: Throughout the book you referred to climate disruption as the problem with the capital P which reminds me of the troubles in Northern Ireland. You rarely use terms like climate change climate emergency, why did you make that choice to not use I guess the technical language that climate change evokes?

Daniel Sherrell: I think for a long time I’d felt sort of dissatisfied with climate discourse in this country. And when the phrase climate change was evoked, it was immediately shunted into this pigeonhole my brain as I think it is for many people, many lay people paying attention to this problem that's like, it's the purview of scientists, it's a very bad current event that is sort of happening up there in the ether, in the headlines. And it doesn't really have much to do like how I’m tucking my kid into bed at night or how I'm thinking about caring for my aging grandparents. And by choosing never to name it in the book I wanted desperately to break it out of its little narrow “environmentalist pigeonhole” as if it were just like one more issue on the long bucket list of issues alongside, you know, tax reform and saving the whales and you know, lead poisoning on our pipes. But was in fact a massive force that was going to change everything about how we live on this planet drastically over the coming centuries. I wanted to be able to like grapple with the full magnitude of that and I felt the phrase climate change was actually thinning in that way. And I also wanted to de-familiarize it for people in that old writerly ploy of making something that people think they knew and have sort of internalized already and put in a certain compartment and that their brain making it fresh again so that a real encounter and a real spiritual, emotional and philosophical encounter can actually occur. Because at the end of the day I don't actually think that what we usually refer to when we say the climate crisis which is mounting greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, leading to a very sick planet, I'm not sure if that's a problem so much as a symptom. And it's a symptom of the very sort of blindered methods of thought and attention we applied to the world around us under late capitalism, in my opinion.

Greg Dalton: Right. So, climate as a symptom rather than a cause. And we talked on Climate One yeah about the capitalism and some of the individualistic and extraction and even colonial mentalities that underlie a lot of that. Explain your resistance to the concept or identity of environmentalism because you write it comes from a root word of environ, which means around, kind of separate from us.

Daniel Sherrell: I think back to my time there’s a chapter in the book where I describe the opportunity I had to walk a traditional songline with an aboriginal tribe in the Northwest of Australia who had just saved that songline from encroachment by the natural gas industry that were trying to build a plant in its middle. But I mention that just to say that I think when talking to folks out there in the Goolarabooloo clan the concept of environmentalism is just like, you know, that makes no sense to them. It’s sort of like saying, oh I subscribe to reality-ism, you know. It’s like the environment is such an all-consuming concept as to be in such a thing that is woven through the absolute texture of reality that to sequester it in its own concept and then anoint with an ism is quite strange because it has a distancing effect. And I think you know in the West, because of that rupture, suddenly that thing starts to suffer because of all the behaviors that rupture allows. And then we’re like, oh no, we have to save the environment as if the environment is not us, you know, it’s a very weird thing. And I also associate it with like multiple decades of the environmental movement being mostly about recycled handbags and CFL light bulbs which I think was a very corporate-friendly, and ultimately unvisionary instantiation of the thing that we’re not trying to build in the climate justice movement which I think is a lot broader.

Greg Dalton: So, we define the environment we separate from the environment and it’s detached from us. Then we realize it's at risk and we need to reconnect with it and understand that we are a dependent and part of it. You write that fossil fuel is everywhere though rarely seen. People pump gas into their cars, but they don't see the gas they smell it. I thought that was really interesting. Can you say more about that sensory relationship?

Daniel Sherrell: The infrastructure undergirding the climate crisis is in many ways quite abstract, right. We talk a lot about fossil fuels but very few people have ever held a lump of coal or seen oil sluicing through a pipeline. The infrastructure of that and the very real things that we’re digging up from the ground which are basically the guts of the earth that we are dredging up and pumping through our cars and our buildings. All of that’s been hidden from us and so there's a way in which the whole the etiology of the problem is just incredibly abstract for people. And I think that contributes to us having a hard time wrapping our heads around it because both the impacts are abstract in some ways. I mean in many ways they’re very real, but they have to deal with parts per million in the atmosphere and probabilistic assessments of how likely extreme weather events are.

Greg Dalton: They’re indirect. It’s not like, you know, if someone pulls the trigger on a gun there’s a consequence, a human consequence. Whereas in climate, you drive a gasoline car and some place, some storm, some bad things happen in a different time and place. So, there's again that disconnect between what we do and the impacts of it.

Daniel Sherrell: Totally. And I think that's why there is much that is demanded of us through policy change and organizing in these next few decades, a tremendous amount. But I also think there are many ways in which we have to sort of like update our culturally normative philosophies about what causality is, about who's responsible for who and about the kinds of things we pay attention to. Because it is the climate crisis makes incontrovertibly clear that the level and breadth of interdependence not only between humans when you know me pumping gas in my car in Washington DC affects a farmer who’s trying to raise a crop from increasingly saline soil in Bangladesh. And not only between humans across time like my pumping gas in my car right now or us succeeding or failing in passing the big reconciliation bill that’s on a knife’s edge in Congress right now will have material impact in people that live probably five or six generations from now. But also the interdependence of the natural world, you know, thinking about if environmentalism is the thing that sees the polar bear on the ice flow and says that’s so sad we should save that polar bear, when what’s increasingly seems like the right attitude is like we’re not separate from that polar bear that it is the canary in our own coal mine.

Greg Dalton: And that’s what indigenous people inherently know. You write that there was no single eureka moment for you to become an activist. Rather, it was slow entrapment. How did that unfold for you and how did you discover your own responsibility or complicitness?

Daniel Sherrell: Yeah. Well, I grew up in a sort of unique position with about the climate crisis. My father is an oceanographic researcher at Rutgers University, he would spend multiple months every year when I was growing up on research voyages to the Antarctic. Basically, you know, doing very esoteric research about how metal particulates in the ocean affect plankton blooms and a lot of other stuff.

Greg Dalton: But drilling ice cores reveals the composition of past atmosphere that’s very direct fundamental climate science.

Daniel Sherrell: Yes, exactly. So, he would not describe himself as a climate scientist but he definitely works with many and he's adjacent to that field. But he would come back and you know, with a little bit of worry in his voice say like, that's not the same continent I went to a decade ago. And because of the albedo effect and other things, you know, the poles are warming much faster than any other place on the planet. So, global warming as a concept was introduced to me extremely early in my childhood and then I had nowhere to go with it.

Greg Dalton: You write that it was difficult for your family to talk about that your dad would say these things and almost like you didn't know where to pick up the thread, were you intimidated or feel inadequate compared to him? I found this part of your book fascinating because I wrestle with that in my own house like how much do I talk about it do I not, do I withhold and how much intensity can the other person handling carry them? So, how did you receive that as a young man?

Daniel Sherrell: I think my father really grappled with those questions, but I also think in the years we’re talking about which was the late 90s, early aughts like the strangest thing for me was based on what my father was telling me I didn't understand why everybody I knew was talking about this all the time. Like it seemed like given what I understood about the magnitude of what he was saying. It just seemed like surreal that it seemed like this little secret between us. I didn't see referred basically anywhere else.

Greg Dalton: Socially constructed silence.

Daniel Sherrell: Exactly, exactly. And I think even for my father like I think culture creates technologies and avenues of feeling you know, like I feel like even subsequent years my father and I have been able to talk much more vulnerably and emotionally about what's happening to our planet. And I think some ways like the culture has shifted under his feet, such that he now has words and frameworks with which to fuel the feelings evoked by the facts that he helped produce. But back in the 90s it was just like the surreal thing that we didn't know where to take it. And I think that was a lesson for me in retrospect, that even somebody who knows all the science, even somebody who's incredibly emotionally available and my father and I have a very close relationship. Even that person has a hard time getting under the surface of the climate crisis in a way that it feels not this abstract current event hovering over your head, but like a personal reality that is going to affect you and your family for the next hundreds of years. And I think figuring out how to do that metabolism of this crisis into something you can hold in your hand and examine and actually establish your own relationship with is an incredibly difficult task, and I also think one of the chief ethical and political responsibilities of what it means to live in the Anthropocene, especially as a young person.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation with author and climate activist Daniel Sherrell. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. Coming up, Sherrell says creating cultural avenues for people to process climate grief and anxiety can lead to more action, and help us feel better:

Daniel Sherrell: Which is why it’s really important that we like, you know, do the work to be able to process what we’re gonna go through for the next century together in public, rather than alone doom scrolling on our Twitter feed.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about processing the emotional intensity of the climate emergency with Daniel Sherrell, author of the book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Sherrell writes about experiencing a delay or disassociation from his feelings about climate collapse. One concept he explores is the difference between knowledge and realization, a distinction that I find fascinating.

Daniel Sherrell: You know, when you go to a meditation retreat for instance, they’ll kind of give you the knowledge up front whatever the knowledge may be: everything is impermanent, the self is an illusion. They hand you the truths right there on day one. And then you spend literally the rest of your life in a practice that is simply trying to realize the truth whose propositional content you knew from the very beginning. But knowledge is sort of this shallow and kind of binary process. You know the facts or you don't, it’s like you switch on the light switch. Realizing is a practice and it takes a long time. And I think you know when Al Gore and you know God bless Al Gore I wish I would chop off both arms who have made him president in 2000 I think we’d be in very different place, but this often very Western conflation between knowledge and realization was what undergirded An Inconvenient Truth. Because he was like if I just show people the graph if I show people the hockey stick and give them the PowerPoint to the facts are right and it's persuasive, that is equivalent to doing this sort of emotional and philosophical and political work that will get us out of this situation. And, you know, the past few decades have shown that clearly that's not the case that there’s another ingredient involved.

Greg Dalton: As a white man you like me have not grown up enduring what you call “the violence of structural racism” as you write in the book. You also mentioned that you feel guilty for not being really vulnerable to the direct impacts of burning fossil fuels. How does your privilege inform your work as a writer and activist?

Daniel Sherrell: I think my relative privilege is the thing that embeds in me a deep responsibility to actually take on this crisis. Because we live in a country and an economy where you know it runs on desperation in many ways. Hopefully our gradual move away from neoliberalism will lessen that but there are a lot of people that just have a hard time making ends meet in this country. In a way it’s a privilege to have all the lower rungs of my Maslow's pyramid covered, don't have to worry about food, don't have to worry about housing, don't have to worry about severe sickness or disability. That leaves me with a lot of extra capacity. And you're damn right and when you use that capacity to try to make lives of the privilege that I enjoy life of basic dignity and at times leisure accessible to everybody. If that's not what I'm using my privilege for I don't know what it's for.

Greg Dalton: And you write that you’re surprised how few people are involved in doing that who are comfortable as you are. In New York City all it takes is one large meeting room to accommodate a good portion of the millennials who make a living trying to forestall the apocalypse. How do you handle and think about the apathy among your peers and neighbors?

Daniel Sherrell: I actually don't I wouldn't call it apathy. I want to be generous to people here. I think for a lot of people it's overwhelm. It’s in fact, I think a feeling that is too deep-seated and too isolating to even really be talked about. And so, people bury it and move on with their lives. I don't know if that's true for everybody, but that’s my most generous reading. And I think creating cultural avenues where people can feel safe bringing these feelings to light is actually going to lead to an increasing outpouring of like people not acting as if they're apathetic and hiding their anxiety or their grief behind sort of like blindered walls of feeling. Which is why it’s really important that we like, you know, do the work to be able to process what we’re gonna go through for the next century together in public, rather than alone doom scrolling on our Twitter feed. But I also think that like you know ultimately, we’re never gonna get a majority of people active in the climate movement, just like in every important social movement in the history of the world. I think the people I worry more about obviously are the active obstructionists like the very few corporate executives and the politicians they've purchased who are literally the only people on the planet incentivized to watch the world burn and the power they still wield over our democracy. So, I think a lot of people feel guilty about the climate crisis, A, because they’ve been suckered into this framework that if we just screw in the right light bulbs or if they are just better recycling then it’ll be solved--

Greg Dalton: Yeah, thanks to the Crying Indian and all that.

Daniel Sherrell: Yeah, it’s, you know, and it’s a very clever move by the fossil fuel industry. It dovetailed with sort of like the Puritan ethic, it dovetailed with our identity as individual consumers under late capitalism. And it left them completely off the hook because what actually has to happen is we need to regulate, build the political power to regulate those corporations into the ground because they are sociopathic actors. So, on the one hand I like if anything, I try to alleviate people of their guilt because I think the fossil fuel industry wants you to feel guilty. They want you to feel horrible at yourself because that bedrock is a very bad bedrock from which take political action.

Greg Dalton: Your group was ultimately successful helping to decarbonize New York economy over the next three decades. How did that make you feel and what needs to happen next?

Daniel Sherrell: Well, on the one hand I feel proud of that victory. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, as it was ultimately named is still one of if not the most aggressive climate and equity policies passed at the state level in the country. It wasn't just the climate, people working on this. In fact, it wasn't the climate people leading on this. It was environmental justice communities, it was community organizations representing low-income communities of color. It was labor unions. We actually had to like form alliances with people we hadn’t always seen eye to eye with in order to build the political constituency that could actually wield enough power to get a bill of this magnitude passed. And I think there's a real beauty in that sort of coalition building. It was you know our target the person we are trying to convince to give his imprimatur to this bill was of course a certain New York governor who is now going down in political flames. You know, the process of passing this bill was like he resisted and resisted and resisted us for a year and a half and then when he finally felt the political headwinds were too much he got in front of the parade and gave the bill his own name, which were like you know were fine. If your ego is gonna be the thing that gets us across the finish line, fine. But I’ve been thinking a lot, you know, with the scandals recently about how that administration governed and how absolutely backward it is and not up to the challenge of the climate crisis because they were essentially a status quo body. And when you push them on something ambitious, you know, I would get calls I remember one instance getting a call from his Chief of Staff, Melissa DeRosa, and, you know, these people don't even wait for you to say hello, they just start screaming down the phone at you. You know, the governor is already like leader in the nation on climate change all the stuff and just basically trying to use an animal fear to like beat you into submission. And there was a basic resistance to any visionary change in the status quo that we had to build a lot of power in order to overcome.

Greg Dalton: This book is addressed to a future unborn child of yours and follows your struggle to consider whether or not to conceive of a child, which is the theme of this episode of Climate One. The prose is bittersweet, heartfelt and full of longing. It really resonated with me as a dad with two young adults. Where do you sit on the idea of having a child at this moment?

Daniel Sherrell: I think a lot of people ask me that and I don't, I haven't landed on a firm yes or a firm no after writing this book. Mostly because this book uses that question as a way into thinking about the climate crisis, but I didn't feel like I wanted to land on a take at the end. And obviously also this will not be a unilateral decision; this will be a decision made with my partner. But I think part of my impetus for writing the book was that you know the deeper I got into thinking about the climate crisis, the more it became clear to me that for a while and sort of without any conscious foresight on my end I had like this framework of wanting to be a father like thinking that that would be a beautiful process and also feeling deeply ambivalent about that prospect given what I knew about the scientific projections. And the more I thought about that being clear that while I couldn't in good conscience, bring a new person against without their consent into this sort of world if I wasn't ready with like a physical document that I could hand them to start the conversation and hold each other in the conversation about the world that they’ve been brought into. And that if I couldn’t write that document and have it feel emotionally honest, then I couldn't have a family. So, this was both like a preparation and a test for myself writing this book. It’s still quite possible that I won't have children for a variety of reasons, but I think, do I think there's a normative answer to this for everybody? Absolutely not. I think having children is still you know is one answer to the question: do I think the human project should continue?

Greg Dalton: Have you talked to your dad about it?

Daniel Sherrell: I have talked to my dad about it and I know that my parents wanna be grandparents. And I think that's a very human instinct and one I'm deeply sympathetic to. But I think part of it is also their are sort of, not uncomplicated but less complicated position toward this question you know I think they have a hard time fully realizing, internalizing the climate crisis. I mean, I certainly do, and all their schemas were set in a world all their understanding is what the world is and how it works were sort of fixed in a period where global warming wasn’t anywhere on the map, you know. Exxon knew about it and was systematically suppressing it, but for lay people like my parents you know their formative years it wasn’t really on the horizon. So, I think it's hard and unsettling for them sometimes to see how much this rocks me like really rocks me in a way they can't quite access. But to their credit, they've come to respect that I think and give me space for that in a way that I'm deeply grateful for and that I, you know, I hope can become more common among boomers. Because other reactions I see more mainstream reactions was like oh, you’re overreacting you snowflake or like don’t be afraid like your generation is gonna solve it. And it’s like okay, thanks for passing the buck, bro.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, well, as a boomer I’m grateful for your book and your work. It really resonated with me as a climate professional and as a father struggling with some of these things. Daniel Sherrell is author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, a beautiful book. Daniel, thanks for your work and for your time.

Daniel Sherrell: Yeah, thanks so much, Greg. This is great.

Greg Dalton: The decision of whether or not to have biological children can be fraught for those concerned about our climate-disrupted present and future. Last year, Climate One’s Ariana Brocious spoke with three people weighing the decision. Irene Mathieu is a pediatrician and writer in Virginia.

Irene Mathieu: I have fallen on the side of having at least one child, I just gave birth to my first child three weeks ago, so I have a newborn at home right now. And it was definitely a year’s long decision.

Greg Dalton: Virginie Le Masson is a research fellow at the University College London focused on climate change and environmental degradation.

Virginie Le Masson: On my side it’s been two years of debating questioning and we still haven't made a formal decision as to whether having children.

Greg Dalton: And Seb Gould is a high school physics teacher, also in the UK.

Sebastian Gould: Me and my partner, we’ve debated for a very, very long time and we’ve come pretty solidly on the side of not having a child based on climate.

Greg Dalton: Ariana Brocious takes it from here.

Ariana Brocious: Irene, I was curious if you could explain your thinking about the climate disruption that we’re seeing and maybe how your thinking has changed a little bit and how you ended up arriving at the decision to conceive a child.

Irene Mathieu: Sure. So, I basically ever since I was a kid always imagined myself being a parent and it was something I just assumed that I would do at some point. And I started to have doubts or questions around that probably in my mid-20s as I became more aware of the climate crisis and then increasingly even more recently in the past couple of years, I’m currently doing a Master’s degree in public health. And I've gotten pretty involved in some activism and advocacy with a group of physicians who work on climate issues here locally. So, becoming more aware of these issues made the decision feel a little bit more tenuous for me and I spent a couple of years talking about this with my partner. And ultimately, what I decided was that there are two kind of big concerns in my mind. The first one was the ethical or sort of carbon footprint rationale for having a biological child, and whether or not I could justify that, and it seems like a selfish decision to have a child just because I wanted one. And then the other concern that I had of course was just the planet’s livability and my child's life in the future and whether or not they would have the kind of life I would want them to have. I think realistically when we look at what's happening with climate change it is very economically and geographically stratified and we see the effects of the climate crisis are not distributed equally in society. And so, for me personally, I think that I have the resources at this point to be able to provide my child with a life that I would hope that they would have. I think it's a false equivalency to say that humans must, you know, forestall things like as basic as having a child for climate change when we have large corporations and governments that refuse to regulate. And the real reason we have climate change is because of that, it's not because one person decides to have a child or two children or not.

Ariana Brocious: I wanted to ask Virginie if she can explain her thinking about it and how it is also changed because I think some of the things that you highlighted have factored into her decision as well.

Virginie Le Masson: Yes, absolutely I can relate to lot of Irene’s questioning and points. My doubts are very much related to the work that I do. And for the past 12 years I guess I read every day about the impacts of environmental degradation and the impacts that fall upon very diverse communities across the world. And so, obviously there is an argument that says because I’m privileged I live in the UK. I come from Europe I don't have to worry about accessing resources to protect my livelihood or to protect my families and my children are likely to be protected as well. But I find it really difficult to see myself in isolation from sort of the things that we witnessed elsewhere. We are all impacted by the levels of pollution of water of soils and air. And the severity of the consequences of that position for human health is dramatic and we know only a little of it because it's under-documented. And especially for children's development we only start to see the tip of the iceberg really and that's extremely concerning for me. I am very conscious with the moral responsibility of bringing a child to life and having to accept the risk that they will face themselves hardship in their lifetime. But this particular hardship of losing someone close, particularly a parent is one that I found really difficult to reconcile because I feel directly responsible for it. And it’s related to my work because I feel like the risk of me falling ill or my partner falling ill or my children falling ill because of environmental degradation is now rising exponentially. And that's how I find it really difficult to make a rational decision about conceiving a child given this awareness and knowledge that the environmental degradation we have created and that we are leaving to the next generations.

Ariana Brocious: Seb, you had said that some of the reasons you and your partner have thought maybe you won't have children, biological children, has to do with some of the inequities between men and women when it comes to child bearing, right or child rearing, really.

Sebastian Gould: So, that’s one of the issues actually that my partner leans quite heavily towards now. A lot of it is to do with the inequities just globally. So, we've quite recently comes to conclusion that it’s quite a privilege not to have a child and to be able to live a normal life. So, you know, across the world there are so many people who through lack of access so I mean if you look at the south in the US a lot of anti-abortion laws, economically it’s not very viable for a lot of countries. Having access to the health care,to the ability to not have a child is quite a privilege. So, that's one of the reasons why she is quite adamant on not having a child. But as well it’s to do with the fact that a lot of the responsibility with fall on to my partner. So, in the UK at least, I, as a man would have about 2 to 3 maybe four weeks with the paternity leave. And for my partner, it would be about three months full pay maternity leave. So, a lot of the responsibility would fall to her. We’re financially incentivized to have that sort of quite sexist idea of or should I say chauvinistic idea of raising a child where the man is the breadwinner and the woman stays at home. And we’re not quite a fan of that.

Greg Dalton: After the break we’ll continue this conversation about whether or not to have children in the climate crisis. This is Climate One. Coming up, children as a symbol of hope for the future:

Irene Mathieu: If 20 years from now, we have gotten off our addiction to fossil fuels and we have created new systems will I regret not having a child? Yes, I absolutely think that I would.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking with three people about their journey to decide whether or not to conceive a child amid the unfolding climate crisis. Irene Mathieu is a pediatrician who recently had her first child. Virginie Le Masson is a climate researcher still debating the matter, and Seb Gould is a physics teacher who has mostly settled on not having biological children. Climate One’s Ariana Brocious spoke with them.

Ariana Brocious: So, I was gonna ask all of you what has been the discussion that you've had with your partner on this and have you been in agreement have you disagreed. Has it been a negotiation between the two of you to arrive at whatever point you've landed at with this decision?

Irene Mathieu: I can speak to that. So, my partner is definitely not as emotionally concerned about this as I am, and has been very much on the side of wanting to have children as long as I've known him. And we've had many conversations about this and basically, he sorts of fallen on the side of yes, it is a selfish decision to have a child. Human beings are fundamentally selfish and I don't think we can avoid that and if it weren't having children, there would be other selfish things we would be doing. And on the whole that life is more worth living than not, which I agree with on that point. And so, bringing a child into the world could be an important source of joy for both us and for that child. And we’ve both talked about how you know having a child could be also an opportunity to help make a difference if we can raise that child with an awareness of the climate crisis that we didn't have growing up. So, he's very much in favor. I think where we are still debating is the number of children. I feel that it's hard for me to justify more than replacement level fertility, so more than two children and he really wants three so we’ll continue to negotiate that.

Sebastian Gould: I think that’s a really fantastic idea honestly having that. Because I think a lot of people's main concern about the climate crisis and children is the idea of overpopulation, especially with countries in the West where the carbon impact of you know people living in America and the UK and Europe are so much higher than other people living all around the world. I think it’s quite interesting, Irene, that you said that it's you are aware that it was quite a selfish idea because that was one of the first things I said to my partner about having a child that it’s quite a selfish idea of thinking I want to have my child and I want to make its life better than mine as a sort of vanity project. And it’s something that my partner never even thought about because she just grew up with the idea of oh that's just what you do. I think I've mellowed out a lot more so I don’t think the idea of having a child is as inherently selfish. I think I’ve got a lot of selfish reasons as well why I don’t want to have a child.

Ariana Brocious: In this episode we’re also talking with author Daniel Sherrell and he's written a book somewhat addressed to a future child of his that he writes, “I realized if I was ever going to start a family. If I was going to bring you into the collapsing world at hand. I’d owe you an honest account of why.” So, I'm wondering if for those of you who are thinking of having children or have, if that’s something you thought about that you would sort of need to explain to them your decision to have them?

Virginie Le Masson: That's part of the issue for me is I don’t know yet what I would say especially if they suffer for all sorts of reasons. How do I face myself if they ever blame me for coming to life and haven't had a choice? And a lot of people argue that it's a gift to be brought to life and we should be grateful for it. But it has, there could be so much suffering, for which we can try and compensate for it especially if we have privileges. But we can't control everything and so, the question and the dilemma I’m facing is that do I accept on behalf of another person to take the risk for them. And I know I would dedicate all my energy and heart to help them as a responsible parent but yeah, I can’t control everything. And this is why it’s so difficult to make a rational decision. On the emotional side I know I want to have children I always wanted but on the rational side, I don't know. And I've kind of had the same sort of a dilemma before that Irene raised and also Seb about, you know, the responsibility, the carbon footprint of children. Some people said, I was the best climate advocate because I didn't children and some people say why you’re so selfish not to want to have children how can you deny your parents to become grandparents. There are all these social sorts of injunctions on this especially on women, which I came to terms with and I don’t really feel pressured or...It's rather actually, this I'm blaming my partner because he’s brought this literature that I wasn't aware of from his philosophy teacher who wrote this piece asking is it moral to have children. And this brought to me so many questions I never considered before including the first one I’m battling with is how do I tell my children if they are unhappy if they’re suffering that I made a conscious choice to bring them up to life because I wanted to have them. Is this valid, is this good enough? I still don't know.

Ariana Brocious: So, you've raised this really important question about this sort of rational versus emotional part of this decision. And so, and how you can struggle when those don't actually meet up. Have the other two of you struggled with that part of it?

Irene Mathieu: Absolutely. I actually spent much of my pregnancy writing a long essay about this very issue. That rationally, I think for me anyways, it is very clear that having children is probably not a great idea, but I think the larger maybe the larger force for me in making this decision is intuitive and not rational. And I had a conversation with a friend before I got pregnant and I was sort of outlining these thoughts to her and she is somebody who's decided not to have children, although not for climate reasons for other reasons. And she said, you know, maybe this is not there is no answer right answer to this ethical debate. But maybe just your certainty and your deep feeling that you are meant to mother in this way is enough to answer the question and then it's about how you do it. There are people who choose not to have children and people who choose to have children. And I think all of us are important in the climate crisis and all the other crises facing the world. But, you know, one thing that was helpful for me in coming to this decision was thinking about all of the populations of people who have gone through crises that felt world-ending in a way. I think about my ancestors who may have been enslaved and certainly not every reproductive choice in that system was really a choice. But there are people who have chosen who continue to choose to have children under really, really catastrophic conditions and it's a symbol of hope. And so, I think for me really following my intuition for a choice this big made more sense than trying to settle a rational or ethical debate because I think that it's kind of an impossible question.

Sebastian Gould: Yeah, the idea of the rational versus the irrational part of your brain almost like the lizard part of your brain that wants to reproduce like that's the whole reason why we’re here because humans keep on reproducing and we do it well. So, it’s sort of fighting that instinct really and, yeah, I mean I’d say for myself and even my partner I think just yesterday she just said, I love the idea of getting pregnant. But then for her at least it’s thinking about oh but then it’s all the other stuff that comes with having a child. And I think when I think about that quote that you gave from the author, I don’t think I could ever justify to a standard that I’d be happy with to any future children that I would have had a reason to bring them into this world. I don’t think I could reasonably justify that and I think that’s really the crux of the issue. If I don't feel that I can do that then I just simply won’t.

Virginie Le Masson: From my perspective I change every day. One day I feel like I'm ready and the next I’m like never, no way. And it has been the case for two years now and up to the point when we decided to set ourselves a deadline because there’s also the time issue that for me is the biggest problem actually. And actually, I think we are blessed in this generation that people are very cautious not to put too much pressure to us. And we are surrounded by very diverse relationships with people who decide not to have children with same sex couples or. And it's wonderful to see that no matter what we’re gonna be fine and people will respect our decisions. And I know it's not the case in many other societies. But that also means that it changes our own decision making process. There was a time a year and a half where actually we thought we were not gonna have children at all. And now I think it’s not so certain. And to allow ourselves to be hesitant and to be transparent was really helpful at least for me because it's okay to change our minds as well.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, and I want to jump in here because this is you know, as evidenced by our discussion. This is a really fraught and difficult decision for a lot of people. It's emotional, it's heavy. But there are some 3 million children born every year just in the US alone and I would be willing to bet a lot of those parents for whatever reason are not thinking about these issues, at least to the degree that you all have. So, Irene you've touched on this already but I mean, how much do you think your decision your personal decision in this matter in the larger scheme of things?

Irene Mathieu: Honestly probably not much. I think it matters mostly for assuaging my own personal sense of guilt or goodness in the world. I don't think that the carbon impact of one or two children is going to change the tide of the climate crisis even children in a high-income society like the US. And so, I don't really think that my decision matters that much in the larger scheme and I think one of my bigger concerns that I alluded to at the beginning about this whole question is the idea of the carbon footprint which was created by British Petroleum to put the onus back on individuals and say we need to watch how much toilet paper we use and how many miles we drive because it's our fault instead of taking responsibility for really contributing to the climate change as big industries. And so, I'm more interested I think at this point in shifting my energy and my focus to bigger policy issues rather than my own individual decisions, which are really kind of small fish when it comes to the actual impact.

Sebastian Gould: I don't want to sound pessimistic or anything, but what about living in a world where we can't change, you know, how big companies pollute the ocean and surely the best decision we can make then, is to not have to, you know, reproduce people who use these big businesses’ services. That for me is one of the things that I feel quite passionately about is yes, we should be advocating for better policies you know in government to regulate these huge corporations. To tax them appropriately and to regulate them but at the end of the day, chances are that that’s just gonna carry on. I mean I don't wanna sound pessimistic but for me that decision is I've made the choice to not have someone else need to use this stuff. For me, that’s another part of my reasoning there and I don’t know how you feel about that.

Irene Mathieu: I guess part of me thinks we can’t predict the future, and while I would also say my nature is probably to be a little more pessimistic as well. If 20 years from now, we have gotten off our addiction to fossil fuels and we have created new systems will I regret not having a child? Yes, I absolutely think that I would. And so, that plays a big role in my thinking, but also, I think part of the responsibility that I've now accepted in having a child is trying to divest as much as possible from those systems. And I know that I can’t do it a hundred percent but you know I live within walking distance of our local elementary school and several grocery stores. We’ve discussed getting investing in solar power so our home can be solar powered. And those are certainly very privileged decisions, at least in the US not everyone can make those decisions. But I think that if I'm going to have a child in a society like this one that is part of my responsibility. Becoming pescatarian is something once I finish breast-feeding and can sort of afford to do that calorically trying to really reduce our meat intake. So, things like that I think are absolutely part of our responsibilities. So, my child learns how to live in a way that is minimizing that resource usage.

Virginie Le Masson: Perhaps I can bring a middle ground there. Part of the reason why my thinking changes so much it’s also because in the last two years we've witnessed Fridays For Future and the rise of the youth movement for climate change. That’s been fantastic to witness and to support and to see all these young people so much more informed than we ever were at their age. So many young girls, you know, taking to the streets to protest for things that they care about and that they can and they’re not scared to protest. This is bringing me a lot of hope, which has also changed my perspective and slightly shifted the attention on my responsibility to actually trusting the future generation because at some point, people would try to reassure me saying because you care then your children will care but then I felt it’s unfair on them because it's put the responsibility on them rather try to think more collectively that I trust the next generation to care more. And we cannot change at the moment what’s going on at the highest level and believe me this is part of my job trying to influence policy decisions being done at the UNFCCC negotiations for example. It’s so slow and so yes slow that I don't have any hope within that process. Rather I feel like this more localized or perspective to think about my own community and having this conversation about procreation actually is changing little things at the local level. It brought me joy and hope actually much more than any other aspect of climate activism so far.

Ariana Brocious: Virginie, I had a question for you because at the beginning of this conversation you have been the person who’s still undecided. What if anything that either Seb or Irene has said resonated with you and has maybe given you something new or different to think about or will continue to sort of I don’t know be part of your thinking on this as you go forward.

Virginie Le Masson: I completely agree with Seb’s pessimism. I feel the same way this sort of feeling of frustration and yeah, and it’s really draining and it's not a happy place and also completely share his partner’s thinking around the imposition of society's norms on reproductive roles for example. And if I knew that my partner had equal paternity leave that would really change my decision, I think. And on the other hand, giving Irene just having a baby just brings me so much hope. I feel like actually this resonates with my guts and that it goes to this emotional feeling that this is probably what I want and that’s what I’m gonna try probably to go to. Because my partner is so indecisive that I felt it’s almost down to me to really decide. And it’s also related to this question of rights and reproductive rights. And a woman, I feel like I’m in control of my contraception and part of it is quite a big responsibility. So, hearing someone who’s came over this doubt and this dilemma with some really good reasons, it gives me a lot of hope.

Ariana Brocious: Well, thank you all so much for taking the time to talk about this really difficult subject frankly. And thanks for joining us here on Climate One.

Irene Mathieu: Thanks for having us.

Sebastian Gould: Thank you very much.

Virginie Le Masson: Thank you.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about the difficult decision of whether or not to have children in the climate crisis. Here’s a note about the big picture before we end. Global fertility rates are falling. In the United States, the birth rate has been declining for several years and in 2019 - before covid - hit the lowest rate in 32 years. A 2018 New York Times poll on the issue cited top reasons as the high cost of child care, desire for leisure time and financial uncertainty. A third of young adults identified climate change among reasons for having fewer than their ideal number of kids. The issues are complicated, but Irene [ee-wren], Seb and Virginie have a lot of company. Special thanks to Stanford researcher Britt Wray for her help with this week’s episode. Find a link to her thoughtful blog about parenting and climate in the show notes on our website.

Greg Dalton: Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast on Apple or wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- but it’s critical to address the climate emergency. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation. Brad Marshland is our senior producer; our audio editors and producers are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Our audio engineer is Arnav Gupta. Our team also includes Steve Fox and Tyler Reed. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Zen and Coping with Climate

Otto Pilot — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 07:01:00 +0000

Zen and Coping with Climate

10/15/2021

Coping with Climate Disruption

More and more of us are seriously worrying about what we’ve done to the earth’s climate. But while climate predictions can be scary, Sister True Dedication says we don’t have to live in a place of fear or denial.

“We all need a real practice to be able to not be afraid of our fear and not be afraid of our despair and anxiety and to learn some really concrete practices to be able to acknowledge it, and recognize it and embrace it every time it comes up,” she says.

In fact, the Zen Buddhist nun says accepting and even leaning into these difficult feelings can make us stronger and more ready to act.

Sister True Dedication is editor of internationally renowned Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s latest book, Zen and the Art of Saving The Planet. She says while the climate crisis is urgent, living in a constantly reactive state is unhealthy and doesn’t help us take action. But there are approaches that can help:

“The power of Zen and the power of mindfulness is that it roots this in the present moment so we can be alert to what is going on, we can be responsive, we can be the master of our mind and awareness in any given situation,” she says. “So, we can really have the present moment as the ground for our urgent action and that is action taken with clarity, with courage, with solidity, with freedom, and not with panic.”

She offers simple guidance for someone interested in beginning a mindfulness practice: take some time for yourself, outside in nature if possible, and relax your body with mindful breathing.

“And then just take time to listen,” Sister True Dedication says. “Say we’re out and sitting underneath a tree, just to listen to the birds and if we’re listening to the birds, we know we’re in the present moment. We know we’re alive, we know we are in touch with the miracle of life.”

Psychotherapist Leslie Davenport is author of several books, including Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change. Her new book, All the Feelings Under the Sun: How to Deal With Climate Change, is targeted at middle-school kids and guides them through exercises designed to build their emotional resilience.

Davenport says many kids struggle with climate anxiety and grief, particularly as they get into high school and early college.

“It's the time in life when you look to the future. Do I want to get married, what kind of relationship would I want, what's my career path, what do I dream and envision my life might look like? And that’s where the youth today are really feeling the climate anxiety and the climate grief because they are tuned in to the scientific projections about what could unfurl, especially without significant and immediate action,” she says.

Davenport says there’s a tremendous need to support our youth, not only in the 16 to 24 age range but also younger children her book is targeted at, to help them develop emotional resilience tools to be prepared for those feelings they’ll encounter as they grow.

Davenport suggests parents and caregivers first take care of their own emotions, so they can model strength and resilience for their children. And then when supporting children:

“Make room for and welcome the feelings. Validate that the feelings are there because you care, because you're paying attention, because it is distressing what's happening to the environment and people and our biosphere as a whole.”

Guests

Sister True Dedication

Zen Buddhist Nun; Editor

Leslie Davenport

Psychotherapist

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. More and more of us are seriously worrying about what we’ve done to the Earth’s climate.

Leslie Davenport: Eco-anxiety and eco-grief have just jumped way up in public awareness as well as the climate change issue as a whole.

Greg Dalton: Climate predictions can be scary, but we don’t have to live in a place of fear or denial.

Sister True Dedication: We all need a real practice to be able to not be afraid of our fear and not be afraid of our despair and anxiety and to learn some really concrete practices to be able to acknowledge it, and recognize it and embrace it every time it comes up.

Greg Dalton: A Zen Buddhist nun says accepting our feelings can make us stronger and more ready to act.

Sister True Dedication: The power of Zen and the power of mindfulness is that it roots us in the present moment so we can be alert to what is going on, we can be responsive, we can be the master of our mind and awareness in any given situation.

Greg Dalton: Zen and Coping with Climate. Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. Before we get into today’s show exploring emotional resilience in the face of the climate crisis, we’re continuing our weekly look at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next month.

Greg Dalton: Estimates suggest there are over 5 billion people of faith worldwide, and religions continue to be a dominant political and moral force even in societies driven by science and technology. This week, our correspondent Aman Azhar explores how world religions are intersecting with the climate movement in the run-up to COP26.

Aman Azhar: Religions’ outsized influence on many aspects of our personal, social, and political lives begs the question: what role should religious institutions play in the upcoming climate forum in Glasgow? Dr. Jennifer Herdt, professor of Christian ethics at the Yale Divinity School points to a growing movement among many religious leaders to weigh in on the climate crisis..

Jennifer Herdt: One basic indication of this is a meeting that was held just this past Monday, where 40 religious leaders from around the world gathered at the Vatican, representing 10 religious traditions, and together signed a joint climate appeal. That was planned to be delivered to the COP26 president in advance of the gathering in Glasgow in November.

Aman Azhar: Stephanie Kaza, educator and author of several books including Green Buddhism says world religions generally don't have a seat at forums such as COP because of their highly structured and political nature.

Stephanie Kaza: They are more effective in the non-governmental organization forums, the NGOs, that's where the environmental and social justice groups can use moral support and very much appreciate when the religions step forward to say, we believe in what you're doing, we want to support you.

Aman Azhar: Kaza says religious leaders of all faiths can also encourage or motivate their membership to be aware and engage more with climate issues.

Stephanie Kaza:These leaders have moral authority, and they are in the position to use their traditions, cultures, teachings, to address the tremendous moral injury inflicted on this planet, and also in a position to lead towards a more sustainable and positive future.

Aman Azhar: Jennifer Herdt says there’s several examples in the history where religious institutions advanced social movements.

Jennifer Herdt: Gandhian movement for Indian independence or the US civil rights movement, major movements for social change, have so often involved a central religious motivation, and a religious mobilization of people. So, this is not just, you know, nice words, icing on the cake. This is powerful.

Aman Azhar: She says the same could apply to the urgency to combat climate change. Herdt points out one problem is the perception that religious thought is opposed to science, which religious leaders are trying to address through statements like the one issued recently at the Vatican gathering.

Jennifer Herdt: One thing that I would point to in the US context, is the fact that increasingly we see evangelical Christian leaders who once were utterly indifferent to issues of climate change. Increasingly, we see these leaders calling for attention to the climate crisis, and calling for important forms a reinterpretation of the tradition, say, for example, away from the notion that human beings have been given dominion in the sense of, of an authorization to exploit nature, and instead understanding human responsibility for caretaking of nature.

Aman Azhar: But Herdt says a lot more work still needs to be done. In addition to the pressure from grassroots religious groups to mobilize climate action locally, Stephanie Kaza says the world leaders at COP need prayers and blessings.

Stephanie Kaza: I think that political leaders everywhere are under so much pressure to deliver solutions to the world. All the prayers and support they can get and I'm really serious about prayers in the sense of well-wishing, blessing, attention Giving. This is something that every religious practitioner, whether they're Muslim, or Jewish, or Christian, or Buddhist, or whatever they're practicing, they can offer their attention and well-wishing for good outcomes at the COP meetings.

Aman Azhar: Next month’s COP26 can be an effective forum for religions and science to join forces in combating the biggest existential threat facing humanity. For Climate One in Washington DC, this is Aman Azhar.

Greg Dalton: Today we’re talking about emotional resilience in the era of climate disruption. Sister True Dedication is a Zen Buddhist nun and editor of Thich Nhat Hanh’s latest book Zen and the Art of Saving The Planet. Internationally renowned Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh was a refugee from the Vietnam War when Martin Luther King nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end that war. A few years later he actively worked to rescue other Vietnamese refugees. I asked Sister True Dedication how that experience shaped his understanding of what he calls “awakened action.”

Sister True Dedication: I think around the time when Thay was calling for peace (so we call Thich Nhat Hanh “Thay” - it means teacher). When he left Vietnam to call for peace and actually that's what led to his exile, that he had dared to call for peace. And it was while he was traveling the world calling for peace that he became aware of the situation of the boat people. At the time he reflected something like this he said, if compassion doesn't lead to action how can you call it compassion? So, there’s really the sense in the whole of Thay’s life that compassion has to be expressed in the way we live our life, the way we speak, the way we act, the way we engage. So, compassion isn’t something that you cultivate in the sitting meditation position in a monastery or a temple, but it's something that should really be embodied with how we spend our time and energy.

Greg Dalton: Right. So, if action is healing, how does that apply to climate?

Sister True Dedication: Well, Thay is so powerful on this and I remember we were at the Parliament in the UK in London when he said something like this. He said, what is that the root of the problem we don't need more science; we have enough science, we don't need more technology, we have the technological solutions. We even have the policies. What is lacking is the insight, the way of seeing and thinking in our collective consciousness in the human psyche. There is something that we haven't woken up to. So, for Thay, contemplation, mindfulness and meditation have to do with the climate crisis is actually in this moment we all being called to a much deeper, braver awakening that hasn't happened yet. We have to really wake up to the severity of the situation and change our whole way of seeing and for Thay perhaps we could call it insight. We all need to get a certain insight and it’s the insight that we don't have and that’s why, you know, it’s so difficult to take action.

Greg Dalton: I often encounter people in the climate conversation who are so scared and so worried about the urgency that we must act quickly. I think people are so scared they think that any action is good action and other people will say, no, we need to slow down and think about more intentional action. But that seems hard to do when literally the earth, our home is on fire.

Sister True Dedication: I think even as Buddhists we acknowledge the urgency of the situation. The question is how do we respond to that urgency and how can we get the strength we need, the insight we need to not panic. And I think what happens to a lot of us in the urgency is we're in a knee-jerk mode, in a reactive state in our own lives, and just we really have to remember that the activists, the scientists, the people who are working in the forefront of tackling the climate crisis, we’re all human beings. And that urgency--we can't live in that state of heightened arousal, you know, it can destroy our body and mind. So, we are also part of the earth and so we want to contribute in such a way that is sustainable and healthy for ourselves while we act urgently. And the power of zen and the power of mindfulness is that it roots us in the present moment so we can be alert to what is going on. We can be responsive. We can be the master of our mind and awareness in any given situation. So, we can really have the present moment as the ground for our urgent action and that is action taken with clarity, with courage, with solidity, with freedom, and not with panic. It's about leaning into the feelings of fear and despair and I feel like anyone, active in this field and honestly anyone, any citizen on the planet right now. I feel we all need a real practice to be able to not be afraid, not be afraid of our fear and not be afraid of our despair and our anxiety and to learn some really concrete practices to be able to acknowledge it, and recognize it and embrace it on a daily basis every time it comes up. More deeply actually to lean into that fear and despair, and accept that it is very possible that we won't manage to turn this around. There’s a certain acceptance that can come with that and a certain, what Thay called peace and freedom. And it’s like, alright, well, we got nothing to lose because everything you know the odds may be stacked against us. And that can liberate us I think from the panic and the anxiety to have a kind of peace, of freedom. And then all the action can come from love. we’re not measuring the consequences of our action, we’re just human beings, part of all the species on this beautiful planet trying our best.

Greg Dalton: And before you became a Zen Buddhist nun you worked as a journalist for the BBC. As part of the media who is dispersing knowledge hopefully also some insight here on Climate One. I’m particularly curious to know how you think about your past profession distributing information and what you’re doing now when it comes to climate consciousness.

Sister True Dedication: So, the insight I got working in the newsroom was that you can have a lot of information but not much insight. I mean it’s the information business, right? There’s not enough reflection for me there wasn't enough stepping back and really taking stock of things. And actually, I was really defined by the time I came into the newsroom, I entered in 2003 with the Iraq war. And at that time, I was already a peace activist. So, it was quite something to swallow, to be involved in that news coverage. And what upset me the most was a few weeks into starting to work there we had the huge protests in the UK. They were some of the biggest political protests in British history at the time and yet the BBC almost refused to cover it. And that really did something to my soul to witness that and to work with these human beings and to want to understand why these human beings, colleagues I cared about in the newsroom had different priorities for how they wanted to cover the news. So, I think I was scarred by not only the fact that you can have too much information, you can have toxic information and then the most helpful impactful information doesn't get a run for the money. It doesn't get any chance to be exposed and shared with the country. So, for me, I also realize that yeah, our news media the system is deeply flawed and that each one of us can still be an agent of change wherever we are.

Greg Dalton: How did you get from there to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh? What was your introduction?

Sister True Dedication: So, I studied at Cambridge University and actually I had gone to the monastery before I started working for the BBC. I went to the monastery the summer I graduated because I felt that although I'd gone to that what was then the top university in the country, I felt so short-changed at the end, I thought how am I equipped to contribute to life in society. And I had a real sense I think of the environmental crisis and climate change, which we then still called global warming. I had a real sense of it and I just thought how has my three, four years of study, how it has actually equipped me to deal with this. And I didn't feel any wiser and I didn't feel I had what I needed to know. So, I thought well okay my parent’s family and friends are happy I got the degrees and now I'm off to actually do the real seeking and the real learning. And so, I think it really was this search for wisdom rather than knowledge like real wisdom. Like really what is that about really what are we can do about these pressing problems internally and externally those deepest questions of our own hearts and the deepest questions that confront us as a species. So, I was 21 when I first came here to Plum Village in France and sat in the meditation hall with Thich Nhat Hanh, Thay, and heard my first teachings. And what really struck me actually was as a young woman I had an opportunity to stay and live with the other nuns and I thought these were some pretty cool women and they were the wisest women I've met. And I thought, gosh, I have no idea that women group together to cultivate wisdom together and that some a young woman like me can come and there was no question. I was really struck because there was no question that they were afraid of. Nothing was off-limits about despair, about grief, about the meaning of life, about death, about loss and about healing deep wounds. This is really a community of truth seekers, and that really struck me. So, I kept coming back.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about zen approaches to climate disruption. Our podcasts typically contain extra content beyond what’s heard on the radio. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. Coming up, the importance of teaching present-moment resilience as a tool to respond to the climate crisis:

Sister True Dedication: So they can be in each moment, no matter what it looks like, no matter how bad it will be, and have all the clarity of mind, all the courage and all the solidity they need to meet those moments in the right way.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about building emotional resilience during the climate crisis with Zen Buddhist Nun Sister True Dedication.

Greg Dalton: When faced with the reality of our climate future, many people get paralyzed thinking their own actions don’t matter, because the scale of the problem is so big. But Sister True Dedication says we should think less about the consequences of an individual decision and more about the feeling of agency we gain by acting in the present moment.

Sister True Dedication: We say that the present moment contains the past and the future. It contains all the moment in it, right. So, something we do now we already enacting what the future will look like and we can call it karma sometimes, right. So, we have a karmic energy and that energy, each one of us is impacting on the world every single moment every single day. The way we speak, the way we listen, the way we interact with the economy, whatever actions we do, that is our karmic kind of resonance that’s continuing out in the world. This is very important in Thay’s teaching and in our approach to understanding how we act in relation to the climate which is we’re in the present moment, the present moment is very important first of all it’s the only moment that’s real, right? In this moment, it’s like our turn to be alive. We are the fruition not just of our immediate ancestry and heritage and lineage but, you know, biologists will tell us we are the fruit of millions of years of evolution. And this is our moment. So, anything we can do, anything we can say, anything we can act, when we act it is not only us acting it is our entire ancestry acting through us in this moment. And if that is true of our ancestors it is also true of our descendants. So, it gives our action a vast scope and this is what we call like interbeing, the insight of interbeing operating in our daily decisions and that's like along the axis of time.

Greg Dalton: The book also talks about throwing away the notion of self that we’re not separate from the earth any more than a wave is separate from the oceans. So, talk about that.

Sister True Dedication: In the book, we explore it through the teachings of a very important Zen sutra called the diamond sutra which you may be familiar with. And it’s for me a really eloquent and visual way to understand the teachings of no self which can sometimes be very scary for people. It’s like what you mean I don’t exist? But no self it doesn’t mean I don’t exist; it means I don’t exist as a separate permanent self-entity cut off from the rest either of space and time. So, another way that we talk about non self in our tradition is that we say we are empty of a separate self but we are full of the cosmos. So, you, Greg, you are full of the sunshine, the rain, everything you have been eating, your wonderful moments in nature, your relationships, your education, your culture, your society, everything, all the inputs you’ve had over your entire life have shaped and formed you. And you are a wonderful impermanent continuum that has evolved over time. And this is when we say no self this is what we mean. We are vast, we contain multitudes.

Greg Dalton: And you say a very key word “impermanent” because I sometimes think that, you know, Zen starts with the impermanence of things, change. And it's our human desire to keep the things the same, the attachment to keeping things the same. So, I’m curious about our attachment to permanence and how that relates to climate change and climate disruption.

Sister True Dedication: I think for me probably our insight on it would be that when we can really embrace the truth of impermanence, we become free to explore radical solutions. And I think a lot of the heel dragging and the delays and the obstacles and the compromises and the unmet goals and all of these things just the solutions aren't anywhere near radical enough because there’s too much fear and there’s too much grasping, we’re sure that we need this kind of economy that needs to function this kind of way. We need these kinds of comforts. And it’s just not true. These are not things that make us happier. Happiness is not made of these material systems and comforts. Deep happiness exists far beyond that and so the human need for permanence is a fear of change and a need for security and comfort. And I think this speaks to why we need a spiritual dimension as part of the response to this crisis because actually when we have spiritual strength, we know that our security doesn't lie in this kind of capitalist growth economy. We know that our security doesn't lie in this kind of structure to the economy. So, for me I wish everyone could break through and have a lot less fear of impermanence and to embrace the possibilities of impermanence.

Greg Dalton: So, for most people who are listening to this fair to say they probably don't have a meditation practice. So, what are some little steps people might tiptoe onto this path that you’re talking about because it seems so overwhelming, I have to, you know, sit in silence and darkness for an hour in a row. That sounds hard and scary for me.

Sister True Dedication: Oh, I quite understand that. For us, mindfulness is most of the time outside the meditation hall. So, for those of us who like to experience a little of this for me it would be I would invite your listeners to go out into nature. I don't know maybe they're even listening to this outside in nature. And to take time to relax the body and practice what we call mindful breathing out in the natural world, so, even if it's just a park in an urban setting or your backyard. Put the phone away and to really be with our body and release the tension in our body that you know often in my practice actually what we’re doing is we just sit and suddenly we start listening to our body we come back to the body and the first response is usually, aww my shoulders hurt, aww my knees, aww my jaw is tense. So, there’s a sense and so we actually get a chance to release a bit of tension and use the breathing especially the out breath to release the tension. And many people are familiar with yoga practice and so really allowing the breathing to soothe and calm the body and then just to take time I would say to listen. So, in this case say we’re out and sitting underneath a tree just to listen to the birds and if we’re listening to the birds, we know we’re in the present moment. We know we’re alive, we know we are in touch with the miracles of life. And to just maybe take 10, 20 breaths full in and out breaths listening to the birds, the wind and the leaves whatever's going on, the hum of the city. And just you know sometimes we use simple phrases like breathing in, I know I’m alive. Breathing out, I am so happy to be alive. You know just very simple or breathing in I know I arrive on this planet I know I’m here on this planet. Breathing out, I am home. I'm at home in this moment on this beautiful planet. When this kind of regular practice of just being with our breathing body out in nature and letting the sounds, the smell and the energy of the earth penetrate us it’s like daily medicine and I feel we all need to take time to do it.

Greg Dalton: There’s been a lot of difficult headlines lately with people drowning in subways and fires in Europe and everywhere. Do you experience climate grief and if so, how do you process those difficult feelings about what humans are doing to this ecosystem that we’re a part of that you described the interbeing?

Sister True Dedication: I do experience climate grief, that wonderful word solastalgia. I think I've been living here in Plum Village we’re in the southwest of France, the monastery founded by our teacher 40 years ago. And I've been coming here since I was 20. So, almost 20 years and there are fewer butterflies there’s not the diversity of spiders. They can't grow the same crops anymore so they’re shifting to dryer crops like sorghum. The creeks that used to run with water don't run with water anymore because they have to use all the water for irrigation. The trees struggle from the droughts that we had in the last 10 or 15 years. So, it’s something that I am witness to, just as many of us are where we are, we’ve witness to the changes in the climate where we are, to the changes in the biodiversity. For me, I was struggling with this a couple of years ago and so I decided I needed to introduce some more elements in my day that were more proactive in terms of taking care of my environment. So, my favorite oaks that I could see were struggling in the droughts two years ago, I was able to harvest all the acorns that had started sprouting underneath these two mother oaks, I call them mother oaks. And so, I have 42 oaks that I'm taking care of which requires more attention than you'd ever imagine. But that is my it’s like a daily prayer to tend to them to make sure they have shade and water and so on. It is a way of being with the world, which is myself becoming part of that nurturing. But I think it is very important that we can actively contribute to nurturing life in whatever ways we can and I bring my grief into those moments. And this really comes back to this not measuring unconditional loving action and not measuring. For me, more at the deeper personal level. For me, my wish is to metabolize my grief into action. So, it's to say my grief, what’s grief if not love persevering, right, this is a famous line I think that came out this year. So, our grief is a sign of love and so for me, my grief is also a mindfulness bell, a reminder to keep that love alive and to do whatever I can in how I spend my time and energy to be a part of the solution.

Greg Dalton: And we don’t need to become monastics to do that, right? We don’t need to choose a life path that you've chosen to turn grief into healing actions.

Sister True Dedication: This is where the means and ends is very important. And I think in Christiana Figueres when you had your wonderful conversation with her couple years back you explored this issue with her, which is that as soon as we start the sacrifice the means for the end and we’re getting into a real state because we’re sacrificing the very thing we’re trying to protect in order to protect that thing. This is what we have to be able to transmit to future generations so that they can be in each moment no matter what it looks like no matter how bad it will be they’ll have all the clarity of mind all the courage and all the solidity they need to meet those moments in the right way. And so, this is why you know that for me present moment resilience is most urgent actually, at the moment as well as all the other actions.

Greg Dalton: You mentioned, Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the Paris climate agreement. She is a student of Thich Nhat Hanh. For those who are not familiar with her, her story, you know, she was in a very dark place. She found Buddhism that helped her move forward and really bring the Paris climate accord into being. So, how has she put these teachings into practice because it had a huge impact on Paris climate accord happening.

Sister True Dedication: Yeah, Christiana’s story is amazing. She wrote to Thay a couple years ahead of the Paris climate agreement asking for his support. And then he asked me to take care of this relationship. So, we've been in touch with her all along that road to Paris and then we were able to be there in Paris to support her. And Christiana speaks both on a personal level how Thay’s teachings and the practice of mindfulness and these insights of interbeing have help her in her own path of healing and her own personal resilience and courage and I would say joy, Christiana is full of joy and love. But also, actually in the negotiations themselves Christiana practiced something that she learns and has practiced with us and deepened with us, but is a very talented practitioner of this and that is deep listening, what we called deep and compassionate listening. And so, mindfulness is not only about sitting, it's about everything we’re doing in the day, including how we talk to others and how we listen to others. And there’s a way we can learn to listen that we’re grounded in our body, we're able to follow our breathing while we listen. We’re able to take care of the reactions in our body and mind as we’re listening to the other person. And it allows for really the connection and understanding of the other person whether that other person is someone we love. Whether it's someone we have real difficulties with. And Christiana spoke about this in the negotiations where she was having to listen to so many different parties who were at loggerheads in the negotiations and how that quality of really coming as an openhearted, open-minded, fully present compassionate listener transformed the dynamic in some of these really critical moments in the negotiations. And I think she described it as the soft skill that helped her the most in bringing the Paris agreement together to realize it.

Greg Dalton: Well, looking ahead in the UK there’s gonna be a big climate summit of course COP 26 coming up in Glasgow you're going to be there in some capacity. So how are you looking to Glasgow yourself and how would you suggest that other people who may have some role or thinking about Glasgow approach it mindfully and intentionally?

Sister True Dedication: I think what’s needed most as we approach Glasgow and the COP 26 is courage. It’s quite simply courage and courage rather than compromise, non-fear rather than hesitancy. And we have to open our hearts to this reality that we can save the planet together or we won't save it at all. And we have to operate as one species and we have to help one another and those countries, including my own the UK that have more privilege, more resources. We’re really called upon now on a real moral front really do everything we can to be generous, to be responsible, to be accountable at every level. We’ve had our time, we've had centuries of high consumption. And for me it's really to see each other as human being somehow, we’ve got to get out of the silos of nations and countries and industries and all the rest of it and just made each other as human beings and to really understand what our ancestors and what our descendants are calling on us to do in this moment. We’re not coming as a representative of an oil company, we're not coming as a representative of one country, we're not coming as a representative of one NGO or activist organizations. We’re coming as ambassadors of our species to do our best in this difficult moment to be brave, to be fearless and not to compromise, to embrace all the qualities of impermanence, radical creativity to really find the solutions that we know will work and to not settle for anything less.

Greg Dalton: Sister True Dedication, Zen Buddhist nun and editor of Thich Nhat Hanh’s new book Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. Sister True Dedication, thank you it’s been an honor and a blessing to be with you today. And thank you for sharing your insights and your wisdom about climate and our being what this is calling us to do and be.

Sister True Dedication: Thank you so much, Greg, for having me. It’s been such a pleasure to spend this time with you.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about using emotional resilience to cope with the climate crisis. This is Climate One. Coming up, how to help kids connect with and process their feelings about climate disruption:

Leslie Davenport: Make room for and welcome the feelings. Validate that the feelings are there because you care, because you're paying attention, because it is distressing what's happening to the environment and people and our biosphere as a whole.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking about how mindfulness and other practices can help us cope with the climate crisis. Leslie Davenport is a licensed psychotherapist and author of several books, including Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change. Her new book, All the Feelings Under the Sun: How to Deal With Climate Change, is targeted at middle-school kids. Davenport told Climate One’s Ariana Brious that many kids struggle with climate anxiety and grief.

Leslie Davenport: You know if we’re talking about kids as young as eight and nine, they are still struggling in an appropriate way in an age-appropriate way to get a full context. So, they might just get one little bit of news about the polar bears being threatened or something like that that really touches them in some way. And so, they will often go into that fear, that sadness, that upset without knowing how to put together the full picture of what's happening. I see it a lot actually in physical symptoms. It shows up like stomach aches, headaches, being kind of agitated, maybe not wanting to go to school, being irritable. And it takes you know really good communication and tuning into them and encouraging them to talk more about it to sometimes get to what the real issue is for them.

Ariana Brocious: In your new book All the Feelings Under the Sun, you’re writing to a middle school age audience, but you don’t shy away from or sugarcoat the hard facts about climate disruption. For example, air pollution deaths, colony collapse disorder, environmental racism and I have to say, even as an adult reading this book, I felt some despair and grief reading about some of these things. So, what level of information did you want to convey to these young readers and how hard was it to strike the balance between informing them and scaring them?

Leslie Davenport: Yes, now that's a very fine line. I'm curious as you read the book if you did any of the exercises?

Ariana Brocious: I have done some things like that in my own life, mindfulness practices, breathing, things like that. I didn't do them all, I didn’t do the homework.

Leslie Davenport: Well, and I raise it because the structure of the book was very intentionally built on a trauma model, meaning you present challenging information, some of the things you described and you pair it with emotional resiliency practices or emotional intelligence practices. And it's that going back and forth between the two is called toggling in trauma studies. And it's very intentional that it was presented that way because as you were relating as adults, you know, we get plenty of information but we don't know what to do with it. And the part that's been lacking is really attending to the tremendous emotional response. So, this was very specifically about attending to presenting as clear of information as could be done in a way that didn't sugarcoat it, but as you say didn't shy away from it. But like I said you know so many of these kids were already getting bits and pieces of information or didn't know what to do with it or how does it again fit into this bigger picture of what's happening around them.

Ariana Brocious: Your book validates feelings of grief and fear for young people and then balances that with these tools for coping like breathing strategies and writing exercises. So, just to give an example, can you describe the internal weather report exercise and its purpose.

Leslie Davenport: Yes, the internal weather report comes very early in the book and it's a way to encourage kids to get in touch with their feelings and emotions to identify them, to notice them. So, they’re asked to record three times a day for a while, a couple weeks. How they're feeling in the morning, the afternoon and the evening, but to do it in weather terms such as feeling kind of stormy or really bright and sunny today or a bit hazy or a chance of rain. Partly to make it very accessible, but there's also a teaching in there that our feelings move and change much like the weather moves and changes. And it's a really important part of gaining emotional intelligence because part of the fears that you know strong feelings in and of themselves are not problematic to be afraid or to be sad or to be angry. But we get afraid of the feelings or afraid that if we allow ourselves to experience that we’re just gonna be stuck in that from now on. And it's actually just the opposite that's true. If we become accustomed to recognizing very healthy natural responses to distressing facts, a distressing situation that's occurring and we allow those feelings to arise, we give them validation, we find ways to express them, we connect with others who are feeling the same thing, they tend to shift and flow and it actually frees up our energy to be more available for other things.

Ariana Brocious: Another thing I noticed is that you coach your readers to avoid catastrophic or black-and-white thinking. You give them an exercise to reframe those thoughts which I think is a version of cognitive behavioral therapy. So, I'm curious how did the tools of psychotherapy strengthen this book. I mean they seem to be sort of underpinning the book essentially.

Leslie Davenport: Yes, yes. Well, it's really helpful to understand how our nervous system and our brain works. So, as humans, children and adults, we don't like to be in an in-between not quite sure what's gonna happen unknown place. And so, some of what you see, and I'll talk for a minute more about adults, but it really applies to kids too. You see some of the denial or the turning away which we call disavowal we may acknowledge that climate change is real, but too big too busy kind of approach or some people go toward doom like it’s too late, we can't do anything, just you know resignation. And paradoxically moving to either one of those places provides a kind of psychological relief even the doom because it gets us out of this unsettled in-between place where we can't really land easily. And catastrophizing is one version of that there's other elements that go into doing that but it just gets there's only one thing black-and-white thinking. Hard to stand in the ambivalence, hard to stand in the we’re not sure what's gonna happen and it's too scary to face into this sense of a void, but it does get reframed as that unknown is also creative potential. You know if you think of an artist looking at a canvas or a dancer in an empty room about to create movement it’s the fact that it's open and undefined and a lot of room for possibility that welcomes in a creative response. So, it's getting kids familiar with what they may tend to do because so many of these defenses are unconscious in kids and adults. So, to increase the awareness to reframe it in terms of creative possibilities and to have tools that build an emotional resiliency to tolerate things like uncertainty or big feelings.

Ariana Brocious: You touched on this a little bit but I'm curious as you've been practicing if you find there is a difference or maybe what's different about helping children cope with climate change and these feelings like eco-anxiety and grief as opposed to adults.

Leslie Davenport: You know it's really interesting to look at our life span from infants through old age in a developmental model. How kids and definitely adults are in relationship to both their feelings and internal landscape and big issues like climate change really begin to vary over time. Kids tend to be more curious, more open, more able to access creative expression through art for example. So, in that sense there's a lot of malleability, a lot more possibility beliefs and perspectives haven't solidified. Kids may be carrying their family and parental perspectives about something. So I'm not saying it's you know completely undefined ground, but in general there's a lot more movement there versus people who are older have often invested a lot in their lifestyle in their beliefs in their what they think is important and it gets a little harder to introduce new ways of viewing things new things to consider.

Ariana Brocious: So, are there points of opening where adults can find you know what chance are the things that can shift somebody's perspective things you found that are effective and kind of helping people find new tools.

Leslie Davenport: Yes, I will speak to that but let me add one more thing about children and youth which is that, especially as they get to middle school, certainly high school, definitely early college years. It's the time in life when you look to the future. Do I want to get married, what kind of relationship would I want, what's my career path, what do I dream and envision my life might look like? And boy, you know, that is where the youth today are really feeling the climate anxiety and the climate grief because they are tuned in to the scientific projections about what could unfurl especially without significant and immediate action that changes a lot of systemic structures. There's such a tremendous need to support our youth not only those in the 16 to 24 but the way this book is oriented, those who are traveling through the slightly younger ages and will be there soon. How can we better equip them emotionally, how to think through even getting accurate information because social media is this other whole complicated area? How can we help them form communities of strength and again invest their talents and interests in a way that would support this shift? But to jump back to your question about adults and open-mindedness. You know, I'm sure you're aware being in journalism in the media world eco-anxiety and eco-grief have just jumped way up in public awareness as well as the climate change issue as a whole. And it gets harder to brush it off when even if you haven’t outrun a flood or a wildfire even if you haven’t lived through a hurricane or tornado. When it's unseasonably warm when you live in an area that's never needed air-conditioning and now, you're wondering if you should invest in that. It gets harder and harder to put it off somewhere else. It's affecting other people someplace somewhere off in the future. It's just coming closer and closer to home and that's an eye-opener and something that gives people pause.

Ariana Brocious: So, your book also includes profiles of young climate activists and encourages civic action and engagement in climate issues. Why is it so important to foster personal resilience in our kids and young people, especially those who want to be part of the climate solution?

Leslie Davenport: Well, couple very practical reasons are unless we know how to nurture ourselves kind of reset and replenish, it leads to burnout. I mean, I'm often invited to speak on panels that include young activists and they talk about that very openly. You know there's this sense of urgency they’ve got all this energy they’re putting everything they can into it, but it's challenging work and can be frustrating work. It's not easy to see immediate benefits from all this time, effort and energy. And they struggle kind of staying invested because of burnout. I think burnout is a good way to talk about it, but by building in these emotional resiliency tools it helps bring things into balance. It makes it possible to be in it for the long run. The other practical reason is that we can be more effective. There's something in the book called the window of tolerance or the zone of resilience and it describes how our brains work. That again if we have too many stressors, too many things on our plate. Too many intense emotions or experiences, we tend to lash out and get reactive or we tend to drop out and isolate and withdraw. And if we’re in either one of those places we can't do the work we want to do. All this attention to emotional intelligence and emotional resiliency is about helping people get familiar with that zone of resilience where the edges are, how to grow it, how to stretch it.

Ariana Brocious: Right. Well, as we come to the end here, the book is dedicated to those yet to join us in this beautiful place which to me was a really lovely expression of hope for our future generation, or generations. So, what are the most important things parents should know about supporting their children through climate anxiety and depression?

Leslie Davenport: One is to do their own work. In some ways the kids are more involved in it than many of the adults so it's going to be challenging for parents, teachers for caregivers to look squarely at that issue themselves and their own lives. And kids are also little integrity detectives you know you can talk about you know, reducing waste, or single use items. But if you've got that Starbucks coffee cup on your desk it raises questions and they'll say something. But also to just make room for and welcome the feelings. You know it's again something as a culture that we are all learning to do, even as adults to validate that the feelings are there because you care because you're empathetic because you're paying attention because it is distressing what's happening to the environment and people and our ecosystem as a whole our biosphere as a whole. Not to stay there, but that to validate it as a starting point and that again as we started out with those feelings tend to fluctuate, they come they go they’re like the weather, but they're a very natural response in part of this and we get into bigger trouble if we try and push it aside.

Ariana Brocious: Leslie Davenport is a licensed psychotherapist and author of All the Feelings Under the Sun: How to Deal With Climate Change. Thank you so much for joining us today on Climate One.

Leslie Davenport: Thank you for having me.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about the power of zen, mindfulness and connecting with our emotions as we face climate disruption.

Greg Dalton: Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be difficult--but it’s critically important. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Ariana Brocious is our producer and audio editor. Our audio engineer is Arnav Gupta. Our team also includes Steve Fox, Kelli Pennington, and Tyler Reed. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Should We Have Children in a Climate Emergency?

Otto Pilot — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Should We Have Children in a Climate Emergency?

08/27/2021

Coping with Climate Disruption

Listener Advisory: This episode contains some content related to a suicide. If you or someone you love is thinking about suicide, the National 24-hour Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255.

Climate One talked with three people deciding whether or not to have biological children in the climate emergency about their reasons and process. Virginie Le Masson is a climate change researcher at the University College London.

Guests

Daniel Sherrell

Movement Organizer; Author

Irène P. Mathieu

Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, University of Virginia

Virginie Le Masson

Co-Director of the Centre for Gender and Disaster, University College London

Seb Gould

Physics Teacher

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Climate disruption is in the headlines nearly every day, penetrating deeper into our personal lives. How do we process the meaning of that?

Daniel Sherrell: I actually think what the climate crisis demands of us is holding to each other tighter and gripping faster in solidarity and love rather than saying goodbye to each other in death or in emotional isolation.

Greg Dalton: And in these uncertain times, how are we weighing the decision of whether or not to bring more children into the world?

Virginie Le Masson: On the emotional side I know I want to have children, I always wanted but on the rational side, I don't know.

Irene Mathieu: You know, maybe there is no answer right answer to this ethical debate. But maybe just your certainty and your deep feeling that you are meant to mother in this way is enough to answer the question and then it's about how you do it. (:11)

Greg Dalton: Should we have children in a climate emergency? That’s up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: How do we plan for the next generation to inherit a society destabilised by our addiction to fossil fuels? Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. I’m Greg Dalton.This summer the climate crisis seems to be unfolding faster than ever --with catastrophic floods, huge wildfires, and killer heat. Climate disruption is here, growing more intrusive every day. How do we bear the weight of these changes, and process our fear for what is coming for us, and our children? Author and climate activist Daniel Sherrell wrestles with intergenerational angst in his new book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. He opens with the story of prominent civil rights lawyer David Buckel. Sherrell says after retiring, Buckel became a “titan of composting” in and around Brooklyn, sequestering tons of carbon every year.

Daniel Sherrell: And then out of the blue several years ago he killed himself by setting himself on fire in Prospect Park in the wee hours of the morning before most people were around. If you read his notes and his writings before he took his own life, which are scant, the sense you get is of a man who was increasingly despairing around climate change and cared about it passionately and was doing his little part by sequestering all this carbon and sort of a Herculean effort when it came to local composting and still saw that as a drop in the bucket. Suicide is a very difficult topic and there are many reasons that contribute to an individual’s choice to take their own life. But the sense I got when I found out about his death was first of all, in a sort of strange way it gave voice to some of my own anguish about the climate crisis. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t considered myself you know, suicide as a political act. You know in my most despairing moments when I felt like my God like what tactics are there left to us what cards do we still have left on our sleeves, I had contemplated this thing. Not seriously, never seriously, never actually making plans, but it was a thought that had crossed my mind as I sort of grappled desperately to figure out, to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Greg Dalton: And your mother said, don’t do it because you would only -- right? Your mother implored you not to do it.

Daniel Sherrell: Yeah. And my mother was deeply right and she said, she is a wise and wonderful woman and it’s never something I would do. And I don't I actually think what the climate crisis demands of us is holding to each other tighter and gripping faster in solidarity and love rather than saying goodbye to each other in death or in emotional isolation. So, the first reaction to his death was like oh my God, somebody has actually done it, you know. And the second reaction was God, he must have been so lonely, you know, and I felt that myself you know this feeling of real heaviness around the climate crisis and not seeing cultural avenues around me to process it. And like climate grief still being a sort of illegible emotion in the public sphere and when we talked about this thing called climate change which I never refer to by name in the book for very deliberate reasons it was often in the language of parts per million in the atmosphere or the IPCC reports or the COP conferences.

Greg Dalton: Throughout the book you referred to climate disruption as the problem with the capital P which reminds me of the troubles in Northern Ireland. You rarely use terms like climate change climate emergency, why did you make that choice to not use I guess the technical language that climate change evokes?

Daniel Sherrell: I think for a long time I’d felt sort of dissatisfied with climate discourse in this country. And when the phrase climate change was evoked, it was immediately shunted into this pigeonhole my brain as I think it is for many people, many lay people paying attention to this problem that's like, it's the purview of scientists, it's a very bad current event that is sort of happening up there in the ether, in the headlines. And it doesn't really have much to do like how I’m tucking my kid into bed at night or how I'm thinking about caring for my aging grandparents. And by choosing never to name it in the book I wanted desperately to break it out of its little narrow “environmentalist pigeonhole” as if it were just like one more issue on the long bucket list of issues alongside, you know, tax reform and saving the whales and you know, lead poisoning on our pipes. But was in fact a massive force that was going to change everything about how we live on this planet drastically over the coming centuries. I wanted to be able to like grapple with the full magnitude of that and I felt the phrase climate change was actually thinning in that way. And I also wanted to de-familiarize it for people in that old writerly ploy of making something that people think they knew and have sort of internalized already and put in a certain compartment and that their brain making it fresh again so that a real encounter and a real spiritual, emotional and philosophical encounter can actually occur. Because at the end of the day I don't actually think that what we usually refer to when we say the climate crisis which is mounting greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, leading to a very sick planet, I'm not sure if that's a problem so much as a symptom. And it's a symptom of the very sort of blindered methods of thought and attention we applied to the world around us under late capitalism, in my opinion.

Greg Dalton: Right. So, climate as a symptom rather than a cause. And we talked on Climate One yeah about the capitalism and some of the individualistic and extraction and even colonial mentalities that underlie a lot of that. Explain your resistance to the concept or identity of environmentalism because you write it comes from a root word of environ, which means around, kind of separate from us.

Daniel Sherrell: I think back to my time there’s a chapter in the book where I describe the opportunity I had to walk a traditional songline with an aboriginal tribe in the Northwest of Australia who had just saved that songline from encroachment by the natural gas industry that were trying to build a plant in its middle. But I mention that just to say that I think when talking to folks out there in the Goolarabooloo clan the concept of environmentalism is just like, you know, that makes no sense to them. It’s sort of like saying, oh I subscribe to reality-ism, you know. It’s like the environment is such an all-consuming concept as to be in such a thing that is woven through the absolute texture of reality that to sequester it in its own concept and then anoint with an ism is quite strange because it has a distancing effect. And I think you know in the West, because of that rupture, suddenly that thing starts to suffer because of all the behaviors that rupture allows. And then we’re like, oh no, we have to save the environment as if the environment is not us, you know, it’s a very weird thing. And I also associate it with like multiple decades of the environmental movement being mostly about recycled handbags and CFL light bulbs which I think was a very corporate-friendly, and ultimately unvisionary instantiation of the thing that we’re not trying to build in the climate justice movement which I think is a lot broader.

Greg Dalton: So, we define the environment we separate from the environment and it’s detached from us. Then we realize it's at risk and we need to reconnect with it and understand that we are a dependent and part of it. You write that fossil fuel is everywhere though rarely seen. People pump gas into their cars, but they don't see the gas they smell it. I thought that was really interesting. Can you say more about that sensory relationship?

Daniel Sherrell: The infrastructure undergirding the climate crisis is in many ways quite abstract, right. We talk a lot about fossil fuels but very few people have ever held a lump of coal or seen oil sluicing through a pipeline. The infrastructure of that and the very real things that we’re digging up from the ground which are basically the guts of the earth that we are dredging up and pumping through our cars and our buildings. All of that’s been hidden from us and so there's a way in which the whole the etiology of the problem is just incredibly abstract for people. And I think that contributes to us having a hard time wrapping our heads around it because both the impacts are abstract in some ways. I mean in many ways they’re very real, but they have to deal with parts per million in the atmosphere and probabilistic assessments of how likely extreme weather events are.

Greg Dalton: They’re indirect. It’s not like, you know, if someone pulls the trigger on a gun there’s a consequence, a human consequence. Whereas in climate, you drive a gasoline car and some place, some storm, some bad things happen in a different time and place. So, there's again that disconnect between what we do and the impacts of it.

Daniel Sherrell: Totally. And I think that's why there is much that is demanded of us through policy change and organizing in these next few decades, a tremendous amount. But I also think there are many ways in which we have to sort of like update our culturally normative philosophies about what causality is, about who's responsible for who and about the kinds of things we pay attention to. Because it is the climate crisis makes incontrovertibly clear that the level and breadth of interdependence not only between humans when you know me pumping gas in my car in Washington DC affects a farmer who’s trying to raise a crop from increasingly saline soil in Bangladesh. And not only between humans across time like my pumping gas in my car right now or us succeeding or failing in passing the big reconciliation bill that’s on a knife’s edge in Congress right now will have material impact in people that live probably five or six generations from now. But also the interdependence of the natural world, you know, thinking about if environmentalism is the thing that sees the polar bear on the ice flow and says that’s so sad we should save that polar bear, when what’s increasingly seems like the right attitude is like we’re not separate from that polar bear that it is the canary in our own coal mine.

Greg Dalton: And that’s what indigenous people inherently know. You write that there was no single eureka moment for you to become an activist. Rather, it was slow entrapment. How did that unfold for you and how did you discover your own responsibility or complicitness?

Daniel Sherrell: Yeah. Well, I grew up in a sort of unique position with about the climate crisis. My father is an oceanographic researcher at Rutgers University, he would spend multiple months every year when I was growing up on research voyages to the Antarctic. Basically, you know, doing very esoteric research about how metal particulates in the ocean affect plankton blooms and a lot of other stuff.

Greg Dalton: But drilling ice cores reveals the composition of past atmosphere that’s very direct fundamental climate science.

Daniel Sherrell: Yes, exactly. So, he would not describe himself as a climate scientist but he definitely works with many and he's adjacent to that field. But he would come back and you know, with a little bit of worry in his voice say like, that's not the same continent I went to a decade ago. And because of the albedo effect and other things, you know, the poles are warming much faster than any other place on the planet. So, global warming as a concept was introduced to me extremely early in my childhood and then I had nowhere to go with it.

Greg Dalton: You write that it was difficult for your family to talk about that your dad would say these things and almost like you didn't know where to pick up the thread, were you intimidated or feel inadequate compared to him? I found this part of your book fascinating because I wrestle with that in my own house like how much do I talk about it do I not, do I withhold and how much intensity can the other person handling carry them? So, how did you receive that as a young man?

Daniel Sherrell: I think my father really grappled with those questions, but I also think in the years we’re talking about which was the late 90s, early aughts like the strangest thing for me was based on what my father was telling me I didn't understand why everybody I knew was talking about this all the time. Like it seemed like given what I understood about the magnitude of what he was saying. It just seemed like surreal that it seemed like this little secret between us. I didn't see referred basically anywhere else.

Greg Dalton: Socially constructed silence.

Daniel Sherrell: Exactly, exactly. And I think even for my father like I think culture creates technologies and avenues of feeling you know, like I feel like even subsequent years my father and I have been able to talk much more vulnerably and emotionally about what's happening to our planet. And I think some ways like the culture has shifted under his feet, such that he now has words and frameworks with which to fuel the feelings evoked by the facts that he helped produce. But back in the 90s it was just like the surreal thing that we didn't know where to take it. And I think that was a lesson for me in retrospect, that even somebody who knows all the science, even somebody who's incredibly emotionally available and my father and I have a very close relationship. Even that person has a hard time getting under the surface of the climate crisis in a way that it feels not this abstract current event hovering over your head, but like a personal reality that is going to affect you and your family for the next hundreds of years. And I think figuring out how to do that metabolism of this crisis into something you can hold in your hand and examine and actually establish your own relationship with is an incredibly difficult task, and I also think one of the chief ethical and political responsibilities of what it means to live in the Anthropocene, especially as a young person.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation with author and climate activist Daniel Sherrell. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. Coming up, Sherrell says creating cultural avenues for people to process climate grief and anxiety can lead to more action, and help us feel better:

Daniel Sherrell: Which is why it’s really important that we like, you know, do the work to be able to process what we’re gonna go through for the next century together in public, rather than alone doom scrolling on our Twitter feed.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about processing the emotional intensity of the climate emergency with Daniel Sherrell, author of the new book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Sherrell writes about experiencing a delay or disassociation from his feelings about climate collapse. One concept he explores is the difference between knowledge and realization, a distinction that I find fascinating.

Daniel Sherrell: You know, when you go to a meditation retreat for instance, they’ll kind of give you the knowledge up front whatever the knowledge may be: everything is impermanent, the self is an illusion. They hand you the truths right there on day one. And then you spend literally the rest of your life in a practice that is simply trying to realize the truth whose propositional content you knew from the very beginning. But knowledge is sort of this shallow and kind of binary process. You know the facts or you don't, it’s like you switch on the light switch. Realizing is a practice and it takes a long time. And I think you know when Al Gore and you know God bless Al Gore I wish I would chop off both arms who have made him president in 2000 I think we’d be in very different place, but this often very Western conflation between knowledge and realization was what undergirded An Inconvenient Truth. Because he was like if I just show people the graph if I show people the hockey stick and give them the PowerPoint to the facts are right and it's persuasive, that is equivalent to doing this sort of emotional and philosophical and political work that will get us out of this situation. And, you know, the past few decades have shown that clearly that's not the case that there’s another ingredient involved.

Greg Dalton: As a white man you like me have not grown up enduring what you call “the violence of structural racism” as you write in the book. You also mentioned that you feel guilty for not being really vulnerable to the direct impacts of burning fossil fuels. How does your privilege inform your work as a writer and activist?

Daniel Sherrell: I think my relative privilege is the thing that embeds in me a deep responsibility to actually take on this crisis. Because we live in a country and an economy where you know it runs on desperation in many ways. Hopefully our gradual move away from neoliberalism will lessen that but there are a lot of people that just have a hard time making ends meet in this country. In a way it’s a privilege to have all the lower rungs of my Maslow's pyramid covered, don't have to worry about food, don't have to worry about housing, don't have to worry about severe sickness or disability. That leaves me with a lot of extra capacity. And you're damn right and when you use that capacity to try to make lives of the privilege that I enjoy life of basic dignity and at times leisure accessible to everybody. If that's not what I'm using my privilege for I don't know what it's for.

Greg Dalton: And you write that you’re surprised how few people are involved in doing that who are comfortable as you are. In New York City all it takes is one large meeting room to accommodate a good portion of the millennials who make a living trying to forestall the apocalypse. How do you handle and think about the apathy among your peers and neighbors?

Daniel Sherrell: I actually don't I wouldn't call it apathy. I want to be generous to people here. I think for a lot of people it's overwhelm. It’s in fact, I think a feeling that is too deep-seated and too isolating to even really be talked about. And so, people bury it and move on with their lives. I don't know if that's true for everybody, but that’s my most generous reading. And I think creating cultural avenues where people can feel safe bringing these feelings to light is actually going to lead to an increasing outpouring of like people not acting as if they're apathetic and hiding their anxiety or their grief behind sort of like blindered walls of feeling. Which is why it’s really important that we like, you know, do the work to be able to process what we’re gonna go through for the next century together in public, rather than alone doom scrolling on our Twitter feed. But I also think that like you know ultimately, we’re never gonna get a majority of people active in the climate movement, just like in every important social movement in the history of the world. I think the people I worry more about obviously are the active obstructionists like the very few corporate executives and the politicians they've purchased who are literally the only people on the planet incentivized to watch the world burn and the power they still wield over our democracy. So, I think a lot of people feel guilty about the climate crisis, A, because they’ve been suckered into this framework that if we just screw in the right light bulbs or if they are just better recycling then it’ll be solved--

Greg Dalton: Yeah, thanks to the Crying Indian and all that.

Daniel Sherrell: Yeah, it’s, you know, and it’s a very clever move by the fossil fuel industry. It dovetailed with sort of like the Puritan ethic, it dovetailed with our identity as individual consumers under late capitalism. And it left them completely off the hook because what actually has to happen is we need to regulate, build the political power to regulate those corporations into the ground because they are sociopathic actors. So, on the one hand I like if anything, I try to alleviate people of their guilt because I think the fossil fuel industry wants you to feel guilty. They want you to feel horrible at yourself because that bedrock is a very bad bedrock from which take political action.

Greg Dalton: Your group was ultimately successful helping to decarbonize New York economy over the next three decades. How did that make you feel and what needs to happen next?

Daniel Sherrell: Well, on the one hand I feel proud of that victory. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, as it was ultimately named is still one of if not the most aggressive climate and equity policies passed at the state level in the country. It wasn't just the climate, people working on this. In fact, it wasn't the climate people leading on this. It was environmental justice communities, it was community organizations representing low-income communities of color. It was labor unions. We actually had to like form alliances with people we hadn’t always seen eye to eye with in order to build the political constituency that could actually wield enough power to get a bill of this magnitude passed. And I think there's a real beauty in that sort of coalition building. It was you know our target the person we are trying to convince to give his imprimatur to this bill was of course a certain New York governor who is now going down in political flames. You know, the process of passing this bill was like he resisted and resisted and resisted us for a year and a half and then when he finally felt the political headwinds were too much he got in front of the parade and gave the bill his own name, which were like you know were fine. If your ego is gonna be the thing that gets us across the finish line, fine. But I’ve been thinking a lot, you know, with the scandals recently about how that administration governed and how absolutely backward it is and not up to the challenge of the climate crisis because they were essentially a status quo body. And when you push them on something ambitious, you know, I would get calls I remember one instance getting a call from his Chief of Staff, Melissa DeRosa, and, you know, these people don't even wait for you to say hello, they just start screaming down the phone at you. You know, the governor is already like leader in the nation on climate change all the stuff and just basically trying to use an animal fear to like beat you into submission. And there was a basic resistance to any visionary change in the status quo that we had to build a lot of power in order to overcome.

Greg Dalton: This book is addressed to a future unborn child of yours and follows your struggle to consider whether or not to conceive of a child, which is the theme of this episode of Climate One. The prose is bittersweet, heartfelt and full of longing. It really resonated with me as a dad with two young adults. Where do you sit on the idea of having a child at this moment?

Daniel Sherrell: I think a lot of people ask me that and I don't, I haven't landed on a firm yes or a firm no after writing this book. Mostly because this book uses that question as a way into thinking about the climate crisis, but I didn't feel like I wanted to land on a take at the end. And obviously also this will not be a unilateral decision; this will be a decision made with my partner. But I think part of my impetus for writing the book was that you know the deeper I got into thinking about the climate crisis, the more it became clear to me that for a while and sort of without any conscious foresight on my end I had like this framework of wanting to be a father like thinking that that would be a beautiful process and also feeling deeply ambivalent about that prospect given what I knew about the scientific projections. And the more I thought about that being clear that while I couldn't in good conscience, bring a new person against without their consent into this sort of world if I wasn't ready with like a physical document that I could hand them to start the conversation and hold each other in the conversation about the world that they’ve been brought into. And that if I couldn’t write that document and have it feel emotionally honest, then I couldn't have a family. So, this was both like a preparation and a test for myself writing this book. It’s still quite possible that I won't have children for a variety of reasons, but I think, do I think there's a normative answer to this for everybody? Absolutely not. I think having children is still you know is one answer to the question: do I think the human project should continue?

Greg Dalton: Have you talked to your dad about it?

Daniel Sherrell: I have talked to my dad about it and I know that my parents wanna be grandparents. And I think that's a very human instinct and one I'm deeply sympathetic to. But I think part of it is also their are sort of, not uncomplicated but less complicated position toward this question you know I think they have a hard time fully realizing, internalizing the climate crisis. I mean, I certainly do, and all their schemas were set in a world all their understanding is what the world is and how it works were sort of fixed in a period where global warming wasn’t anywhere on the map, you know. Exxon knew about it and was systematically suppressing it, but for lay people like my parents you know their formative years it wasn’t really on the horizon. So, I think it's hard and unsettling for them sometimes to see how much this rocks me like really rocks me in a way they can't quite access. But to their credit, they've come to respect that I think and give me space for that in a way that I'm deeply grateful for and that I, you know, I hope can become more common among boomers. Because other reactions I see more mainstream reactions was like oh, you’re overreacting you snowflake or like don’t be afraid like your generation is gonna solve it. And it’s like okay, thanks for passing the buck, bro.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, well, as a boomer I’m grateful for your book and your work. It really resonated with me as a climate professional and as a father struggling with some of these things. Daniel Sherrell is author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, a beautiful book. Daniel, thanks for your work and for your time.

Daniel Sherrell: Yeah, thanks so much, Greg. This is great.

Greg Dalton: The decision of whether or not to have biological children can be fraught for those concerned about our climate-disrupted present and future. Irene Mathieu [ee-wren MATT-chew] is a pediatrician and writer in Virginia.

Irene Mathieu: I have fallen on the side of having at least one child, I just gave birth to my first child three weeks ago, so I have a newborn at home right now. And it was definitely a year’s long decision.

Greg Dalton: Virginie Le Masson is a research fellow at the University College London focused on climate change and environmental degradation.

Virginie Le Masson: On my side it’s been two years of debating questioning and we still haven't made a formal decision as to whether having children.

Greg Dalton: And Seb Gould is a high school physics teacher, also in the UK.

Sebastian Gould: Me and my partner, we’ve debated for a very, very long time and we’ve come pretty solidly on the side of not having a child based on climate.

Greg Dalton: Climate One’s Ariana Brocious takes it from here.

Ariana Brocious: Irene, I was curious if you could explain your thinking about the climate disruption that we’re seeing and maybe how your thinking has changed a little bit and how you ended up arriving at the decision to conceive a child.

Irene Mathieu: Sure. So, I basically ever since I was a kid always imagined myself being a parent and it was something I just assumed that I would do at some point. And I started to have doubts or questions around that probably in my mid-20s as I became more aware of the climate crisis and then increasingly even more recently in the past couple of years, I’m currently doing a Master’s degree in public health. And I've gotten pretty involved in some activism and advocacy with a group of physicians who work on climate issues here locally. So, becoming more aware of these issues made the decision feel a little bit more tenuous for me and I spent a couple of years talking about this with my partner. And ultimately, what I decided was that there are two kind of big concerns in my mind. The first one was the ethical or sort of carbon footprint rationale for having a biological child, and whether or not I could justify that, and it seems like a selfish decision to have a child just because I wanted one. And then the other concern that I had of course was just the planet’s livability and my child's life in the future and whether or not they would have the kind of life I would want them to have. I think realistically when we look at what's happening with climate change it is very economically and geographically stratified and we see the effects of the climate crisis are not distributed equally in society. And so, for me personally, I think that I have the resources at this point to be able to provide my child with a life that I would hope that they would have. I think it's a false equivalency to say that humans must, you know, forestall things like as basic as having a child for climate change when we have large corporations and governments that refuse to regulate. And the real reason we have climate change is because of that, it's not because one person decides to have a child or two children or not.

Ariana Brocious: I wanted to ask Virginie if she can explain her thinking about it and how it is also changed because I think some of the things that you highlighted have factored into her decision as well.

Virginie Le Masson: Yes, absolutely I can relate to lot of Irene’s questioning and points. My doubts are very much related to the work that I do. And for the past 12 years I guess I read every day about the impacts of environmental degradation and the impacts that fall upon very diverse communities across the world. And so, obviously there is an argument that says because I’m privileged I live in the UK. I come from Europe I don't have to worry about accessing resources to protect my livelihood or to protect my families and my children are likely to be protected as well. But I find it really difficult to see myself in isolation from sort of the things that we witnessed elsewhere. We are all impacted by the levels of pollution of water of soils and air. And the severity of the consequences of that position for human health is dramatic and we know only a little of it because it's under-documented. And especially for children's development we only start to see the tip of the iceberg really and that's extremely concerning for me. I am very conscious with the moral responsibility of bringing a child to life and having to accept the risk that they will face themselves hardship in their lifetime. But this particular hardship of losing someone close, particularly a parent is one that I found really difficult to reconcile because I feel directly responsible for it. And it’s related to my work because I feel like the risk of me falling ill or my partner falling ill or my children falling ill because of environmental degradation is now rising exponentially. And that's how I find it really difficult to make a rational decision about conceiving a child given this awareness and knowledge that the environmental degradation we have created and that we are leaving to the next generations.

Ariana Brocious: Seb, you had said that some of the reasons you and your partner have thought maybe you won't have children, biological children, has to do with some of the inequities between men and women when it comes to child bearing, right or child rearing, really.

Sebastian Gould: So, that’s one of the issues actually that my partner leans quite heavily towards now. A lot of it is to do with the inequities just globally. So, we've quite recently comes to conclusion that it’s quite a privilege not to have a child and to be able to live a normal life. So, you know, across the world there are so many people who through lack of access so I mean if you look at the south in the US a lot of anti-abortion laws, economically it’s not very viable for a lot of countries. Having access to the health care,to the ability to not have a child is quite a privilege. So, that's one of the reasons why she is quite adamant on not having a child. But as well it’s to do with the fact that a lot of the responsibility with fall on to my partner. So, in the UK at least, I, as a man would have about 2 to 3 maybe four weeks with the paternity leave. And for my partner, it would be about three months full pay maternity leave. So, a lot of the responsibility would fall to her. We’re financially incentivized to have that sort of quite sexist idea of or should I say chauvinistic idea of raising a child where the man is the breadwinner and the woman stays at home. And we’re not quite a fan of that.

Greg Dalton: After the break we’ll continue this conversation about whether or not to have children in the climate crisis. This is Climate One. Coming up, children as a symbol of hope for the future:

Irene Mathieu: If 20 years from now, we have gotten off our addiction to fossil fuels and we have created new systems will I regret not having a child? Yes, I absolutely think that I would. (:10)

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking with three people about their journey to decide whether or not to conceive a child amid the unfolding climate crisis. Irene Mathieu is a pediatrician who just had her first child. Virginie Le Masson is a climate researcher still debating the matter, and Seb Gould is a physics teacher who has mostly settled on not having biological children. Climate One’s Ariana Brocious spoke with them.

Ariana Brocious: So, I was gonna ask all of you what has been the discussion that you've had with your partner on this and have you been in agreement have you disagreed. Has it been a negotiation between the two of you to arrive at whatever point you've landed at with this decision?

Irene Mathieu: I can speak to that. So, my partner is definitely not as emotionally concerned about this as I am, and has been very much on the side of wanting to have children as long as I've known him. And we've had many conversations about this and basically, he sorts of fallen on the side of yes, it is a selfish decision to have a child. Human beings are fundamentally selfish and I don't think we can avoid that and if it weren't having children, there would be other selfish things we would be doing. And on the whole that life is more worth living than not, which I agree with on that point. And so, bringing a child into the world could be an important source of joy for both us and for that child. And we’ve both talked about how you know having a child could be also an opportunity to help make a difference if we can raise that child with an awareness of the climate crisis that we didn't have growing up. So, he's very much in favor. I think where we are still debating is the number of children. I feel that it's hard for me to justify more than replacement level fertility, so more than two children and he really wants three so we’ll continue to negotiate that.

Sebastian Gould: I think that’s a really fantastic idea honestly having that. Because I think a lot of people's main concern about the climate crisis and children is the idea of overpopulation, especially with countries in the West where the carbon impact of you know people living in America and the UK and Europe are so much higher than other people living all around the world. I think it’s quite interesting, Irene, that you said that it's you are aware that it was quite a selfish idea because that was one of the first things I said to my partner about having a child that it’s quite a selfish idea of thinking I want to have my child and I want to make its life better than mine as a sort of vanity project. And it’s something that my partner never even thought about because she just grew up with the idea of oh that's just what you do. I think I've mellowed out a lot more so I don’t think the idea of having a child is as inherently selfish. I think I’ve got a lot of selfish reasons as well why I don’t want to have a child.

Ariana Brocious: In this episode we’re also talking with author Daniel Sherrell and he's written a book somewhat addressed to a future child of his that he writes, “I realized if I was ever going to start a family. If I was going to bring you into the collapsing world at hand. I’d owe you an honest account of why.” So, I'm wondering if for those of you who are thinking of having children or have, if that’s something you thought about that you would sort of need to explain to them your decision to have them?

Virginie Le Masson: That's part of the issue for me is I don’t know yet what I would say especially if they suffer for all sorts of reasons. How do I face myself if they ever blame me for coming to life and haven't had a choice? And a lot of people argue that it's a gift to be brought to life and we should be grateful for it. But it has, there could be so much suffering, for which we can try and compensate for it especially if we have privileges. But we can't control everything and so, the question and the dilemma I’m facing is that do I accept on behalf of another person to take the risk for them. And I know I would dedicate all my energy and heart to help them as a responsible parent but yeah, I can’t control everything. And this is why it’s so difficult to make a rational decision. On the emotional side I know I want to have children I always wanted but on the rational side, I don't know. And I've kind of had the same sort of a dilemma before that Irene raised and also Seb about, you know, the responsibility, the carbon footprint of children. Some people said, I was the best climate advocate because I didn't children and some people say why you’re so selfish not to want to have children how can you deny your parents to become grandparents. There are all these social sorts of injunctions on this especially on women, which I came to terms with and I don’t really feel pressured or...It's rather actually, this I'm blaming my partner because he’s brought this literature that I wasn't aware of from his philosophy teacher who wrote this piece asking is it moral to have children. And this brought to me so many questions I never considered before including the first one I’m battling with is how do I tell my children if they are unhappy if they’re suffering that I made a conscious choice to bring them up to life because I wanted to have them. Is this valid, is this good enough? I still don't know.

Ariana Brocious: So, you've raised this really important question about this sort of rational versus emotional part of this decision. And so, and how you can struggle when those don't actually meet up. Have the other two of you struggled with that part of it?

Irene Mathieu: Absolutely. I actually spent much of my pregnancy writing a long essay about this very issue. That rationally, I think for me anyways, it is very clear that having children is probably not a great idea, but I think the larger maybe the larger force for me in making this decision is intuitive and not rational. And I had a conversation with a friend before I got pregnant and I was sort of outlining these thoughts to her and she is somebody who's decided not to have children, although not for climate reasons for other reasons. And she said, you know, maybe this is not there is no answer right answer to this ethical debate. But maybe just your certainty and your deep feeling that you are meant to mother in this way is enough to answer the question and then it's about how you do it. There are people who choose not to have children and people who choose to have children. And I think all of us are important in the climate crisis and all the other crises facing the world. But, you know, one thing that was helpful for me in coming to this decision was thinking about all of the populations of people who have gone through crises that felt world-ending in a way. I think about my ancestors who may have been enslaved and certainly not every reproductive choice in that system was really a choice. But there are people who have chosen who continue to choose to have children under really, really catastrophic conditions and it's a symbol of hope. And so, I think for me really following my intuition for a choice this big made more sense than trying to settle a rational or ethical debate because I think that it's kind of an impossible question.

Sebastian Gould: Yeah, the idea of the rational versus the irrational part of your brain almost like the lizard part of your brain that wants to reproduce like that's the whole reason why we’re here because humans keep on reproducing and we do it well. So, it’s sort of fighting that instinct really and, yeah, I mean I’d say for myself and even my partner I think just yesterday she just said, I love the idea of getting pregnant. But then for her at least it’s thinking about oh but then it’s all the other stuff that comes with having a child. And I think when I think about that quote that you gave from the author, I don’t think I could ever justify to a standard that I’d be happy with to any future children that I would have had a reason to bring them into this world. I don’t think I could reasonably justify that and I think that’s really the crux of the issue. If I don't feel that I can do that then I just simply won’t.

Virginie Le Masson: From my perspective I change every day. One day I feel like I'm ready and the next I’m like never, no way. And it has been the case for two years now and up to the point when we decided to set ourselves a deadline because there’s also the time issue that for me is the biggest problem actually. And actually, I think we are blessed in this generation that people are very cautious not to put too much pressure to us. And we are surrounded by very diverse relationships with people who decide not to have children with same sex couples or. And it's wonderful to see that no matter what we’re gonna be fine and people will respect our decisions. And I know it's not the case in many other societies. But that also means that it changes our own decision making process. There was a time a year and a half where actually we thought we were not gonna have children at all. And now I think it’s not so certain. And to allow ourselves to be hesitant and to be transparent was really helpful at least for me because it's okay to change our minds as well.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, and I want to jump in here because this is you know, as evidenced by our discussion. This is a really fraught and difficult decision for a lot of people. It's emotional, it's heavy. But there are some 3 million children born every year just in the US alone and I would be willing to bet a lot of those parents for whatever reason are not thinking about these issues, at least to the degree that you all have. So, Irene you've touched on this already but I mean, how much do you think your decision your personal decision in this matter in the larger scheme of things?

Irene Mathieu: Honestly probably not much. I think it matters mostly for assuaging my own personal sense of guilt or goodness in the world. I don't think that the carbon impact of one or two children is going to change the tide of the climate crisis even children in a high-income society like the US. And so, I don't really think that my decision matters that much in the larger scheme and I think one of my bigger concerns that I alluded to at the beginning about this whole question is the idea of the carbon footprint which was created by British Petroleum to put the onus back on individuals and say we need to watch how much toilet paper we use and how many miles we drive because it's our fault instead of taking responsibility for really contributing to the climate change as big industries. And so, I'm more interested I think at this point in shifting my energy and my focus to bigger policy issues rather than my own individual decisions, which are really kind of small fish when it comes to the actual impact.

Sebastian Gould: I don't want to sound pessimistic or anything, but what about living in a world where we can't change, you know, how big companies pollute the ocean and surely the best decision we can make then, is to not have to, you know, reproduce people who use these big businesses’ services. That for me is one of the things that I feel quite passionately about is yes, we should be advocating for better policies you know in government to regulate these huge corporations. To tax them appropriately and to regulate them but at the end of the day, chances are that that’s just gonna carry on. I mean I don't wanna sound pessimistic but for me that decision is I've made the choice to not have someone else need to use this stuff. For me, that’s another part of my reasoning there and I don’t know how you feel about that.

Irene Mathieu: I guess part of me thinks we can’t predict the future, and while I would also say my nature is probably to be a little more pessimistic as well. If 20 years from now, we have gotten off our addiction to fossil fuels and we have created new systems will I regret not having a child? Yes, I absolutely think that I would. And so, that plays a big role in my thinking, but also, I think part of the responsibility that I've now accepted in having a child is trying to divest as much as possible from those systems. And I know that I can’t do it a hundred percent but you know I live within walking distance of our local elementary school and several grocery stores. We’ve discussed getting investing in solar power so our home can be solar powered. And those are certainly very privileged decisions, at least in the US not everyone can make those decisions. But I think that if I'm going to have a child in a society like this one that is part of my responsibility. Becoming pescatarian is something once I finish breast-feeding and can sort of afford to do that calorically trying to really reduce our meat intake. So, things like that I think are absolutely part of our responsibilities. So, my child learns how to live in a way that is minimizing that resource usage.

Virginie Le Masson: Perhaps I can bring a middle ground there. Part of the reason why my thinking changes so much it’s also because in the last two years we've witnessed Fridays For Future and the rise of the youth movement for climate change. That’s been fantastic to witness and to support and to see all these young people so much more informed than we ever were at their age. So many young girls, you know, taking to the streets to protest for things that they care about and that they can and they’re not scared to protest. This is bringing me a lot of hope, which has also changed my perspective and slightly shifted the attention on my responsibility to actually trusting the future generation because at some point, people would try to reassure me saying because you care then your children will care but then I felt it’s unfair on them because it's put the responsibility on them rather try to think more collectively that I trust the next generation to care more. And we cannot change at the moment what’s going on at the highest level and believe me this is part of my job trying to influence policy decisions being done at the UNFCCC negotiations for example. It’s so slow and so yes slow that I don't have any hope within that process. Rather I feel like this more localized or perspective to think about my own community and having this conversation about procreation actually is changing little things at the local level. It brought me joy and hope actually much more than any other aspect of climate activism so far.

Ariana Brocious: Virginie, I had a question for you because at the beginning of this conversation you have been the person who’s still undecided. What if anything that either Seb or Irene has said resonated with you and has maybe given you something new or different to think about or will continue to sort of I don’t know be part of your thinking on this as you go forward.

Virginie Le Masson: I completely agree with Seb’s pessimism. I feel the same way this sort of feeling of frustration and yeah, and it’s really draining and it's not a happy place and also completely share his partner’s thinking around the imposition of society's norms on reproductive roles for example. And if I knew that my partner had equal paternity leave that would really change my decision, I think. And on the other hand, giving Irene just having a baby just brings me so much hope. I feel like actually this resonates with my guts and that it goes to this emotional feeling that this is probably what I want and that’s what I’m gonna try probably to go to. Because my partner is so indecisive that I felt it’s almost down to me to really decide. And it’s also related to this question of rights and reproductive rights. And a woman, I feel like I’m in control of my contraception and part of it is quite a big responsibility. So, hearing someone who’s came over this doubt and this dilemma with some really good reasons, it gives me a lot of hope.

Ariana Brocious: Well, thank you all so much for taking the time to talk about this really difficult subject frankly. And thanks for joining us here on Climate One.

Irene Mathieu: Thanks for having us.

Sebastian Gould: Thank you very much.

Virginie Le Masson: Thank you.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about the difficult decision of whether or not to have children in the climate crisis. Here’s a note about the big picture before we end. Global fertility rates are falling. In the United States, the birth rate has been declining for several years and in 2019 - before covid - hit the lowest rate in 32 years. A 2018 New York Times poll on the issue cited top reasons as the high cost of child care, desire for leisure time and financial uncertainty. A third of young adults identified climate change among reasons for having fewer than their ideal number of kids. The issues are complicated, but Irene, Seb and Virginie have a lot of company. Special thanks to Stanford researcher Britt Wray for her help with this week’s episode. Find a link to her thoughtful blog about parenting and climate in the show notes on our website.

Greg Dalton: To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

All-Time Favorites

6 Episodes

Play

Power Shift: Jamie Margolin and Dorceta Taylor

Otto Pilot — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 07:56:27 +0000

Power Shift: Jamie Margolin and Dorceta Taylor

10/30/2020

How does power shape our climate and our future? For young activists, speaking climate truth to power can be daunting when climate change is here and now and your future seems in doubt.

“No little girl is like dreaming and she's like, I hope to spend the rest of my life desperately fighting against this massive catastrophe,” says Jamie Margolin, co-founder of the youth climate justice organization Zero Hour.

At age 18, Margolin is also author of Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It – though she’s under no illusion about the kinds power young people can actually wield.

“A lot of young people can’t vote yet ... they don't hold the political power in terms of office and don’t hold all these other things,” she says. “The power that we do have is to shift the needle towards change by shifting the culture, because culture shifts cause shifts in law.”

As we think about a shift of U.S. presidential power, how can we expect those who do wield power to confront the twin crises of covid and climate?

“It is precisely for people when they vote to not just think of the vote as voting for health or voting for schools or libraries, but to start connecting the dots,” says Dorceta Taylor, Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School for the Environment. “That's another dimension of power.”

An original leader of the environmental justice movement, Taylor sees support for strong racially inclusive climate action garnering power, as evidenced by this year’s street demonstrations, school strikes, and the first-ever question about environmental justice during a presidential debate

“Once you can start connecting large things that look unrelated, then you really have taken a very first step in liberating yourself, educating yourself, but making a very informed decision that would make it very clear how you should vote in this upcoming election.”

This program was recorded via video on October 26, 2020 and September 15, 2020.

Guests

Jamie Margolin

Co-Founder, Zero Hour

Dorceta Taylor

Professor of Environmental Justice, Yale School of the Environment

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Talking climate truth to power is no small undertaking.

Jamie Margolin: No little girl is like dreaming and she's like, I hope to spend the rest of my life desperately fighting against this massive catastrophe.

Greg Dalton: Fighting for environmental justice can be overwhelming when climate change is here and now, and putting your future in doubt.

Jamie Margolin: You have your moment where you’re like literally the world is trash and nothing means anything, but then all you can do is continue to act.

Greg Dalton: As we think about a transfer of U.S. presidential power, how will our leaders confront the twin crises of covid and climate?

Dorceta Taylor: It is precisely for people when they vote, to not just think of the vote as voting for health or voting for schools or libraries, but to start connecting the dots. That's another dimension of power.

Greg Dalton: Climate, Justice, and Power. Up next on Climate One.

---

Greg Dalton: How does power shape our climate and our future? Climate One conversations feature all dimensions of the climate emergency, the personal and the systemic, the exciting and the scary. I’m Greg Dalton.

Jamie Margolin: The power that we do have is to shift the needle towards change by shifting the culture. Because culture shifts cause shifts in law.

Greg Dalton: Jamie Margolin is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of the youth climate justice organization Zero Hour. At age eighteen she’s also the author of Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It. She’ll join us later to explain how she’s helped build a climate youth movement, from first-time activists to families on the frontlines of pollution -- a subject that came up in the most recent Presidential debate.

Potus: The families that we’re talking about are employed heavily, and they’re making a lot of money, more money than they’ve ever made.

Dorceta Taylor: When you look at those jobs, they’re short-term, they’re low wage, they are not jobs that help people in the long haul.

Greg Dalton: That’s Dorceta Taylor, Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School for the Environment, and an original leader of the environmental justice movement. I began our conversation by asking Dr. Taylor for her reaction to a definition of power cited by Dr. Martin Luther King in March of 1968. Speaking in Memphis to striking sanitation workers, he said QUOTE We can all get more together than we can apart, we can get more organized together, than we can apart. This is the way to gain power, power is the ability to achieve purpose. Power is the ability to affect change. We need power.”

Dorceta Taylor: I think it's very prescient, and it's still very a propos about what's going on, because power really is not only the ability to do things, but it's also the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. And it's the ability of groups of people to consolidate and extend, actually elevate their ability to get their desires accomplished, and we are seeing that in the US, at an unprecedented level, were very small numbers of people are able to put forward narratives, but also to execute plans to get outcomes that they desire to benefit themselves and those that they value, but also to disenfranchise authors who are not in the in-group with them. Today with traditional ways of organizing and doing and mobilizing in addition to technology to media to kind of understand global inter-connections, we're able to do it on massive scales with very different amounts of resources, so with power comes that understanding of how one can manipulate various things to get that outcome, even if one's poor or one’s not in the traditional class of power brokers.

Greg Dalton: Right, and supporters of strong racially inclusive climate action have garnered power this year as evidenced by their presence in the street, the school strikes, and the first ever question about environmental justice during a presidential debate. Debate moderator Kristen well, car as President Trump why people in Texas living near oil refineries and chemical plants should give him another four years when he's eliminated Environmental Protections that regulate those types of facilities. What did you think when you heard or read about that question?

Dorceta Taylor: You know, a response to that is it is precisely for people when they vote, to not just think of the vote as un-voting for health or in voting for schools or libraries, but to start connecting the dots, that's another dimension of power in how we understand how things that might seem completely disparate, do I live beside a coal-fired plant or not, or do I... Lieder is indeed related to how many covid cases are in your community, how the healthcare system operates, what kind of hospitals you have, what kind of schools, illnesses in school, your children perform, and it's on the electorate, regardless of education, regardless of cultural background, once you can start connecting large things that look unrelated, then you really have taken a very first step in liberating yourself, educating yourself, but making a very informed decision that would make it very clear how you should vote in this upcoming election.

Greg Dalton: And isn't it true that people of color actually pull higher when it comes to climate concern and change, partly because of the reasons you just said that they're often closer to the impacts...

Dorceta Taylor: Indeed, not only do they pull higher studies that have been conducted since the early 1990s, again, at the beginning of the formalizing of the environmental justice movement, the League of Conservation Voters have tracked how people are voting, and they've tracked the Senate and the House and black congressional representatives, vote more systematically pro-environment, support environmental legislation than any other group in Congress, and that's something that doesn't often pop out, but that kind of pro-environmental voting record has transition or is translated into the communities that they represent wanting these things. So it's not just League of Conservation Voters. If we look at Gallup polls that go back quite distance, decades, we see African-Americans, Latinx communities are more likely to say they will support government spending for environmental improvements than other groups in the society, and so what we're seeing with the youth around climate and the interest in climate and the activism that's going on on the crown around across the country is coming out of that background of communities that are willing to pay for and opt for options that will improve our chances in terms of dealing with negative climate impacts.

Greg Dalton: There's another current going the other direction though, which is fossil fuel companies have cozied up to the NAACP and other organizations to try to get black and Latinx communities to come on board for some of their plans, power plants, etcetera, that aren't necessarily in the interest of the members of those organizations, so speak to the other side about how some powerful fossil fuel interests have tried to work their way into those communities of color and some of the top tier institutions

Dorceta Taylor: Yes, good question. And that piece of it has always been a part of the divide and conquer strategy, so if you go back again to the 1980s, 1990s, corporations, for instance, when they wanted to site their polluting facilities in the south, they would come in with the promise of jobs. So they take the economic argument, and when you look at those jobs, their short-term, their low wage, they are not jobs that to help people in the long haul, so that's been a long-term strategy to try to get some communities of color to host these facilities or to get organizations led by people of color to endorse what's going on. They have never made extremely large inroads into the wider community, because if you look at again, if you look at climate, if you look at broader environmental justice for everyone or so group that they might get to endorse or to collaborate, you have a large number of other groups completely opposing or not wanting to be a part of the corporate, necessarily corporate response, that being said, you do have to think through what are the ways in which we move forward to get better environmental outcomes, if that's the long game is, if that's the long-term goal, then one has to see how that happens, how does one hold corporations responsible for harms, but also help them to see how they can shift and help the communities that are being affected to see how they can actually improve environment, community living, but overall standards.

10:27 S1: The American story is largely about land and Manifest Destiny, and in this election, one side presents a story of glorious American exceptionalism and white dominance and other side is reckoning with an American story that's fraught with actions that are hard for white people to confront the stealing of land from indigenous Americans and enslaving blacks and keeping out Asians. What does that story from your perspective, and what do we not learn in school that we should have...

Dorceta Taylor: Yes, in school, I think many people missed or the discussion just didn't occur around how do we still all benefit, but acknowledge difficult chapters in history that occurred, difficult decisions in moral decisions, decisions that were patently incorrect. How do we acknowledge those and think about our society today, and think about how do we move forward and make some of those home? So when we have a country in which some people were deliberately seen as objects as just tools to get agriculture completed, to clear the land, people that have no rights simply because of their skin color, other people whose lands were just... Someone just looked at it and decide, I want that, I'm gonna take it. You will not have it. How do we today, with the hindsight of history, but with, I think in some ways, a more sophisticated understanding of how we should engage as human beings, how do we move forward and have that respect for each other, have that understanding that somebody's skin color shouldn't be so fearful that they're killed simply because of how they look, not because of what they think, not because of what they can contribute to the society, but simply based on how they look, how are we gonna in the long haul, succeed as a society, if we continue what we're continuing now. Who’s to say we're not killing off the next person who could invent the very thing that could save us all when we run out of resources, what are we gonna do in this country when in about another 25 or 30 years, we become a country where there are more people of color in the country than white, what are we gonna do, and how are we preparing ourselves to reconcile that and get the best out of each other, not the worst, not elevate the people who are willing to play to the worst, but to go through the uncomfortable spaces that we need to traverse to be able to understand and move in a way that we all benefit later on hen we need clean water, fresh air, enough food as a globe for us to all survive.

---

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about climate and justice in 2020. Coming up, finding inspiration in history for environmental justice today.

Dorceta Taylor: Harriet Tubman -- I was reading a bedtime story to my twin daughters when they were about three years old. I felt I just stopped in my tracks, and I said, she's an environmentalist, she's one of the earliest environmentalists.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

---

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about climate, justice, and shifting powers with Dorceta Taylor, Professor of Environmental Justice, Yale School for the Environment. In addition to focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion in the environmental movement, Dr. Taylor spends a lot of time teaching students — who she says are growing up in a world that’s very different from their parents’.

Dorceta Taylor: Something like the National Parks. It was a brilliant idea to think about, as a country, do we have these most amazing spaces that when you go to... I've taken students to Yellowstone and they stand... Groups of students that are very multicultural students, most are coming from inner city neighborhoods, they just happen to be really incredibly smart students that nobody or a lot of people don't give an opportunity to in the environmental field. I do in my program, take them that to Yellowstone and we use your coming in on a trail, and if you are going to the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the canyon is behind you as you approach it, and the waterfall is behind you, and you're looking down into a very spectacular part of the canyon, but it's when you turn around and they're usually talking 'cause they're 20-something years old and they're on their phones that are not working, and I often point and say to them, Look behind you, and when they see it, that look of awe under faces and the look of awe on everybody's faces, but that being said, we cannot go there and experience that awe without recognizing that this was an another people's homeland and that homeland was taken without adequate compensation, taken period to create the space that we can now since 1872 go in and enjoy, the idea of not turning them over unfettered commercialism, that was something that was brilliant that people saw early on that if they weren't protections around them, they would be put into private hands. That was another piece of it. These should never be in private hands to own them, it should be for the people to enjoy... But the idea that we don't want to fully own that these are native homelands, and that we should reconcile how we go forward with this, how we think about compensation, how we think about who runs it, whose ideas should be reflected in it when you go to spaces, like the Grand Teton, you'll stand at headquarters on the plaque that literally has these pointers that to every peak, and it tells you the name of the first white male, and I think a couple have white females that went to these peaks, and I remember just standing there getting really very annoyed at the fact that are we suggesting that a native person didn't bring those visitors in and help them to get to those peaks or that we're supposed to see him that... These peaks are sitting there, you’re tribal member, and you have had no curiosity for so many centuries to go up there and see what's there, it took a European to go there?

Greg Dalton: You said you temperament, you start to tell... Or you said you were annoyed as someone who's studying the history for decades, as you have... Do you ever get really angry, you have such a calm, soothing voice, I wonder if you ever get enraged when you're looking at those plaques at Yellowstone, the Tetons, you ever get just really mad?

Dorceta Taylor: It's a good question you ask 'cause I've had people... I had a young African-American scholar who was doing some writing, and she called me up and she asked the same question, she says How... And students have asked me how do you do this research, especially for something like The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege and Environmental Protection. Do you not get very angry because your books don't sound angry or when I express it to you... And I said to her, I know how to pace myself. Now, and it is a part of... First of all, incredulity, when you first read and see something, and then second, dismay. And then third, how can I do something to change it? And yes, that anger or resentment is there, but I could get a heart attack if I get angry every time I encounter one of this. And another question folks often ask me is, How did it ever occur to you to think, for instance, of talking about someone like Harriet Tubman as an environmentalist, or Phyllis Wheatley as being of a person who started to write in environmental thinking and ways before Henry David Thoreau, before Ralph Waldo Emerson. And it's keeping that calmer demeanor and that calmer way of thinking about this, that my mind takes me into places where I can connect these thoughts, and sometimes I ask myself or wonder, Are you crazy Dorceta, what makes you think that actually works? But it helps me to do that. Harriet Tubman, I was reading a bedtime story to my twin daughters when they were about three years old, yes, these are the crazy things that academics read to their children, the story of the Underground Railroad, that I was reading the children's version of it to them. As I was reading it, I felt... I just stopped in my truck, like says She's an environmentalist, she's one of the earliest environmentalist for her to have been able to... As a woman, to do it on her own, beyond phenomenal, but as I was reading this book, my mind wanders off and luckily my daughters had drifted off to sleep, and they thought for her to have been able to successfully escape the first time on her own, but do it repeatedly, and freed more slaves and almost anyone else required an incredible amount of environmental knowledge, we can celebrate John Muir, Thoreau, and what they did and their hikes of all that are important, but here's a woman that hiked more than they did, she did it at night, she did it with dogs chasing her, she did it with the highest bounty for any slave ever on her head, and she was able to successfully do it, so it's the ability to still have this annoyance as I called it, to be able to move past that, to then be able to connect something like a Harriet Tubman life story into the environmental narrative that when young black kids read that and when I give talks where I talk about that, I've had black people that really jump over chairs and benches to say, I've never ever seen myself an environment, you've just made it clear to me why I must care about the environment, how my life is connected to it, how some of the things I've seen my family do and I didn't quite understand how it's a piece of the story and how it's revolutionized how they think.

Greg Dalton: If Joe Biden wins the election, environmental justice advocates are urging him to appoint an indigenous person to lead the US Department of the Interior, which includes the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. We've been talking about overall Department of Interior provides over about 12% of the American landmass and billions of dollars in oil and gas leases. It’s a massive agency that many coastal and urban people don't know much about. What would be the significance historically of an indigenous person leading the U.S. Department of Interior?

Dorceta Taylor: It would be phenomenal in the sense of if we think of where does the Bureau of Indian Affairs sit. It sits in that same agency that's a part of the Department of Interior. Part of the control of native people at one point was to put Indian Affairs under the War Department. And so, to have a native person, an indigenous person, first of all, be in control of that much physical land in the U.S. that in of itself is just historic. But to be in a position of authority and decision-making over those resources, many of the oil and gas leases many of the wind resources many of those things are on tribal lands. And so, the idea that if we’re gonna talk about diversity if we’re gonna talk about inclusion. If we’re gonna talk about antiracism if we’re gonna talk about creating a new way forward in the country. We cannot be afraid of looking at who are the people who have stewarded this land and why haven't we had a native person in a position like that before.

Greg Dalton: My guest today is Dorceta Taylor, professor of environmental justice at the Yale School of the Environment and an original leader of the environmental justice movement. Dr. Taylor, New Jersey recently passed a law that has been called by some the Holy Grail of environmental justice. It requires the rejection of new power plants, incinerators, landfills, large recycling facilities and sewage treatment plants in certain minority and impoverished neighborhoods if the projects present health and environmental risks in addition to the burden those communities are already carrying. What’s the significance of that New Jersey new law?

Dorceta Taylor: Well what that is really trying to recognize is the idea of disproportionate impacts. So if you have a community that is a host to maybe say a mining facility. Do we then think that that community also should have all the waste dumps. When we want to have industrial facilities, mining, commercial facilities, why do we think that just one group of people or one set of communities should be the host for those? And so, the idea of disproportionate impacts really gets at the idea of when you take all these negative things and you start multiplying them and place it on one community, one group that is something that we really ought to take seriously and start looking at what are the overall impacts. What does that mean from a perspective of health of the community longevity. How long are those people gonna live? Are we really being very efficient when we are sacrificing people because we know their lifespan is going to be shortened. What's gonna happen in the schools does it cost us more to then be able to educate all the kids that are gonna be in special ed and who will be needing all the extra resources that those things by concentrating so many negative things in one place. Who’s going to pay for the hospital?

Greg Dalton: In your 2014 book, Toxic Communities, you looked at the question, why don't people just move away from places like St. Charles, Cancer Alley in Louisiana or elsewhere?

Dorceta Taylor: Yes, because that's a question I would get. I still get them, but I used to get that question a lot if you do a seminar or you give a talk. And even in the classroom, even teaching students and these are not reactionary students. These are students trying to grapple with that simple question. Why don’t they just move? And so I almost titled the book that was almost the title of the book, and it’s usually they just move. And even from students of color would ask that question. And it isn’t always as simple as that because if you live in a community or an area where because of your race, you are prohibited from living in certain neighborhoods, your family might not just be able to move. With students, one of the exercises I’d have them do when that question comes up is to process the map out what are the costs of moving. People also assume when they say why don't they just move that the low income or the people of color are moving to the facility after it's been built. They're not asking the question did the facility come to the neighborhood after people were already there. Can you afford to buy because if you own a property also, in some of those neighborhoods your property values have dropped some time to the point where you will not recoup your cost if you have to sell the house to then be able to pay off the mortgage. This shock a lot of students that if you have a property and it's beside one of these facilities and it's completely the property value has been lost. If you get see a government payout or a corporation pays you for the property, they don’t realize you have to pay off the mortgage on it first before you can do anything. Because they just thought you just pack up and move.

Greg Dalton: Right. We’ve certainly seen during COVID that knowledge workers have a lot of privilege to move out of place or because of fires and people who can't move – so there’s lot of privilege built into that question. The United States is undergoing a generational transition. Millennials have passed baby boomers as the largest living adult generation. And Joe Biden says he will be a transitional president if he wins. What advice do you have to young people concerned about the climate, we’re talking later here with Jamie Margolin, a teenage climate activist. What advice do you have her and others in her generation to write a new American story on race, power, and the environment?

Dorceta Taylor: I see the young people and I for a long time had just incredible hope and incredible admiration for the millennial generation. One of the things that they have brought to the table in a very powerful way, is they’re not afraid or they're not as afraid of racial mixing as their grandparents were or as their parents were. They have grown up going to school together with people from different cultures, backgrounds, classes. They've gone to college where they had to share rooms and dorms. I take people on a field trip and I remember being on a field trip with some students and I thought if your conservative parents from another part of the country could see you now because there are three or four kids in a room where there are different colors of them on the bed. And I remember saying, whose clothes do you have on today? I know that’s not yours. And they’re sharing out their clothes even their undergarments. And one of the things when I was at Michigan, Michigan deliberately created a set of options for students. So, these are not study abroad options. These are these multicultural shorter-term trips that a professor takes the students and we all live together and they did it for exactly that reason. That if you're all miserable and the mosquitoes are biting you and you are all having an experience together you break down some of this stuff and all of a sudden you start to see the commonalities and you see the different skill sets. So, the millennials bring that piece to the table that they are very much more wanting to understand how to live multiculturally. You saw in the protests, kids from every color, every stripe being tear-gassed by the police not running home to the suburbs and being defiant and being a part of that the fierceness of this generation is that’s part of their secret weapon. And they also have lived in homes so they have had to argue some of these cases. A lot of my students say to me, when I go home, I have family members that say some of the most incredibly racist things and I have to know how to hone my arguments to speak with them so I don't get thrown out of the house. And so, at home they’re fighting some of these battles.

Greg Dalton: Well Dr. Taylor, Taylor, thanks for coming on Climate One and sharing your insights on privilege, power and the environment. It's been a pleasure to talk with you.

Dorceta Taylor: Thank you for having me. It's been wonderful.

---

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about climate and justice in 2020. This is Climate One. Coming up, how today’s youth activists balance fighting for their futures while living their best lives now.

Jamie Margolin: I'm just trying to find joy where I can while the world is in decline, which is a very scary and unsettling thing to do while trying to plan and study for a future that you're not even sure even exists.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

---

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Jamie Margolin is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of the youth climate justice organization Zero Hour. At age eighteen she’s also the author Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Jamie writes about defending the mountains of her homeland as the primary motivation for her climate activism. I began our conversation by asking how she felt during the fires that are ravaging the American West.

Jamie Margolin: I am currently at New York University studying film and television. So, I am in New York watching the fires happen from afar and it's very surreal seeing pictures of my hometown and my parents sending me pictures of the sky. It was ironic when my best friends were sketching the fury and send me a picture of a sign and like everything was smoky and a sign that says no smoking or vaping. That was kind of ironic because breathing the air is like smoking a pack of cigarettes right now or more. I don't know the exact statistic. But it was just seen these images are surreal because back in 2017 the smoke from the wildfires blew over Seattle and coated a small layer of smog, but it wasn't as bad as it is now. And I could never imagine it getting any worse but it did. And back then those initial fires and that initial smog is what propelled me to start Zero Hour the youth climate justice organization. And now like three years later and it's only gotten worse and it's very frustrating because I’ve been doing this work for so long and yet this is the result. This is what's happening it’s still getting worse. Leaders still haven't taken action. I’ve been fighting for climate justice for almost five years now and it’s still nothing but just worsening of this crisis.

Greg Dalton: And you’re going to college during this time you’re going to NYU. I read that there’s a one of the dorms at NYU is now under quarantine. So that seems like a lot to carry for someone like you at this time to watch your home burn while you're in college and there's a COVID quarantine.

Jamie Margolin: It's a very difficult situation in many ways because of the uncertainty of everything like it's hard for me to like settle into my life in college because I don't know if there will be an outbreak at my dorm. Like right now my dorm is fine, but they’re testing us weekly and so results are coming in like every week, every week, every week. And I’m just scared like what if there are so many positive cases that we get sent home and I have to scramble to find a way to stay in New York because my goal is to stay here stay in the city. But if I don’t have college housing then like I’m gonna have to scramble and it’s gonna be difficult. I don't know like I'm really nervous. That's why people are like when I FaceTime my friends, they’re like your dorm is so bare and boring. It's just like wait, where are your signs where are your posters? I’m like I don't know if I’m gonna be sent home tomorrow. So, I'm just like living very tentatively, uncertainly and there’s this just anxiety there's no certainty. So I’m just trying to make the most of each day but it's difficult to make the most of each day when you have like three essays due. So, you’re like I’m gonna make the most of the time I have but then you look at your homework load and your emails and it’s like it’s striking a balance between getting your work done and trying to make the most of it of life. I mean people act like 2020 is some strange curse, but honestly all of this is because of long-term issues. So, I don't know if it's gonna get worse so I'm just trying to like find joy where I can while the world is in decline, which is a very scary and unsettling thing to do while trying to plan and study for a future that you're not even sure even exists. And I haven’t been able to like exhale and settle in because I don't know if there's anything to settle into.

Greg Dalton: Right. And even calmly breathing these days or breathing deeply can be dangerous these days. You write about not losing yourself in your cause and say remember to care for yourself and sibling, lover, whatever. How do you do all that while also the things you mentioned, but also a growing public profile. You’re 18 you published a book, you’re talking on radio shows, you’re on social media. How do you juggle all that?

Jamie Margolin: I think a lot of it is trying to focus on what brings me joy. I mean a lot of people expected me to go into politics which is why a lot of people were surprised when I made my announcement like I'm going to Tisch to study film and television. And people were like, what why she doing that? And they’re like, oh it’s because you’re gonna make climate documentaries, right? And I'm like nope I want to do nothing that has anything to do with climate change. Because what I want to do what I've always wanted -- no little girl is like dreaming and she's like, I hope to spend the rest of my life desperately fighting against this massive catastrophe. That’s not what I dreamt of when I was little. And I will be fighting because survival is an instinct and I will always be fighting for the survival of our planet. But in terms of my career for my own sanity for my own happiness I need to have something in my life that I'm working towards that has absolutely nothing to do with this crisis and absolutely nothing to do with the climate catastrophe. And so I'm a storyteller and I really love to write screenplays and tell stories and direct and make things come to life and I love movies and I love shows and I've such a passion for arts and theater and creativity and acting and I really want to bring all these things together and make beautiful narrative cinema and TV shows that have nothing to do with the climate crisis. Not because I don't care, but because I need just one aspect of my life that isn't taken over by this crisis.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, that’s very wise because it can be all-consuming. I’ve been in this for going on 15 years and seen a lot of people be consumed by it. And you write that you’re propelled by outraged. Does that outrage ever, how do you keep that outrage in check because some activists get really angry and bitter and ineffective.

Jamie Margolin: My outrage kind of manifest into a general baseline of cynicism and negativity. Like I'm not punching walls, but I am like how many more not a desensitization but more of like a normalization of everything being up in flames. Not just like literally with the West Coast being on fire, but also just like with the climate crisis. If you live and breathe bad news and eventually it’s gonna like wear you down. And I don't really feel like I am angry but I’m not like punching drywall I’m more of just like like the other day when the fires like when it was like hey guys, the entire West Coast is on fire. I couldn't finish my homework. I couldn't do anything like I was just completely frozen with terror and fear. I just called up a mentor of mine and I was like little enough thing means anything. Like with the COVID crisis and us being on the edge of fascism with the current administration and the climate crisis. It all just feels too much. I'm tired I can't do this. But then I just said that I'm just like, oh my god I hate this I can’t do this and then I just get up the next day and do it anyway. It’s more of just like you have your moment where you like call someone and you’re like literally the world is trash and nothing means anything, but then all you can do is like continue to act. So, my life I mean, I had that exact moment three years ago where I was like literally nothing means anything, this is horrible. I hate the climate after the fires in 2017. And then I got up and cofounded Zero Hour. And now you know I'm gonna get up and make art that makes me happy and continue to fight for climate justice and do a push for the election to push Donald Trump out. You know, it’s more of just like I have despair, but then I just get up and do my thing. It's all you really can do.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining me, Jamie Margolin is a climate activist and co-executive director of Zero Hour, a climate action organization based in Seattle. Her new book is Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It. I’m Greg Dalton. You’ve been quite open about experiencing shame and depression and alienation for being a career young woman in a world that erases people like you. As someone who has been shamed how do you think about shaming people on the other side of the climate divide?

Jamie Margolin: I feel like being alienated for an identity that you can't control versus alienating others for some their actions that they can control is very different. I got that question of it's like oh you hate it when people discriminate against you for being a lesbian. So, are you hating on the fossil fuel industry? And it's like it's different. Me being born a certain way, not hurting anyone, is different than people consciously choosing to go into a field consciously knowing they’re hurting people and hurting people like it’s almost like the whole blue lives matter thing. There's no such thing as a blue life. A cop is not -- being a cop is a profession that you choose and you can quit. I feel like the same thing goes for being a denier of climate change or working for the fossil fuel industry that’s something you can quit. That’s something you can change but an identity isn't. And I think in general though, in terms of shaming, shaming people in terms of environmentalism in terms of the individual it never works. But I feel like in terms of the industries like the fossil fuel industry 70% of all global emissions are caused by 100 corporations. We should be shaming them. We should be putting such an immense amount of public pressure that they either have no choice to completely change or to move out of the way and just to stop operation. Because I mean the entire West Coast is on fire so I'm not afraid to hurt a few feelings of the people causing this. You see how it's pretty different?

Greg Dalton: Yeah, I think some coal workers might say, I hear what you're saying about identity and born and that’s different than a professional choice. I think some coworkers would say they don’t feel like they have a lot of choice living where they are with the options in education.

Jamie Margolin: Oh, I'm not mad at the fossil fuel workers. I'm mad at the executives. I think that you know a lot of people don't have it to be clear, I don't shame like the person who has to work at the coal plant or the person who has to, you know, work on building these headlines or whatever because that’s like their only job, and that's all that they have. My anger is never directed at the individual. My anger is directed at those in power. So, I'm not angry at the people who mine coal because they had no other option like they're not the ones responsible for this. I'm talking about the executives because the coal miners did not see the documents about climate change and then bury it and start the propaganda machine. Like they were just trying to get to make a living. I have no hard feelings towards them whatsoever. I'm talking about the executives, the CEOs the CFOs the people in charge the propaganda people that they hired. The whole operation on top. The Wall Street people the investors the bankers. I'm talking about those people. I'm not mad at the little guy. I don't blame them at all.

Greg Dalton: And as we approach this election you wrote a book about power, youth taking power. How do you think about youth gaining power taking power now at this time in this tremendous upheaval of fires demonstrations in the streets, COVID. Where do you see power shifting?

Jamie Margolin: Yeah, so I wrote a book called Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It which is a guide to being a young organizer for any cause. Even though it says youth in the title though, it’s actually useful to anyone of any age. It does have some things in the book where it’s like specific to balancing school or getting to college and stuff like that and like how to balance that whole system. But other than that, a lot of the advice in there is useful whether you're 10 or 90. So it's really for everyone. And I wrote it because I feel like young people have a power to take action and a power to make change, but it's not the power -- but leaders often misinterpret that power. I have a chapter in the book where I talk about like what power do youth have and what power don't. I made it very clear that we don't have the power of controlling like federal budgets. A lot of young people can’t vote yet or even only can it’s like they don't hold the political power in terms of office and don’t hold all these other things. So, when leaders are like oh young people would change the world it’s like well, and as I talk in the book like the power that we do have is to shift the needle towards change by shifting the culture. Because culture shifts cause shifts in law that’s why I am going to study, you know, film and television. Because that film and TV changes the culture and then culture changes the society and the laws. So young people have a huge influence on the culture, but we can’t actually physically pass, you know, we can't be the one to pass the Green New Deal. The people in power do. So, I get very frustrated when leaders are like oh youth, they’re so powerful you're going to save the world. I’m like literally the world's on fire you have to do that now. By the time I'm older, I would be old enough to even be in the position that they are in now it would be too late. So, I am very, you know, I wrote a book about a guide to being a young organizer and activists and to help young people take action, which means that I do genuinely believe in youth power. But I make it very clear in the book that it's not young people will be the ones to save the world single-handedly because I don't believe that, and I don't believe it's a fair burden to put on people who are just trying to get through high school or college or middle school in a dying world.

Greg Dalton: And Greta Thunberg was very clear about calling boomers and others out. That's a copout, don't put that on me. You trashed it you fix it. And she's been quite like right back at you. I wanna go to our lightning round with Jamie Margolin. And I’ll mention a noun and just get the first thing that comes to mind off the top of your head unfiltered when I say this one word or one phrase.

[00:20:12] Jamie Margolin: Okay.

[00:20:13] Greg Dalton: Jamie Margolin, what’s the first thing that come to mind when I say coming out?

[00:20:18] Jamie Margolin: Scary.

[00:20:21] Greg Dalton: The TV show Glee.

[00:20:23] Jamie Margolin: Santana and Brittany.

[00:20:26] Greg Dalton: Washington Gov. Jay Inslee?

[00:20:29] Jamie Margolin: Interesting and contradictory.

[00:20:35] Greg Dalton: The Republican Party.

[00:20:37] Jamie Margolin: Evil.

[00:20:38] Greg Dalton: Nancy Pelosi.

[00:20:43] Jamie Margolin: She said the green new dream or whatever and I do not like her for that. As well as other things.

[00:20:49] Greg Dalton: Erin Brockovich.

[00:20:52] Jamie Margolin: I don’t know who that is.

[00:20:55] Greg Dalton: She was – yeah, so she was portrayed by Julia Roberts won an Academy award for portraying her in a film before you were born.

[00:21:05] Jamie Margolin: Probably why I don't know.

[00:21:07] Greg Dalton: So that’s why you probably don’t know her. This is true or false. Every climate champion needs a good therapist?

[00:21:14] Jamie Margolin: True.

[00:21:18] Greg Dalton: Boomers trashed the planet and should feel guilty about it?

[00:21:22] Jamie Margolin: False. It's not as black-and-white. Some people some “boomers” like my abuela in Columbia like she grew up living off the land. She didn't cause the climate crisis. But like then there are other boomers like Mitch McConnell who absolutely did. So, it's not as black-and-white.

[00:21:37] Greg Dalton: Affluent American boomers. Last one. True or false. You allow yourself to fully feel the fear flowing from your understanding of how dark the climate science really is?

[00:21:51] Jamie Margolin: Is that a true or false question?

[00:21:53] Greg Dalton: Yeah. I mean, do you allow yourself to really embrace how dark the science is?

[00:22:01] Jamie Margolin: False for most of the time. Like true in the action that I take, but false, in that like I’m not in my daily life just thinking like we’re doomed, we’re doomed, we’re doomed. Otherwise, I can't like go to the store without having a panic attack. True in the sense of like when I act and when I push for policies, I push for them knowing the science. But it's not on the top of my mind otherwise I would just crouch into a ball and be crying. And I wouldn't even have the energy to do this interview.

[00:22:23] Greg Dalton: Denial is a coping mechanism that helps yeah.

[00:22:27] Jamie Margolin: I’m not denying it. I just turn that part of my brain off for the day that like during the day, unless I'm like actively doing a climate thing that I'm in that mode. But if I'm not, I turn it off and I just try to like okay right now I’m just going to the store and we’re not gonna think about it.

Greg Dalton: So, as we wrap up here. How excited are you about Joe Biden's climate plan?

Jamie Margolin: More excited than I was before he changed it, but still like tentatively like just cautious and like understanding that we’re going to keep pushing and keep pushing for more action. Like I mean, we need a Green New Deal, and I know I mean, I know how a lot of the corporate Democrats feel like Nancy Pelosi was like they call it the green new dream or whatever. And I don't appreciate that sentiment when literally half of the other coast is on fire and so the green new dream or whatever is what we need because the alternative, like Bernie Sanders said, solving the climate crisis is expensive as opposed to what. People always like it’s so expensive it’s so expensive as opposed to what. So, I just really feel like he could use some more work obviously I’m voting for him I’m pushing for him to win. We need to get Trump out of there because it would be absolutely catastrophic. I don't even want to think about it if Trump gets another four years. So, I'm very pushing hard to get him out of office and Biden is the one who's gonna get him out of office. So, we just need to keep pushing. Like I'm not confident I can’t just sit back and be like, well, he’s gonna handle it because I don’t think that. I think we’re gonna need to get him in and then pressure like hell.

Greg Dalton: Right. That’s what Obama said when he got in. Jamie Margolin, thanks for coming on Climate One.

Jamie Margolin: Thank you so much for having me.

---

Greg Dalton: Jamie Margolin is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Zero Hour, and author Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It. To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

Greg Dalton: Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. Sara-Katherine Coxon is the strategy and content manager. Steve Fox is director of advancement. Devon Strolovitch edited the program. Our audio team is Mark Kirchner, Arnav Gupta, and Andrew Stelzer. Dr. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, where our program originates. [pause] I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

High Risk, High Hopes: A Year of Climate Conversations

Otto Pilot — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 07:25:00 +0000

High Risk, High Hopes: A Year of Climate Conversations

12/06/2019

In this special episode, we look back at the climate stories of 2019 by listening to excerpts from a year of climate conversations:

If You Won’t, We Will: Youth Action on Climate (5/31/19)

Although many climate conversations talk about impacts on future generations, all too often those younger generations are not at the table or in the room. So how are young people taking charge of their climate future? For Isha Clarke, a high school student and activist from Oakland, California, by speaking truth to the senior U.S. Senator from her state.

The Art of the Green Deal (7/26/19)

The climate conversation in Washington has changed enough that Democrats and Republicans are talking climate deals. A lot of that change can be attributed to the Green New Deal, a Democratic resolution co-sponsored Sen. Ed Markey, who has served over 40 years in Congress and co-authored the last big legislative push for national climate policy a decade ago.

David Gergen on Climate Politics and Public Opinion (5/24/19)

What does a former advisor to Richard Nixon think about the climate crisis? Political analyst David Gergen, who served in four presidential administrations, favors urgent action on climate but is skeptical of the all-encompassing vision of the Green New Deal.

EPA Chief Andrew Wheeler on Cars, Coal, and Climate (3/15/19)

Shortly after the U.S. Senate confirmed Andrew Wheeler as Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Greg Dalton sat down for a rare interview with the new EPA chief at a conference on the future of personal mobility.

Republicans and a Democrat on Climate (5/17/19)

In 2018, Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, proposed legislation that would impose a carbon tax, which garnered the support of many of his GOP colleagues. What inspired him to act on an unpopular cause?

Tom Steyer: Power Disruptor? (8/23/19)

Would you vote for the candidate who says he’ll declare climate change a national emergency on Day One of his presidency? Businessman and activist Tom Steyer says his willingness to use emergency powers to deal with the climate crisis sets him apart from the crowded field of Democratic candidates.

A Tale of Two Cities: Miami and Detroit (9/20/19)

As people are attracted to areas of lower vulnerability, developers see an opportunity to make a killing. Valencia Gunder, a community organizer and climate educator in Miami, recognizes the irony. As longtime residents are being priced out of their community, climate change isn’t helping matters.

David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth (6/28/19)

In his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells explores how climate change will impact not just the planet, but human lives – including how a five degree increase in temperatures would make parts of the planet unsurvivable.

Katharine Hayhoe: Why We Need To Talk About Climate Change (1/22/19)

Many of us find it daunting to talk with our neighbors, colleagues and family members about climate change. But climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe says that having those difficult conversations is the first step towards solving the problem.

Guests

Isha Clarke

Student Activist

Ed Markey

U.S. Senator (D-MA)

David Gergen

Founding Director, Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School

Andrew Wheeler

Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Carlos Curbelo

Former U.S. Representative (R-FL)

Tom Steyer

2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate, Activist, Businessman

Valencia Gunder

Founder, Make the Homeless Smile

David Wallace-Wells

Deputy Editor, New York Magazine

Katharine Hayhoe

Climate scientist

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, the economy, and the environment.

Greg Dalton: In 2019, climate rose to the top of the national agenda.

AOC: We have the Green New Deal, and we have Green New Deal projects.

Inslee: I am the only candidate who says this has to be the top priority of the U.S.

Greta: My message is that we’ll be watching you.

Greg Dalton: Youth activists skipped school and spoke truth to power, while Democrats – and even a few Republicans – competed on climate policies more than ever before.

Matt Gaetz: You can either believe the climate deniers, or you can believe your lying eyes. And I'm from the pro-science wing of the Republican Party.

Greg Dalton: The risks are high – but so are (the) hopes.

Isha Clarke: Our task is to fuel our fear into passion and determination. There is no other option but to win this fight.

Greg Dalton: The Year in Climate Conversations. Up next on Climate One.

---

Greg Dalton: Climate One conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats, the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge. I’m Greg Dalton. On this special episode we look back at the climate stories of 2019 by listening to excerpts from a year of conversations – beginning in a US Senator’s office.

[Start Playback]

Isha Clarke: Our earth is dying literally. And it is going to be a pricey and ambitious plan that is needed to deal with the magnitude of that issue. And so we’re here asking you to vote yes on the resolution for the Green New Deal because that is the only way that can work --

Dianne Feinstein: That resolution will not pass the Senate. And you can take that back to whoever senator here.

Isha Clarke: Why do you think it won’t pass?

Dianne Feinstein: I’m telling you because it doesn’t have a single Republican vote.

[End Playback]

Greg Dalton: That’s Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein talking to Isha Clarke, a high school student and activist in Oakland, California, who was confronting the Senator over the Green New Deal. That video went viral and later Isha described how it unfolded starting with a rally in the street outside the senator’s office in San Francisco.

Isha Clarke: There was a crowd of about 100 people very lively, very passionate and I spoke and it was great. And there were some kids or youth activists, excuse me, from -- very important, from Bay Area Earth Guardian's crew who wanted to present a letter that they had written to Sen. Feinstein and they invited all the young people who were there to go out and present the letter. And just for some reason she happened to be in her San Francisco office that day and they invited us up after some pushback and here you have the renowned Sen. Feinstein interaction.

Greg Dalton: Senator Feinstein issued a tweet a statement thereafter saying I want the children from the Sunrise Movement to know they were heard loud and clear. I've been and remain committed to doing everything I can to enact real meaningful climate change legislation. So Isha Clarke, tell us what it was like to go stand there toe to toe with a political legend in California.

Isha Clarke: It was, you know, I think for me it was less about the actual interaction and what happened after that then what happened after that. There was I felt accountability to what just happened and for me as a young person as a person of color I’m kind of used to people talking to me like that, let’s just be real. And so when I was in that interaction I didn't really recognize how disturbing it was until I saw that the video hits 10 million views on Twitter and was all over CNN and all over the news. And for me it was really powerful to have my voice become such an important way in politics and media. And I think the conversation now isn’t really about Sen. Feinstein anymore and it's really about politicians in general and power holders in general, who aren’t and haven't been taking the necessary steps to reverse this climate crisis.

Greg Dalton: You’ve also said that Sen. Feinstein learned and gained some respect for you. How do you think it affected her?

Isha Clarke: You know, I hope that all that is true and but, you know, the reality is that I don't really know how she responded to the interaction and I would love to have a conversation with her if she's willing about next steps proceed in a more productive manner. I hope that in watching the reaction of that interaction she like you said learn from it and realized the power of her voice, especially to young people to the future generations. And though she's been an extremely powerful force in American politics that there are still things that she could have done and she didn't or, you know, and that goes for her peers as well. And so I think that conversation needs to be had about holding our politicians even who were powerful people accountable because there's always something more that can be done.

Greg Dalton: How did this sudden fame affect you. You were on Amy Goodman which is like wow, you know, how do this being suddenly I mean you're a junior in high school being thrust into this national spotlight. What was that like?

Isha Clarke: It was crazy. I mean I know I’m dope I love myself and I love -- it was so, thank you, it was really cool to have Amy Goodman in my earpiece that was crazy. And, you know, getting all of this attention and I’m just a kid from Oakland and now I’m like on national news and some people know who my name is and are like listing it next to AOC, like that’s crazy. But, I think that for me what was important from that wasn’t my fame but my new platform. And like that I can actually use my voice in a way that is impacting people who can make real policy change can make the change that I've been wanting for so long. And so I just feel grateful to be able to have had and hopefully continue to have the spotlight to have my voice heard in a way that's really impactful and meaningful.

Greg Dalton: You say that respect is very important to you, you take it to every place you go and yet there you were kind of interrupting a senator. How do you challenge power by being respectful? Is there a contradiction can you do both?

Isha Clarke: You know, I think that truth is respectful and that you can speak truth in a way that is compassionate and authentic and to me that is respect. And you know, I recognize that she is a well-respected politician she is an elder in the community and that I was to address her accordingly. But at the same time I felt a responsibility to tell her the truth and to bring the truth to her and that if she was gonna ignore the truth that I had to continue to push my voice and to make sure that my voice was being heard in a space that she was trying to bring that down in.

---

Greg Dalton: Oakland student activist Isha Clarke, who gained fame in earlier this year for a viral video in which she and other youth activists confront Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein over the Green New Deal. That resolution, co-sponsored by New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, is largely responsible for the greater focus on climate this election cycle. Last spring I spoke to Senator Markey, a 73-year-old member of the Democratic establishment, and asked him what it was like working on the Green New Deal with AOC, who is challenging the party’s status quo and at 30 is young enough to be his granddaughter.

Ed Markey: We share a passion to create a movement which is going to change the relationship between the American people and the fossil fuel industry their power, their money, their ability to distort what happens in Washington just has to change. And so what Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and I agreed upon in introducing the Green New Deal was that we were going to try to lift the gaze of Americans to the constellation of possibilities in terms of deploying clean energy technologies, creating millions of jobs. And finally once and for all wresting the power in Washington away from the fossil fuel industry and their control over the climate agenda for the planet.

Greg Dalton: Though there's some resistance coming from within your own party. Barney Frank, longtime progressive colleague of yours, said the Green New Deal was a loser in 2020 and said that society could only absorb so much change it wants. What do you say to that, that this is too ambitious?

Ed Markey: Well, the polling says that climate along with healthcare is now at the top of the interest especially of democratic primary voters in our country. And I think that what we’re going to find is that it's becoming a voting issue. The intensity level is very high and that increasingly Republicans are going to understand that they are going to vote against the solar and wind and all electric vehicle revolution at their own political peril. So I think there’s something very special that’s happening we can see it especially in young people at the high school and college level. We can see it all around the world actually millions of young people are now marching. It has an intensity that I think is going to make a big, big difference in the 2020 election cycle.

Greg Dalton: What’s your plan for the Green New Deal, is it to lay foundation to develop policies so obviously nothing’s going to happen with a climate denier in the White House. What’s your plan for the next couple years what are you trying to do?

Ed Markey: Well you are right. The denier in chief is sitting in the White House he says that it's a Chinese hoax. So politically, we could hope that he could change his mind in the next year and a half, but it's more likely he's going to continue to try to use the remaining 50,000 coal miners in America as a proxy for how he fights for blue-collar workers in our country. And we care about those coal miners and we want to ensure that there is a just transition for them. But at the same time what we’re going to do is make the case that we've already created 350,000 wind and solar jobs, that there are millions of clean energy jobs writ large already in our economy and that there are millions more to be created, and that the economic argument is absolutely overwhelming and the moral imperative is equally compelling. So I feel very confident that if we a more aggressive if we lean into the issue if we're willing to stand up and fight for it, all across the country on campuses out at town meetings in the suburbs there are people now rising up who weren’t there in 2016 who are going to make the voting difference in the next election.

Greg Dalton: Who on the Republican side do you see as parties that you can deal with on this issue. A lot of the moderates are gone, Carlos Curbelo, who started the Climate Solutions Caucus, lost to a Democrat, Lamar Alexander introduced an R&D Bill, but he also heaped ridicule on the Green New Deal, he is a moderate. Do you have people on the other side that even perhaps privately you think you can do business with on climate?

Ed Markey: Well, some Republicans are bringing out old ideas for more incentives for nuclear power and carbon capture and sequestration. But, we've yet to hear people say that they would support permanent tax breaks for wind, and solar and for all electric vehicles and for battery and storage technology. So we haven't heard that yet. So only at that point, you know, is it reasonable to say that Republicans are moving towards a position where we can put together a bipartisan bill that would in fact make a meaningful difference in terms of reducing greenhouse gases.

---

Greg Dalton: U.S. Senator Ed Markey, one of the co-sponsors of the Green New Deal. You’re listening to a Year of Climate One conversations. Coming up, we’ll hear more about the prospects for bipartisan progress on climate.

Carlos Curbelo: We went from having 4 or 5 Republicans in the house who are even willing to acknowledge this issue to having 45 join the Climate Solutions Caucus acknowledge that this is a real threat and that the government has a role in solving it.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next – when Climate One continues.

---

Greg Dalton: We continue now with a look back at A Year of Climate One Conversations. I’m Greg Dalton. David Gergen is a political analyst and former presidential adviser who served in the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. When we spoke earlier this year, I asked him what changes he’s seen in the politics around climate following the 2018 midterm elections.

David Gergen: Well I think the politics have changed dramatically. If you look at both parties they have not taken in the presidential elections in the past they have not taken climate as seriously as they might to our, I think everybody surprise. As I recall in the debates of 2016 with Hillary and Trump, I'm not sure that anybody ever asked them a climate question. I think of that, there were like three debates and nobody asked the question. And now it's not always on top of mind, but it certainly mostly on the top of mind for Americans. I think that's a significant part because of these storms and fires and what people have seen. Almost every American now has a friend who's been affected.

Greg Dalton: So it's on the agenda, you know, some people might say also it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's been a vehicle for that. How do you see this playing out from now. Democrats don't really agree on how ambitious to be and what’s the Republican alternative.

David Gergen: Well it seems to me Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has great heightened interest and heightened focus on climate and you have to give her credit for that. I do think there's a danger for the Democratic Party if it embraces the entire Green New Deal in all of its glory. Because it’s about much more than climate, it’s also about transforming our society and the equity and dealing with the inequities in our society. All of which is to be appreciated, but if you adopt that as your platform as opposed to your aspirations you don't have to tell people how you’re gonna pay for it. And that is so mind blowing I think the Democratic Party has been wise, I think Nancy Pelosi has been wise to focus on the climate aspects of the plan and not on the other the rest of it into a secondary category or on the back burner as they sometime say in politics. But to focus on what we need to do by 2025 or within a 20-year period whether we can get back into Paris and whether we can look at something like the Baker-Shultz plan. There are other alternatives now which I think need to be on the public agenda to debate.

Greg Dalton: Some people environmental justice advocates would hear that and say, oh you're asking for us to wait again as we so often do. While the affluent people, coastal people solve their concerns and the people of color have to take a backseat again. And I think some environmental justice advocates I've interviewed would say, we’re not gonna take a backseat in the green economy like we did in the brown economy.

David Gergen: With all due respect, I don't think people are living in California who got chased out of their homes many of them died were elites. The people in Iowa who are farming along the Missouri river where the walls are crumbling, and the water is flooding the states. These are not, you know, elites I don't think the question is the elites versus everybody else. The question is what can we do rapidly that would alleviate this and be fair to all. And obviously that includes people who are living in urban areas that are, you know, like in Flint, Michigan and we have to deal with that as well. But you have to be realistic about how are you gonna pay for things. And if you want to do Medicare for all, you want to have free college for everybody and you want to do all these climate issues. If you don't have priorities you get nothing done. Let's take it one step at a time and get it done. We've been arguing and arguing everybody knows the Republicans have been hopelessly dismissive of science. We need the country to come together and do some serious things in the next four years or it’s gonna be too late.

Greg Dalton: So some combination of the Green New Deal and the Baker-Shultz plan something --

David Gergen: Yeah, something, certainly green. I am not quite sure of the new deal part, that’s what I’m questioning. Because I think it's, you know, these are aspirationally terrific but the planet is burning up. And listen, this is an international concern now it has risen not just on the U.S. but we are seeing the rest of the world increasingly is holding things up. I was in Davos in Switzerland this January for the world economic forum. They take an annual survey with CEOs from all over the world, lot of heavyweights come there. And they take survey about what are your biggest concerns. For four years in a row it has been the climate. Number one concern of CEOs and others around the world. And very importantly if you look at the top five concerns of people in Davos this year, four of them were about climate and the environment. This is a deep-seated response to an accumulating problem. I just can’t tell you -- when historians look back if we’re not careful, the Trump saga is gonna be like a little footnote. And the bigger story is going to be where in the hell were you people when the world was threatened that way.

---

Greg Dalton: Former presidential advisor and CNN commentator David Gergen on climate politics, public opinion, and the Republican party. Today’s US EPA has been pursuing a different set of priorities than it did under previous administrations, including Republican ones. At his Senate confirmation hearings, the current EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, said that climate change was not the greatest risk facing humanity, but somewhere around an eight or nine on a scale of 10. When I spoke with him earlier this year, I asked what the current administration is doing to address a challenge of that scale.

Andrew Wheeler: We're moving forward with our ACE proposal, the Affordable Clean Energy Act, which will reduce CO2 from the electric power segment. We're also moving forth our Cafe Standard, which will also reduce CO2. On the ACE Proposal, it's projected to get 33 to 34 percent reduction in CO2 in the electric power sector over the life of the regulation.

Greg Dalton: Though I think there was a Harvard study that questioned whether that will really reduce reductions, reduce CO2 compared to the Obama Clean Power Plan, which I think that's trying to replace.

Andrew Wheeler: Well, you got to remember the Obama Clean Power Plan never took effect. It was stayed by the Supreme Court because, in my opinion, it went outside of the Clean Air Act. It's really hard to compare apples and oranges when you have a regulation that was never implemented outside the jurisdiction of the agency and the outside of the authority of the Clean Air Act versus a proposed regulation that follows the law, follows the Supreme Court precedents, and will reduce CO2.

Greg Dalton: A lot of this was really about coal. Coal production, coal capacity in the United States is down about a third from 2010. Banks, insurance companies, hedge funds are all moving away from coal, as you well know. Do you really think that that easing regulations on coal will help bring back an industry that's in decline for lots of reasons?

Andrew Wheeler: I think the important thing here is that we're not tipping the scales. The Obama Administration tipped the scales away from coal. It's not the job of the EPA, the authority of the EPA to pick winners and losers between the different fuel sources. That would be either Department of Energy or FERC, or even more likely, the state PUCs. Our job is to set the regulations that govern the industry, and that's what we're doing, and it's, and we believe we have a responsible regulation that will reduce CO2 in the electrical power segment, following both the Clean Air Act and the Massachusetts versus EPA decision.

Greg Dalton: There was an effort to require utilities to stockpile a bunch of coal, which even the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission didn't go there. That seems like a pretty clear effort to help coal by requiring power plants tends to stockpile coal

Andrew Wheeler: That is outside of the authority of the EPA, and I know the Department of Energy and FERC were looking into those issues. As far as their authorities are concerned, I think it's important to make sure that we have a balance of fuel sources in order to make sure that we have electric power for everyone across the country. But again, that's not the role of the EPA. Under the Obama Administration, the EPA really took that on as their role, which is not what the pavers set up to do.

Greg Dalton: And what is the way, if you say climate change is an eight or a nine, I heard you talk about the clean energy plan. What are the other ways to tackle climate change? Because we're seeing storms, fires and deaths in California. Storms are more severe. It's getting very expensive.

Andrew Wheeler: It is a global issue. It's a global problem that needs to be addressed globally but not through a mechanism such as the Paris Climate Accord, which is really unfair to the United States, United States manufacturers, and United States citizens compared to the people who live in China or India or other countries. If you're going to address it, it has to be done globally. But also equally important is looking at adaptation and making sure that when a natural disaster strikes that we rebuild in order to sustain a larger storm surge. As far as the California fires, I believe the unofficial name is Little Hoover Institute here in California. The draft of the report based upon the fires, and they blame the, the forest management practices of the last hundred years more than climate change. I think it's important not to lose sight of that aspect because we really do need to have better forest management in order to stop the wild destructive fires that we've seen in recent years.

Greg Dalton: There's forest management. I've interviewed some of the firefighters it's high winds, hot temperatures, a lot of fuel, low precipitation, lots of things kind of combined, no single factor.

Andrew Wheeler: But we can't say that this was just because of climate change, which a number of people try to do.

Greg Dalton: Sure. But would you say that it's amplified or turbo charged by, but not caused by? Anyone of Barry Bonds’ home runs-

Andrew Wheeler: How do you define turbo charge? It's a factor.

Dalton: Right? We say here in San Francisco that we know that you can't attribute any one of Barry Bonds home runs to juicing, but we know that some of those 750 home runs wouldn't have happened without steroids. Last word in terms of, going forward, do you feel a sense of urgency on climate change or is this something that technology will solve and we have time to work on?

Andrew Wheeler: I have a lot of faith in technology. When I said at my hearing that climate change is not the biggest crisis we faced worldwide on the environmental side, I think our biggest crisis is on water and potable water, and the fact that we have a million children and people dying each year from lack of sanitary ...

Greg Dalton: Clean drinking water.

Andrew Wheeler: Clean drinking water. Right, exactly. I think that is a huge crisis. If we spent a fraction of what we're spending on climate change to provide those people with safe drinking water. We'd be saving a million lives a year. that is a crisis today.--

---

Greg Dalton: US EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler. You’re listening to a Year of Climate One Conversations. I’m Greg Dalton. Despite the fossil fuel-heavy policies of the current administration, some Republicans have gotten out ahead of their party on climate. Carlos Curbelo was the U.S. representative for Florida's 26th congressional district from 2015 to 2019. While serving in the House he co-founded the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. He told a Climate One audience that for the South Florida community he represented, the issue was very close to home.

Carlos Curbelo: In my community an area that is at about sea level and where most people live near the sea. The threat is real, it's imminent we get tidal flooding, our drinking water supply is threatened by saltwater intrusion. So that's why I decided to get involved. In 2015, when I got to Congress with Ryan, there were maybe three or four Republicans in the house who were even willing to acknowledge climate change this reality that we’re facing. And having a lot of one-on-one conversations and starting the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus which was the first of its kind an effort to establish a dialogue and then cooperation between Republicans and Democrats in Congress. We really started changing things. So I think we bottomed out at least when it comes to Congress in 2014, ’15. I think things are headed in the right direction now we just need to accelerate the process because time is running out.

Greg Dalton: Right. And Carlos Curbelo, we often talk about, oh, we can't do this fix because it will cost too much. But people don't think about the cost of not fixing it, right. We had Harvey, Maria, Irma, Midwest floods oh yeah Florence in the Carolinas and I mean we’re up over $100 billion in damages for these things not entirely caused by climate but partly. So how do you address the cost of inaction and the cost of action. Because it’s always the cost of action that seems to be too much.

Carlos Curbelo: Right. And that's because well there's a natural disaster Congress just pass as a supplemental bill and then that solves everything. But a lot of people don’t realize we’re paying for that. I mean those are resources that we won't be able to use either today or in the future on education on transportation and all the other national priorities. So I would spent a lot of time in my district just educating voters. And I think everyone in elected office needs to educate voters and those of us who care about this issue, activists as well. We need to spend time educating voters with the mindset that we’re trying to convince them not lecture them or shame them. Because I think that's the most effective way to bring people to our side and your--

Greg Dalton: Do you think Democrats do that sometimes?

Carlos Curbelo: Well, look, with all of these controversial issues everyone has a choice, right. We can either exploit the issue for maximum political benefit or we can work toward solutions. But that doesn’t mean you can't do both, because obviously come campaign season there are contrasts to be drawn but I think especially after campaigns we need to find ways to work together. And the truth is, of course Republicans are responsible because for two decades they just balked on the issue completely, but in some ways I think Democrats and some liberal groups have been complicit because they've doubled down on this dynamic in our country, where Republicans don't want to be part of the solution, don’t want to have a conversation. And Democrats want to own the issue entirely. We live in a country where the founding fathers established the government that’s designed to work by consensus. And what I tried to do during my four years in Congress is to try to build out that coalition from the middle out. I think we made a lot of progress we went from having 4 or 5 Republicans in the house who are even willing to acknowledge this issue to having 45 join the Climate Solutions Caucus acknowledge that this is a real threat and that the government has a role in solving it.

Greg Dalton: So the Climate Solutions Caucus, 21 of the Republicans did not return from 18 to 19, 13 of them lost. So, you know, that caucus that you built has been pretty well damaged now. No new Democrats can join. Republicans can join. So, is all the wind out of the sails of that, you kind of built this coalition and now a lot of them got blown out in the midterms?

Carlos Curbelo: Well, certainly lot of Republicans retired and others were defeated in 2018. But the ones that remain I think there are 23 Republicans still in the caucus are recruiting new members. And although it's an option to abandon the Noah's Ark rule, I don't think we should do it. The Noah's Ark rule for those who have no idea what I'm talking about and are thinking, you know, back thousands of years ago. It just means that to join the caucus if you are a Republican, you needed to find a Democrat who would join with you. If you are a Democrat, you needed to find a Republican. And let me tell you I think that was the best thing we did because that sparked hundreds of casual conversations between Republicans and Democrats about this issue. Now of course a lot of people wouldn’t join but they were kind of forced to have a dialogue to explain to their colleagues why they would join or not join. And of course many of them ended up joining. And again, we all put our jerseys on come campaign season, but I think if we are going to address these big challenges, climate change, I think being the greatest one our country faces, we need to have these conversations, we need to create healthy political environments where these solutions can get done.

Greg Dalton: Carlos Curbelo, Republican representative for Florida's 26th congressional district from 2015 to 2019. Though Curbelo may have lost his seat, more and more Republicans are finding that they ignore the topic of climate change at their peril. Meanwhile, Democrats trying to capture their party’s presidential nomination, are competing for the boldest plan, to invest in clean energy and confront the climate challenge. Washington Governor Jay Inslee created a foundation for many of those plans until dropping out of the race in August. The mantle of “climate candidate” then was taken up by billionaire activist Tom Steyer.

---

Tom Steyer: If you think about actually dealing with climate in the real world it’s a global problem. If we do a perfect job in the United States on January 21, 2021, the day the new president is sworn in it’s not nearly enough. You know if you look at what we have to do we have to lead a coalition of countries around the world to solve this problem. And the question is why would they ever listen to the United States of America unless we've got our house in order. It's an emergency treat it like an emergency. It’s got to be people based. Every single thing that I've learned over the last 10 years about running propositions and getting votes about coming up with fair policies about putting together any kind of responsible Democratic coalition involves being a grassroots oriented movement. And so if you're not doing that in my mind you’re gonna have the wrong policy and you're not gonna win. And so if you're just talking about the United States and policies that you hope to get voted in at some point in the future, I don't think that's nearly enough to be honest, Greg.

Greg Dalton: You talk about pragmatism what can get done and the Green New Deal. Some people even on the left have criticized the Green New Deal for being fuzzy, overly ambitious. And so is the Green New Deal -- first of all, it’s a resolution, it’s aspirational it’s not a bill they’re not specifics there. You think you can get something that big through that fast?

Tom Steyer: So I don't how many of the people in the audience or the people listening have actually read the Green New Deal proposal. It’s about five pages. It's very broad and I think that's absolutely appropriate. If you're talking about rebuilding and changing the economy then you have to understand it's not a siloed policy issue it’s something that goes across issues and that touches many different parts of the economy in the country. And I think the Green New Deal fits the answer to the scope of the problem. I think it’s very responsible in the way that it addresses this problem broadly and I'm a big fan of it. It is just a proposal and a guideline but I think that it got a lot of attention in a very good way and it was vilified by the right-wing press, you know, the Fox News’ of the world the Breitbarts that exaggerated what it was to try and make it seem like something that it isn't. It's actually a very responsible and thoughtful document that I think push this debate forward in many ways. I'm a big fan.

Greg Dalton: And one thing that the Green New Deal that other green plans didn't do is it addressed some issues of capitalism, wealth distribution, jobs, etc. Do you really think that that is at the root of it because some people would say, hey, climate’s so big and serious and urgent let’s tackle that and we’ll get to some of those other things later. Because we can't do it all at once our nation can only absorb so much change at once. So can you address capitalism and climate at the same time?

Tom Steyer: Well, I think that if you're talking about rebuilding the United States, you’re gonna have to put that I mean in our plan it’s $2 trillion of government money over 10 years, plus a bunch of regulations and rules like building codes like EV requirements like the renewable portfolio. So changing the way we do business broadly in this country so that the $2 trillion of expenditure by the government will be dwarfed by how much the private sector spent. So if you're going to do that, you’re gonna rebuild this country. I think it's important to reflect on how that’s gonna be done in a fair way and in a way that will make us richer, better employed grow faster be healthier. As a businessperson I can tell you the common response of people who are trying to deny climate and prevent progress is to say we have a choice between a healthy economy and a healthy environment and that is an absolute lie. That's a false choice. We’re gonna have a healthier economy and a healthier environment and we proved that years ago and talked about it here. If you look at the cost of renewables versus the cost of fossil fuels on a per kilowatt hour basis, renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels and will continue to get cheaper. So when people talk about oh, it’s gonna be bad for the economy because the cost of energy will be higher the opposite is true. We can create lower-cost energy without even talking about the health costs of old-fashioned pollution from coal or the climate cost of the pollution of putting CO2 in the atmosphere.

---

Greg Dalton: Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer speaking at Climate One earlier this year. You’re listening to a Year of Climate Conversations. Coming up, assessing the risks and finding hope.

Katherine Hayhoe: We view the solutions as a greater threat than the impacts whereas in actual fact it’s exactly the opposite. There are many beneficial solutions that can increase the quality of life but the impacts are here today and they’re bad.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next when Climate One continues.

---

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to A Year of Climate One Conversations. I’m Greg Dalton. Climate gentrification can turn a city’s poorest neighborhoods into some of the most desirable real estate around. As people are attracted to areas of lower vulnerability, property developers see an opportunity. Earlier this year we spoke to Valencia Gunder, a community organizer and climate educator in Miami, where the billion-dollar Magic City project is threatening to transform the neighborhood of Little Haiti. She told us about the very real effects of climate gentrification felt by Miami’s poorer communities. To see the impacts first-hand, Valencia took me out for a walking tour of Little Haiti.

Valencia Gunder: So right now we’re at Northeast 2nd Avenue in 59th Street in Little Haiti which is like Little Haiti’s downtown. We’re standing right in front of the Caribbean Marketplace which is attached to Little Haiti’s Arts Center. It’s surrounded by Haitian business, small business and things like that. Colorful.

Greg Dalton: Yeah.

Valencia Gunder: You can hear the Caribbean music, you can smell the Caribbean food. You see the Caribbean folks here being great.

Greg Dalton: So we’re looking at some storefronts recently closed storefronts. What are they, what used to be there what happened?

Valencia Gunder: So they were small businesses, Haitian owned businesses that used to be there. A few months ago they were all evicted at the same time. They all closed their doors in the same day. They try to fight it as a community, the community tried to step up but it just could not do it because the building is actually owned by somebody else. They can’t afford to stay there and quite honestly, these new developers and investors don’t want those types of restaurants or businesses in their community now. But that’s just something that the people of Little Haiti or just communities of color come to Little Haiti for in the first place, right. The culture, the fact that we can get Haitian food here, get Haitian culture here and honestly, they are taking it away, they are stripping it away so Little Haiti won’t even be Little Haiti anymore. Because all of the businesses are leaving and all the culture is leaving and all the residents are leaving. So what's happening is we’re starting to see transients, Northeastern folks moving down to Miami. We’re starting to see a lot of tech industry coming to Miami we’re starting to see a lot of people from the beach come over to Little Haiti and they are actually whitewashing the culture and communities like Little Haiti. Because there’s no Little Haiti unless you have Haitian people with Haitian culture. So they are literally wiping it away little bit by little bit by displacing the business owners and the residents.

Greg Dalton: Valencia Gunder, a climate change educator and founder of Make the Homeless Smile in South Miami. Even for people who are not directly threatened by rising seas, climate change is shrinking the livable world. In his 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, author David Wallace-Wells describes how he became aware – and afraid – of what humankind is doing to itself.

David Wallace-Wells: I’m 36 years old I was raised mostly in the ‘90s, I came of age in the ‘90s is I have a kind of very end of history perspective on the future. I thought, you know, I knew that markets were imperfect and globalization was imperfect. And, you know, the future was not going to be endless bounty for everyone on earth. But I also felt that we could probably count on it getting better and I thought that climate change was going to be part of that story that it was an issue it was a major issue but also one that was within our power to address and control. And that probably the leaders that we had would be responsible enough to take care of it. I also felt that the story was a long one. I had sort of been led to believe like I think a lot of us that climate change is a really slow moving phenomenon and that meant that we didn’t need to take dramatic action quickly. We could develop our way out of the problem we could invent our way out of the problem. When I realized just a year or two ago that, you know, half of all of the emissions that we put into the atmosphere in the entire history of humanity have been put into that atmosphere the last 30 years that really, really opened my eyes. It made me think this is not something that will unfold in the lifetime of my grandchildren. It something that’s unfolding in my lifetime in fact, has already unfolded in my lifetime. When I was born the planet's climate was relatively stable scientists were worried about the long-term but in the near-term things were okay. We’re now in a situation where we’re basically face-to-face with real climate catastrophe and that is because of what's been done just in 30 years. The next 30 they promised to be just as consequential. And we could in those 30 years choose to take a path that produces some incredibly terrifying depressing punishing climate impacts or one that allows us to avoid at least most of those impacts and secure a kind of more fulfilling and prosperous and just future for ourselves and our children. And the scale of that story remains astonishing and kind of invigorating to me as a storyteller, it's an epic saga. It's the kind of thing that we only use to see in mythology and theology. We really do have the fate of the world and the species in our hands and each of us who’s alive today is a protagonist in that story making choices political and otherwise they're going to determine that future. That's just incredible drama. And so in addition to fear I was sort of woken up by the sense of the scale of that story. And as a storyteller the need to share the sense of drama with, you know, any reader who would have been basically.

Greg Dalton: So your book is heavy-duty and you write it, it’s a synthesis it looks like kind of the second half of the bell curve kind of the more damaging perhaps less probable outcomes. How do you sit with that and hold that darkness without getting sucked into it. Because I’ve seen people like I would say, you know, Jim Hansen spent so much time looking at dark models that he kind of got, he got pretty dark and dour himself. How do you prevent yourself from being consumed by the darkness that you're trying to share with us?

David Wallace-Wells: Yeah, I mean part of it is living myself a bit in denial and in complacency and compartmentalization. I think probably that's gonna be a human response to this kind of suffering no matter how much of it unfolds, which is a tragedy and something we should fight against. But I also think it's in ways kind of inevitable. But, you know, I also try to remember that as horrifying as some of these really climate impacts could be, you know, if we end up on the track we’re on at the end of the century we could have twice as much war as we have today. We could have agricultural yields that are half as bountiful as the ones that we have today trying to feed 50% more people. We could have a global GDP that's 30% smaller than it would be without climate change it’s an impact as twice as deep as the Great Depression it will be permanent. All these places in the world would be hit by six climate driven natural disasters at once. Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions, perhaps in the billions according to the U.N. Those impacts are horrifying they can sound and seem paralyzing. But I also try to remember that they are ultimately a reflection of our power over the climate because the main thing that's driving climate change is human action it's how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. We have our hands on those levers. If it is possible to get to that quite hellish 4 degree scenario that we’re on track for that is just a sign of how in control of the climate we are. And therefore how much we could conceivably choose a different path should we want to. Now, there are a lot of political obstacle social obstacles cultural obstacles that would prevent us from making different choices rapidly and really avoiding all of those outcomes. But I think we fall into a trap when we think of this story as being beyond our control something that’s unfolding without our input. The only thing that's actually driving it is our input. And, you know, that leads us to some complicated questions about who we are and what our inputs are and who’s making these decisions and, you know, again those are really complicated questions. But pulling back and adopting a kind of global perspective. If we find ourselves living in a climate dystopia it will be because of human action. And to me that's an argument for more action in the other direction now. And ultimately it's a kind of perversely empowering perspective.

Greg Dalton: David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, speaking at Climate One earlier this year. As his book makes clear, the risks of inaction on climate are high, which can lead to a paralyzing fear. What’s needed, according to climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe, is rational hope – rational in understanding the magnitude of the problem but hopeful in being motivated by the vision of a better future. Katharine is Director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and winner of last year’s Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Science Communication. At the ceremony on the Climate One stage, she addressed some of the biggest myths about climate change.

---

Katharine Hayhoe: The biggest myth that the largest number of people have bought into people who disagree with the science people who agree with the science is the myth that the impacts don't matter to me they’re about future generations or the polar bear or people who live far away, but the solutions do matter to me and I don’t like them. They are gonna disrupt my comfortable life they’re gonna be unpleasant, they may even be punitive, they could ruin the economy, next thing you know the government is gonna be setting my thermostat. So we view the solutions as a greater threat than the impacts whereas in actual fact it’s exactly the opposite. There are many beneficial solutions that can increase the quality of life but the impacts are here today and they’re bad.

Greg Dalton: And you also talk about this fact, I don’t know post fact world, climate there’s lots of facts flying back and forth and talk about the importance of facts and identity.

Katharine Hayhoe: So when you ask people do you agree with the simple fact that climate is changing, humans are responsible and the impacts are serious. The number one predictor of whether people will agree with those facts -- the scientific facts that we've known that date back to the 1850s -- it’s not how much education people have it’s not how much they know about the science it’s not how smart they are. Actually the smarter we are the better we are at cherry picking information to validate our pre-existing opinions.

Greg Dalton: Lot of deniers are highly intelligent.

Katharine Hayhoe: Yup. The single most important predictor is simply where we fall on the political spectrum. So it has become a matter of identity to say, oh, I don't agree with all that stuff. And that's why again it’s so important to begin our conversations with identity, with a value, with the part of people's identity that they already have that is good that we can honestly at least admire if not actually agree with and share. And then from that position of shared values, walk together connecting the dots to why since we are both the type of person who cares about -- we could both be hunters or birders or hikers. You live in the same place or you care about your kids or, you know, you served in the Armed Forces or you go to a similar type of church. There’s a million points of connection that you could have, the point is making that shared connection first and then walking together to connect the dots to why both of you, because you are that same type of person who shares that same interest or value, would naturally care about the changing climate.

Greg Dalton: Katharine Hayhoe, a lot of the climate conversation you mentioned earlier that the government is gonna set my thermostat, a lot of the conversation people feel bad because of what they eat or what they drive. So get us to the shame and should part of the climate conversation which I think is a real hangup for a lot of people.

Katharine Hayhoe: Oh yeah. I mean, I have talked to a farmer in West Texas who thinks it’s all natural cycle but he look at me and he’ll say, I know I drive a big truck but I need the truck. So even still, we have the sense of we’re using these resources. I was at a meeting once with other faith leaders and I'll never forget one of the people in the room turned to everybody else and he said, you know, every time you turn on a car you're sinning. And you know how that made me feel? I wanted to go find the biggest Hummer I could and just turn it on and just drive circles around them. Because I was like okay, so I got here to this meeting you’re saying that was a sin. I live in a place where there’s no public transport so going to work is a sin. My child is sick, I take him to the hospital that’s a sin. Thank you very much. It was the most frustrating and infuriating reaction and that made me realize wow that's what we all feel when we’re told you can’t do this you shouldn’t do this, you’re a bad person for that. And so I really appreciate that you asked the question and we even have a Global Weirding video specifically about this the question about fossil fuels. And I would just like to say I am grateful for fossil fuels. I would not be here today if it were not for fossil fuels. Fossil fuels freed women from unspeakable drudgery, fossil fuels actually helped end slavery in this country and fossil fuels brought us all the benefits of modern life that we enjoy today. But just like a child that grows beyond formula in the same way we too are already growing and must grow even faster beyond fossil fuels and we can do so because of the benefits that they brought us.

Greg Dalton: Katharine another part of the climate conversation is voluntary virtuous restraint. Less meat, less air travel, a little more of this, is that gonna get us there, is that necessary and sufficient or is that kind of are we deluding ourselves if we think that going vegan is gonna create the kind of change on the scale is required?

Katharine Hayhoe: No, it won’t. And a very distant second after people who don't accept the climate, science of climate change very distant second the most amount of attacks I get on social media are from vegans who think that it will solve the climate crisis and they don’t like it when I say I actually crunched the numbers on methane emissions and it won’t. Does that mean it’s pointless? No, it doesn’t mean it’s pointless. In fact individually, depending on our lifestyles for many of us the most important thing we can do is eat lower down the food chain, reduce food waste, look at plant-based diet. But individual choices are not gonna fix this thing depending on how you crunch the numbers individual choices are only gonna take a 30% maybe max 40% of the way there. The bottom line is we have to completely change the way our entire society gets its energy from fossil fuels. And that means that every option has to be on the table. It is not I will do only this and this will fix the world. There is no I will do only this. And so that's why one of my personal favorite encouraging resources is Project Drawdown. They said correctly there’s no silver bullet but there’s lot of silver buckshot. And they went through and they listed a hundred different solutions and some of these solutions are very surprising. Reducing food waste is near the top because we throw a third of our food away. Well you know that’s something that’s pretty simple that I can do personally in my life but I can also advocate for it in the community. Education of women and girls of course is one of my absolute favorites on the list. There’s a lot of smart soil management, putting carbon back in the soil, smart agricultural practices. And so getting back to your original question. In our community we fly a lot for most of us the biggest part of our carbon footprint is flying and so there’s, you know, flying less, don’t fly. I said, you know what, I’m not about less I’m about smart. Let’s eat smart, let’s live smart let's travel smart let’s get our energy in smart ways. Let’s do this in a way that’s better. It’s not about returning ourselves voluntarily to medieval times, it's about moving forward into the future and to do so we have to do everything smarter. Not because we have to, but because we want to; because it really is better for us, it’s better for our health it’s better for our pocketbook it’s better for the world too.

Greg Dalton: Katharine Hayhoe, Director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University.

Greg Dalton: To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org or wherever you get your pods. We’ve been nominated for “Best Green Podcast” at the i-Heart Radio Podcast awards presented in Los Angeles in January. That’s super cool. We want to thank you for your support and i-Heart Radio. Keep writing those reviews, they really do help.

Greg Dalton: A quick reminder that as a non-profit, we rely on the generosity of individuals like you to produce these podcasts every week. We hope you’ll consider making a tax deductable donation to support Climate One, which will be matched up to $15,000. Please go to climateone-dot-org-slash-donate.

Greg Dalton: Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. Sara-Katherine Coxon is the strategy and content manager. The audio engineers are Mark Kirchner, Justin Norton, and Arnav Gupta. Devon Strolovitch edited the program. Dr. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, where our program originates. [pause] I’m Greg Dalton.

Annual Reflections

6 Episodes

Play

Naturally Wired: Getting Outside in the Digital Age

Otto Pilot — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 07:39:00 +0000

Naturally Wired: Getting Outside in the Digital Age

03/22/2019

What does it take to get people off their phones and into the outdoors? Research has shown the deleterious effects of electronics on weight, sleep, and cognitive development in children, who in 2018 spend four hours or more each day glued to screens. Other barriers like income and proximity to nature make access to the outdoors extremely challenging for some families. Meanwhile, doctors have started prescribing hikes over medications, and terms like “forest schools” and “unstructured playtime” are new buzzwords. So how do we encourage outdoor curiosity and conservation in a generation raised on screen time?

Guests

Phil Ginsburg

General Manager, San Francisco Recreation and Parks

Rebecca Johnson

Co-Director, Citizen Science at the California Academy of Sciences

Nooshin Razani

Director, Center for Nature and Health, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, the economy, and the environment.

What happens when people get off their phones and into the outdoors?

Nooshin Razani: Within a few minutes you’ll see improvement in heart rate and blood pressure... Around 20 minutes you’ll see improvements in attention span... After an hour you’ll see more physical activity... 90 minutes they've shown that depression goes down.

Announcer: But what about people who might not have easy access to the great outdoors?

Rebecca Johnson: It's not just by going to a National Park or somewhere really far away. It’s on your street across the street it’s wherever you are.

Announcer: And it’s not just about reconnecting with nature. It’s also about dis-connecting from distraction.

Phil Ginsburg: The impact to mental health, the impact on creativity, relationship building all these things happen easier in nature without a phone.

Announcer: Getting outside in the digital age. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: What does it take to get people off their phones and into the outdoors? Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded before a live audience, and hosted by Greg Dalton.

I’m Devon Strolovitch. In today’s modern world, many people – especially children – live disconnected from nature and may not understand the impacts of a changing climate.

Phil Ginsburg: Every child should have a nature-based experience every single day.

Phil Ginsburg is General Manager with the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, where he works to make the city’s park system more equitable and inviting to an increasingly urbanized population.

Rebecca Johnson: When my kids were little in the city we spent a lot of time in big open spaces in the city so they could just run and climb and no one would tell us not to.

Rebecca Johnson is Co-director of citizen science at the California Academy of Sciences, where she helps design programs that connect people to nature wherever they are.

Nooshin Razani: How do you raise children who love place and love the Earth and in the next sentence tell them about climate change?

Nooshin Razani is Director of the Center for Nature and Health at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, where she prescribes time outdoors to her pediatric patients and their families as preventive medicine.

Let’s listen as Greg welcomes all three to the Commonwealth Club stage for a conversation about reconnecting with the natural world.

Greg Dalton: Nooshin Razani, let’s begin with you. You talk in your fabulous TEDx talk in I think it was Nashville about the loneliness of motherhood and how you missed your mother and then you've looked to a solution. So tell us that story.

Nooshin Razani: I am a pediatrician by training and I was a pediatric infectious disease specialist. And I think that I was actually really arrogant about having kids I thought I knew everything. I also had four brothers that I kind of raised. And so I thought, you know, I have this I got this. And then I was living in a city and I had my kids and I think there's no level of expertise really that could prepare me for the overwhelming isolation of the experience. And we don't talk about it that much but it was like I was inside in four walls and I had two and now three little crying beings and actually much love to our city but everywhere we would go I actually had to fight their natural instincts. Like if they wanted to climb something or walk over something or even sometimes just be in the space as a child I had to rein that in. And it was like I was an enforcer of some sort to saying no all the time and I was really unhappy. And I think after a while I started noticing that when we were in natural spaces and especially when we were in natural spaces and had free time and I just like I stopped, I didn’t listen to everything that was telling them not to follow their natural instincts, things were just easier. And even though I have a huge and juicy and wonderful family I don't live near them they live in another country. And so even though I was away from my support system and in a city when I was in natural places I felt connected and I think, you know, that was for me a bit of a savior. And I actually changed my entire profession and I devoted myself to helping people get back into nature through that experience.

Greg Dalton: So from that you call it almost breakdown, nature was your prescription your salvation.

Nooshin Razani: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Phil Ginsburg, let's talk when you were a child growing up in suburban Philadelphia when you were upset you went to the backyard. Tell us about that place you went when you were -- emotions were overwhelming you as a child.

Phil Ginsburg: Yeah nature was always the place where I went for calm. We had this -- it wasn’t really in our backyard it was actually sort of a forested sort of border of our house and it was when I got in trouble for leaving wet towels on the bed or something else and I needed a little bit me time. I went to the same spot, there was a little spot in the woods that I just kind of hung out in. And it made me calm and then I could kind of come back and function and pick up the towels and all is good. And right near my house there was also this creek, Marion Creek where I used to go and this was at the time, you know, we probably all grew up in a time when being a child was less programmed and less structured. And Marion Creek was known for its crayfish and its turtles and much to my parents chagrin, I often brought them home. And we have this -- they indulged and I had this big I don’t know 20 gallon tank that they made me keep outside where I had about, you know, 10 of them, 10 turtles and 10 crayfishes as pets and it stank.

Greg Dalton: As every child should have, right. Rebecca Johnson, you also had a special place a cabin that you went to in the woods. Tell us about that place-based early connection to nature.

Rebecca Johnson: Yeah, my family I grew up in Southern California and my family had a small cabin up in the San Bernardino Mountains. And my family weren’t really campers I grew up in the suburbs. My mom and dad didn't camp but we would go to this cabin that my dad had inherited from his family and he had great childhood memories of being there and being outside. And we didn’t really have any, there was no schedule when we were there, right, we just got to be. And a lot of the times it was really just me and my brother outside while my parents were doing whatever else, so fixing the cabin mostly because it was quite old. And it was just a place that I could be outside in nature and turn over rocks and watch birds and learn about animals that I didn't see in the suburbs. I mean I grew up in a great little suburban community where we had a lot of access to open space that I didn't really appreciate until I left the city. So there was always nature around us and my parents encourage us mostly because we’re always encouraged to be outside not sitting inside to pay attention and to be curious and ask questions. And so I got to spend a lot of time in this place that was really special to me and my family and I have been fortunate to take my kids back there to just sit and be and watch the same birds or same kinds of birds. And now I know a little bit more so I can help them kind of understand that place a little more.

Greg Dalton: So you’re all parents who have teenagers grew up in a different era. There's a stereotype that young people are particularly glued to their devices these days and is that really the case. One of our producers went to the Esports Arena in Oakland to try and find out. Several nights a week, dozens of gamers gather to play games like Fortnite, Call of Duty and Super Smash Bros. We ask some of the gamers about their relationship with nature and how their screen time compares with their green time.

Male Speaker: My name is Brandon Shey [ph] and I’m from Newton, Mass. Because I grew up in like an urban area that was just outside Boston like if I were to go to the park I would literally be the only one there and, you know, I wouldn’t have anyone to play with or anything. Your friends are online and you talk to them online and whatnot. I do a lot of cycling I guess that would be like my connection with nature.

Male Speaker: I’m Verion Rall [ph] I’m from Piedmont Pines. I love going to National Parks on Yellowstone. My family lives on like kind of a mountainside so the location is we kind of _____ [00:08:48] because it’s just really beautiful there. I don’t know, I’m the kind of person who stargazes sometimes, I love nature.

Male Speaker: My name is Raymund Francisco and I’m actually from Boyle. I go to like yearly retreats sometimes haven’t gone camping this year but sometimes we used to go camping, you know, with friends and family. And then that’s when like, you know, no reception so you’re kind of taken away from technology because we forget, right, in the city we forget, oh yeah, nature is here, nature is beautiful. It’s there and it’s not always gonna be there if we don’t do something about it.

Male Speaker: My name is Onaguako Obioma [ph] and I’m from Hayward. Majority of us we do like spending our time in front of the screen. For me it’s kind of sad because I used to be like I’m like an outdoor person. Like as a kid I was always outdoor doing whatever I can. I went to the beach one time it was pretty relaxing, other than that, I just been swamped with work. So as like deep, deep nature, I guess you could say I’m somewhat off of it.

Greg Dalton: Those are voices from a Friday night at the Esports Arena in Oakland, California. We are aware that all of the voices were male in that segment. There were in fact no woman playing video games the evening that we visited there. So I’d like to get your reaction there's a lot in there, Phil Ginsburg, if I go to the park my friends aren't there, there’s a bit of loss there's some stargazers. What’s your reaction to that?

Phil Ginsburg: Oy is my reaction to that. So let’s start with the, you know, sort of some of the hard reality here, which is the generation of children that are growing up today is the most sedentary generation of kids in our history. It's the first generation that whose life expectancy is probably less than their parents and that stuff about screen time is very true. On average, kids are spending somewhere between five and eight hours a day on their screen and less than an hour a day outside. Not a great recipe. More optimistically, particularly here in the Bay Area we are blessed with incredible open space within city limits of San Francisco, 18% of our city is green space. 18%, that's pretty good and San Francisco is the first city in the United States of America where 100% of us live within a ten-minute walk of a park. So we have access and I think you know under two or three different mayors who've cared a great deal about this we've invested $500 to $600 million in our park system to try to make it more equitable, more welcoming. And I think we’re doing a pretty good job of that but we have a big culture shift to ensure that every child has the opportunity to enjoy nature every day. And that is what we should all be working on every child should have a nature-based experience every single day.

Greg Dalton: Not just go to a park one week in the summer sort of thing. Nooshin Razani you deal with an underserved population in Oakland that doesn't have the access and has some of the same generational thing you still talked about, sedentary screens, etc. So talk about reaching that underserved population at your work.

Nooshin Razani: I think that it’s important to clarify that while there is absolutely a difference in who has access to nature and sadly nature is like many other commodities in our society it’s inequitably distributed that does not reflect whether or not people want to be in nature. And we've spent a lot of time talking to and studying and being with the patient served that Children's Hospital Oakland who happened to the majority are on public insurance such as a marker of being near federal poverty line. And definitely people still want to be in nature and so lack of access is not a marker for whether or not people want nature. And so I think when you're talking about how to make people have that desire, which I think is what you’re kind of getting to, I usually try to start with folks where their at. And so in a family that has multiple stressors whether if you're living in poverty, you may be working several jobs and this actually applies to all of us. There is so much to do in the modern day that it's really hard to come out a parent and add one more thing on. And so I really don't take that approach that, oh you have to do X, Y and Z in order to maximize your health. I really try to come from a place of you have the right to have this thing in your life that will help you cope with the rest of your life. And you have the right to rest you have the right to spend quality time with each other and let me see if I can help you find that. And so that’s the approach we take. I think that your point about equity is an important one and so I hope that physicians can join in with people like Phil in parks districts to also advocate for the fact that, you know, if every child is going have a nature experience then every child needs to have a tree near them. And so we can’t have all the trees and all the green in one part of town and not in another part of town but we cannot advocate for more equitable distribution of nature.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about getting outside in the digital age. Coming up, Greg Dalton asks how engaging with nature can help us better understand the impacts of a changing climate (on our own lives).

Rebecca Johnson: People if they’re paying attention to a specific place and they go back to that place and they start paying attention a little bit more and in a different way, they can start to recognize change and witness the changes that we’re all seeing.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about reconnecting with nature in the digital age with Phil Ginsburg, General Manager with the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department. Nooshin Razani, Director of the Center for Nature and Health at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland. And Rebecca Johnson, Co-director of citizen science at the California Academy of Sciences.

Here’s your host, Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Rebecca Johnson you work for a program iNaturalist, you know, citizen science where you're trying getting out into nature and using screens as tools of engagement. It's not black or white, good or bad. Tell us about screens as tools of engagement and learning in nature.

Rebecca Johnson: So through my work at the California Academy of Sciences where I co-direct citizen science, we design programs and try to work with lots of partners all over the city and the state and the world to figure out ways to connect people to nature and at the same time help them by using this platform called iNaturalist, an app and a website, to make biodiversity observations. And so those observations like speaking as a scientist, those observations are really important for understanding and doing really good science and furthering conservation but at the same time, this tool is a way to connect people to the natural world. And sometimes that sounds a little counterintuitive but people are inherently curious. And having this app and tool that encourages them to be curious and take pictures of what they're seeing whether or not they know what it is and knowing that there’s kind of a space where you can take a picture of a plant and you might not know where it is. But if you take a good enough picture the app and then people online, a community of people, will help you learn what it is, is a way to foster curiosity and at the same time use that tool that can sometimes be really isolating but to connect you to a community of people. And all of our events and the things that run use this app as a tool but it also has a huge in-person community building. There’s a part of it that is in-person community building. So we bring people together in places that matter to them to help discover and document biodiversity together. And so we bring people together that may not have met but share a love of usually of a place and so they can discover and explore together. It might sometimes be through a screen but usually the screen is kind of helping the experience it's a little different than just being isolated by the phone in between them.

Greg Dalton: And how are you using that to document climate change? Are you seeing climate change?

Rebecca Johnson: Yeah, I mean this, so the app is you can use it to take pictures but all of this data are shared. So basically when you take a picture of a let’s say of a plant and it knows where you are, who you are and when you took that picture and it’s shared online with iNaturalist. And that’s a data point that’s a species occurrence record. And so on iNaturalist now, there are about 16 million observations that have been shared from all over the world and together those make up a picture of biodiversity. And so we can use those data to look at where species are found is changing. And so individual people can take a picture that they might be taking a picture because they want to know what that spider is that they see on the sidewalk. And they're not really interested in conservation or climate change but that piece of information can help us understand how where that spider is found now compare as to where it was found in the past and where it might be found in the future. So there are lots of different examples of you can use these type of data to understand climate change. And sometimes more importantly is that people if they’re paying attention to a specific place and they go back to that place and they start paying attention a little bit more and in a different way, they can start to recognize change and witness the changes that we’re seeing. And they have a record so they can remember and they can look back and it really helps everyone I think kind of bear witness to the changes that we’re seeing.

Greg Dalton: Nooshin Razani, there's a professor at the University of Utah named David Strayer, you referred me to his work I watched his TEDx talk. He’s done research about human brains 20 minutes and science. So tell us about his research and what he's found with people in nature with their phone and without their phone.

Nooshin Razani: Sure. Well, I think in general and this is both the work of David Strayer and many others. If you take an urban person and you put them in the forest within a few minutes you’ll see improvement in stress. And so you’ll see improvements in cortisol in heart rate in blood pressure. Once you get to around 20 minutes you’ll see improvements in attention span after an hour you’ll see more physical activity and then 90 minutes they've shown that depression goes down. And then when you spend even longer time in nature and this is one of the studies that Dr. Strayer did where he actually hooked people up to EEG machines while they were backpacking in the wilderness they had no technology at all.

Greg Dalton: Except the EEG machine.

Nooshin Razani: That’s so true. But what he found is that there seems to around day three there's a little bit of a tipping point where your creativity is really maximized and your cognitive ability goes up. He has also done another study where he looked at the changes in brain waves in nature and then what if you go into nature with your phone. And I’m really sorry to say I mean we were just discussing that there are different ways to interact with your phone, but he did show that some of the benefit went away with the phone. And I think as a pediatrician one thing that I'm also and you brought this up, concerned about is parents and parental distraction. And the fact that the emotional attachment that happens between a parent and a child when a parent actually looks a child in the eye and mirrors their facial expression that whole interaction is key to the emotional development of the child. And so when both parties are fixated on the screen instead of each other there is a loss of actually what is not, you know, what is not optional what is actually essential to the development of a human being, which is having your parent mirror your emotions. And so I think except for iNaturalist, we need to be aware of our, you know, of the fact that we might be missing out on really enjoying nature together if we’re doing it through a screen, yeah.

Greg Dalton: Phil Ginsburg, there are juveniles on probation that go to Yosemite. Tell us about that program.

Phil Ginsburg: We run a really, really great program called the Teen Outdoor Experience. It's a multi-agency partnership, but we manage a property near Hetch Hetchy called Camp Mather, maybe some of you have been there. It is a place where there is no cell service and there is no Wi-Fi, think about that for just a second and it is paradise. And you know picking up on Nooshin’s you know, apt remark about the equitable distribution of opportunities like that it is historically not been a place where we have seen that many people of color and that many people from underserved communities. It's beloved among much of San Francisco but we've made a concerted effort to give kids who don't know about it or wouldn't normally have a chance to get up there to get up there. So the program works with kids who touch our juvenile probation system and it involves the Juvenile Probation Department, the Police Department, Department of Children, Youth and Family and my staff and we bring up every year about 70 kids for about five days. And what's amazing is that this is a population that probably wouldn't may not flinch at a gunshot that they hear in the city that are used to concrete and asphalt have seen all kinds of awful stuff that doesn't really scare them very much. And you bring them up to the woods and they just become kids again. They're scared of the dark they're scared of water they’re scared of animal sounds. They have trouble understanding why you can't have a bag of Cheetos in your tent in the woods and a couple had to learn the hard way. And to see this group of kids up there you literally watch this population become kids again. And it speaks to everything anecdotally I’m just relaying everything that Nooshin has evidence about the impact to mental health, the impact on creativity, relationship building all these things happen easier in nature without a phone.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us we’re talking about connecting to nature at Climate One. Our guests, Phil Ginsburg, General Manager of the Recreation and Parks Department in San Francisco. Nooshin Razani, Director of the Center for Nature and Health at the Children's Hospital in Oakland, California. And Rebecca Johnson, Citizen Science lead at the California Academy of Sciences. I'm Greg Dalton. Nooshin Razani, you have a son who is 13 years old who has a YouTube program or channel I’m not sure if I’m saying that right, making an old guy mistake. Tell us about that.

Nooshin Razani: So I raised my kids loving nature and I realized that that has consequences because everything that they're hearing about is that nature is in trouble, right. And so And I think what I've realized around the time that my oldest turn 13 is that if that energy doesn't get channeled into something productive and powerful it will become anxious and sad and withdrawn and not active. And so he wanted to make a YouTube channel, it’s called Movies with Mike One, let me just give a little shout out. But it’s for climate change and he does little challenges like he did, am I supposed to talk about this, three days without plastic. And I think what’s just beautiful about it is

Greg Dalton: Three days without touching plastic?

Nooshin Razani: Well, I mean he tried and we took a picture of our trash before and after and there was still like there's still plastic in our trash.

Greg Dalton: But I’ve looked at it he brushes his teeth not with a toothbrush brushing his teeth with like a metal bar or something.

Nooshin Razani: No, it was a stick.

Greg Dalton: Okay.

Nooshin Razani: But it was so humbling it was impossible to run a family I mean it was really hard to not use plastic. But I think the message here is like it doesn't really matter how you engage with climate change if you’re youth but just that you do and that you know that you have a voice and a role in a way better voice than all of us. And not only that but like we’re all behind you and if you choose technology to do that, great, even though I told them not to be on technology, you know, it is the tool that you have so I’m proud of him. And I’m proud of all the youth just for being alive in this day and age and for any creative energy that you bring to climate change that’s, you know, facing all of us.

Greg Dalton: And the youth are really driving a lot of the politics in this country right now around climate. The Sunrise Movement, children are in federal court suing the government to do more. But Nooshin, I wanna ask you, lot of people struggle with how much to tell children. I remember some eighth-graders coming to me and they did a research project and they're very prepared and they looked at me and I looked at them and they look at me as an authority figure. I didn’t know how much to tell them because I think it's kind of dark but so, you know, how do you talk to a 10-year-old versus a 15-year-old versus someone younger? How do you calibrate what you tell them?

Nooshin Razani: I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot and I've actually been drawing from the research that's done on trauma. There's been research done after 9/11 and after really huge events on how to talk to kids about something very traumatic. Because I don't think we should take it lightly that we’re telling children not only that we foresee the entire change of ecosystem but also that we don't really know what to do about it. I think that we have to do that in a developmentally appropriate way. What that research around trauma shows is that children do best when they think that they’re part of something and when they have social support and when they know their elders are doing what they can and that they and have a story to tell themselves about what's happening. So I think for children 0 to 5, you have to recognize that there’s very little separation between the external world and internal world and their relationship to a tree or an animal is one of intimate love. So you really have to talk about the death of that animal in a way that recognizes that you're telling them something they love will be dying. As kids get older I think you have to progressively give them more leadership in it. But just to wrap it up with drawing from the literature on trauma, I think the really important thing is to not say the world is ending and it’s up to you to change it. I think like because you’re five and you have no power, right. I think the thing to say is, yes, what you've heard is true and what you see is true and my generation is going to do every single thing that we can but then we actually have to do everything that we can. And what we don’t get to will be up to you and if you have any ideas I’ll try my best to follow you and your lead. But to not like leave it up to them or not say the world is ending so you should recycle. Like I mean it doesn’t make sense.

Greg Dalton: Rebecca Johnson, talking about participation in something bigger themselves. Tell us about the City Nature Challenge, which is a bioblitz is going to connect people from all over.

Rebecca Johnson: First of all I completely agree with Nooshin because I’m in this kind of environmental education role I mean I’m a scientist and an educator. I hear this all the time is that people are seeing all the work I do must be with children because children are the only ones who can do citizen science and the only ones who can be connected to nature. And even when I talk with adults who are out there with me making observations they’ll say it’s so great that you work with kids because they’re really the hope. I’m like, no, we’re actually the hope I mean we’re the adults here like who can call their supervisor their congressperson like me not my six-year old or my seven-year old. So I really appreciate this and I feel like this all the time it drives me, it’s one of my biggest pet peeves about this work and the world that we’re in. But the City Nature Challenge is an amazing endeavor that the California Academy of Sciences and the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum lead and it's an urban nature or a city in metro area biodiversity documentation contest which is a lot of words but really it’s a contest to see which city in metro area can document as much nature, the most nature over --

Phil Ginsburg: Beat L.A.

Rebecca Johnson: Beat L.A. So it started out the first year was in 2016 it was just San Francisco versus L.A. we worked together with our colleague Lila Higgins at L.A. County and President Obama had announced Citizen Science Day. So we thought what should we do and we thought well we could just see which city can make the most _____ [00:35:22] observations like that would be great. Then we did it for a little bit longer but together our two cities made 10,000 observations of plants and animals over like five or seven days. And we talked a lot on social media with like the beat L.A. hashtag. So the next year a lot of other cities wanted to join so the next year it was 16 cities across the U.S. And then last year it was almost 70 cities around the world. Hats off really to Lila and Alison who are the main organizers. They have, you know, multiple conference calls with multiple partners to get everyone on the same page because the most amazing thing about this is its, you know, the academy and the Natural History Museum working together with all these local partners who work in their cities and build partnerships that are meaningful in their place. And they say here are the basic things you have to do but really do what works for you. And by doing that, you know, you can have 17,000 people making nature observations in cities and make 400,000 observations over four days. And so for us this is a way to kind of get that like competition that the best that our work doesn't really have a competitive aspects but this is a way to get a lot of people engage in the nature that they see all around them. And it's not just by going to a National Park or somewhere really far away. It’s on your street across the street it’s wherever you are.

Phil Ginsburg: That’s a super important point which is nature is not about the once a year trip to Yosemite or to glacier. Nature is in your city it’s in your backyard it’s where we are and that's something that we really focus on here locally. Not as competitive as the bioblitz but I want to plug one another sort of cause for optimism, which is San Francisco is one of seven cities nationally participating in a sort of national effort to connect kids with nature. And so we have the San Francisco Children and Nature initiative, which involves not just the city and county but the school district about 25 nonprofits. The Presidio the Academy is involved, all these organizations working together and the toughest thing about change is getting different institutions to figure out how to work together to fulfill that mission statement of ensuring that every child has a nature-based experience every day. And one of the really interesting more interesting initiatives that this collaborative is focusing on right now getting to nature where you're at is we’re working with childcare providers. And there are some childcare providers that are very blessed to be near Golden Gate Park or near McLaren Park that have really easy access to nature. And then there are some in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin or the Excelsior or that are kind of landlocked and it might be sort of a basement kind of unit where a couple of people are watching eight or nine kids. And we've gone out and surveyed all of our sort of 0 to 5 childcare providers in San Francisco and those that don’t have easy nature access. One by one we are working on bringing nature to those facilities. So with tree stumps and leaves and branches so we’re trying to bring nature there that's just one of the initiatives that this is doing. But there is some cause for optimism this a real, there’s a real policy focus now. I mean again as Nooshin talked about the antidote to trauma antidote to mental health challenges that general idea of being connected to nature rather than connected to the Internet. And so we’re starting to see both locally and nationally much more of a policy push towards kind of making this happen.

Rebecca Johnson: It’s really about the people and connecting to people and finding ways to build a community around nature and nature connection for everyone – everyone who lives in the city, everyone who lives anywhere.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about getting outside in the digital age with Phil Ginsburg, General Manager with the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department. Nooshin Razani, Director of the Center for Nature and Health at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. And Rebecca Johnson, Co-director of citizen science at the California Academy of Sciences.

Here’s Greg.

Greg Dalton: Before we go to our audience questions, Phil Ginsburg I want to talk about what's being done to make parks hip and cool these days. Millennials are a generation that’s, you know, golf is thinking about making the hole bigger so the game moves faster, right. What are you doing with parks whether it's BMX or a ropes course what are you doing to make parks more --

Phil Ginsburg: Well nice lead-in, BMX and ropes courses. McLaren Park now has a great BMX bike course. We’re putting a ropes course in McLaren, you know, skateboarding is actually I think it's the second most popular physical activity among kids under the age of 21. So, you know, you gotta meet people where they're at. I think what's amazing about our park system is it is both cool and hip. It is also a place of reflection and really our 225 parks around the city can accommodate everyone and everyone's values. And it does tie into the nature conversation because there's a lot of activities that happen in parks whether in all honesty, whether it is soccer or a team sports or it is riding a bike or it's a museum or it's a concert that actually help welcome people into nature, right, they’re gateways. And so you come to Golden Gate Park for outside land you stay for the botanical garden or you stay for a walk along the new Oak Woodlands trails. And so I think we have to be open to creative strategies and whether that you know might mean geocaching or something, it could mean something that involves some technology of getting people outside in community in these shared experiences and then the nature follows.

Greg Dalton: Tell us about the treasure hunt.

Phil Ginsburg: The treasure hunt. How many people here know about Byron Preiss and the treasure hunt. Byron Preiss was a children's author who, this goes back actually two decades, apparently buried a key in a casque in parks all across the country and then published a book of images art that accompanied verse that were the clues to where these casques were buried. And the key actually unlocks a safe deposit box with actually very valuable jewels. So the story goes. Only three of the 14 casques have been found Mr. Preiss, sadly, I think died in a car accident. So he's not around to tell anybody where they are. And so there is one rumored to be in San Francisco and it was this was on the Travel Channel about six months ago and all of a sudden made all these request for people who wanted to dig for treasure in our park system which creates a kind of an interesting dilemma for a land manager. And we actually kind of leaned into it and said, sure, we want to do it responsibly we don’t want to hurt nature. We don't want to dig up irrigation systems and things like that so you have to be accompanied by a treasure ranger or a treasure gardener and you can dig away. So it spawned this really, kind of kooky quirky way of exploring our parks. There was a rumor just last week that it'd been found, but it apparently was a fraud where somebody flew here from I think from France with a scheme and a fake casque. My job is if you watch Park and Rec -- it is the sitcom, but it does lead to geocaching which is actually quite popular which are these, you know, GIS sort of coded little marks that people place all around parks and that is a true way of using technology collaboratively with your kids of exploring nature.

Greg Dalton: We’re gonna go to audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Hi. This question is for Mr. Ginsburg. So I found your work with the youth at Camp Mather very interesting. Did you see any long-term benefits after they spent such a long period in nature?

Phil Ginsburg: Well the benefits for us are we were able to engage kids in our system that actually have come back year after year. They come back the second year as a pure leader and several kids that have been in that program now actually work for us. So, you know, we weren’t really collecting data on these kids and maybe at some point we should figure out a way to do that. But just the mere fact that we have kids who are still in our system and are now pure leaders and camp counselors is quite good. We have one other program that I think is worth mentioning a program called Greenagers where we work with teenagers in the Bayview and in Chinatown and they are with us nine months a year, three Saturdays a month and it's an environmental education and leadership development program and those kids also become stewards. I mean I think Rebecca and Nooshin talked about how do we get us all but how do we get our next generation to kind of sort of care about the earth and really have a vested stake in making sure that we have nature and we have parks. And rather than telling kids what they can't do I think we've done a pretty decent job of giving kids an opportunity to learn and grow and actually work in nature.

Greg Dalton: Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Hello. So the earth is always been a changing thing, you know, for centuries it’s always changing. It never stays the same. I think that’s something that's really interesting. But when things like climate come up there is always these issues and I guess this is vague, but this is kind of for all three of you, what would be some things that we want to keep the same like as our usage of technology and also balancing it out with like nature what you guys were talking about.

Phil Ginsburg: I could take a stab at the way that technology is actually helping us in water conservation. We now use something called the evapo sensors which are, you know, this is basically an Internet 2.0 technology that is actually able to measure the water content in soil so that we can irrigate much more precisely. That's an example of technology being used to help us conserve. And there are probably a few other examples of that but I do think that we have to be open to, you know, building design changes irrigation techniques change, land management, you know, techniques change with technology. And we have to be open to that as long as we understand what our values are, right. And our values are to try to conserve natural resources to try to respond to some of the impacts of climate change and again in this era of, you know, unfortunately a very sedentary disconnected generation giving the next generation of kids a reason to be outside to form a community. And I guess kids and parents I mean what Nooshin said about you have to be there to kind of look at your child, I mean that really resonated with me. Because I have a busy job and I spend way too much time on my phone even though I love nature and I’m out in it all the time. I think we have to get back to using our park system to create community. And I do think we should be open to ways that technology invites us to do that.

Rebecca Johnson: I would just add that, you know, even though the work that we do on my team is we use an app and we use technology. I mean like Phil said, it’s all about community. I mean I don’t think I will be in this job or doing this work or care about it nearly as much as if it was just about the technology. I mean it’s really about the people and connecting to people and finding ways to build a community around nature and nature connection for everyone. Everyone who lives in the city, everyone who lives anywhere and helping them use technology to learn more about the nature around them. And to help kind of collectively generate the data that we all need at the scale like global scales to help solve these problems and help understand how biodiversity is changing. We have global data about climate and a lot of most other variables but biodiversity data is really, really hard to get at that scale. And the only way we can do that is that people everywhere make and share observations. And then the flip like other benefit is that then they’re more connected to nature and hopefully through the work that we do can be more connected to each other wherever they live.

Female Participant: So I know that spending a lot of time on screens can be bad for a growing brain which my dad tells me a lot. But can Ms. Razani elaborate on what you said about seeing positive aspects to screen time and how that connects to knowing how much time is spent on screens and how much time to spend outside.

Nooshin Razani: Yeah, so there was a large national study where they look at screen time in kids and adolescents. And what they found is that there's a huge uptick in number of hours spent on screens at around middle school. And for kids age 14 to 17 sadly, you know, every hour that you’re on the screen does increase your risk of anxiety or depression. And so I think it's real it does seem that those kids that spend more than seven hours a day, and that's a weekday, on screens tend to have like double the risk of anxiety or depression which may be that kids who are depressed need screens more than other kids. But I would say that going back in the beginning when I was talking about basically how to live as a human you need 8 to 12 hours of sleep if you’re a teenager it can be up to 12. You need to exercise I mean I can’t even believe that I’m settling for an hour a day but I would settle for an hour a day. And I tell people that you need to be out of doors in the sunshine for an hour a day. And if you think about the human animal, it’s like the only animal that we allow, to only be allowed outside for one hour a day and we find that acceptable. But I think you need to be outside an hour a day, you need to have physical activity and then you should be eating dinner with your family. There should be screen-free zones and screen-free times for families to interact with no screen. And then, you know, in terms of what to do online, I think there is some data that some of the social networking stuff is more correlated with anxiety and I don't want to speak to that fully. But like instinctively what I think is like when I see my kids creating something or generating content or if they can get good enough to code or actually be in a position of power when they're using the technology as opposed to just a consumer, I feel like that would be better for their mental health. I hope that was some guidelines.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our next question. Welcome.

Female Participant: Hi. I’m Scarlett I’m a high school student as well. And I was wondering because there are so much information these days out and I mean me personally I try and stay updated with all the recent news with climate change and different scientific advancements in those fields. I was wondering maybe for you guys what are the best ways to stay like up to date with all of the information and find the best ways that we can reduce our waste or just be better citizens in that way.

Greg Dalton: Rebecca Johnson.

Rebecca Johnson: Yeah, I would say there is so much information out there and I’m sure I don’t have to tell all of you that. I have found actually some of the best science communicators around climate are more on Twitter. And so I think there’s this amazing community, especially female scientists who are working in climate change. Jacquelyn Gill, there are just like -- you start searching, they are communicating science so beautifully and so powerfully and are really honest about what we need to do and connecting it to the kind of science that they do. And so I think that's where I would look to kind of curate it, I mean, it’s Twitter so you have to curate it but I think that is where I’d go to find like hope and inspiration and also the real science that’s happening right now.

Nooshin Razani: And I think the most important thing is to not disengage. I mean really anything you do that's engaged is good. And remember, you are nature so taking care of yourself is part of taking care of nature.

Greg Dalton: Last question.

Female Participant: So based on the recent research of the effects of nature on the mental health. Do you believe that psychologists will begin to use nature more as a treatment for mental health, specifically depression in teenagers?

Greg Dalton: Doctor Razani.

Nooshin Razani: Well, we’re trying to do randomize trial about that right now. I think first of all eco-psychologists have been doing that for a long time and the medical field is just waking up to that. And it's never going to take the place of an actual therapist because therapy is its own art and its own discipline. But there are people right now who are trying to figure out how much nature how often do you need it to help with anxiety and depression.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking about getting outside in the digital age with Nooshin Razani, Director of the Center for Nature and Health at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland. Rebecca Johnson, Co-director of Citizen Science at the California Academy of Sciences. And Phil Ginsburg, General Manager with the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department.

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more. If you like the program, please let us know by writing a review on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. And join us next time for another conversation about energy, the economy, and the environment.

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. The audio engineers are Mark Kirchner and Justin Norton. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show. I’m Greg Dalton, the executive producer and host. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

Prosperity and Paradox: A Conversation with Arlie Hochschild and Eliza Griswold

Otto Pilot — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:05:39 +0000

Prosperity and Paradox: A Conversation with Arlie Hochschild and Eliza Griswold

10/04/2018

Red states, blue states – when it comes to our environment, are we really two different Americas? New Yorker writer Eliza Griswold spent time in southwestern Pennsylvania to tell the story of a family living on the front lines of the fracking boom. Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild traveled to Louisiana to escape what she calls the “bubble” of coastal thinking. Both writers emerged with books that paint an honest portrait of a misunderstood America. On today’s program, tales of the people whose lives have been impacted by America’s craving for energy, the choices they’ve made, and their fight to protect their families and their environment.

Guests

Eliza Griswold

Journalist, The New Yorker

Arlie Hochschild

Professor Emerita, University of California Berkeley

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

Today, dispatches from Middle America – or as it’s known in some circles,

Eliza Griswold: “Trump country.” I think Trump country is a dangerous stupid moniker we shouldn't use anymore. It just allows us to write off wide swaths of America.

Announcer: Eliza Griswold spent time in southwestern Pennsylvania to tell the story of a family living on the front lines of the fracking boom. Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild traveled to Louisiana hoping to escape what she calls the “bubble” of coastal thinking.

Arlie Hochschild: So let me get into a bubble that as far right as Berkeley, California is on the left and take my alarm system off.

Announcer: Both writers emerged with books that paint an honest portrait of a misunderstood America. Tales of prosperity and paradox. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: Red states versus blues states – when it comes to protecting our environment, are we really two different Americas?

Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded before a live audience, and hosted by Greg Dalton.

When the fracking industry came to her Pennsylvania community, Stacey Haney felt good about signing over the rights to use her family farm. To Stacey, it felt patriotic.

Eliza Griswold: Her father was a Vietnam combat vet and she really wanted to keep American troops out of harm's way, out of foreign entanglements over oil. And so she thought she was really doing her duty by signing this lease.

Announcer: What happened to Stacey’s family as a result turned her world upside-down. New Yorker writer Eliza Griswold tells her story in her new book, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.”

Spending time in this Appalachian community, says Griswold, opened her eyes to a side of America that many don’t know – and don’t bother to understand.

Eliza Griswold: We know what our stereotypes are and we feed them, you know, reporters go out for a day to Trump country.

Announcer: Sociologist Arlie Hochschild also wanted to get past the stereotypes. That led her to leave her “Berkeley bubble” behind to spend five years reporting on the conservative community of Bayou Corne, Louisiana.

Arlie Hochschild: When I got there, I told him hi, I’m from Berkeley, California interested in the Tea Parties. He said, “Berkeley, so y'all communist, right?”

Announcer: Hochschild’s book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” tells the story of a community that’s been betrayed by the promise of prosperity – and by a government that has let them down. It’s what she calls “The Great Paradox.”

Arlie Hochschild: The heart of it is this question of why it would be that the states that are the most polluted are also the states with the most voters who don't believe in regulating polluters.

Announcer: On today’s program, Greg talks with Arlie Hochschild and Eliza Griswold about the people whose lives have been impacted by America’s craving for energy, the choices they’ve made, and their fight to protect their families and their environment.

Greg Dalton: So Eliza Griswold, tell us about Stacey Haney. Her dad was a Vietnam vet. She thinks that U.S. energy is better than foreign energy. Tell us about her.

Eliza Griswold: So Stacey Haney is a nurse and a single mom of two kids. And she and her family have for about the past hundred years been from two towns in Southwestern Pennsylvania just where Appalachia began. The towns are named Amity and Prosperity. And Stacey, she is truly a remarkable person she has the small farm, she’s had it for really the family has had it for about a century. It belonged to her great-grandfather.

And what happened in 2010 and 2011 is that her son who is 14 at the time, Harley, began to develop mysterious illnesses. And she as a nurse had the capacity to do some testing. And she found that she and her daughter and her son had benzene and toluene in their bodies. And Harley had arsenic poisoning. And once she got this information and she knew that there was gas drilling just next door on conventional drilling fracking about a quarter of a mile from her house. But then her daughter looked in her seventh grade computer science class, looked at their house on Google Earth and she saw that just a quarter of mile from them there was a 7 acre industrial waste pond. And it turned out that pond was not only leaking, it was off-gassing near lethal levels of hydrogen sulfide into the air. It was literally rotting with a bacterial infection. This were just the very beginning of Stacey learned about this mystery that was unfolding next to her and how it might be impacting her family’s health.

Greg Dalton: And there’s one dramatic moment where I think she's in a room with her friend Beth and some energy representatives and they're about to sign a lease.

Eliza Griswold: So, you know, when fracking came to Southwestern Pennsylvania a lot of the messaging around it and a lot of the reason that Stacey wanted to sign a lease was this idea of energy independence, which is clearly nothing new. But to Stacey it felt patriotic. And it felt patriotic for a couple of reasons. First of all she comes from the Rust Belt and the promise of industries return -- her dad was an out of work steel worker and they grew up in poverty. So the idea that she was doing something for her region so people might go back to work, that was very positive. But what was also positive you mentioned her father was a Vietnam combat vet and she really wanted to keep American troops out of harm's way, out of foreign entanglements over oil. And so she thought she was really doing her duty by signing this lease and she was also going to end up with $9,000 payment that would allow her to build her dream barn. And that was really, she thought gonna secure her spot in the middle class.

Greg Dalton: And one of the interesting points I noted was that coal and oil have been extracted in these areas, and most of the money left. But with fracking, some of the money stayed because people were able to lease for frackings like hey we can get rich, you know, the money can stay here in a way that it didn't for coal and oil.

Eliza Griswold: Absolutely. So this is one of the most important points that we really need to understand. When outsiders come into this place and they say how can you possibly be signing leases, you know, many of the people who live in this part of Appalachia have extremely sophisticated understandings of the minerals underneath their property. And, you know, for coal in particular, coal has been divorced; they haven't made any money off of coal since the late 1800s. And so Stacey in particular in fact the kind of coal mining that's going on in this area that really undermine, that's the verb, undermine the town of Prosperity next door is something called longwall mining. And when the longwall industrial mine comes under your house, you by definition lose your water for your farm. So people were afraid and they are still afraid of what’s gonna happen when the longwall comes. And so for Stacey and her neighbors signing these gas leases they thought might actually be a protection against coal. And that’s a story we don't hear very much at a distance on the coast. And we really have to understand the complexity of why people made these decisions because they’re not simply voting against their own interests.

Greg Dalton: Arlie Hochschild, one of the characters in your book is Lee Sherman sort of epitomizes the Great Paradox. So tell us about Lee Sherman and the Great Paradox.

Arlie Hochschild: Well, Lee Sherman worked all his life for petrochemical companies. He was a pipe fitter. And he worked for Pittsburgh Plate and Glass. And one day he was asked by his boss to take on a certain mission and it would be at dusk when nobody could see. And there was something called a tar buggy and it was heated from the bottom and it had all the toxic waste and sludge that had produced that day. And it was Lee's job to look left, look right make sure no one was seeing and unscrew a valve and release this toxic waste into public waters.

And he told me this, he is now in his 80s, and he told me that he was felt guilty about doing this. But one thing happened that on the job he himself was exposed to ethylene dichloride and he got sick, couldn’t move his legs. So he was put on medical leave by the company doctor and later he was fired for absenteeism.

So here's a man who'd been doing the dirty work for the company who himself was now out of a job and out of health and he became an environmentalist later in life and also enthusiastic voter for Donald Trump. And I had periodic conversations with him about how he puts these two things together. But he regrets what he did and he’s --

Eliza Griswold: I think of all the characters and the stories in your remarkable book, Arlie, it’s Lee Sherman who is just indelible. And the complexity of that moral situation that I just can’t get out of my head.

Greg Dalton: Another character in Strangers in Their Own Land is Mike Schaff, a lifelong resident of the Louisiana bayou about an hour south of Baton Rouge. He’s tea party member, a Trump supporter and an avid fisherman. In 2012 a giant sinkhole swallowed much of his small community because of a well drilled by a salt mining company called Texas Brine. The well punctured a naturally occurring salt dome underneath the ground. Schaff campaigned for years to get compensation for displaced residents.

Arlie Hochschild: Right.

Mike Schaff: Well I’ve been a conservationist since I’ve been a little boy. Since I’ve been fishing and hunting and stuff and I’d find dead fish and I knew something was wrong. I joined the green army which is a sort of a coalition of people on Louisiana who got screwed by companies, you know, and we fight each other’s fight and support them. And I am pro-industry, I’m just pro-clean industry, you know what I mean. We need what the industries, petrochemical industries in particular in what they produce. Our goal is to make it be produced in the most environmentally acceptable way as possible. I mean who wants a dirty water or a dirty atmosphere. Do you know of anybody that wants that? How many Republican friends you got, do they want that? Well, they don’t want it I promise you. We have some air pollution problems mainly because of the state agencies that are in charge of it are under the thumb of the legislatures and the lobbyists and industry. One person asked me why I vote for Trump when he’s getting rid of the EPA. And I asked them what has the EPA done for me? We’ve asked them to intervene on this mess we have over here and they haven’t lifted a finger.

Greg Dalton: That’s Mike Schaff, a Trump supporter outside Baton Rouge. Arlie Hochschild, your response to what he said there.

Arlie Hochschild: Yeah. You know when I first met Mike and I asked him why was he like the tea party and why government, big bad federal government or state government was so bad. And he said, well, I believe in community and the government is doing for us things we ought to do for each other for community. So get rid of government, recover community. And yet what happened to him with about the Bayou Corne Sinkhole was that he lost a community, his whole community was declared a disaster zone, a sacrifice zone. But it wasn’t big bad government that took it away it was unregulated industry that took it away in the absence of good government that took it away.

I went to visit him in Bayou Corne. And he just shortly after this had happened and things were -- it never had earthquakes before, but suddenly there were earthquakes. And he thought he was having a heart attack because things were moving and it sounded like someone had put a dumpster just loud. And then he began it was raining and he noticed there was bubbling in his front lawn it was like Alka-Seltzer that was methane gas that was there.

Everyone else had left but he didn't want to leave that's how much he loved his community kind of a Cajun community many people had been working in the oil industries and were retiring there loved this community and he didn’t want to leave it. But he had this gas monitor he’d check it in the middle of the night. You know if you lit a match, the place could go up but he took that risk, that’s how much he love this place and how much he hated leaving it.

Eliza Griswold: I think just to talk about regulation a little bit like to tease that out a little bit. Why do people feel that the federal government is against them like what is their lived experience of that. When you look at farming communities where there are small farms like if you look at Appalachia in this area of Southwestern Pennsylvania, there's a pork farmer who comes to mind, a guy named Jason Clark, he’s president of the Washington County Pork Association, he’s in his 30s and he has a brother who is an opioid addict. And because when I talked to him about let's talk about the government why are you so opposed to regulation and he tells this story which is, you know, he’s got the small number of pigs every time has to give a pig a shot he’s got to pay a hundred dollars because according to regulation the vet has to come out and give that pig the shot. But if he just thinks maybe his shoulder hurts a little bit he can get in his car drive 10 miles up the road go to MedExpress and get a prescription for oxy. And he turned to me and said, you wanna tell me the government isn't hypocritical, I am less regulated than my pigs are. So just to understand that a little bit that is lived experience for people in a great deal of America.

Arlie Hochschild: Right. I really think that’s a great comment. And I would add that in the case of Louisiana, it’s interesting that in a way companies give to the state the moral dirty work of promising to protect them from pollution, but not protecting them from it.

In the case of Louisiana there was $1.6 billion that was given to a variety of industries as incentive money to come and basically process the natural gas they weren’t getting from Pennsylvania. And so with that money companies could give out money for the Audubon Society and chemistry classes for the third grade and LSU uniforms, you know, so they could branding, they could be thought well of. But it's also true that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, they don’t even have protection in the name, does not protect people, they, as Mike himself said at one meeting, oh they give out permits like candy. So in a way everybody thinks well, industry is okay but it is government whose salaries you're paying for environmental employees are not protecting you. So it's easy to explain why they think state government what are these people doing, they’re not doing their job.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about prosperity and paradox in Middle America. Coming up, how oil fracking on her land further impacted the lives of Stacy and her family:

Eliza Griswold: She loses her house, she loses her way of life - she's living in a trailer with her kids…They really are a different kind of climate refugee.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about Americans living on the front lines of fossil fuel extraction. His guests are Arlie Hochschild, author of “Strangers in Their Own Land,” and Eliza Griswold, author of “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.”

Let’s continue with the story of Stacey Haney, whose family began to get sick after gas drilling contaminated their farm in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Greg Dalton: And in the case of Stacey Haney she went through a lot of work to try to understand what's in her water to get her water tested.

Eliza Griswold: Sure. I mean, so in Pennsylvania the Department of Environmental Protection is often called “don't expect protection” that's its acronym for local people. The way that it works and NPR state impact in Pennsylvania has done excellent work on this issue. There's a revolving door between public-service and private industry. And that is really important to understand because it's a form of public poverty that's really driving a lot of the lack of regulation and the lack of upholding state regulation.

So what Stacey did is she tried time and again to hold different parties accountable to testing what was in her water. Essentially what happened is that the state DEP was coming out to test, if you complain that your water is contaminated by oil and gas you suspected it, the state DEP would come out and they would test for 24 different metals associated with oil and gas contamination. But when they got those results back so they were testing for 24, but they would only give you results for eight, right. And that is exactly how these kind of, this is how this unfolds, right, that people have inadequate information that leads them into great harm.

Greg Dalton: And there’s even one scene where she meets with regulators and she get some information and then one of the regulators calls her back afterwards and says “don't drink your water” and like hangs up.

Eliza Griswold: That’s the EPA. So the EPA has launched two criminal investigations into the site. And I am proud to say that since the book has come out, Josh Shapiro, the Atty. Gen. has launched a new investigation.

So I was at, you know, I’ve been going around talking about this book and I was in Washington DC not long ago and most of my work as a journalist has been in Afghanistan and elsewhere. And there was a guy in the front row who was bald and I was sure he was like a tough general I forgot, from Afghanistan and he came striding up to me after the reading, I thought oh god I don’t remember this is. And he said, you know, I am Marty, I'm the first state federal regulator on Stacey's case and I did everything I could to make those that stick and I couldn't do it, right.

So you look at the failure and I’ll just say this that, you know, some of the people in the book were standing by this contaminated site when a state representative somebody from the DEP asked a representative from the private company if there were jobs available at the company. I mean but and why shouldn’t they because they need to feed their families too. So these are the complexities and the ways that we have to really understand how people live their lives and how we have to do better at addressing public failure.

Greg Dalton: So eventually she does get some of the information, Stacey get some information, she has to leave her land.

Eliza Griswold: Yeah. So Stacey has to leave her land, I mean following this in real time was mind-bending. Because, you know, when I first met Stacey, I met her at the Morgantown West Virginia airport the first time she ever spoke publicly about what she feared was happening. And she didn’t have much information and she was terrified that if she spoke out publicly the company that was supplying her water at that time would punish her by taking the water away. And she does not, she’s not a fan of journalism she’s not a fan of outsiders. She wanted the company to do right. And she believed if she told them her story that they would do right by her. And time and again this fails over seven years.

So finally, what happens is her kids are so sick they have to move out, they move into a trailer behind her parent’s house in the nearby town of Amity. So she's living in a trailer with her kids at night it’s so cold that they tried not to roll over because they stick to the trailer’s walls because they are warm and the trailer is cold. She's constantly on the move. They really are a different kind of climate refugee. You know they are really moving as a result of extraction next door to their house and they lose in the process the way that she and her neighbor Beth Voyles start to put together what's happening is the death of their animals. They keep losing goats and dogs and horses. And it’s that kind of sensitivity to toxicity that makes them put the story together.

So they lose everything. She loses a house she loses a way of life. She loses her farm. She loses all of her animals because when the house is abandoned wild dogs end up attacking the farm. And that was just, I mean it was really apocalyptic and as much as the story is about fracking it’s really much more a story of the failure of the common good and what it is that binds us together.

Eliza Griswold: Eventually the company settles. And I don't know what those terms are because they are protected under the terms of the settlement which is quite standard.

Greg Dalton: How do they feel about the settlement?

Eliza Griswold: They feel pretty disappointed. I will tell you they feel pretty disappointed. And Harley, you know, in the course of the book we meet this 14-year-old boy who wants to be the first kid in his family to go to college. He wants to be a veterinarian. He loves animals. The process of seeing animals sick and then die makes him think I'm not gonna be a vet. Then he wants to go into the military like his grandfather. And then he decides that he is not gonna fight for a country that has let him down that has failed him and his health isn't good enough either. He runs a lawn company and finally he does what he is doing today; he goes to work for the pipeline. He's laying natural gas pipe for the industry that's sickened him. So it's hard to imagine what this industry has cost this family.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us at Climate One my guests are Eliza Griswold, the journalist at The New Yorker and fellow at Harvard Divinity School. And Arlie Hochschild is an author and a professor of sociology at University of California Berkeley. I'm Greg Dalton. Arlie, I want to talk to you about the empathy wall the empathy gap because you -- why would anyone in Louisiana talk to a liberal from Berkeley first of all? And how did empathy play into that?

Arlie Hochschild: Yeah. Well, five years ago I decided that already the country was splitting in half and Congress was at a gridlock and Trump was not yet in the White House. But I thought I don't know anybody on the other side not really to talk to in a complex way. So and they probably don't know me in fact, we're all in bubbles, electronic bubbles, media bubbles, geographic bubbles as we know. So let me get into a bubble that as far right as Berkeley, California is on the left and take my alarm system off. Not forever, but long enough to permit myself a great deal of curiosity and interest in the lives of people that I knew I disagreed with. And people have said, oh well, you know, you must have a lot of empathy. No more than anybody else there’s no magic to this. We do it with our children with our loved ones with our family and our friends but we just don't do it for people that we think of as really disagreeing on climate or politics or anything else. So when I went there this Mike Schaff, I told him hi, I’m from Berkeley, California interested at the tea parties. He said, Berkeley, so y'all communist, right?

And then he laughed, you know, and then I felt we can talk. He was very generous hearted and very open. He knew we didn't agree on almost anything but I asked, could I see where you were born, could I see where your school was, you know, what church did you go to, where are your folks buried. And in the course of all of this and going out fishing he knew the faces of fifty kinds of fish that oh for me there was just one category of fish but for him, this one had whiskers and that one had eyes -- he really generously shared his life with me so that I could kind of try and understand how he saw this disaster that happened to him at Bayou Corne and how he saw Trump and how he saw the EPA.

Greg Dalton: How about you Eliza, did writing this book, you know, put another narrative in your head that you can relate to?

Eliza Griswold: A hundred percent. But it’s more, yes, what’s really changed for me since the election as a journalist is, you know, my understanding before the election was really that, you know, as I mentioned I have spent until this project, most of my work has not been in the United States. And so I would write about, you know, a Syrian refugee family that was stuck in, you know, different continents because I knew that by writing about that family I would bring some pressure on the U.S. immigration system. The State Department would respond they’d have to unify the family it might help give the Obama administration some cover under which to meet quotas for refugees. I mean that was the idea, right, behind the work, okay. But I took for granted the issue of audience; that the people reading it would feel as I did.

And I think what I’ve learned is just how little our coastal readers know, you know, and how much we assume by virtue of economic privilege that we know better than others do about the terms of their own lives. And so to sit down with farmers who can tell you the history of the shale beneath their feet the coal when these things were sold off what their sophisticated understanding is, how resource extraction is a give-and-take how rural Americans have paid for the energy appetites for urban Americans for a century, that is humbling in a whole different way.

Greg Dalton: You’ve written about Veronica Coptis, I think who is a rural Pennsylvanian she carries a Russian pistol she's very much a make America great again country. And she's thinking about Appalachia after coal trying to look for --

Eliza Griswold: Yeah, so Roni Coptis who I spoke to this morning she is definitely talking about what you do in a region after coal. And there’s -- how can I say this; there are ideas that look like a great idea to us from a distance about tech that don't really play out as well on the ground as they might.

Greg Dalton: So the idea that a coal miner is gonna build windmills and have a --

Eliza Griswold: That's not universally true. There's coding going on.

Arlie Hochschild: There’s coding, yup.

Eliza Griswold: There are definitely small-scale solutions. One of my friends and I have both worked on this issue of Amazon warehouses, right. And in Pennsylvania these guys really want Amazon processing centers and of course those are going to be out of use in five years they'll all be automated, right. And my assumption at a distance would be like, oh, Southwestern Pennsylvania doesn't understand how quickly automation is coming to Amazon. No, no, they say who are you to take jobs for five years from us? At least it’s five years.

And this is true when I written about Roni, I’ve spent a lot of time with coal miners too. Young miners who are making, you know, $150,000 a year in places where the median income is $40,000. Their understanding is that coal is gonna go away, for sure the reserves are such they’ll maybe work for 10 more years. But they voted for Trump because four more years means sending their kids to private school for four years. It means paying off their house and it means paying off their car. They’re not looking toward a future; for them this political divide isn’t intractable and ideology it’s very real. It's very much a day-to-day economic reality.

Greg Dalton: Arlie Hochschild, you also write about fossil fuel executives and workers having different attitudes toward climate change. I thought that was really interesting.

Arlie Hochschild: Yeah, you know, in the back of my head I’ve and probably it’s the same for you and Eliza, of how could we get a conversation going left and right on climate change. And actually my son, David, who is a member of the California Energy Commission in charge of renewables and who is a big advocate for getting California to 100% reliance on renewables. He came with me to visit Mike last year and we went fishing and we had a conversation. And I said look, I'm just gonna hold a tape recorder here can you guys come to some agreement on how to get a clean energy, clean environment. I know you both value it, but how do we get there? What’s the role of government in it?

And that -- so they agreed that renewables are great thing and Mike had a different vocabulary for it. Yes, private enterprise you start your own business. You’re self-sufficient in energy and wasn’t that a great thing. And there actually is an organization called the green tea movement which is tea parties for green. So he was not alone, Mike, in that attitude when it came to climate change. And David was saying, well, you know, you could have solar on the roof of your house, right here in the new house he lives in and to move out of Bayou Corne, so this one’s on Lake Verret. And he said, yes, it’d be a good thing and it would even help with climate change. And Mike said, oh no, no, no, no, not climate change.

And in my mind I’ve been continuing that conversation. Mike loves the military and he said, you know I would give my life for my country. I was in the military and proud of it. The military has been a leader in renewable energy and they’re worried about rising tides that's a security issue. And actually the Navy has a higher goal than the state of California they want to get 50% reliant on renewables by 2020 and California is 25. So actually that would be a way to begin a conversation left and right. Look, for the military it's been a leader in the very thing you’re suspicious of. Also I would add that many of the CEOs for the big companies, Phillips 66, Shell, they believe in climate change. If you look at their websites, they’ll say, yeah, the science is there and it’s a problem we’re worried but the people that work for those companies don't. So that would be another way of starting with the figures that people on the right revere and saying, well look, some of them agree that climate it's real and it’s based on science. I’m not sure how much the Navy says about that but we do know that they’re worried about rising tides.

Greg Dalton: There’s a whole school that you can talk, solve climate change without using the word and talk about technology and food and sex and fun and all sorts of things just don't use that word. But Arlie, you also have the idea of, you know, exchange programs rather than college students going to France they should go to Louisiana and learn and we don't have those shuffling mechanisms that we used to have.

Arlie Hochschild: Exactly. We used to have a robust labor union movement that got people of different regions together and races. And we used to have, you know, a compulsory draft that put people together. Now we need a new one that mixes and matches us across region and class because if you look at left and right they have become region class votes.

So how do we do that? I think in high school would be a wonderful time for the south to go north the north to go south, coast to go inland, inland to go coast for three weeks work on a project together. And before you do take a class in civics and take another class in mediation. How do you listen to another how do you respect both respect and disagree with a person. Get them train to do that get each other's deep stories and maybe we could reknit this country together.

Eliza Griswold: I think that's a terrific idea. And as a journalist I think we have to do better at being careful with our work to look at who is actually in places. I mean, you know, we look at Appalachia 700,000 square miles, 25 million people and we know what our stereotypes are and we feed them, you know, reporters go out for a day to Trump country. I think Trump country is a dangerous stupid moniker we shouldn't use anymore. It just allows us to write off wide swaths of America. I was in Charleston, West Virginia a couple of days ago with some young trans activists and resistance activists they were doing different work. And they were just so eager -- what we think of who is in places, yes an exchange and also media do a better job at not going out and looking for your stereotypes because, you know, they don't want to be. They’re like we are as diverse and as boring and as screwed up as any other area of America. But don't blame Trump on us; blame Trump on the Philadelphia suburbs! You brought us Trump, you know. So I just think we have to do a better job. And that’s a lot of economics I mean it’s one thing to spend four hours in Taylor bookshop but you got to spend four days, you got to spend four years and that’s a harder ask.

Greg Dalton: And one of the things I think is the themes in both of your books is how people can smell that condescension that, you know, peel back these layers of politics, economics is that they know that the coastal elites look down on them and they resent it and they can smell it a mile away.

Arlie Hochschild: That’s right. That’s right.

Eliza Griswold: They know that the coastal elites have benefited from their poverty.

Greg Dalton: And their energy.

Eliza Griswold: And their energy. So screw like screw what somebody thinks of them like what have they actually taken from them. And I think that for me, you know, one of the things I've been thinking about bringing young people young immigrants back to communities in Appalachia. And I was working with some kids to do this and the Appalachian kids said, you can’t do that yet with people who are so you could definitely do an exchange program working on a project together. But don’t bring us people who are really very different because we are wounded and first you need to come to listen to us. And I think that degree of wound is really alien to us and I also wanna be very careful about talking about they in a general way because that’s the problem. But the individual stories told carefully with the diversity an eye toward diversity that we know is out there it is part of what I as a journalist have to be doing.

Announcer: You're listening to a Climate One conversation about bridging the empathy gap between red states and blue states. Coming up, using patriotism to fight big oil in the courts.

Eliza Griswold: They know they’re gonna face a conservative Republican bench at the State Supreme Court level and they know that the argument that's going to work is what are our God-given rights. And in Pennsylvania, one of the rights in the Constitution is the right to clean air and pure water.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking with UC Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild and New Yorker writer Eliza Griswold. They both have new books out that explore the delicate balance between conservative values and environmental stewardship.

Let’s get back to their conversation.

Greg Dalton: Eliza Griswold, a lot of the story you chronicle happens under the Obama administration. So what's your take looking back at the Obama administration how, you know, U.S. went from an importer to an exporter during that administration. So what’s your assessment of how that government did?

Eliza Griswold: That the concept of bridge fuel that was the cornerstone of Obama's policy was a farce. Unfortunately I think it was incredibly short sighted. We didn't need that bridge. That was a bridge to nowhere. I mean renewables, you know, we were talking a little bit before; the most craven energy investors who are just don't care about the environment who are just looking to make money will tell you that growth in the market is in renewables. That has lots of reasons we've reached what's called peak grid which I’m not gonna get into I'm sure that’s something you have discussed here before. So growth is off grid it’s in renewables as well as the fact that these things are easier to build and much cheaper than anybody thought. So the idea - so we don't need natural gas as a bridge fuel; we are ready for renewables. And I think that was unfortunately I don't know the genesis of that in the Obama administration certainly the idea of energy independence and national security are valuable goals and important, right and so are jobs in the Rust Belt, all of these ideas. But I have to think that industry got into Obama's ear in an unfortunate way and he believed metrics that turn out to be shortsighted.

Greg Dalton: Well there is also the electoral map that every president pays attention to and there's a lot of red states that are very important to get reelected. And those states wanted to have some kind of extraction he was trying to, you know, the Jerry Brown thing, you paddle to the right you paddle to the left and you --

Eliza Griswold: But it’s not so much the states that wanted the extraction it’s the industry that wanted the extraction. And when you look at what drives fracking and you’re gonna have Bethany McLean who is another hero here just wrote an amazing book called Saudi America, Wall Street her question is would fracking exist without Wall Street and the answer she reaches is no. Because actually fracking isn't turning a profit. What comes out of fracking the money is basically investment money. She’ll tell you much better than I can summarize her amazing work.

But again talking systemically talking about our responsibility in New York City to those who live in Pennsylvania the money is coming from Wall Street. So the reality --

Greg Dalton: It’s coming from the pension plans of people sitting in this room and listening to this podcast.

Eliza Griswold: Exactly. Exactly. So when I asked Bethany is this a Ponzi scheme? She said it's an unintentional Ponzi scheme as most Ponzi schemes are, which again she's amazing, listen to her yourself. But we have culpability here it's not just distant Texas execs or red state people voting for energy, no, it’s Wall Street.

Greg Dalton: And Wall Street is 401(k) plans and retirement plans.

Eliza Griswold: Exactly once again this is pension funds that are looking for return and are getting, and private equity but pension funds in particular that are getting deeper and deeper into this idea of energy, that in a way they don’t need to be.

Arlie Hochschild: So this suggests another form of activism, you know. Look at these pension plans and if you have a piece of one, you know, you can get together with others to get a voice and say no don’t invest in that.

Greg Dalton: And that is happening, the divestment movement on college campuses. You know there’s the Divest-Invest and there’s a lot of money is moving toward away from fossil fuel because of stranded assets all sorts of reasons. But Arlie Hochschild, you talk about how some of the dirtiest states are the reddest states. Tell us that correlation.

Arlie Hochschild: Yes. Actually, you know, it’s a part of a whole red state paradox actually. How come across the country the red states are the states that have most poverty, you know, most disrupted families, have the lowest life expectancy as part of that the worst pollution.

Plus they are also the states that don't believe in government solutions so that seems like paradox.

But the heart of it is this question of why it would be that the states that are the most polluted are also the states with the most voters who don't believe in regulating polluters. That’s kind of heart of this paradox. And actually for Strangers in Their Own Land, I did a special analysis putting together two things. There's something the EPA has a tox map and it has a measure RSEI, it's called, that looks at the distribution of the amount and volume of polluting materials the toxicity of them and the populations that are exposed to this. That’s a measure the EPA has and I hope that with these cuts that kind of knowledge doesn't go away. I related that to, it’s called the General Social Survey with a bunch of attitudes nationwide on the environment. And lo and behold the closer you are to a ZIP Code that has high rate of exposure to toxic waste, the more likely you are to be Republican, the more likely you are to agree with such a statement as the government is already doing enough to preserve the environment.

So, you know, we were talking before that in 1988 the environment didn't used to be a partisan issue. You had just as many Republicans as Democrats worried about it. Now we’re doing the splits and so now is the time for us to get together with the skeptics and sit down to see if we can find common ground.

Greg Dalton: You say skeptics that imply sort of conversion. I wanna talk a little bit the idea that people need to be converted to the way we see it. If those people would just think like me, everything would be fine. Is that the way that, you know, that's not finding common grounds, it just like I wanna persuade you I wanna convince you isn’t that where a lot of our political dialogue is right now?

Arlie Hochschild: In writing Strangers, I met an extraordinary person. His name was General Russell Honoré. And he was a rescuer in 2005 of the victims of Katrina and he now has become an ardent environmentalist. He’s leading the environmental movement and the green army that Mike Schaff is part of. And I watched how he talked to non-environmentalists and he did it this way. Not by arrogantly kind of disregarding the values and symbols of the people he is talking to but by acknowledging them and doing what I would call a symbol stretch. I’ll give you an example.

He was talking to a group of Lake Charles’ businessmen whose mantra was freedom, freedom. They didn't want anything to do with environmental regulations. So freedom to invest your money. Freedom to make a lot of money. Freedom from onerous regulations. Freedom. And so he is talking to them. They don't like environmentalists, don’t even like the word. And he says this, I woke up this morning and I looked out at Lake Charles, I saw a man in a boat and that man had his fishing line out. But that man is not free to lift up an uncontaminated fish.

I thought, you genius. Oh, I followed him around for the next day, you know, just how do we do that. We need to do that with patriotism, not to say oh you’re silly to be patriotic. No, of course not. We’re patriotic too but what does patriotism mean. Doesn't it mean a free press, doesn't it mean an independent judiciary, doesn't it mean democracy. I mean you start with the symbol and you apply it more broadly.

Eliza Griswold: I think that's brilliant. I also think, you know, that one of the ways to do this is through a conversation about rights. In the book these two heroic husband-and-wife lawyers who are no environmentalists, I mean Kendra and John Smith. Kendra is a corporate defense attorney for railroads. She mostly deals with asbestos cases. And they take a case that defends Stacey and others against the companies and against the Pennsylvania against the government itself all the way up to the State Supreme Court. And they're trying, what their argument is they know they’re gonna face a conservative Republican bench at the State Supreme Court level and they know that the argument that's going to work is what are our God-given rights. Right, these are all inalienable rights and in Pennsylvania, one of the rights in the Constitution is the right to clean air and pure water.

And that has been on the books since the 70s, but it's largely been instrumental. I mean it’s largely been decorative it hasn't had any teeth. And because of the Smiths’ case and their apt argument about our right to clean air and pure water the conservative Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found in their favor. And that’s the kind of thinking, these are just terms to change, you know, there was something else that was so important about that.

Greg Dalton: George Lakoff is a Berkeley linguist who also says that purity is a key to unlocking to finding common ground using that right, that conservative frame.

Eliza Griswold: So as Mike said is the idea of conservation. Prudent use of resources for the next generation is a much better thing than liberal -- also I wanted to say this. Here is something you might not think about for people who are living in rural places who hold conservative values. For people who live in cities to come out to them and tell them about the environment they’re just gonna flip you the bird because oh you are so divorced from the land you care so much about the land that you live in New York City, what a joke. That’s their understanding and just I mean another way to just flip the script and see that for a second that’s the understanding.

Greg Dalton: I wanna talk about faith, you know, the way that religion plays into this. Eliza Griswold, you've written about this, you know, what role does religion play in these attitudes?

Eliza Griswold: Religion provides us another excellent word and another excellent concept to use with people who feel differently, which is stewardship. You wanna talk to conservative evangelical Christians about climate change in the environment, you talk about stewardship of the earth. And there are plenty of people I mean the issue of the environment within the evangelical community is so profound that there's a schism within the -- we are seeing it within the religious right within traditionally what we would see as the religious right. We are seeing deep divides over issues of the environment of issues of immigration of issues of abortion. And so there are plenty of people and I would call them heroes. They are really trying to move away from the cultural inheritance of religion.

And in this case that would be associated with like the Moral Majority, right 70s, 80s, you know, Christian right and return evangelicalism in particular to its roots in antislavery, its roots in Jesus' actions and Jesus' life, and there's plenty of language and shared experience there to change the terms of the conversation. I think religion has a real role to play here it’s actually something I'm just starting to work on. So I'm just starting to identify some of these figures. But again you wanna be really careful that you’re not just talking to people who are talking down to others.

Announcer: That was Eliza Griswold, New Yorker writer and author of “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.” Greg Dalton’s other guest on today’s program was Arlie Hochschild, author of “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.”

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more. And join us next time for another conversation about America’s energy, economy, and environment.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

children & family

Youth Activists 15 Years Later

Youth Activists 15 Years Later

Guests

Alec Loorz

Victoria Loorz

Slater Jewell-Kemker

Kyle Gracey

Abrar Anwar

Get Up, Stand Up: What Actions Move the Needle?

Two Heroes Challenging the Powerful

How Activism Can Win Bigger and Faster with Kumi Naidoo

What More Can I Do?

This Year in Climate: 2023

Rebecca Solnit on Why It’s Not Too Late

Jane Fonda: A Lifetime of Activism

Law and Oil: Taking Climate Offenders to Court

Power Shift: Jamie Margolin and Dorceta Taylor

Killer Heat: Confronting Disproportionate Impacts on Women and Girls

Killer Heat: Confronting Disproportionate Impacts on Women and Girls

Guests

Eugenia Kargbo

Kathy Baughman-McLeod

Eleni Myrivili

Extreme Heat: The Silent Killer

Chasing the Harvest in the Heat

The Hidden Health Hazards of Climate Change

This Year in Climate: 2023

Reporting from COP28: The People at the Heart of It All

Weathering the Storm: Mayors of Houston, Miami and Columbia

2021: This Year in Climate

Climate Migration: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

How Activism Can Win Bigger and Faster with Kumi Naidoo

Rethinking Economic Growth, Wealth, and Health

Two Heroes Challenging the Powerful

Two Heroes Challenging the Powerful

Guests

Nalleli Cobo

Marjan Minnesma

This Year in Climate: 2023

Rebecca Solnit on Why It’s Not Too Late

Jane Fonda: A Lifetime of Activism

Youth Activists 15 Years Later

How Activism Can Win Bigger and Faster with Kumi Naidoo

What More Can I Do?

Law and Oil: Taking Climate Offenders to Court

Killer Heat: Confronting Disproportionate Impacts on Women and Girls

REWIND: Should We Have Children in a Climate Emergency?

REWIND: Should We Have Children in a Climate Emergency?

Guests

Daniel Sherrell

Virginie Le Masson

Seb Gould

Irène P. Mathieu

Should We Have Children in a Climate Emergency?

Youth Activists 15 Years Later

Killer Heat: Confronting Disproportionate Impacts on Women and Girls

Two Heroes Challenging the Powerful

Zen and Coping with Climate

Power Shift: Jamie Margolin and Dorceta Taylor

High Risk, High Hopes: A Year of Climate Conversations

Naturally Wired: Getting Outside in the Digital Age

Zen and Coping with Climate

Zen and Coping with Climate

Guests

Sister True Dedication

Leslie Davenport

Mind Over Chatter: Exploring Climate Psychology

Elizabeth Kolbert on Hope, Despair, and Everything In Between

Yes, Happiness and Climate Action Can Go Together

2021: This Year in Climate

Coping with COVID and Climate Fatigue

Should We Have Children in a Climate Emergency?

Living with Climate Disruption

Heavy Weather: Balancing Joy and Despair

Should We Have Children in a Climate Emergency?

Should We Have Children in a Climate Emergency?

Guests

Daniel Sherrell

Irène P. Mathieu