 pursuing. There's three other women who are doing this work. My interest in eco-theater dates from the 1980s when I wrote Better People, a play that critiqued in satiric form the then current now failed mechanistic fascination with genetic engineering as a cure for all disease. Better People is about scientists with views across the spectrum of genetic research and I've interviewed many of them. The play includes the presence of a rare yak who speaks one word, rendezvous. Rather than be cloned she swallows Dr. Edward Criot who emerges as an ecologist from the belly of the beast. Also in the 80s I created a series of ecology and theater courses at NYU and I adapted Krista Wolfe's eco-feminist novel Cassandra for students writing choral passages of peaceful and ecological desires for students to sing and dance. I think there's no difference between ecological concern and a concern for peace. All my plays include the natural world, the oil soaked birds in going to Iraq, the fate of the bees, the super, the forest and the sea provides to the refugee woman and the beekeeper's daughter, the soldier's idol on the beach in prophecy, but when I returned full-on to science in 2012 it was to confront the reality of climate change. In my play Extreme Weather which is spelled, yeah we're going to some slides of the production, it's spelled W-H-E-T-H-E-R weather, not weather, right? I am again using current research not only about the science of global warming climate change which in and of itself is enough to sound one's hair on end but about the ways in which that science has been censored and is being willfully misunderstood by the so-called climate change deniers of those with financial ties to coal, oil and natural gas industries. This well-funded campaign against scientific truth we hear in the Republican campaign that's going on now, the critiques of the pope. You see it on your television and those ads that talk about clean energy through fracking and millions of jobs. This is all funded by the fossil fuel industry. It's all a campaign, much more we could say about this, of disinformation. This well-funded campaign against scientific truth may well prove the most consequential blockade of human knowledge in history and this is what my play is about. The play is based on the life and work of American scientists, most particularly James Hansen, Michael Mann, and Jennifer Francis, plus the research of biologist Tyrone Hayes into the effects of the herbicide atrazine. All four have been attacked and vilified for their groundbreaking research. I came to view climate scientists as visionaries and altruists, flawed and plomics like all such people who are suddenly called by forces outside themselves to excel themselves. In other words, their science made them have to speak. Fighting not just their own reluctance to become publicly involved and their own ill-adaptation to public and activist lives, but ultimately fighting for the truth in the face of falsehood. Not just because truth matters in some abstract or even moral terms, but because the fate of the earth itself and all who live here is obviously at stake. I set the play as a family drama because we are an American family, broken again by the events in Charleston, as we've been broken so many times, as we're broken by this feud about climate science, but still somehow family, dysfunctional and broken. What happens to the least of us, a frog in this case, is likely to happen to us all. Extreme weather, whose title is a pun that is also a dare, is built on pairs and opposites. The scientists, John and Rebecca, struggle with the implications of their knowledge. One supports and encourages the other, and the other loses strength or hope. The publicist and lobbyist, Jean, whose John's twin sister and Frank, her husband, plot and plan their misinformation campaign and the exploitation of the family land. And the wise old environmentalist uncle and young motherless intersex Annie, longed across generations and through a shared commitment to protect earth and earth's creatures. Throughout the play I'm also juxtaposing styles of what might be called psychological and magical realism. In extreme weather, I want people to re-experience those moments of absolute wonder, utter peace, and sudden insight we have all experienced alone in the natural world. Through the irregular voices of uncle and Annie, and the juxtaposition of lyric and realist, stylistic modes, I try to create a poetry of the theater that frees the imagination and allows us quite literally to come to our senses. So that's the reading. Now George Bratenyuk is going to talk about how we present these plays in what format. I mean we present them as plays, but then we do something else. Okay this this theme has been my favorite theme since I was in kindergarten because I went to an incredible school where they taught youth by using nature as the model for everything. And that included dramatizing all of the holidays as plays, as drama, and we all dressed up in costumes and enacted all the various rituals that that are present in those holidays that celebrate the changes of seasons and the death and the re-burthing of life. So to me this has been my obsession in many ways for over the years and I keep coming back to it for this simple reason. We are now in a world crisis and many years ago somebody said to Sean O'Casey the playwright what do you think of the atomic bomb and he said oh it's a wonderful thing you know and they said what if it was shocked and horrified he said oh no it's going to bring us all together. Well to some degree it did and we managed to pull Reagan back from the swashbuckling oval office and many met with Gorbachev and then you know it was possible to slow down and slowly stop the Vietnam War. Well now we are in the issue for the first time universally that that really really really has all the other social justice issues in it. It is embedded every single if you really think about it every single other social justice issue is in the environmental issue and I don't care what it is because it's all respect for the other for the other person the other creature the other plant the other rock and you know Indians say that rocks dream so everything is alive and to me sacred so this is what we do because the the the the RTC of the issue has grown to such a degree we have added another dimension to our productions and that has come about very naturally because even in the beginning when when we didn't do this Karen who always does incredible homework so that the plays are filled with the information you need to understand what the problem is but also the imagination so that you can feel it and feel your own feelings about that issue and this is a very important kind of dimension in because we believe in the art first first is the art you must you must really believe in what you are doing so that it affects people so that it works because that's my definition of good art and bad art is if it works as good art it doesn't work as bad art okay so you really have to pay attention to that first then when people are opened up you can start having other people come in and start saying what do you think and and and now you know i'm going to tell you a few things that i know because i've been out in the field trying to do something about it and and i'm an expert in this particular focus of the issue and this particular focus and that's what we do so every performance we have somebody uh and those two scientists that she mentioned they came to see your early readings of the play and that's what you have to do you have to engage the people and the people that that you're writing about the communities that you're writing about engage them from the very beginning before the project is even finished you want to say because then they can do a little of uh uh they can make some suggestions they're just worried of time yeah okay so anyway uh uh uh what yeah just the festival of conscience is the way that we do it so that the play goes into another dimension uh when it when it gets to the the speaking that we call it the festival of conscience and we have all these people from different you know so the audience really dialogues and even argues and now it is my great pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker dale jameson who has written uh he's a very powerful book reason in a dark time is to jameson well i first i just want to say that an honor it is it is to be here this is such a powerful play the second thing i want to say which i think the play does an excellent job of bringing out is the relationship between science and policy is extremely complex um john often seems to have a rather naive idea that uh all i have to do is do my science tell the world about it and everyone's going to go right right going to change my behavior that's the way it is science tells us what we ought to do science doesn't tell us what we ought to do tell us science tells us how the world is and science tells us how the world will be probabilistically on certain pathways but science doesn't give us the odds it doesn't tell us what we ought to do it doesn't tell us how we want how we how we ought to live and it doesn't tell us what kind of world we ought to be leaving our children and our grandchildren there's always that gap between what the science can do and what we have to do and i think the play does an excellent job of showing how much space there there is in that gap and that is one of the key problems with climate change that science is at its most authoritative when it is describing the world when the scientist moves away from the laboratory and starts telling us how to live they're now in the world of politicians of priests of bartenders and your mother they're just another person telling us what we ought to do the third point i want to bring bring out which i think is also really excellent in this play and quite unusual i think when artists try to confront issues like climate change you know when you think about climate change often the focus is just on this world we're making you know how catastrophic it is and all of that all that's true but but what we often tend to lose sight of is that life is really built up out of moments and encounters with other people with other creatures with nature with cities with places we love and places we hate and in some ways the fundamental challenge of climate change you know isn't to save the polar ice cops or to save the polar bear those those are important challenges but the fundamental challenge is to how to find meaning in the world that is undergoing this rapid change and so i very much like the character of uncle for example because in a way uncle would be uncle and live in his life whether climate change was happening or not uncle is somebody who is all about forging meaning in the life that he's living in the world so we shall surround our pond with rosemary time and england time partridge pea blue eye i think it obsessed with rats low shrub blueberry bushes the red flower called cosmos and most miraculous of all this scruffy little wildflower tories mountain mint endangered the world wide impaired yet amazement on my face here it is to see to sniff sometimes i do despair why not not with you my dear no not in front of you i tell myself forgive me child care of this land was passed to me by your grandfather and noble soul like your papa and demeanor uncle he said they called me uncle even then though i had no one i was sublimely unattached had wandered by and struck by the beauty of the viewhead stopped to linger here you shall be the steward of my land as far as the eye can see we shall hold in perpetuity should any of my progeny wish to dwell in this domain you uncle will see the land comes to no harm no one shall disrupt the mountaintop a mountain stream or bubbling brook your grandfather spoke like in those days nature intervened in all our words we painted with our tongues we kept the land forever in our thoughts we walked with beauty inside and out we've been down and marvel in the sprig of tories mountain mint we have our miracles still small though they are once we walked the world and we were minty skewer old growth forest above our head a cacophony of creatures we sensed our place in the grand design to marvel at the large and small the sky the mountain the honey bee the blood beneath our feet not to step lightly not to leave a mark where we had walked the grasses would rebound the forest would remain undutched we would harvest and replace we would exit as we'd come gently unremarkable i hope they can get this to uh broader audience because it makes a lot of valid points and it does it in a more entertaining way than usually this subject you know the the uh the documentaries are just not very interesting uh-huh and so it's hard to reach the public maybe if this would uh maybe this could take off and reach a bigger audience what do you think was the most like poignant part of the play um as far as reaching people about how important this topic is well i think it's actually the love of nature uh-huh the the girl um rather than the ice you know uh but um you know it's a combination of all these different characters bringing in with the there's quite a bit of realism in the way the fracking and everything is brought in and on the other hand what it's competing against and you have to have a love of nature or it's hard to um be concerned about the problem on a short run because the big biggest problems in this are things that will happen over the timescale of decades and centuries when the ice sheets run out of control we can't say how rapid that's going to be although it's looking more and more rapid as we see what's happening um around Antarctica but um we are missing with a system which is appreciate your hand real quick that's what I'm gonna make you cut and I think that comes through very strongly in this play because a lot of what you heard tonight which I don't know about you but I am absolutely exhausted you've been through again so much of it is true um and the complexity of these many aspects of the climate system and people and energy and politics and the ecosystem and all of these very complex parts of our society that she wove together in this play in just I thought a masterful way um but there is a lot of truth to it and that's because she did her homework so well it's it's just a very impressive play and I just wish the audience were 50 times bigger I just want to thank you all for coming and being so interested for whatever reason you know this was this is a very important message that Karen is is bringing to the public in a way that I think will reach many people I mean as as it as you heard in the play it's hard sometimes for scientists to to connect with the public you know some people obviously get it but some people just don't and so this is a venue and a and a way of communication that I think is extremely important because this message is extremely important and we've got to just try every way we can so that's why I think we formed such a bond so quickly through our phone calls and then I came down here about a year ago I think for an early meeting of the play and I must say it's improved it was great then but it was even better tonight and um I just want to thank you Karen for doing this amazing work so Sniffley's demise that door that door cannot be fixed it slams at your fox time I look ridiculous I am wearing the skins of the deer you killed for years some use must be weight of waste we've neglected to eat her meat some screws and a new spring I shall put it on my list but however let me provide you with fair warning I fix what needs fixing first I'm standing perpendicular to the good earth for but a flash not to be wasted on mundane tasks Sniffley's loss serves to remind us how fleeting life is so Sniffley lived long and well he left a pond populated by his descendants he uh had friends across species he served by devouring his fair share of insects solar wind and wave these alone last forever sufficient unto our needs and those who remain after soon as Sniffley has been mourned I shall return to my last great project upon the hill yes John great project I tell you I shall not be moved I saw surveyors up there in hard hats with Frank but it is a little better hi John I'm constructing a wind turbine farm on the northwest corner not only the small domain but that old town below will be able to survive on nature's endless bounty alone a beacon to all the work the solar panels on the roof were the cause of my last witness and the wind turbines on the hill will be the source of my death but the wind will blow for eons and eons eternity will be here on earth where it belongs I'm and the analysis is next that's great and actually no if it's okay um you know the the ways you deal with climate change artistically have to do with the many ways it's going to impact our society and we were talking about you know the the state of becoming refugees and because we all will be in some sense because we're turning taking our own planet away from ourselves so Leilani you just want to talk a few minutes about your work sure and then if universes want to talk a little bit about their work that would be great and then I'll share um well my company's called Tida you want to come up here oh yes because howl around is right there okay howl around okay actually can you put up my one of you I'll try that's our one thing right down there okay um so we're based in Los Angeles and Santa Monica over the last 10 years we've been working with the Laotian refugee community in the United States and um if you you may or may not know it is right now the 40th anniversary since refugees came to the US after the Vietnam War and those refugees did not only include uh Vietnamese refugees but Laotian refugees and Cambodian refugees who were intrinsically involved in the Vietnam War and um the secret war in both Laos and Vietnam we don't talk about much and that was kind of the source of wanting to start the refugee nation project yeah if you could scroll down to the bottom this is our current project global taxi driver which is taxi driver stories which we're really excited about and then these two photos here are from the refugee nation project right now it's a three-person show it began as a two-person show and part of our inspiration was my husband um at the time was my boyfriend uh and we went to Laos and visited his family and we found that the effects of the war um still 10 years ago had not and still is the case um was still being affected by the family who stayed in Laos and one of the things that stay in my mind is uh an airstrip that went through the earth that can't be removed and it was put down during the Vietnam War for US planes to land um it can't be removed out of the earth there's cows walking across it we went over on a tuk-tuk and just like rattled across it because it's like it was corrugated metal looking um and the other sponsoring organization was organized called legacies of war was organizing to remove the bombs from Laos and those were the bombies that were dropped that are still embedded in the earth and um at that time the Iraq war was just beginning and so we just started this play as part of getting you know realizing that um the one you know we do we do workshops with with youth and we everyone and we say show images of war and everyone shows the gun and the dead person and at the end of the workshop we say unless there's refugees in that workshop no one ever shows a refugee and every war that has ever been there's refugees and this is what our story was about was the story of the refugees coming to the US and learning how to survive and assimilating and trying to figure it out and we a lot of times have performed in traditional and non-traditional venues and it's always been hard to bring the community to the traditional venue because they never necessarily think that that's their home or where they're going to see their story so for example one of our early performances was at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley and um there was a Laos New Year festival and that's the one time of your everybody gathers and so we went there did an excerpt there there were 300 Laotians there for this Laos New Year festival so we did an excerpt performance for them um in San Pablo just outside of Richmond the largest Laotian community one of the largest Laotian community is in Richmond um so we thought you know Berkeley, Richmond two exits down you know one exit past the Costco you can make it to Berkeley La Pena CR show right so we go out we perform one of the skits or one of the pieces scenes for this audience we've never performed it for that many Laotians before and there were things you know with every show there's the understanding that people get just when telling the story there's the understanding that people get from knowing us and there's the understanding that people who know the inside jokes get and so here we are performing as professionals not our best most desired performance circumstance um but we hadn't good luckily enough the sound was good enough for us to hear for them to hear us and the elders were cracking up standing up and applauding in places I had never had them do before like oh I have to wait okay and then I'm gonna talk um and it was such a rewarding experience to be like this audience knows exactly all of our all all of our references um and then afterwards the elders were coming up to us oh that was great that was awesome it was great and we're like great we have a show at La Pena Culture Center you know just down the street at Berkeley and La Pena you know come see it and they'll be like oh 10 minutes is enough so um that's the next thing it's like how do we get this community to come and see our shows in the theater where we'd love to be able to present it but at the same time my most rewarding performances has been out in the community where they gather anyway so if questions arise why does our show look so episodic why does it look that way it's because we've had to develop it for this when we get that audience we develop it as excerpts out at outdoor festivals at fundraising dinners um in in conferences you know and and then we put together the show I love the show but um getting the audience there to see it is always a challenge because they're not used to seeing their own voices told on stage yeah thank you um and I go uh yeah great please go the way you like thank you because of the war in iraq the invasion of iraq the application of iraq and etc there are now syria there are now more refugees in the world today than there ever have been so yeah and then I've made it the last thing I will say is there's a lot of humor in our show refugees are some of the funniest people in the world because they they use humor to survive and the jokes are like some very morbid jokes but it's in it's in the work um well universes um okay well universes is uh we've been working on we're a very political organization so a lot of our work is very political in nature and literally in nature we started so we started exploring uh the I play called America we started exploring um the fear the history of fear in America is how we started with this political play and in the middle of our research um deal with the history of fear in America Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and uh and the south mississippi and it was just devastating to the entire world I actually think and uh we created this piece called um America where we talk about climate change we talk about our responsibility to the planet as well as to each other and also our dependence on our government to protect us and defend us or be there when things happen right the problem with the hurricane was not the hurricane itself but that we built these levies that weren't able to support it to support what we what what we needed you know to defend us in addition we create levies to begin with you know it's like and we live in places that just you know you just don't allow you you want to stop nature right you want to stop the planet from being who it is you know and and so by building the levies itself and you know we're saying no we're gonna control this but you just can't do it um so in America we talk about all kinds of things we talk about fracking we talk about um the water ride the level the water level rising um there's just a whole slew of um different information that we take people through and a lot of times we also create episodic work right we've always created it because that's the nature of the beast when you're creating these pieces for community your community has certain attention span certain amount of time that you can you know that they can you know afford and so we created it episodically as well and when we took it to the manifesto we created we constructed this entire piece I think that the big deal for us doing the work doing this work about Katrina what had happened was actually going to New Orleans and just like you said you have to talk to the community and the people we when we went there um and I really strongly believe this there are maybe four or five people they are called almost like the mayors of the city and if you talk to these four or five people you pretty much will get a pretty good landscape of what the community what the city's like so if anybody talks to you and says well who did you talk to and we got a lot like you guys ain't from here who did you talk to and I won't be talking to miss Harrison I mean oh you guys are good um but it was talking to folks who did go through that experience and went from being American citizens to refugees overnight um and their relation to the country and how they felt neglected and um abandoned we talked to a group of kids this one kid it was 16 years old and he described sitting on his roof for four days um and to talk to a 16 year old who's been on a roof for four days looking for somebody to come get them who never arrives um for them then to be talking about the city they can't wait to leave um because there's nothing for them in the city and one girl stood up and said I'm not going anywhere who's going to be here to take this over if we leave so I'm here and the amount of pride that they had in that city to stay to come back to rebuild um for people to understand what levies are what it actually did to the community how they were abandoned one woman described the last time she saw her project building was on a bus as they were evacuating and she said she having to look out the window as her building was going away and when she came back it was gone they had tore it down and she didn't know they were going to tear it down um and having to look at her city that way so I think um and taking the show on the road to different cities as a touring company um and having them not be from the woman and we were very conscious of making because obviously the storm on earth a lot of things so going to different communities and having that dialogue about what it did to an american city and we're all american citizens and that if it happened here where would you be how would you react how would you respond to your neighbor um and to see the level of commitment that they have to that city I haven't been to a certain woman's especially within itself but there's just a there's a commitment and to us as artists to be able to do that and have a commitment to the work um and to talk about these type of climate changes and things that's going on in our own in the world in general but um in the united states um and to be able to sit there I mean I'll talk backs worrying about oh the show was great oh was this how long you got to be together it was not um especially in the woman's we literally kind of like sat back and it was this going on um we had people and most of night we had people getting up and walking out you know you're doing hard work that happens but then they were coming back so I'm like okay I'm on stage going okay that woman came back so you see people getting up and walking back and forth maybe the water images were and it was a lot it was it was like traffic and I'm like what the hell is going on so finally doing the talk back one of us said so why did you keep getting up and the woman said I needed a minute there was so much going on in here it was bringing up so much stuff I needed a minute and then you hit yes yes yes yes I needed to get up and just breathe and come back and to have people um like us even acknowledge their story um and what they went through they were very appreciative the important thing the whole message of america was really to not be isolated or not feel america the reason we actually it's a village that's the point of the title it's like we're not this giant thing that's just disconnected from each other disconnected disconnected from the planet disconnected from other nations but we're this we're all together right and we're all in and you need to start looking at it in microcosm and just really being people from New York right at the time people were like well why don't you write about 9-11 right because that's what you know and we were like it is what we know we need somebody else to write about it because we can't you know because we're in it right so no we have not written 9-11 play we wrote a new one as a hurricane Katrina play because we can see it from the outside and we could claim it and we could come as a community and say here we're here we're gonna we're gonna step in so yeah if you if you're not from New York write a 9-11 play you know because you can see it from a place that we can't and it was about that and I think a lot of the time we can't see our own planet because we're on it and we're in it and it's about just really trying to step out of it if there was a chance for us like you know like every time you see one of these you know the space shuttle flew out and all of a sudden you see the planet you're like oh man what am I doing and a lot of times even in the play people would be sitting there with their water bottles right because look they're all over us all around us right and suddenly we're talking about New World Water and you know plastic and they're like trying to hide the water bottles and it's just like if we could just bring more and more of that you know activity and make people be just to be visually present and to literally move yourself out of your world or the thing that you think you know and go to the thing you don't don't know you know then you won't be calling people refugees when they're going from New Orleans to Utah you know so that was really the yeah and it was it really was beautiful so thank you thanks you guys and i know there are many other people who have done great work in this room and we're gonna have time at the end to share and the thing that i want to i want to do a couple of things um i'm gonna first move this screen out yeah that's the first thing i'm gonna do um i want to give a shout out to the cornerstone theater company hi if anyone's in los angeles their tempest which was created with 10 communities up and down california is closing tonight in los angeles it's a great show and i want to talk acknowledge the work of the oregon shaker festival i'm my artistic element is both was cornerstone theater and the organ shaker festival um osf has been taking halting but we hope ultimately successful steps in terms of creating support for work around environmental questions partially we have recently commissioned idris goodwin to write a play about a moment of change um in the history of americans relationship to its own environment um we also if anybody is interested we have a gathering of uh suggestions of plays from different playwrights about 30 playwrights we ask to say what are your ideas for play if anyone is interested in hearing those thoughts from playwrights please let me know and we will send them out and make them available to you because there are a lot of people who care about this a lot um and i what my job is for the next 20 minutes and then at 1150 i have to go catch a captain of the airport um i want to i want to capitalize on the work of something called the green task force which is at osf which is osf is a very large organization and there's a group of really committed cross departmental people staff members who have for the last seven years been trying to improve osf's practices and artistic efforts not always entirely successfully but always with great determination um and i you know i think we all know that determination is really forced with this kind of work um but we through our work that and through a gathering of people um in new york last september around the time of march we decided that that all this great work is being done by people in this room by people not in this room um but we what we haven't done is successfully engage field-wide we haven't created a movement and you don't create social change without a movement and so hey we're here we've got we're all together so i think we ought to create a movement yes so we're going to do some game training um because we're mighty we're few but mighty um and so i talked to t so that yeah so what's the first thing a movement needs web page um we're not going to start though but um i talked to tcg as because i'm really focusing on sort of theater as you know this is the community of action uh and weirdly slow and and broadly and taking up the this work but so tcg is going to support um uh two ideas one um the idea that we as both individual artists and organization can make a commitment and we're going to be asking meaning me you anybody who wants to do this a commitment it could be this climate change engager's life we will help stop it it doesn't have to be that it can your commitment can be do anything your commitment can be anything you want but we are going to ask tcg will provide a place for us to stake our claim whether it's our theater or individual artists who are saying yes i'm going to stand up and promise to do something um and that's sort of the first part of the and tcg it is the page does not exist yet if they don't do it we'll do it again the technology is available but it's that place of statement and then the second thing of course is what do we do because that's the scary part right and and but we are all collectively really smart and the great things there's so much stuff going on there already but it's very hard to find um and so we're going to create a resource page and i'm just going to talk about sort of what the way we've seen through all these various conversations with people about the sort of the areas of action can we just the web page need to be this does this list no this is a place to start and all it is about sort of getting us started so the first thing you got to make a commitment or you have to think about making a commitment everyone gets to decide what their own commitment is this is mine i think this is something the osm green task force is going to sign off on and we're going to make a difference and we'll see what happens and course don't be there as well the first thing one of the early things too is you have to have the conversation i think we have all as individual artists or institutions found ourselves not sure where to have the conversation i think we probably all experienced that phenomenon of when you ask someone to engage they step back because if you open that door the implications for what you have to do are so huge and there's so much fear around well i shouldn't do theater at all because theater is essentially wasteful which of course is nonsense but i mean but there is a lot of waste that's not what we're asking we're not asking people to deny their lives we're asking people to engage and the only way you can do that is by starting the conversation and we all have to be brave and people have to be brave in response um and a lot of the conversation is of course how you have the conversation and really absolutely as george was saying and other people it's a question of social justice you can enter this conversation through science you can enter it through the lives of your children but you can also enter it through social justice as we all know and um tell everybody to read this changes everything you know we find ways to go about it if people are interested this is all stuff you know but this is an organizational tool the concept so we can have plays that are directly about it and we can also um if there are plays that are not about it we can also it would be great if every play that was written in the United States in the next year and produced had one line at least one line about the environment of the characters because it's so interesting so many plays you see they don't acknowledge that there's an actual real world and that's part of the pathology right that has led the climate change the environmental movement to partial failure it's just that we have so successfully been disassociated from our environment and when artists create worlds that are not contextualized then we are actually continuing the problem so every play one line just one line unless it would make the place up then you don't have to but anyway this is just another possible tool um contextualize all the work in environmental themes following up on that so uh every play exists in an environment if you are staging any play at all it is happening in an environment so even if it's an old existing play that you don't want to change the lines in you can explain to your audience you know it was happening in the world around while this play was being produced so that we're recontextualizing everything we do in terms of the environment of the moment because you know you know uh whether it's you know a play that's being set while um the mining is going on and it's not explicitly talking about mining but it's it's behind the world or a play like all the way which was produced at osf about lbj well it's this fantastic interesting play about how lbj and others uh his legislative approach to trying to get the civil rights bill passed one of the things he did was give away water rights to the colorado river and that's how he got votes well wait you know that's uh something that you're not necessarily focusing on but making sure that when those things exist in the plays that you call attention to them it's basically have to recontextualize everything we do and then of course there's collaborating with outside organizations building your community there is almost everywhere you look there are huge groups of people who give an enormous shit about this and they may be in local organizations or they may just be people and they're looking for a forum and a place to talk to people to talk to and we can do that this is what we do really well and then i think one of the reasons it's to have moments like this is because we have to build camaraderie in ourselves um because it's really scary you know and that's uh that sort of goes to the next thing it's scary to do the work it's also scary to live in the world now because when you know it's scary to think about the future but we have the opportunity to through our through our camaraderie and our work to offer ourselves comfort but also to offer our audiences comfort because we may change everything and i hope we do but the damage there's been plenty of damage done right and people are going to mourn and if they don't mourn then they despair and if they despair then there's no hope right so our job is not just to show our offer our job is also to hug during this process and then of course there's the witnessing you know which is means that we all talk about each other's work which means we talk about the great things in the world and remind everybody else who you know who we work with uh where there is independent artists or institutions that this is happening in the world and then nothing more exciting right like we're not alone in this look at all this great great work that's out there and then advocacy if you want to do what you can go to your governor go to you know the turn the levers of power um and that is not necessarily there are lots of artists who don't feel that that's their job fun any one of these things and many more things can be done and then of course there's production and logistical practice reducing your travel um uh Broadway who is it Broadway the Broadway Green Alliance anyway there's lots of stuff online about improving production practice and there are a lot of very serious production people who are doing work in theaters around so the job so our my goal I will speak for myself only is to try to get the collective energy of our field behind this which again starts with the commitment and moves into structuring our our work um and having imagination about what this level of commitment what our particular way of committing is and I do think as we collectively encourage ourselves and other people to take this work on you know it's important that we now have purity tests you know purity tests build clubs they don't build movements um and so I think probably I would love what time is it 1135 so um two things I know there are people who want to do work and I and there are probably people with questions and I would like to start talking about next steps because we can create some pages on the TCG website but then we all figure out how we collectively join hands right and maybe it's through the website but I you know I think there's also something in the energy in this room and the energy of the people who are watching know how around the world um and how we get that going and I know there are people who are interested in doing this who just couldn't be willing to so sir so I work with the Institute of Doctor of Theater and there's very little work being done in those venues on this subject where it naturally walks we track about 380 theaters around the world and there's a Google map that shows all of them on our website homepage and I think there's no reason why we shouldn't say if you have a script or a pitch scenario or whatnot or a good environmental production that should be put out and outdoors to send it to us and we'll broadcast it to the field as an opportunity that sounds great I would say there also just I forgot to write this up there is a Facebook page there are a couple of Facebook pages the one that I started which that's why I know the name of it is called theater makers against climate change which is not the best title but it was late at night and I was desperate so we can while we're waiting this is a place for communication obviously we can communicate through we have knowledge of each other now through our TCG participation in this conference this is also a verification can I just do one other thing yes yes and I stumbled this morning on a BBC news read that I got daily and it's so succinct and it's so much even more dramatic than what's being said here that I want to read it it's just very short do you want to read it do you want to stand up and read it the earth is entered a new period of extinction a study by three universities is concluded and humans could be among the first categories the report led by the universities of stanford princeton and berkeley said vertebrates were disappearing at a rate 114 times faster than normal these findings echo those in a report published by dupe university last year one of the news studies authors said we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event the last such event was 65 million years ago when dinosaurs were wiped out and all likelihood by a large meteor if it is allowed to continue life would take many millions of years to recover and our species itself would likely disappear early on said the lead are the author gerardo shavales so it's more than frogs and bees yeah it's everyone the sixth extinction which just want to feel surprised by the cobearer is about this and there this is a partial bibliography which i had asked to have zero i could say you could all have one but i can send it to you because it's on my computer it's not theater books it's books about and their websites also climate skeptical science is a very good website daily climate news is a very good website um because the news comes you know daily daily and the news is yeah difficult to hold yep and i think we should we should start uh by getting everybody's email i guess you have you have everybody well tcg knows that let me let me throw out one more fact phenomenon um recently a couple of things have happened which i'm sure will not surprise you but um the nrgc the national resources defense council actually got in touch with the network of ensemble theaters and then at harvard their climate change uh department department some subset of scientists work in the climate change actually reached out to the american repertory theater and that and i had spent some time with anthony leiser witz that they yell climate change communication group and the scientists are extraordinarily aware of the fact that they one may not it may not be the storytellers but that the larger environmental movement has failed in creating a narrative of hope and change a possibility um and that's what we can do and the cry has gone out to us um and we are gonna respond and it's gonna be awesome scientists as you heard as you've heard are very very into this but i want to raise one really difficult question which is funding because our experience we had more we had an easier time funding another life which is a 9-11 play it's about the u.s. torture program coming out of it starts on 9-11 it goes through the u.s. torture program and the open society institutes funded it immediately but we could not get a single foundation to fund extreme weather and the slum foundation which says that it funds plays about science does not fund plays about climate science it's general motors money it funds um richard linston at mit who was one of the major climate deniers in the country it funded his chair at mit i think that the funding problem has i mean i'm addressing it right now at risk to say that fossil fuel pays enormous dividends and everybody is invested in fossil fuels and they sit on boards and they contribute to museums and to theaters and to da da da da da and this is a real dilemma you know the divestment movement which is started by the guardian and and picked up by the people's climate movement is happening but uh funding is is a real problem and i think we have to say it honestly and figure out a way to address it honestly uh because we're not going to get anywhere without the funding that we need yeah go ahead um just to pipe in uh Cleveland Public Theater did a four-part sequence called the element cycle um and the most recent one was called fire in the water um it was about the 1969 burning of the kaihoga river and all the all 12 burnings before that um and uh and we actually i i want to put a fine point on the collaborate community part because we ended up through development and the audience engagement angles we reached out to their green companies in Cleveland um Parker Hanfin does um uh in a corporation that invests a lot in uh wonderful you know construction and and products that are you know sustainability related um we reached out to a local brewery that is very much involved in local clean water uh work we reached out to an office chair company who supplied rolling office chairs for part of the production so um and then in addition to the northeast ohio regional sewer district this uh sustainability department of the city um and and so getting out of the foundation model and also getting away from arts funding um there are you know really creating partnerships yeah um so uh and it ended up bringing in of course from an audience perspective brought in a very very diverse audience um one of the most impactful moments was a woman who works for the Cleveland Metro Parks um coming up after the show and saying it's so refreshing that other people are talking about this you know to see a cast a multi-generational cast including young artists who weren't even around um you don't even weren't even around for the origins of the environmental movement um you know talking in an educated way about climate issues was was really exciting so um but yes the partnership collaboration thing finding the people that want these conversations to happen and do not have the tools through my position at the National Theater Project you've been a number of projects that have gotten funding but they are for devised and ensemble work right and um right now maybe the last month of bizarro is finishing up their cryeworn project and and it's in right now it's in New Henning, Connecticut and it's actually on a reservoir and those kinds of projects you know we looked for those kinds of projects not just for the environmental but where there is a real working work community and winning community and I think um aside from our funding the most successful projects in that sense are those that involve community because the community supports you in totally different ways they also did this in Vermont with uh same last public theater as their coast and that took enormous community that was way beyond any monetary funding that they ever received and that is often I think for some of the most successful shows the only way to get it done are extreme where there was funded by individuals who came from you know we have groups coming uh by in benefitting means you know so although it's a written play with actors it involves also community in that in that way and that was how we got funded I don't I don't think a three mile procession can happen without community we have to be aware of what we're up against because the you know this uh and this is very well documented what we're up against for this information campaign is funded by the fossil fuel industry with enormous but we are asking for community involvement um we should because the climate change climate change will not be solved without government action there's going to be a change of public policy there has to be public policy in order to be a major major major change it's like the depression you know the depression was only uh solved because the government got involved and start funding the arts literally you know all all over the place so uh the government has to has to has to step in and the world governments and this is what cop 21 in the un is involved with yeah i just wish in terms of public policy i'm in the master's of public infrastructure program at the university of georgia um and so we were one of my classes talked about co-production and just in different public and private sector and some of the research that we looked at was environmental public policy there's not a lot of research on in general and how co-production is done um luckily co-production is starting to be more of a a precedent in research itself so i mean i think it is just going to take a while but you know with us at UGA in particular is being one of the leading um research organizations within public law and public administration but there was little to no you know research that has been done co-production in environmental public policy and how that can kind of impact but i think with the the younger leaders coming in we're are trying to do more research on it i'm going to just step in because i have to go get on a plane um and thank everybody who's here and in turn i'll watch the end of it on hell around i'll see what i mean don't talk about me behind my bed um but uh you know what we have we have a structure and we have so many great people and i encourage you all to talk about the work you're already doing for those who haven't had a chance to speak um but our next step is figure out how to inspire and require our compatriots um and so as we all go home and think about the best ways to do that and then we will collectively assign tasks or you do that after i'm gone and we'll get it done because it's too important up to and it's really great to be in the room with you guys i really appreciate it so bye i'm going to go expand my carbon footprint well we took the train and it took 12 hours from new york to cleveland there's no infrastructure in this country for non-carbon intensive travel time that's another problem i mean this is a public policy issue we have a congress that is blocking every meaningful climate piece of legislation and we haven't even been that many you know um uh and has blocked it for you know many many years and we cannot solve this without public policy in the public interest we must change public policy and and culture can help do that obviously but it's a big yeah we have to so 10 minutes around let's go around i just want to um say as something i know we talk about how to get funding how to get you know i mean it's such a difficult thing to do but we are at a theater conference and one of the things that i don't see is us putting our regional theaters attached on actually commissioning works that talk about the environment right we were fortunate that the humanities festival mark masterson commissioned a maraville and that allison it always says is commissioning you know do the american revolutions do a history cycle they're commissioning but what other theaters are making it their business to actually commission new works or to produce works works that are continuously you know just like we say yeah we want to diversify theater we want to make sure that they're a place of color they're a place that you know that we're there has to be a place for this kind of work where in your season you have to have this play you have to have a play like this and you have to play out like this and you have to talk about this so since we're here right wouldn't it make sense for us to really try absolutely okay even an advocacy group among the regional theaters and the people who actually i was told by someone who will be nameless who runs a very big theater well i already did one climate change play yeah right as if that's the end of that and i just want to have you heard of arts earth partnership so they're an organization in los angeles um they started the uh electric log which is based in venice california and it is completely solar powered except for the light board and the light system and so what they did was create an organization to now teach the other performance venues and cultural centers in los angeles how to be green so they actually got some big fun things to go around and do that so i mean i'll put it on the two-point-one list and you can find out what they're doing um but it's pretty impressive they're like really i mean it's not just what you put on page but what is your practice in the that you're in yeah um i just wanted to share a quick anecdote um also related to this fire in the water project in partnership with the office of sustainability we had um it was the year of clean water here in cleveland it's the celebration year um and this play happened inside of that so one of the features was that there was this big banner that at all the organizations where there was some sort of water related event there was a big banner that said what um what clean water means to me is that that that there were markers and audience members could sign this so these banners were out at the zoo and that you know beach cleanups and everything we were the only arts organization that was hosting a clean water event um and afterwards at a meeting with the office of sustainability um i i found out that the the cpt banner was sort of had been sort of rolled up and put into corners like no we can't display that one um because there's sort of inappropriate language on it all of us and they were like oh let's see it so um we rolled it out and it was interesting because it was filled with color people had drawn you know and they come out of this exciting uh play and um and there were some critical questions um in response to what clean water means to me and there was one that said something along the line of you know um the city is really proud of x y and z but we still have so much far you know so much further to go and um and then in this area this area in this area and but there was and there was you know some slight like profanity you know damn or a hell or something like that um and uh and all of us in the room said oh this this is what like this is like this is what art provokes guys like this and and it was interesting because that's the and there's something about um that allison raised about the sort of hope change conversation and how we need the critique and i feel like that's what the arts can bring to the environmental movement is you know and i think there are parallels to you know um i'm drawing a parallel you know between this and uh and sexual health training with kids like if we talk about the bad stuff we'll be talking about like they're gonna they're gonna know these they're gonna know about these things if we are critical of our you know if we're critical of our policies if we're critical of environmentalism like it's gonna puncture the movement no it's actually people need to feel like they can authentically express their um their their critiques um and uh and sort of harsher harsher feelings and i think that authentic engagement is something we can really bring and i think our art can also um you know we don't want to always be sanctimonious about these issues you know that that hope and change needs to be grounded in um the reality and the the darkness and the other thing is that i i think quite a few people mentioned this uh early today but you have to use comedy you know you have to use fantasy you have to use uh in the play about torture that we did we used surreal surreal reality and reality surreal reality and reality and we kept switching back and forth and we found the audience loved that and also and because it gives them a space to look at it with you and and to get the critical view of something and say yeah why shouldn't we criticize why shouldn't we because that's the beginning of change okay and you know it's very important to use every tool uh that you can that you see in any other form of entertainment that is also and becomes a viable tool in a place about social change it's so important you know and brecht was the first one to say uh i always make sure that it's entertaining yeah well i mean what's so moving about this group is that the commitment to art is so clear we're all doing political art art right and so that's not really a problem and we have strategies and we change styles and we you know we have all of our artistic practice that work constantly that's our most important that's what we do um there is enormous pressure what the antidote that you described is pressure from on top who made the phone call to who to who took that banner down because of what the art provoked and and this is this we have to recognize as well the the pressure is coming from from the top and we're going to see this as we move towards the cop 21 in paris what the u.s sabotage copenhagen right um the copenhagen un congress resulted in nothing everybody says cop 21 is the last chance the last best chance to put a cap on carbon emissions so that the temperature doesn't rise over two degrees celsius in the next 30 years if it goes over two degrees celsius in the next 30 years we'll see catastrophic disasters more so than we're going to see the the ice in the Arctic is melting faster than it ever has the ice in the Antarctic is doing the same thing this is the hottest year on record already 2015 we have already committed ourselves to climate change it can be slowed down and it can only be slowed down through public policy in the public interest we have to put enormous pressure and i'm not just talking about advocacy also but i'm talking about the arts all of the things we do but we have to recognize that this pressure is coming from congress and they are and it's documented they are the republican climate deniers in congress are funded by the fossil fuel industry they are there because of the fossil fuel industry and this is all documented i'm not making it up and this is what's going on and somehow we have to recognize that and not stop working because of it but work being harder because of it but no it's going on it's not a it's not a pretty picture i just want to speak to the hope and despair issue because i know i find myself in despair around a lot of things that come up in in the news and things that people are saying and the things that i've learned and in my work in the theater one of the things i've been trying to cultivate is a sort of higher spirit and a place of hope and a place that we can come together in order to manifest the results i think it's really critical because a lot of my work has taken a very environmental activist kind of come on people let's get together and get it get it together and i've been doing that for so many years and yet i see it you know it's all just kind of unraveling through i can't i can't pull it back and so it's to me it's about you have to kind of surrender to this place of despair in order to kind of move on through to the other side so that we can transform and we can manifest and there's this piece around it that's also about solidarity in working with other people who really want to affect change and putting that hope and that spirit into the work i think is really critical because i really don't want people to walk out of the theater going there's no hope it's the end and then they won't even do anything so there's this cultivation of not only is this really important work and really vital and really must happen but we've also kind of kind of lift each other up in it or we're going to just fall down and cry and not do anything and and and that's the piece that i've been working around around spirit because if we can kind of uplift the human spirit around that coming together there's some some possibilities that can happen absolutely absolutely beauty beauty is and spirit is the is the essence and you can hear it in the post encyclical the beautiful language you picked up from st francis our sister mother earth right extreme weather ends with two possible epilogues and one is the disaster epilogue and the other is when we wake up and then light comes back the sun comes back the birds come back the wind blows and it's a simple matter of waking up literally and it's a spiritual awakening we also as honest theater people have to accept that the other alternative is possible it's yes the end of the species is possible one way to be right about that one of the most effective nuclear folks that was ever it was on the beach might have a shoot talk about a depressing book but those who read it said this became so real through a book that came in just to change the tragedy is a real story this is the back and forth pull and every tragedy has beauty in it and that's what the bottom the bottom which is a great ecological plan you know there there is no tragedy without the beauty of nature so it's always it's always a balance and it's always a pull and i totally agree with both of you if i may say you're both absolutely right you're both absolutely right but that's what art is art contains the ambiguities art is largely on a theater piece that is a good theater piece contains both possibilities within it there's a beauty and the possibility of even an extension and i think that that conversation is very important and perhaps you know us thinking that we're so so important to this planet that the planet can't live without us beyond us you know is a very real conversation and sometimes i'm like you know what maybe we have to go and something new has got to happen because we obviously can't get this together and and maybe a morbid kind of way i'm not really sure of what kind of way that is of thinking but sometimes i do think about that and i'm like you know the the planet has cleansed itself before and um this is really a conversation of our personal survival as a species and and how do we have other species survive but there is also an evolving possibility that beyond the cleansing of the planet there are new species the only thing i want to add to that more the deep ecologist asks this question what are we here for because we're just destructive exactly and answered it with we are the storytellers of the universe we tell the story of the universe and and i do think that's a valid thing that we do do and that the universe enjoys so let's leave behind some good fun yeah let's leave behind some good fun i'm gonna also expand in terms of funding that i'm a part of the Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated and so it's a historically african sorority which is part of the divine nine which is nine historically african fraternities and sororities and so we do have in budgets that we have national initiatives that we have to do program and implement so Delta in general has local chapters and states and we have international chapters and we have funding to be able to support initiatives so i'm an arts and letters chair for my local chapter inside the program and have a budget based on plays but then also we have Delta Research and Educational Foundations that's a foundation that can give when we have partnerships um this year we work with 13 13 natural organizations to provide funding with and work with these organizations so i definitely say like let's think about organizations who have these national initiatives that we're funding is available my dues the dues that i pay every year you used to go to something thank you so much for coming um and i hope we continue all of these conversations it's such a pleasure to hear from people and keep the good worth going