 Along with that one there, and that one there, both of them are called Kate. We've been doing, the Family Theatre has been hosting dialogues since 1994. We started the company with a show by a great artist that another great artist introduced me to and kept me out of mid-school, named David Hancock. And after we did David's play, we did a dialogue on genocide, because of what was going on in Bosnia at that time. And so for a number of years, we hosted dialogues that asked questions about things that were actually happening that we didn't understand. They were happening, and more specifically, it was like a giant pause button to go, wait a minute, this is happening, is this what we need? And then in 2004, I went to the World Social Forum, I was in 2004 or five, I went to the World Social Forum in Brazil, and I realized how much prefiguration there was in the world. And what I mean by that is how many people are dealing with issues in really proactive ways, and a different future is being built by their work right now. And so this idea of identifying things that are happening started to shift around that time when we said, well, these things are happening, and these are some of the really exciting things that are also happening in response and out of some of these issues. And so this is Founder Dialogues 2015, so we're in our 21st year, which is kind of incredible. And again, we're also always looking for ways that artists themselves are asking new questions and learning from people that we haven't met yet. And so some of those people are on the panel tonight, and who are in many ways living the future now, which is how I understand prefiguration. So thank you again for coming, and it was a pleasure to invite people to this, and have a nice talk. And I need to introduce Nana Sen, who is the curator of this series, and it's because of her that all these remarkable people are coming together. Hi, everyone. How are you all doing? I'm just going to take a few minutes to tell you about all of our wonderful speakers today so you can have a little bit more context about the work that they do. And I think they're hanging around in the back, so folks, you can take your way to the front of the room when you have a second. So we have on the panel today Becca Iconopoulos, who is the co-founder of Not an Alternative, an arts collective with the mission to affect popular understandings of events and institutions in history, to engage critical research and design. Not an alternative curates and produces interventions in material and material space, bringing together tools from art, architecture, exhibition design, and political organizing. Not an alternative's most recent ongoing project is this amazing thing called the Natural History Museum, a new museum that offers exhibitions, expeditions, workshops, public programming, and unlike traditional Natural History Museums, it actually turns an anthropological lens onto the institution of museums. It makes the point to highlight sociopolitical forces that shape nature. So when you get a chance maybe after the dialogue, all of these exhibits in the space have been produced, designed, produced, and created by the Natural History Museum, and they reflect a lot of the content that we have been inspired by from Naomi Klein's book. This changed everything, so I'd encourage you to take a look. Rachel Falcone is the co-director of Storyline Media. Rachel uses oral history, art, and technology to engage people in the telling of their own stories. She's the co-founder and executive producer of the award-winning transmedia storytelling project Sandy Storyline. As part of her Montanilla project, Housing is a Human Right. Rachel has produced first-person stories about the housing series and the Human Right to Housing movement. She has also been an organizer for social movement organizations, including Occupy Our Homes and Organizing for Occupation. Worcestership has been born and raised in New York City. She is a nationally recognized Puerto Rican attorney and environmental justice leader. She is now the ED of UpRose, which is Brooklyn's oldest Latino community-based organization. Her award-winning vision for an intergenerational, multicultural, and community-led organization is the driving force behind UpRose. She's a long-time advocate and trailblazer for community organizing around sustainable development, environmental justice, community-led climate adaptation, and community resiliency in Sunset Park. And Mallory is our moderator today. Mallory is an OV award-winning director and dramaturg of performance across disciplines. She's the artistic director of Restless NYC and on and off-site theatrical enterprise that excavates the classical repertoire as a source of contemporary performance to engage the past in a dialogue about life in the present. As a dramaturg, she has worked on projects for Lincoln Center, Directors Lab, MAI, The Culture Project, The Labwind XP Girl, Free Fall Dance Company, and Urban Stages. So please join me in giving a round of applause. I'm going to try to leap right in and to get, I'm going to ask everyone now to get very specific, very quickly. So maybe we'll create some gaps that then will instigate further specialists to build those. So we might lack, like, a lot of broad context in the, because I would like to kind of get to the heart of the subject more quickly and to kind of get everyone kind of involved in the problematics of what we're going to take on with complexity. So the first question to each of them is going to be kind of, is it a big question as Elizabeth said, but the idea here is the question is what in your own life and work has led you to engage with environmental issues? And I would like each of one of them to connect that sort of point of entry in a way to a very specific project that manifests that idea that they're doing right now. All of these people work on a lot of different, many, many different kinds of projects, but I want them to go from the personal to something specific and endeavor that they're doing right now. Gosh, we were talking about this earlier back there and I thought, yeah, I thought I had a way into this question that was a little sneakier than I realized was possible. So yeah, I guess I will go ahead and just tell you a little bit about, I think a formative moment for me was growing up in a multicultural household where my parents came from countries over in the United States and my mom was very religious, wanted to be a non-lector in the Catholic Church and my father being very much against religion, having seen how it tore apart his country in the Civil War in Greece. And so I was going with my mom to church and became an altar server and there was a point at which I felt very uneasy by what I felt like in Bethesda, Maryland, growing up in an upper middle class background, was hypocrisy in this institution where I was like, God doesn't care about an old chalice and why are we here in this fantasy place? We should be out in a meadow. So this is like my early hippie inclinations. And I think in, you know, many other formative experiences, having two older brothers really sharpens my sense of oppression and injustice. And so, you know, ultimately it was like a path towards having been imbued with these values that the church taught but also very offended at this sort of righteous level by the contradiction between ideals or rhetoric and practice. And that actually is something that now as I collaborate with artists and cultural producers is an orientation in our practice. We also inherited from the legacy of institutional critique art which is taking a look at the gap between the ideals of the institution and its practice and sort of inhabiting the vocabulary of those symbols, those events, those institutions in order to reveal and hopefully to close that gap. Do you have like a specific project other than that you feel like it's a good manifestation of that in your mind? Yeah, a few weeks ago we teamed up. So the Natural History Museum is a museum that's registered with the American Alliance of Museums. We do everything traditional Natural History Museums do but we make a point to highlight the socio-political and economic forces shaping nature. And we teamed up with dozens of the world's top scientists several weeks ago including several Nobel laureates to release a letter calling on science museums to cut all ties to the fossil fuel industry. And then in tandem with that launched a petition calling on our country's two biggest Natural History Museums, the Smithsonian in D.C. and the American Museum of Natural History here in New York to kick David Koch off their boards. So it sounds like you guys know who David Koch is. So I won't go into that. But yeah, within a week, two weeks, 250,000 petition signatures. And that scientist's letter also like struck a nerve. It made headlines around the world. There were hundreds of news articles. And it almost sort of blindsided us. I think it's just sort of a no-brainer to get climate deniers, climate science deniers out of science museums. And these spaces that communicate science to the public. So yeah, maybe that's a bit of this like contradiction thing that we were really interested in is sort of borrowing the aesthetic vocabulary, the presentation forms of a natural history museum that mediates understandings of nature in order to offer a different perspective on nature as a cause and tell stories about climate change that include the role of the fossil fuel lobby and that offer the justice perspective and that amplify the voices of communities on the front lines of the climate crisis. I'm so glad you talked about that. That's just good work. So I guess I'm a little late to the environmental game. I grew up in New Jersey and I spent most of my summers on the Jersey Shore. How many of you all have been to the Jersey Shore? Love for the Jersey Shore. So my parents actually moved there and have been there so they live a block from the ocean and so a lot of my notion of place is like standing with my feet in the water looking at the ocean. And so for the last like eight years I've been doing a lot of work around housing and home and the idea of displacement mostly in New York but also nationally. I have a story time project called Housing as a Human Right. When Hurricane Sandy hit New York, New Jersey I think like many New Yorkers started to make the connection between things in my own life and sort of bigger issues of the environment and climate change. And so I very quickly actually my collaborator and I went to Red Hook where there was an amazing hub that was developing because of a really strong existing community group there called Red Hook Initiative. And so I lived in Brooklyn. My parents were okay, although they were by the shore they lost power but they weren't flooded. So I wasn't hit because I live in Bed-Stuy which is one of the higher parts of Brooklyn. So right after the storm, the next day I went out to Red Hook to see if I could help and I brought my recorder because that's kind of like what I do and I think just wanting to listen to people and see what was happening. And so what was so fascinating was people were sitting in the charging station and had all their cell phones out in New York and were starting to tell stories showing images of what they had taken. And so there was one woman with a picture of this insane tree that had fallen into a public housing unit actually in Bed-Stuy. And so they were sort of starting to talk over the images and I kind of had this overwhelming feeling that there was no way that I could tell that story by myself. There was just like hundreds of people in this charging station and they all had incredible stories that they wanted to share both about the storm itself and what was happening and what they were making of it. And we had done a lot of work with folks in New Orleans, post-Katrina particularly, on the housing and displacement and the total decimation of public housing down there after Katrina. And so pretty quickly we realized that this was going to be years to rebuild and sort of how much now our homes were being threatened by something else and so for me that was, Sandy was kind of like a moment I think for many people to kind of start to see that there was something larger that was going to make all the other problems we were dealing with whether or not it was homelessness, you know, lack of jobs, all these things before closure crisis, it was going to make it that much worse. And so for me that was kind of the moment of starting to connect these issues and to get involved. My story is a little different. I'm a descendant of colonization and slavery so when I think about extraction I begin with the extraction of the labor of my people and then we start talking about extraction of fossil fuel and so when you think about that history one of the things I think about is how generationally one generation after the other has been exposed to the worst housing, the worst food, the worst living condition, living with stress, generation after generation after generation and how that shows up as disease. And so I remember as a child one of my first experiences where I thought I can't do this. I'm going to have to fight for things. First let me just say my mom said that I came out of the womb with the fist first. And I remember as a little girl I had an uncle. He was black, transgender and fabulous. He taught me how to put on makeup and taught me how to do the catwalk. And I remember all the suffering and all the abuse he went through because he was black, because he was transgender and because he didn't speak English. And I remember putting my body in front of him to protect him from having people throw rocks at him and I was about five years old. And I think that my early experiences watching my uncle Robert go through that and listening to my mom's stories about how they were beaten up with these things called garrison belts when they first moved to the United States from Puerto Rico. I remember thinking I would never let those things happen. But in terms of environmental justice and the work that I do, those are my early experiences. Those are the things that I remember and a lot more stories that would take a lot more time. But those were the early ones. I think my uncle had a major effect on me because he was so kind, so generous, so gentle and people were so cruel and I always think that if he lived today he would live such a different kind of life. But I always learned that there's nothing more fundamental in the right to breathe that if you can't breathe you can't fight against that policing. You can't fight for housing. You can't fight for any of those things. My father died in the South Bronx of an asthma attack at the age of 50. A few years ago I would smoke out a drink. I'd never done drugs. A few years ago I had a severe bilateral and pulmonary embolism. I had all of the conditions that one has having been born and raised in environmental justice community living next to environmental problems. And so there is a direct correlation between the work that I'm doing, how I grew up and the places that I lived in and this place from growing up and the history of my people. The fact that no matter where we live anywhere in the United States people of color we're the most likely to be living next to environmental burdens. And so I went into the environmental justice movement because I thought that it was probably the most important thing to be doing. And in the time that I've done it we have stopped deciding power plants. We've doubled the amount of open space. All of our young people get into first year colleges. We've sent three to an article once in the North Pole. We, with the front line of the people's climate march, we insisted that it be made up of young people of color. I remember saying last year that when you see young people on TV it's when they're doing the perp walk and young people need to be seen, young people of color need to be seen in leadership. And so the work has really grown organically. I didn't take an environmental policy class in my life. It was basically what needed to be done and we've learned about energy. We've learned about ground fields, about open space. You name it. We learn it because we are resourceful. And so one of the things that we've done recently in response to the community's request after Sandy is we built the Climate Justice Center which is a block to block organizing effort around adaptation and resiliency which we're going to talk about later. But I think my entire trajectory has really grown from having been born and raised into struggle. So that's it in that shot. All right. You learned a lot. Good. So my next question is just, I think a lot of one of the objectives of this is to get certain kinds of language out in the mix and talk about how it operates within the construct of talking about climate change and environmental this around. So I'm just curious for each of you how do you understand climate change? I think you've kind of already got the ball rolling a little bit on this topic. But how do things like race, class, gender, immigration and privilege relate to climate change? Are we going in a line? I think you could just jump right in. I mean, you've gotten us on the, I mean, where are you kind of on that topic? Yeah. So, you know, climate change is at the intersection of everything that we need. Food, housing, employment, social services, everything. And for frontline communities that have really other ones that are going to be most impacted by climate change and the ones at least responsible for creating it. And the fact that by 2042 we're going to be a majority of this country, this is an issue that we have to own and that we have to drive. And so privilege comes into the fact that it is the largest obstacle to climate change. Privilege is the largest obstacle to climate change. We've got a lot of well-intentioned people who don't know how to come in and work to build just relationships, who have always been in power, who want to control, who want to turn us into passive recipients of their good intentions. People who are, where I consider, a contemporary missionaries, folks that don't understand that if we're going to survive climate change, we're going to have to build a different kind of power dynamic, a different kind of economy that we're going to have to engage in just transitions and work with each other differently. And that, you know, we can think about technology and we can think about how you reduce carbon and how you can get engaged in attenuation of sea level rights. We can do the complicated stuff, but what we can't do is address this issue of privilege. And so, these spaces are really important spaces for people to come correct and to understand how they show up into our spaces and how you build those relationships that we've never really had before. So I think it's extremely important in this conversation. And then resilience, and I'll stop there. I want to get to that. Okay, cool. I think this is actually really great, this idea of privilege in terms of like getting this from you. But I think it's really good because I think from both of your perspectives, like how do you encounter this idea of privilege and one of the things that you do within your practice that deal with this issue. Because I think this is a huge issue and I think it's a really important place. It's key to actually getting anything to change, which is why we're all here. So I'm just wondering in terms of the framing of this question more specifically in terms of privilege. Well, one thing I want to say that I really appreciate that Elizabeth has made very clear is that climate change is not an environmental issue. It's an issue, it's capitalism. We are severing the life support systems of the planet and it does not just have to do with the environment, it has to do with ourselves and our communities. And it is an issue of equity and justice. And so there's a great asymmetry in the burden of responsibility. It's not enough to say that climate change is anthropogenic for human cause. There are some humans that are more responsible than others for some collections and institutions and people. And there are some who will bear the brunt of the impacts and that burden much more so than others. And those are the fault lines that have been born because of this economic system that suggests that unlimited growth in a finite system is possible. It's not. And so I think it's very important that when we talk about climate change we are also talking about racial profiling and community policing and food security and immigration and all of these other issues. Militarization. The immigration fight that we're having now is setting the stage for how we're going to deal with climate refugees in the future. And in fact, already are. Millions upon millions of people. And so that speaks directly to the issue of privilege. Today the discourse on climate change has been framed by the United Nations, by, you know, nation states, by big green NGOs, by corporations. And it's framed as an issue of greenhouse gas emissions. And so the solution is clean technology. But there's omitted variables in that equation. And so that's great. If you understand the solution to climate change, if you're defining the problem just as greenhouse gas emissions, then sure, 100% clean energy, great. But what that doesn't account for is the reality that climate change is already happening. We're already in the middle of it. And we can expect more extreme weather events. And so the question is how are we responding to climate change? And are we incentivizing or encouraging individualistic responses or collective ones? Are we stepping on each other's heads? Are we on the way to the life raft? Are we pulling our brothers and sisters up? And I think that's especially important because you've got projects like Eco-Atlantic in Nigeria that are 100% zero-carbon clean energy that are lauded by many of the powers that be in many of the big greens, right? That costs $6 million for a single plot where the average Lagozian makes $2 a day. And so we have to be thinking about this at the community level, but also not just our communities right here, but like communities around the world. And to me that's a vocabulary of solidarity that is very intertwined with an understanding of privilege. And it requires that those of us with greater privilege understand that, tell that story, knock on the halls of power, dismantle these dominant narratives and create space for those who are telling alternate stories. That could be our salvation. Yeah, I mean, when we think about who's deep, both of you touched on the fact that when we think about who is so deeply impacted by climate change, it's the most vulnerable communities who are dealing with everything else they're dealing. So for example, just through the lens of Sandy, the communities that were the most deeply impacted by the storm, when the ones that didn't have money to buy the food that was spoiled didn't have the ability to figure out how to get to work when the transit was completely shut down, don't have the money to rebuild. One of the communities that we've been looking at is a community called Baymar that's in Rothland County. And when we think of Sandy, we don't often think of people of state. And so we've been collaborating with that community to tell their story because it's a mobile home community and it's people that have had the most vulnerable housing situation before the storm. And so they were already being exploited in the way that they were living. Basically the mobile home community is, you own the home and structure that you live in, but you have to rent the land. And so they already were dealing with having the rental payments and being low income. And then after Sandy, immediately, unlike a homeowner that doesn't have that immediate burden, they had two days after the storm, people came and knocked on that door and said, where's rent? So gave them no leeway, absolutely no leeway. And so they were stuck in a situation. A lot, half the community is mostly immigrant community and half low income white folks. And so they were in a situation where they weren't able to even think about applying for aid. They were in a situation where if you can't pay me rent, you're going to lose your home and lose everything. You've already lost all your possessions. You've lost your ability to go to work. You're going to probably have to rent somewhere else to live. And it's your squeeze that much more. And so we're seeing that, I mean, both here in New York and New Jersey, but then globally on different scales where communities are being squeezed when often they aren't sort of the biggest perpetrators of the fossil fuel industry. And so they're the most vulnerable. And so, you know, I think I'm so happy that you brought up the idea for this. I think some of our work has been to try to think about how do we amplify specifically the voices of frontline communities who are not heard and are drowned out after disasters. And so, particularly after Katrina, we saw that, you know, this disaster complex sort of comes in, sweeps in, and policymakers sort of determine what is going to be happening in terms of development, in terms of rebuilding, in terms of where all the money is going to go. And so one of the things that we did is start a project called Sandy's Storyline with the idea that no one person should be dictating what the story is and the narrative after a disaster. And it should really be an opportunity for the communities that are most impacted to share their stories. And so we invite anybody that is impacted to share through an online platform, through a phone line, and have been sort of experimenting with how do you just create the space and that opening for people to actually share and have their voice heard as part of this disaster response. Yeah, okay, so I'm going to go into the next question which is this question of resiliency. And it was interesting in the last panel, the panel prior to this which is about the body, this is about community, we're going to do the idea of the state and then the planet. It was interesting because the two speakers found this word resiliency as being like a really good metaphor in terms of dealing with how they think about what they're doing. And when we were talking about it, interestingly it came up is that Annalisa was going to talk about her difficulty with this word, and I'm wondering just like this idea of how, why this word may not scale in a certain sense. So from, and also like just moving a little bit, trying to kind of see our way forward beyond kind of these traumatic situations that get that better people are dealing with right now. So being resilient right now, I'm sorry to get myself into this. I don't know whether it's really hot in here or I'm having a middle-aged moment but I don't really have so. It's hot? Oh, thank you. So the word resiliency means to bounce back. And why would low-income people and people of color want to bounce back to unemployment, to racism, to a lack of the kinds of, if you look at Katrina, you know why would anyone want to bounce back to where they were before. So even for the Gulf South Rising, for those of us who are part of the Climate Justice Alliance, all of us have revisited this word and decided that the word is resistance. That we can't use the word resiliency because the word resiliency, you know, nobody wants to go back on the situation that they were in before. And in addition that we're finding that all of our successes around the environment are contributing to our displacement. So this word resiliency is also a word that is used so lightly, almost like it's okay, they're going to go back to being where they were before. Well, you know, people of color, you know, one of the things that I always say is that there isn't anything, anybody more sustainable than a 4% that we've always been able to recycle, repurpose, reuse, because we had to because our lack of resources made us bad. And so our, you know, we're the ones who survived and we're here, so does that mean we're resilient? That word presents a lot of problems for us. And so we're using the word resistance because we want to say that we want to resist this idea that we have to go back to where we were before. So something happened, it was serious, it was an extreme weather event. Now how do we rebuild and how do we make sure that we engage in just transitions that economy changes and that we're moving forward in a way that's more just. So I think that that's where it came from. And I have a question from back in the sense of when we started talking, you were talking about feeling uncomfortable in terms of talking about just like your representing yourself and that a lot of what not an alternative does is sort of represent a collective and this idea of the collective. And I'm wondering if you can talk about this idea of maybe resistance or resilience in terms of this discussion about the self versus the collective. Well it's funny that you say that I hadn't really unpacked the term resiliency until we started talking about it and I really appreciate what you just said and it's a lot of sense to me. It's a framework we've inherited, right? Mitigation, adaptation and resiliency are the bugs words that frame like mitigation reduction of carbon emissions and adaptations adapting to a changing climate and resiliency is about strengthening and balancing back, right? But I feel like resiliency just triggers for me this thought of like pull yourself up by food straps. This sort of kind of guiding story for like American individualism. So it actually doesn't feel like it invokes community as much as it invokes the individual to me which I think is the problem. So much of the problem is like and in fact it's like they're very competing understandings of nature, right? And that's where as a museum if we're interested in presenting an understanding of nature is something that we are, you know have inherited from our ancestors and we are here for a time and we shepherd and steward for generations for the common good for generations to come. Not something to be like chopped up and sold off to the highest bidder. And so it's the it's the tug of war between the public and the private the privatizing forces and under neoliberal capitalism and the public. And I feel like yeah, if you understand resiliency as connected to this sort of dominant narrative of American individualism that just sort of reinforces all these other structuring stories that that can enforce the status quo. Yeah, I'm just curious like the sort of like the individual versus the collective and dealing with these larger issues like how each of you make sort of negotiate that idea. I mean I think in the work that you do it's with storyline standing you know it's about individuals voicing their story and like how does this play between the individual and this American story and this collective idea how does it like play itself out or how do you negotiate that Elizabeth or Rachel like in terms of is it something that you're encountering all the time or is it do you think about it at all or like is it an issue in terms of the work that you do or not? You know sometimes and I would say it's a U.S. story I would call it an American story because they're 21 Spanish-speaking countries in America and Canada so I just have a problem of referring to this country as America I would call it the United States so I think that some of the tensions that we see in trying what we do is we facilitate community engagement and mitigation is important to us because mitigation is about reducing NOx, SOx, PN 2.5 all of the things that have gotten our communities sick because we're the reluctant host of the environments and burdens that serve everybody else so mitigation is important adaptation is important but there's also a historical context that there are things that our people used to know how to do and to become an American means to be American U.S. to be addicted to consumption culture to throw things away and that's why you see people you know living outside of public housing in a big SUV because the thing is you want to acquire more and more and more because things mean that you are successful but who people used to be were people who were connected to the land who had to make things who knew how to live differently and so the idea of adaptation for us is reclaiming who we were before we became what we are that's part of it and then the individualism one of the problems is that when people come to this country they want everything that they have been watching on television everything they've been reading the American dream is to have you know the two cars in the house and all of these things and then in facilitating their engagement and to try to create a community that is prepared for the next extreme weather event we have to tell them what you are going to have to value and what you are going to reclaim is your indigenous ancestry who you were because those are the things that are going to help us survive and so there is this opportunity to create the space to talk about those things about who people were because it's almost like you're saying to people well now that you're here now that you've finally crossed that border with a gallon of water you can't have those things because climate change is here and there's nothing to do with it so the idea is to use their history, their culture anything they bring from wherever they're coming from to sort of redefine what being in America is and that's a real cool thing facilitating that kind of engagement and people say yeah that's true we have to live differently now and living differently may seem like an individual thing but it gives people the power to make choices about what to purchase where to put their dollars what corporations to support it which ones not to support it's much larger than that so that's the context that the individual versus the collective comes in and that's an ongoing community building process and it's just and you have to also know how to facilitate it so that you don't you don't manage or control the conversation you have to sort of check your privilege and set that and then you find that you learn a lot and that those things that people the least expected people people with the lowest educational attainment levels have answers that redefine how we do our work I don't know if I answered your question yeah no I think you did I mean I also like wrapping back around to this idea privilege and the distinction and the way you facilitate those ideas coming from the communities as opposed to like things being proposed to a very specific agenda that's proposed I'm gonna oh so this is the question about and I think we're sort of getting there the difference between more sort of language question the difference between preparing communities for stability versus adaptability I mean this is interesting this is the first time I've heard this idea that adaptability actually has to do with kind of almost like reclining or going backwards in a sense in the sense of reclining something historically that your culture had that has been lost perhaps so it's actually it's interesting because I think when we think about adaptability we think about moving forward in some sense so but ultimately the word has really just changed in any sense right so that's interesting to me and also like do you use this word stability in the work that you do and I'm just curious about the point with negatives you were talking about not using stability very much or feeling no I mean I think it's about people want to people feel like lost right when they've gone through trauma so people want to in some ways reclaim something that they've lost but they also want to move forward and they want to have the opportunity to do that and sort of the power to do that and so I don't tend to use the word it comes more in terms of like loss and sort of what you want to what you want to gain get back I guess so after the feeling of loss you're kind of seeking a sort of stable environment and just to add to the conversation around individual and community I mean I think that's what the power of organizing is right so how do we like connect our stories and individual experiences I think it is a really American thing that we are like the me me me like having done storytelling internationally it's people are much more community oriented and almost it's hard to get people internationally to say I or to talk about the personal experience and I find much more in in America I think that's the power of community organizing like it's bringing and facilitating people coming together and seeing themselves as connected and then you know taking power and making change together in a unified way and so I think this is a real opportunity for people to see themselves as connected in ways that they have and I bring up the word power I mean to me that's that's where the collective comes into play and you know you're you're doing community organizing in some such part so of course you speak at the individual body level right but it's it's in long term sustained community organizing that you build power and to me that question of stability I don't I don't know what stability versus adaptation as much as it is stability versus precarity and you know and it is through mutual aid and solidarity and collectivism community building power that we become stable as communities and I think about how you know going back to this idea of like defining climate change as greenhouse gases and so mean energy is the solution Bloomberg is like was the green mayor just flown around the world to talk about Plan NYC yet there's also the gentrification there and so so I think that this individual versus collective to me is like individualism is really like the logic of neoliberalism it's atomizing it's deregulation it's privatization and we see it reinforced in so many spaces you go to the natural history museum where it talks about climate change and at the end of it they talk about recycling and individual consumer choices so where are the exhibitions that talk about collective choices and collective power building and community organizing and the work that is represented do you know I'm wondering just in terms of like because we're we're I've been pushing the conversation in this very binary way between the individual and collective and like I'm just wondering do you feel like we're in this moment where where there's a we need to like the opportunity is to find a different way for an individual to kind of like acclimate themselves within this relationship with the planet with each other, with themselves is there can we see a way forward where we don't have this choice of either to be the individual, either collective or like is there an opportunity within the work that you're doing to kind of reimagine that binary in some way I don't know if I'm being completely clear but I feel like that the collective versus the individual is something that we're kind of stuck with and I wonder if in this moment that we're in whether there's a like whether we should be trying to identify ourselves in some not either or but like a more connected way or is there a different way we need to look at that binary, do you think or is there something that has proposed itself in the work I'm so lost but I'm sorry what we try to do is we try to provide as much information as we can so people can make informed choices and let them know what the connection is between extreme weather events all over the world and the way that they're living and fossil fuel extraction and the way that they're living and the way that they've lived and try to connect all the dots so that people can make those decisions and we really believe that the path to that's really where change is going to happen you know I mentioned before that by 2042 people of color will be the majority of the country and while that scares some people the reason it's important the reason it's extremely important is that those of us who are the children of the civil rights movement felt really strongly about the civil rights movement that was something that we knew that if we were able to get an education if we were able to do anything it was because the civil rights movement and some of us made a commitment that we were going to continue to work for that if people in our communities all over the country or the majority are not driving the climate change agenda they don't own it the way that the generation all the civil rights movement this country is in a lot of trouble and so the reason that I raised that and raised the issue of privilege and raised the issue of what has to happen in Detroit in the film in LA in Chicago in the South Bronx in Miami it has to happen all the places where people live is because all of those are communities that are particularly vulnerable to climate change just to give you a few examples our elected officials this is how conventional they are and they don't need any harm by this if they have to be on a committee they're going to be on the criminal justice committee on the housing committee on the employment committee it never occurs to them to serve on the agriculture committee or the energy committee there isn't any thinking about this in an institutional way about how we address this from that point of view funding for the environment comes through one place through DEC instead of coming through every single I'm not thinking Spanish I'm not thinking every single agency should so all of these things really sort of require that there be a groundswell of support on the ground I'm very redundant but that has to happen on the ground but we have to be building these connections that people have to see of their survivability and the future of their children connected to climate change and there has to be discussion about the interception of all of these things and then everything else will follow because once you have that groundswell elected officials around this once they listen it's all really connected so I don't know how to answer the questions in the way that you frame them I just think that there is this climate justice frame that makes sense to us and that in organizing and talking to people it's something that resonates with them, they understand it and that there are things I mentioned the traditions because you think about a communal extent that far well, sense of fact is sort of a microcosm of what's going to happen in this country you've got people from the Middle East you've got people from China you've got people from Central America South America, the Caribbean these are people who know struggle they have survived all kinds of things those are things we can learn from someone asked me on Spanish radio since you're from the United States what can you teach our friends in Latin America, so what can they teach us there's a lack of humility that we have from people in Brazil in all of these places that have to survive a lot of things you talk to people from Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance and they can tell you about what's happening there and how they need support so we are connected internationally to folks all over the world it's the same struggle it's the same struggle everywhere but I think that it really starts community by community and making sure that people are giving the tools and the support and the information that they need so they can perform choices and start building that kind of support for climate, for addressing climate change just to add I think the connection the biggest thing that came to mind was just the notion of the foreclosure crisis for me was one moment where people didn't share that they were in crisis so one of the things we found doing a lot of storytelling is like no one wanted to talk about it because it's just really shameful a lot of people internalize the notion particularly when you've earned and become a homeowner to struggle to become a homeowner and then feeling like you personally fail and then that's why you're in that situation and I think for a lot of the housing movement is trying to tell people that it's not them and they're connected to the climate and the same thing with the climate movement it's like Sandy didn't just happen to you it's actually you're connected to a lot of other people that are also impacted by climate change one of the interesting things I think at least in communities where entire blocks were designated is like people didn't feel necessarily alone because they could see all their neighbors impacted and they were all out in the street I think it's a little harder to be organizing that happens like in public housing or in urban areas because still it feels they're out and we're out and we immediate after that but after that it's like you know you can go to the Lower East Side and have no idea what's happening and how people are still impacted by something that happened a while back so it's more hidden I think that's the interesting thing about looking at climate change in the New York City area is that I feel like a lot of it is behind closed doors and it has to be brought out into the organizing efforts and not just through organizing efforts I think also through naming I've worked in arts and cultural the arts and cultural sphere and to think a lot about representation and storytelling and so on just a couple of things that you guys made me think about is one in the student debt movement the slogan you are not alone spelled like a loan L-O-A-N and part of that is like that transparency the space of individual shame like I screwed up it's my on the problem grade to the point where you realize actually that this is a collective problem and that there's the power in joining forces and teaming up and you were saying one struggle many fronts which I've always loved but I also love it's inversion which is many struggles one front because I think that that really works well we've changed this course we're working on housing we're working on food security we're working on displays and we're working on so many issues but how do we present a united front because we need power it can't just be happening at the local level you are mobilizing a local community but you have a relationship around the world with communities that are doing the same thing and so how are we representing that is the power and I feel like that's one space where arts and culture symbols have currency and the Occupy movement was fraught we can unpack that and that's a whole other sidewalk series but the one thing that I think that was very interesting about Occupy was that Occupy functioned as a meme in common and it wasn't about consensus you didn't have to petition somebody to say can I sit down in a square in my town can I start to use twinkle fingers rather there were certain it was actually based on disagreement yet a fidelity to a name or a symbol or an aesthetic vocabulary in common that signaled the presence of a movement and so problems aside because like I said there were a whole bunch of conundrums something that we had to really be thinking about as we're talking about building power around the issue of climate change I mean can I respond? I'm sorry I have to respond because I feel that one of the concerns is this language about homogeneity and you know we celebrate difference and we think that it's important that people come to things from different perspectives in a different lens and sometimes you know I don't even want to talk about occupying and what happens in communities of color because honestly it was like they discovered us and they discovered organizing and they stayed and there was a level of disrespect that still felt and in some places you know like that was wonderful and it was great that they did that but again privilege and they weren't able to check it and so that was a great opportunity to build just relationships which is why we always talk about the Jimenez Principles for Democratic Organizing and so one of the things that happens when people talk about you know working together is that there is a need to level the playing field in a lot of places and that it has to be done and we just can't assume that everything's the same everywhere and that we can come together and work together but that's good it creates problems in terms of leadership you know that people should be able to speak for themselves and when you do it in a way that says we can agree in principle let's all fight against climate change but we can have stories we can talk about the frackers and how the frackers try to bomb the front line and how they almost turned us off to fracking I mean when we should have been aligned so I think we can't be Pollyannish and idealistic we have to be real about the things that divide us and figure out how to build alignment in addressing all of these things together coming from all of the different perspectives that we have and in building that alignment I think we have to also figure out how to build just relationships because once people do that they find that it's not that scary and that we have more power and I may not even be disagreeing with you I just think that the problem with me sometimes is the language and how we disappear in language and we cannot disappear we have to speak for ourselves we cannot have people speaking for us regardless of what their intentions are and when we come together in that space of respect we can do amazing things like we did in March I agree with that March I mean that was yeah that was what we did but we did it because we were aligned and we made space for all the disagreements and we made space for the diversity of perspectives and we celebrated difference I mean that's I don't think we said anything that I disagree with I think I'm talking about represent I'm talking about most people experience their news now visually in news feeds, on television in newspapers etc that's how they're encountering things on Facebook and so I'm talking about the opposite of anything and I'm speaking as an artist now thinking about how do we communicate and signal the presence of the movement of a movement or how do we signal the diversity etc these are aesthetic problems for artists to address and in this case I think a traditional model is there's a coalition and we come up with branding for the coalition or an organization and it's got its visual code etc what that does is smooth over difference that's not what I'm interested in what I'm interested in is the opposite of branding but rather the sort of collaboratively produced open sourcing of a visual language and I use the word language because I feel like language is actually a great metaphor it's like a lot of people from different places and communities and backgrounds contribute towards the building of a language and as it sticks as it starts to sink into the consciousness it becomes a word and that is a process that hope happens over time and it's not a process that happens in a meeting it's a process that happens all over in many different spaces and places and so again it's not about consensus but it's rather an acknowledgement of disagreement and difference yet also acknowledging resistance is essential and we have to have a means of demonstrating and making visible that that resistance where it pops up is in relationship to one another so that we can signal power I think it feels like we're talking about there's a thing about it feels like all three of you what you're doing in a way is like making connections between things and or like the organizations are there to support that happening is like how one is connected to their past or to other people that are having the same problem or to these bigger issues and then the question I think which is handed to us by climate change is just like how do we create the critical mass to and what will that look like what will the front look like you know what I mean like how can we think about that how do we talk about that what does the front look like is it simply just people on a level protecting what they protecting and doing the work they have to do to maintain or evolve with the planet or are we imagining a sort of like a global confrontation in some way and I'm just wondering like it seems like this is where the words about the work it's sort of like how does one create a sort of critical mass and acknowledge the difference you know and how like I think that's sort of the that to me is like the big question of like what this whole thing is offering us you know and the next question that they you know the next question that they ask is sort of like what is the relationship between the community based challenge and the global issues like so again we're talking about like how the individual operates and the bigger larger question and how those things interface and I'm just wondering in the work that you do like how do you how do you talk about or present to people on the ground like do you talk about what are you preparing for something or are you just trying to strengthen what's what's there do you know just one example came to mind another project that we're working on besides the Sandy project is a project called Water Warriors and my collaborator just actually went to North Carolina to put together a photo show that documented this amazing struggle against fracking that was happening in New Brunswick and it was interesting because it's you know we're trying to take the story of this incredible actually like I mean really led by indigenous communities but then became a coalition of like French-speaking Acadians and other non-native white people and sort of then translate that to North Carolina where there's a lot of fracking is highly contested and thinking about translating it to like a rural white community in the U.S. and I brought up a quote actually from one of the Meet Back First Nation women who's like really powerful and I think a lot of her and sort of words really like resonated I think a lot of what storytelling is is like how do we connect our personal experiences though we may have a lot of difference and I think it's so important to celebrate that difference but then there's like a connection so it's okay I just wanted to share her words but she said I never participated in a protest before the first night I went out to stay was the night of my daughter's prom I got her ready like any mother would I made sure her makeup and hair were done and took some pictures and as I said goodbye to her I left for camp at that moment I decided as a parent it would be irresponsible not to fight for this cause and to stay with it until it was done I forgot what the question was I'm sorry Yeah it's impossible not to do that you know you've got the Southwest with no water you've got Yemen with no water you've got you know I was down in meeting with the Global South and I'm sorry not the Global South the Gulf South rising and they're losing the size of the football field of land every hour and you know if you ever thought about where the intersectionality of racism and climate changes that's down in the global in the Gulf South and so can you say that again the Gulf South I'm sorry I keep saying Global but the Gulf they lose the size of the football field of land every hour yeah because of the water and that's happening here in the United States but there's also things happening in Yemen and there are things happening in Bangladesh and they're happening all over the world and so and our people who are here are from those places and so it creates the opportunity to have these conversations about what's happening over there and what's happening over here and what are the opportunities that we have over here so that we could because this country does have a lot of power and is responsible for a lot of it so what are the things that we can do here to start moving away from fossil fuel how do you get an entire community off the grid and so while people may think it's small and it's very local it could be really transformational and it could set a trend and so we constantly connect what's happening in different parts of the world to what's because to not do that is not to know your audience to look at an audience in a community and not talk about what's happening in the world is to not see their faces and to not celebrate their difference and you know we say it's either all matter it's either all good or it's no good you know so that kind of flavor that we have in New York City of having a world here is a really cool thing and it provides us with a big opportunity to make those connections so yeah we have to do that and then you know with the global south we have a part of movement they come here because this is where the United Nations is and this is where the big foundations are and we have meetings with them and we host meetings with folks from literally all over the world and our community gets to interact with them they identify on the basis of struggle and struggle here and struggle there is still struggle so I don't think that that is really challenging to do that's the easy part but the thing that's so unique about uproads and a cuente some other groups that were that are that I've met that are very active in climate justice fights here in New York is that you're doing that so many groups don't but we're doing it all over the country it's not just us, I mean we're part of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance we're part of the Climate Justice Alliance they're out in California, Covell, Yucca down in the southwest in Detroit and in Chicago we have organizations that are doing this literally like all over the country the thing is that we are under resourced we do big things with very few resources that's a conversation for another day about what you're having but did you bring that political context and that global context in a way that is not the norm for a lot of community groups that are struggling and have their nose in their community and you know we've seen it all the time working with community groups as not an alternative in collaborations where we're interested in engaging in the site specific in the particular as a means of pointing to the universal and you know in the systemic and you incorporate that in your narratives all the time and I think that's really powerful you're empowering your community with political education that takes into a whole other place than if it were just like a circle in our experience interesting too how it kind of completes geography too because like Yemen is in your neighborhood because I think a lot of these problems you have to like yeah you have to bridge what seems to be these enormous gaps and you managed to do that very quickly just because you're looking at difference and that's one of the things that you honor because like you have a connection to Yemen and the way it's close this great distance so those I think that intersection and those making connections drawing those things out as a way to get people to understand like have a more holistic understanding of the problem and then maybe feel more empowered holistically to kind of deal with it it matters what they do here it has a difference somewhere very far away the next question is really about it's about art making and fortifying communities and I'm really interested in this idea of how it may be story or your interest in kind of symbol or naming it relates to this question of the connections being made and the intersections being made and then how does one represent what is actually happening because the representation of it not actually make that fall apart but actually galvanize it in some way and I think that that's I would be interested in terms of like how unique story does that and then also like how the work that you do with creating symbols and you these panels are all not an alternative and this organization does really great things in terms of giving people tools and I'm just interested in hearing well I can talk a little bit about some projects that we have coming up and what we're thinking about one we're really excited about partnering with uproads where uproads used to do toxic tourists and rolling workshops and so on and they got a community before seeing the history of your buses and our natural history museum has now a 15 passenger noble museum bus that's kind of wrapped with animals and symbols and taxidermy and so on and so we're going to be teaming up so that now they have a bus again to start up that program and we're really excited to document those tours and bring them into the context of climate change and climate justice traditions one of the things we just came back a couple weeks ago from the American Alliance of Museums Annual Convention it's the world's largest museum convention there's 7,000 museum professionals from 60 countries around the world and we found ourselves with the single largest exhibitor spot in the entire convention center thanks to some allies in the upper echelons of the Alliance who really appreciated our Muckrake game and so we took it it was 9 times bigger than all the other museums there right next to the Smithsonian and the American Museum Alliance so we did an exhibition on fossil fuel industry greenwashing in science museums and specifically recreating installations from the American Museum of Natural History but inserting previously excluded socio-political context i.e. the role of their Gord member and biggest sponsor David Koch or Koch Industries the best moment of the convention for me was the night before the exhibition opened we were in a bar and met some exhibition designers from Brooklyn and it turns out that they do exhibitions for the American Museum of Natural History specifically work on their traveling exhibitions we were like oh no way and then it turned out we had a bunch of friends in common so we were like very politically aligned and joined together and so my partner pulled out his phone to show him a picture of one of the installations they had just finished installing that day it was a recreation of a 2009 climate change exhibit installation in the 2009 climate change exhibition that Amy and each did it was actually a very cool installation the first time around it had a polar bear on top of an iceberg with a bunch of trash and like a and a bunch of trash that could be traced to New York City so it was like an interesting commentary it was almost like an art installation in the American Museum of Natural History but we thought it would be perfect to add a Koch Industries pipeline an oil pipeline right in this amount of trash under the polar bear so Jason pulled out his phone to show this exhibit designer a picture of that installation and he said the guy said yeah, yeah, I built that wait a second, no I didn't and he pulled out his phone and showed a picture where he had just installed it in Italy and side by side they were almost identical except for those pipelines so that was a really exciting moment but for us in being there we were really interested in sort of doing something on a par with the other museums so that we would be taken seriously as a museum and get into the museum sector in order to transform it from within and you know and shoot I was so excited to tell that story and I was going to relate it back to your question so I think I mean I think it does like how the art and signifiers you know these are very like legitimizing the formative aesthetics that natural history museums do and they have their own legacy of colonialism all the way back so there's so much that's problematic within these museums but I find it fascinating like they're museums within museums almost and so it was interesting being on the convention because it was an expo most of what was there was vendors selling their services or the other traveling exhibitions were exhibits that museums could buy or lease to come to their institutions so half the people that came to visit had that mindset and they were like what am I looking at and of course they were like why are you criticizing yourselves you know like you're so edgy but a bunch of natural history museums there that are affiliated with universities were like can you bring this to our museum and we're like yes we have a menu of options in the style package we can do all kinds of exhibitions so we're really interested in this idea of producing a couple of cookie cutter exhibits on the climate denial machine or on collective responses to climate change but then in taking them to different places like the Florida natural history museum or the Kansas natural history museum but then customizing them to the local context so that they can serve as vehicles to amplify local campaigns so that local activists can leverage that platform and we can do programming and panel discussions etc and then when we're shooting video and talking about environmental burdens and sunset park and toxics on a waterfront and storm surge and then in the context of that's a video that we're showing in these other places talking about the storm surge in the museum I mean I think with the alternative they have this great they give you like this they talk about everything they do in terms of its thematics but then also in terms of its tools so like they give you these kind of tool building things like this and I think it takes part of what that process is is dealing with aesthetics in terms of how one needs people tools to communicate and how aesthetic kind of plays into that I also think it's about so amazingly like edgy like pushing people and joining people around issues of struggle but it's also about trying to support people's imagination of what's possible and what's interesting about the group in Canada is that it's like at least a temporary success story they were able to like knock out the current politician and get someone that was aligned with their politics and then get a moratorium on fracking so after months of like using their bodies and they built this amazing fire blockade to stop these exploratory trucks that were trying to explore financial gas and sort of stop this process from leading to fracking they were able to have like a success story and so I think it's like really critical that we kind of like lift up what we are able to do so that people can just like imagine okay why would I do that what's possible is this possible to actually stop because I think it's one of the big challenges with climate change is it just feels so huge it feels like I can't do anything particularly when it's put on like do I cop out of my trash or do I buy this thing or do I change it but there are victories and we are able to win things and I think that is really critical to like share and I think the thing is that the victories have to be short-term and long-term they have to be accessible they have to be things that people can wrap their heads around and that sustains engagement we had we expanded the Fourth Avenue Median and the community was involved and we gave them maps of the language of planning and they decided what that looked like the Waterfront Park that just opened on 43rd Street and 1st Avenue took 15 years and so that happens in somebody's lifetime and when you engage people in these sort of short-term you know one-year three-year campaigns that have success people keep coming back and they sustain over time because you know when you've got people that have two or three jobs and families that have to come home the last thing they want to do is go to meetings so they need to be able to see the benefits of their engagement in the short-term and so you have to be able to do that and integrating art into that is really important because not everybody learns the same way and not everybody engages the same way and there are a lot of different ways of engaging people by using different kinds of art you know whether it's spoken word or whether it's the zoning workshop we had recently with Legos or we had our young our children we had we got the mark but it didn't have a playground and so we've been holding these workshops with children with materials that they collect that they bring from the house and they use those materials to design the kind of playground they want to have and they do presentations this is what I want to do and they're doing it using just stuff that they'd want from home and it's really cool and beautiful and in the process they're developing the language of planning and availability I mean you've got nine year olds talking about green infrastructure and it's the coolest thing and they like it they like using that language because little kids like big words like Tyrannosaurus Rex instead of Tyrannosaurus we say infrastructure so there's a lot of ways that art is used to engage people in planning in land use and zoning all the things that make your eyes glaze over because they do especially at the end of a long day and so that's extremely important I think that I know I've mentioned the march a few times but that was the most beautiful example of how art took a local narrative it made the process it wasn't what happened that day that was as important as the community building process that people came around people came together for the art builds and while they were painting and while they were building and while they were doing all of that we were having conversations about climate change and community and so there was learning going on and relationships being built while they were getting ready for that without them even thinking about it and that sustains because now people want to know what is the next one of that a few weeks ago and all we did was we did a learning circle of our climate change in the park but we flew kites and we had these kite kids and people came and built their kites together and they were all about the kites because the kites reminded them of the march and so people bought their families and people who might not come to a protest might not come to a workshop to learn about zoning will come to build kites and in the process of building kites we'll learn about these kinds of things so the art piece is is really really powerful I'm curious about this question which is the I mean and maybe we've covered it but just to kill a big picture a little bit about language when you talk when you think about sort of the mainstream environmental movement this is the question about what are the limitations or what are the other contradictions that you see with that in terms of what you're doing and what you think the mainstream idea of it is well I you've kind of addressed this question do you have more that well I was just going to say I've worked with and for a bunch of the big green groups and there's a lot of good that they do but there's a lot that's been so frustrating and a lot of damage that they do in the perpetrator as well just today I've read an announcement that this year our club elected their first black president and part of that came out of Robert Bullard the sort of grandfather of the environmental justice movement was board chair and an important part of their mission put out a statement around black lives matters when it happens and its relationship to environmental issues and climate change and why a middle class environmentalist should care and should get involved and this is like coming so far from where this here club was like a decade ago with a disastrous vote on immigration wanting to lock down our borders so I I've seen some progress in the big greens and mainstream environmental movement and part of that I think is because of the discourse on climate change and it didn't just happen it was because there are a lot of groups on the front lines of the climate crisis and from climate justice alliance and others that we have been pushing this and I know it's a it hasn't been fun or a long history but I saw a lot of work being done in the context of people's climate march that was really inspiring there's still a long way to go but that's a huge thing for environmentalists to get out of their silo and recognize the interconnectedness of these issues I would just say that the unfortunate thing is that before extreme weather and pollution and opportunities to have front line communities based in the US but it's growing right and so the need is for environmental groups to really let front line communities take the lead and sort of be somewhat of the voice of climate change I think that was a big discussion as part of the messaging for the people's climate march is where is the voice of front line communities and lift it up as part of that I mean I think interestingly it's actually been difficult as part of the Sandy project like I never thought it would be hard to try to convince people that this is like this incredible opportunity where all these people have been directly affected to actually connect them to the larger environmental movement and that's actually been a struggle and so it's just a process of trying to sort of negotiate that and figure that out as part of the National Environments of Justice Leadership and Aaron was with Sierra Club for 30 years and we have been beating up Sierra Club for a really long time and I think that we have had as a movement as part of the leadership lots of conversations with the big greens across the table like really big fights with the big greens because when the big greens realize that the demographics were changing and that it was important to start bringing people of color into the movement what they did was they hired folks to come into our community and supplant the work that we were doing and to basically start doing the work for us but I think that the turning point really wasn't Bob Rollo I think the turning point really just happened today because that was a huge huge fail and that was one where we were really trying to get the big greens to understand we were asking them for very simple things we were asking them to include co-pollutants that it couldn't just be garbage and that the legislation had to address the siting of facilities that pushing cap and trade was going to stop power plants from being cited in communities of color either in the United States or in different parts of the world and they didn't give and they didn't realize that things had changed that things had changed nationally that it was a new administration that we were in a very different position than we had been in the past and so out of that comes this meeting that we had with the two foundations where we created this thing called Building Equity and Alignment and we met with Greenpeace Sierra Club and we met with a bunch of big greens some foundations to try to figure out how do you support the work on the ground how do you make sure that there is a different kind of allocation of resources that big greens that have a lot of wealth in terms of information and technical assistance can work in a way that complements what's happening locally and does it's a plan so that we can be more strategic in how we work with each other to address this behavior that's called climate change so there has been a lot of work that happens before Aaron then steps up and honestly I was really excited you should have seen all my emojis I'm going to hate that I was doing the Snoopy Dance I was very proud of him I'm really happy but they understand but I think that one of the things that happened at least in the last few years is that Sierra Club here's the other thing because I don't want you to think that we have organizations has these people in there that are fighting a good fight that are looking out for our communities that work with us in a way that's just that brings resources to our communities but there is a culture to these organizations that is very exclusive and is really kind of old school and so there's this new energy there and these people that are really pushing and as they push and as they take positions at immigration and stuff like that their members start finding out it's all good, it's going to work it's fine and so they're being moved from these places of comfort and sort of like dated positions that they've had into a space that is more relevant is going to be more relevant for them their survivability depends on their relationship with us there is no way that organizations that deal with conservancy that deal with you know with land trusts, with issues that have not been relevant to our communities to thrive in the future unless they have a base that looks like us so they have to for their own survival build those relationships and then they should just do it because it's the right thing but if they know that doesn't always work with people but there is in order for them to be able to survive in the future they have to start laying the foundation for moving in a different direction and we've been developing those relationships with them because listen we don't lay out with them what if the truth is that these organizations have a lot of resources and they have expertise in a lot of different areas that are really important for all of our communities whether you're talking about India country or you're talking about Detroit and so the idea is how do you build those relationships so that we do what is going to be necessary they're going to be fewer resources and there's going to be more extreme weather events and so we need to be able to be working with each other in a way that's strategic that brings power and resources to all of our communities and so we're real open to doing it and I think that the fact that Sierra Club took this step was really awesome but it didn't just happen with Bob you know anointing the brother it really I love Bob but it did happen it was really sort of a combination of 20 years of struggle so alright I'm sorry I went on to it questions we have probably a few questions I know Melanie wants to ask a throughout the scene question no we have time for two we have two two really good questions questions do we have people with really good questions or burning burning questions yes so I'm wondering what your responses to the like I can see how amazing it is that there's all this work being done around the world and the local level and so on and so forth and then at the same time as we speak we're closer and closer to this massive horrible trade deal going through the trans-specific trade deal and I think you would have to you know potentially consequences for all the things that we're talking about and it has to do with like this increasing foreclosure of the democratic process which I'm wondering about in relation to the global and the extent to which the US in particular is very forceful presence along with other major global forces so so what about how do you see your work in relation specifically to a kind of I'm not sure what the word is like recuperation reinventing etc the democratic process itself which feels so endangered of course it's a big thing I you know it ties to also what you were making me think about where you see the babies out in the bathwater the big greens bring a ton of resources and have a lot of potential to play a role in the struggle and that derives from an understanding of institutions as not monolithic they're made up of a lot of individuals and a bunch of them are fighting a good fight and for us that's been the that's been our that's informed our entire practice is not an alternative specifically our project the natural history museum is to occupy institutions by occupying institutionality as a form that's our specific tactic here but in general this idea of occupying institutions in order to create space for champions on the inside to make change and that this needs to happen across all sectors of society and if you know we're talking about community is the theme here right building power at the local level at the community level is really important making the connection to the systemic and the other examples across the world is really important to situating the community within a global context is essential and part of that has to do with like challenging I think the United States left ambivalence to to power right like we really celebrated these DIY expressions because our institutions have failed us they've been hollowed out by new liberal budget cuts to fuck them right has been the orientation of like my generation certainly millennials and so on so we need a new vocabulary around to power and understanding of how to deal with it just more specifically with the natural history museum project like that's a slice that's a little sliver we're taking on and you know part of that is by forming by collectivizing scientists you know who normally are out back in the lab right collecting them as a political body to speak out against the attack on science and to kick the fossil fuel lobby science institutions yeah I mean it feels like those of you who've been talking a lot about like the relationship you know the privilege the issue of privilege and these working new sorts of relationships of power so I feel like that speaks a lot to what you're talking about in terms of she's are I mean she's imagining a different kind of what reimagining that what it means to have a democratic process and we're doing at every event voter registration and we're telling everyone who is part of the movement that they have to include an aggressive voter registration campaign that has to be really visible that whatever we have an action that whenever we have a community event that whatever it is you have to have an aggressive voter registration campaign going on I don't think one of our tactics is around participatory storytelling and I think one of the biggest barriers to democracy is like people not having a platform in which to share it's one of the interesting things about participatory budgeting and why it's so successful is that people have a platform to voice what they think should be happening in their community and actually then have the power to get money to actually do that so for us it's been an interesting process over the last years as much as we're trying to tell a better story about Sandy because we're trying to empower all of the amazing experts in communities like Elizabeth and Sunset Park and there's people in New Jersey and there's people that have been part of the recovery for the last two and a half years that have so much knowledge and wisdom to share and so we're trying to sort of create a platform where their voices are able to be heard and interestingly I think we've also seen you know which isn't just a tribute to us, it's also the power of technology but you know we're trying to be in meetings with like you know different publications like The Guardian and The New York Times and we're starting to see like participatory storytelling in the way that they're reporting where they're actually asking you know their audience to contribute to the reporting and the process of what they're sharing and so to me that's really exciting and to try to like push that on below because as much as a grassroots media maker I want to think that we have the power, it's really needed to transform our media institutions in the way that these stories are being told Another question? The last question? We just covered it all, yeah? I have a question that you know the pressure of it being the last question also is a good question and it's like a burden but ever since you mentioned adaptation and the way you have I can't stop thinking about it, I'm fascinated by it and about this process of returning to a kind of a cultural memory and kind of re-inscribing it in the present tense and I'm just curious where if there's been communities in particular that you've found are doing are taking part in that adaptive process in really creative in really creative ways Certainly in indigenous communities that's happening and I think that the denay to things like that but in Brazil they're doing things like that in the rural communities and we had a delegation of visitors from Brazil a few years ago, they were so excited about meeting a group from Brooklyn and they had so much to teach us about some of the traditions that people bought to Brazil from from West Africa and how that was part of how they were becoming sustainable and how they were addressing climate change in the rural communities and so these conversations that we've had with these folks from all over and even just remembering like your own personal stories like I remember things that my grandmother used to do and how she didn't use western medicine and how she used herbs and how she booed them and cancelled and how she didn't throw anything out just remembering those kinds of things and really sort of respecting some of the local knowledge you have to respect the local knowledge people just know all kinds of things and when you create the space for them to share that with you that becomes sort of a defining moment things that people share and learn from each other so there are, if you think about so if you come to our organization we're going to ask you who your people are and we always ask you who your people are because we're going to research who your people are and we're going to integrate something about your history and your journey into whatever we're doing so that you feel represented and you feel like you're an integral part of the space so we're constantly listening to what people are saying about their experiences and then they share across just to give you a little example where this doesn't have to do with adaptation it has to do with planning we were many years ago facilitating the greenway design and we, and people were doing it all in their native languages and the Chinese women wanted Tai Chi and they were acting it out and the Mexican women were talking about and they were talking to them and everybody was communicating in a different language and everybody had something to add that came from who they were and it was going to feel like it wasn't just going to be a bike path it was going to be something where culture was reflected and so that that gives them ownership and it's such a cool thing, it's so fun to sort of sit back and watch this stuff happen so the adaptation stuff is the same thing that people know how to grow things they know how to make things they know how to build things we don't want to do anything you know what I mean all of this, all of this has to be approached with tremendous humility and a big open mind that these answers are coming from all of these places and that redefines us as a society and that it's okay that that's what we're all going to look like all of it and it's all good in organizing it since the program stopped get excited so we know for example that with the Polish community we don't ask them to go to protests they don't do that, they're children of war but they love doing stewardship tree stewardship that they'll come to so knowing about all the different groups and what the thing that moves them and learning that and respecting it and lifting it that is how we come up with adaptation solutions I think that's really interesting because I know in cognitive science there's this phenomenon with PTSD that if you can change someone's relationship to their past their idea of their future changes so I just in drawing this thing between adaptation that might look back and like how we could imagine a different future, a better future I think that there is a relationship between like what you're doing which is like we go back we reclaim these things and that potentially can radically change the way those people think about their own futures and I think that's what it feels to me like that's what you're doing which is like it's really fascinating because I know some of them are on this adaptation thing which is awesome that's something we were also really excited about with the potential of like we talked about with the museum project that it's a part of Biodemic Cree we're really borrowing these aesthetics and so on and then to tell a sort of people's history of natural history that are like sort of parasitic attachment in a host institution in the American Museum of Natural History where they have like the Poqueteal Tribe represented in Francoise's like cultural expedition where and they're depicted like historically with like cobwebs you know on the display cases and so on there's all these static displays of nature about you know bringing in communities that are actively fighting campaigns in these places that are represented within the museum and having them come in and like and bring the contemporary into the picture so the Poqueteal Tribe is in Vancouver and they're actually actively fighting industrial logging and oil pipelines and tar sands so yeah it's an interesting juxtaposition of the past and like I mean to me the past is created in the present there's a very much of a relationship alright yes well I just have a burning question I know it's the third one but I'm doing what do you feel like you absolutely know about climate change and what do you absolutely know and what confuses you is that I when I first moved to New York City I had this that I had this idea that I really wanted to organize a post apocalyptic movie marathon like I love Mad Max and like Boy and His Dog and like I don't know there became a point in the last decade where I realized like that we're already there we're already in this post apocalyptic moment and you know and it's a very existential thing to contemplate climate change because we're looking at depth like we're staring at the face and not at the individual scale but at the you know at the global scale and that's hard and scary and it's enough to paralyze and so that's the sort of ongoing thing is where do you find your fuel and for me it's like I find it in like Mad Max the Young Thunderdome with this like awesome Tina Turner anthem where it's like even if you're down to like the last like few people are you fighting like are you fighting on the force of good or evil it comes down to it it goes like it goes like that's what we gotta do you know Carrington said you can't be neutral on a moving train this is what like we just wrote an essay for the Guardian that they put a week ago on the front page of their environment section that was shared 11,000 times in the last week like that was so exciting to me we're not in a big organization we don't have a list like but I think you know we're looking at the museum sector to let go of this false notion of neutrality as if such a thing were possible and as if it doesn't mean resignation in the face of that you know stand up take a stand I mean I think the only thing that I know is that there's like incredible stories of resistance of trauma of loss of connection that I feel like need to be told I just came back from Paris that had never been I was invited to speak before a group of thought leaders and I was the only one talking about climate change and I couldn't believe it I get up and I go to sleep thinking about it I feel a little bit like Tina Turner just a little bit more horizontal than you give to the closest people I think that I you know you don't grow up coming from African and indigenous traditions without knowing that something's happening to Mother Earth you know that you grow up in that you grow up in traditions that say respect the earth and give back to the earth you know just a few days ago was the day of Orishawako my belief system and so that's ingrained in us from the time that we are very small and so that clearly it is unwell and so we are unwell and I think the thing that freaks me out the second part of your question of the deniers the fact that we can't even have a conversation that if we even have a conversation with them it means slowing down it means not being able to take our energy and our time and our resources to do something to keep moving and that we have to keep moving so we don't even engage them we're not even having a conversation with them because that would mean slowing down for us means death and so we can't do it and so we choose not to do that literally like we will not even engage them if they're on Twitter they get blocked I mean that's how serious it is because there's no time to let people who are in the way of your child's future they don't deserve time you know I'm a mother and I work with young people and these people are in the way of the future of our children and we just can't they don't get that respect they don't get that time so I think that that's the hardest part because we're organizers right and that's what we do we engage we engage but there are just some people who just said this is it that we can't do this we need to focus on this vision and this is and we have to just keep moving alright we just have a few announcements before we let you go the next dialogue is going to be on Saturday, May 30th and actually we'll be back to moderate that yeah and that is going to be reimagining our countries and we'll have Vijay Prashad and Lena Helm-Renandez for that and the final dialogue will be on Monday, June 1st and both of these are right here and that's going to be our final one did I say that already? Restoring our planet and that'll be Mike and Leon Guerrero Pablo Salon Romero and it will be moderated by Lisa D'Amore if you can't be there in person we are live streaming all of these events so you can watch them on HowlRoundTV you can also catch up last week's video and watch this again if you don't wish so do that and spread the word if you have people who are out of town who would be interested in this this is just one part of a really big conversation thank you so much to all of you for your incredible yeah dm.org or kickcokeofftheboard.com to sign our dm.org