 Welcome to the first OEG, OE Global Live. I'm Alan Levine and I'm here to start the show with you and hopefully not fill up the space with me because it's really about the guests that we're having. But I just wanna say this is something that we kind of experimented during Open Education Week and it was really great to have these informal unstructured conversations online. And it's something that we wanna be able to continue going on. And just as it happened through the channels of OEG Connect or wherever, heard from our colleague, Judith, who I'm gonna bring on stage now, that she was working on this new OER about climate change and welcome, Judith. Like I can't believe you're making this your launch for your new OER, but say hello and whatever you wanna say, tell us about your t-shirt. Alan, hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm just so excited to be a guest on this inaugural version of OEG Live. And yeah, I'm Judith Sebesta and I'm based in Austin, Texas. And I am a fairly recent climate change advocate. Hence my t-shirt. I just made this last night advocating for planet over profit. And yeah, this has given me a reason to complete my passion project, which is what I'll be talking about today, which is an open educational resource focused on climate change depicted in narrative film. And so like I said, this gave me a chance, that really gave me a deadline so that I really got over the finish line to, oh, Karen, hey, how you doing? Good to see you there. I was able to take this resource over the finish line at least enough to publish it on press books and get it out in the world and use this as kind of my informal book launch. So thank you so much for the opportunity, Alan. Oh yes, and we're gonna start and we're gonna get a chance to see the new book, the brand new press books, which we're really excited to see and learn and share. We do have Brian Alexander coming on, a colleague of mine and good friend. He is actually just wrapping up his own seminar series. And so he's gonna be kind of dropping in late, but I said, that's how this show is gonna work. You know, people will come in and go out and we're just gonna wing it from there. So maybe start out why you said this was the relatively new idea for you to break up climate change. So what was the impetus to do this project? You know, Alan, I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, that I'm one of those cliche people who until climate change affected me directly and personally, I really didn't pay that much attention to it. I wasn't a climate denier and I'm a great believer in science and the ability of science to help better our world and help us better understand our world and the challenges within it. But it just had not directly affected me. And I have to admit also that my father worked in the oil industry here in Texas my whole life. So there was kind of a familial reason why my family supported fossil fuels and it's money from the fossil fuel industry. Oh gosh, my father actually might be watching this. I'm not sure. It's money from the fossil fuel industry that paid for my college, for my master's degree partly for support during my PhD. So in a way I owe quite a bit to the fossil fuel industry but let me tell you that two years ago, a little over two years ago in Austin, some of you might be aware that we had what I refer to and some others do snowmageddon or snowpocalypse. And we had this really on just unprecedented freezing event in Austin. I was without power for five days. I was without hot water for six weeks. It's a first world problem, I know. But it really shook me and shook my belief in my incredibly privileged position of not being directly affected by things. And that was really the beginning. And again, everybody that's here, I understand this is a really privileged position that I'm coming from. But it really just spurred me to start researching and looking more into what is the existential crisis of our planet and make no mistake. This is a planetary problem. It's a planetary issue because we all share the same earth and the same air, ultimately the same waters that are all connected. We are all connected like the force because it's made the force with you. I'm a big Star Wars fan. We are all connected. And this is a problem that we all share. So that's kind of what got me on the road to being a advocate fighting for solutions to human-caused climate change. Climate change isn't new. Human-caused, the problems that human-caused climate change have caused are just growing exponentially, exponentially. Something I think younger generations understand. And I think we all need to understand. I need to do something about it. So this, I also am very passionate about film. And this is kind of a way for me to harness that passion with something out there to help people better understand what we're dealing with and what potential solutions there might be. That's the whole answer to that question, Alan. That's okay. Do you remember like some of the movies you watched maybe growing up or that kind of included like these, like I know I used to watch a fair number of science fiction and, you know, and then of course you get mixed in with the novels that where the different climates in them were present. Like is there one that stands out for you that is memorable? Yeah, Alan. And by the way, the climate fiction film or Clifife film grew out of the climate fiction literature that is out there on climate change. But, you know, I saw Soylent Green with Charlton Heston. It's made of people. You're one of the scenery. Oh, you just gave away the... Sorry, I'm terrible. I saw that at a relatively young age, not when it first came out in the early 70s, but just dating myself. But I saw it at a fairly young age and it really kind of stuck with me more and more, not in my backyard climate activists, love it, yeah. But it wasn't, you know, and then it wasn't really until I got to be an adult and saw a film called Waterworld with Kevin Costner. And that, even though it's never mentioned explicitly, really is, you know, not very explicitly, is about the global warming and the effects of that. That's featured quite prominently in the book. Avatar is another that's featured quite prominently in the text. And probably one of my favorite Clifi films that I analyze here. And that really, even before the snowpocalypse that happened here in Austin, Texas, got me thinking about these issues with Snowpiercer. The Snowpiercer, if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it, Chris Evans, before Chris Evans became the big Chris Evans that he is now. It's a really amazing film. Most recently, and the final film I analyze is Don't Look Up. And that coincided quite a bit with my personal experience and that was the one that really spurred me to write this book. It's not necessarily my favorite Clifi film, but because it's most recent, I think it really did affect my decision to create this resource. Okay, so I mean, well, this is the premiere. Should we show it and then we can talk about it? Or what does the audience think? Do you wanna see Judas? And I'll leave it to you to say like when we can put the link on screen, maybe after you show it, and then we'll let people get access to it. But you're getting here on OEG Live, the premiere of Judas' open textbook on climate change. Hopefully I clicked on the right things there, Alan, and you could get that pulled up. So yes, thank you. Funny that you ask, twist my arm, right? So here it is with great appreciation to Pressbooks and how user-friendly Pressbooks is to publish open educational resources. But I also, this is also now available on OER Commons. So you can do a search either in Pressbooks for it or in OER Commons, but we'll put the direct link to this. I'm not gonna take a lot of time giving you a tour of it, but I just like you to kind of have a general sense of what some of the topics are within the text here. I've got your usual front matter, including an accessibility statement and what I've done to attempt to assure that this is accessible to as many learners and readers as possible and viewers because it's quite video heavy. And notice that I've utilized some film terminology throughout here. I call myself an auteur, which is a film terminology or film term. I set the scene for it. I have opening credits. But then what I've done is I have organized this thematically, the films that I explore thematically. But I start because I myself am not a client science expert. I begin with climate change science, the facts, which is a chapter that is a primer on climate science in communicating climate change, a guide for educators. So I have to give a nod and give attribution to Ann Armstrong, to Mary and Krasny and Jonathan Schult who wrote that book and gave it an open license so that I could utilize it verbatim within this text. I talk a little bit about why narrative film, which maybe Alan, we could come back to as opposed to documentary film. There's a specific reason why I focus on narrative as opposed to documentary film. And then I just kind of talk about what are clarify films, give a little overview. And then I delve into my various topics of humans versus aliens or nature, post-climate apocalyptic dystopias, heroes and Deus ex machina to borrow a term from ancient Greek theater, psychological thrillers, comedies, believe it or not, because there are some clarify films that are very much comedies and humorous, don't look up being one of them. And then I talk a little bit about the future of climate fiction films because we are seeing these more and more, I would argue. And I have some closing credits there, including a badge that you can download for moving through this text. The other thing that I wanna mention is that there are interactive quizzes at the end of most of the chapters, but they're not directly in this press book because the subscription that I have as an individual user does not allow me to use HP5, sorry, H5P within press books. So what I had to do was create them on my own website and link out to them. So press books, I wish you'd make it so that we individual users if I might be missing something, but I could not have them directly embedded within the text, but they link out to my own website so that you can do these interactive texts. And the one last thing that I wanna show, Alan, is just how kind of video heavy, let me go into one of the chapters. I'm not gonna play videos, but just to give you a little taste of this first chapter, which begins with the movie, Fern Gully. And you'll note that there are videos embedded within the text of trailers for the films, clips that are available, these are all on YouTube. And so they are captioned on YouTube, except, yeah, they're all pretty much available on YouTube. And they at least give you a little taste of the films. But what I'm hoping that folks will want to do is to go and to watch as many of these films as they can, so many of them are available on DVD, Blu-ray, streaming. So hopefully you get a little taste of that. And along the way, I talk a little bit about myself and some of the things I've already mentioned today. So that's a little tour of the text. Alan, I'm gonna go ahead and- Thank you, yeah, and I'm gonna interrupt because I wanna bring on Brian Alexander, who is just here, coming off of his other forum. And I threw him in here and didn't explain, but hello, Brian. Where am I? What's going on? It's all climate change, right? Oh, it is. I feel right at home. Yeah. Even as my video tiles around the screen. Hello, Alan, and hello, Professor Sebetska. Or, I'm sorry, Sebesta. Oh, no worry, Brian, I'm here. Nice to see you, because I think actually we've met before, but yeah, nice to see you. We may have. Your class sounds fantastic. Oh, thank you so much. Well, and it's not a class yet. I would love it. And I'd like to just put out in the world. If somebody would wanna hire me to teach an adjunct a class based on this, I would love it. So I am a former professor. I taught theater for about 15 years, but I'm now more interested in film. Hey, by the way, Karen, the day after tomorrow is included. She just mentioned the Clifi film, Karen. Nice job. Oh, God. Not like the Clifi film, but it is one of them. We already missed the mention of Waterworld, which- Oh, oh. Oh, oh. My bolt. I didn't think that much of it when I first saw it, but on review, watch it again. On reviewing it actually, it's from a feminist perspective, it's highly problematic. Oh, yeah. Okay, it's traumatic on a number of levels, but it actually, it has some value, I would argue. I would. You don't want it to sink beneath the waves. No. There's so much I want to go into, but first I want to give Brian a chance to come on and talk about this book that's sitting behind him and how he got into climate change. But first of all, like do the intro, Brian. Tell us where you are and what you do. Maybe just what you just finished doing. I just saw you in your web bar. Sure. I'm a futurist. I specialize in the future of higher education. I'm coming to you geographically from Northeastern Virginia, right near Washington, DC. There is at least one cat trying to climb on me. So you may see a fuzzy invader occur any second now. I work, I do research, I write books, I make media all over the planet. And hello, Karen. It's really good to see you. I, among other things, run a weekly video conference about the future of education called the Future Transform. Just now we had a great discussion about generated AI with roughly 200 people going frantically, talking about everything from hands-on tech to faculty support to politics and robocologists. My previous book was called Academia Next and it took a look at the next 25 years of American higher education. So it was pretty narrowly scoped. And after it came out, people read it, I was happy with this. I wanted to do a bigger book on a broader subjects. I wanted to cover all of higher education globally and to look ahead to the next 75 years. And as I was working on this insanely huge project, I realized that, among other things, climate change was looming larger and larger in the world but wasn't appearing in most of higher education. I saw very little discussion of it anywhere, scholarly literature, the periodicals, conferences, and it was beginning to just really frustrate me and make me concerned. So I ended up focusing on that and producing Universities on Fire, which takes a look at what climate change may mean for colleges and universities worldwide. It looks at that from a whole series of perspectives, including what happens to physical campuses, to how our research mission may change, to impact on our teaching and learning mission, to how campuses interact with the community around us. It just came out a few weeks ago already. It's gotten some attention. And I'd be happy to talk about it all the time, but I'd also like to learn more about all of you and what you're all thinking and the connections of climate change and higher ed for you. That's fantastic. And one of the things Judith sort of mentioned about some of her, an event that happened, the big storm that happened in her area in Austin a few years ago, it's kind of a wake up call. This is something you've been monitoring for a while, but what was it that finally clicked for you, Sissette? It's time to do this focus on climate change and higher education. Was that for me or for Judith? For you, yeah. Partly there was no one tipping point. I mean, partly it just seemed staggeringly obvious. In the futures community, we now think that you have to include climate change as part of any forecast. And then not doing so is a kind of malpractice. So looking and seeing faculty, staff, administrators, not encountering this or not speaking of it just became very, very weird and unsettling for me. And then the more research I dug into, the deeper the problem got. And I can find people in all fields from athletics to libraries to technologies to student recruitment and all academic disciplines from philosophy and art to atmospheric science. We're already starting to talk about it, but there didn't seem to be any larger discourse or conversation on it. And then when I've raised the topic, I've gotten some really strange pushback. I asked a group of faculty what they thought about the idea of flying less. One of them told me I must be a Trump supporter. One called me I was openly anti-intellectual. One said I couldn't be a real academic for posing the question. And I've talked to a bunch of presidents and deans and trustees about this. And I find almost no climate deniers. What I see are people who either think that the subject is so explosive that to mention it is too risky politically or that they just don't see any traction. They could look at small steps, right? We'll teach an extra class, maybe we'll do more recycling on campus. Beyond that, they just don't see what they can do next, which I find fascinating. And on top of that, I mean, you have a lot of faculty and staff who are exhausted. I mean, we're right now in years of a huge pandemic. We're coming off of, among other things, economic wildness and political stress. A lot of faculty and staff, not to mention students are hosed. I mean, it's really difficult to say, by the way, we need you to help grapple with the biggest problem facing human civilization. And it's gonna take a hundred years to get a handle on it. And we may not have that time. Well, that's the thing. I'm not seeing that sensibility, Judith, anywhere in academia. When I talk to people over 50, over 40, they're like, well, this'll be an issue for my descendants or this is something to worry about in the year 2090. Like, no, you're not seeing the science here, right? I mean, this is, we have to act now. There's a fun, I don't know if you've seen this and Judith, this would be a great one for your syllabus. Have you seen The Age of Stupid? No. Grab a copy. It's a little, I don't recall it. It's like a mockumentary taking place in the future after climate change has wiped out the world. And I think the entire cast is the actor, P. Possilthwaite. British Ag, British Ag. And he's doing basically a vlog and he's saying, well, you know, this is the terrible world and someone had, well, how did this happen? And he says, well, we think things started to really go wrong around 1990, which is what we call The Age of Stupid. And whenever I show this to people who are like, oh yeah, that's credible. But the immediate goal of being able to do stuff now when I talk to students, traditional age students, they're all over this. They grew up with Captain Planet, right? They grew up with all the science. In fact, I've given presentations at big academic events where the tech staff, the media services crew who are under 50 will come to me and thank me because they think this is such an important topic. But the presidents, the deans would be much slower to respond. I call the book The University is on fire because it is that urgent. Yeah. Oh, Brian, I could not agree more. And I'd love Karen's comment. What if all higher education was focused around addressing climate change? It needs to be taught. And as you mentioned, Brian, across the curriculum. And part of my reasoning for creating my resource is that often film can be a way in for folks who otherwise aren't that interested. And I argue that it sometimes can be those blockbuster films that we might dismiss like a water world, like an avatar that can reach vast amounts of audience members. And you never know which one might see that and might decide to become a climate advocate, a climate scientist. Oh, thank you for sharing that link, Alan or Mario. You just never know. And the numbers of audience members and minds that you can reach through blockbuster films alone is huge. Now, I go the range of blockbusters which are little independent films. You've not been taken away from my best point. Cannot emphasize enough what an amazing little independent film Take Shelter is that deals with climate change. And you can read about it in my book. But as you said, Brian, I mean, it is the existential crisis of our world and it's that important. But Brian, I try to be an optimist but I'm just unfortunately a little bit of a pessimist enough to know that or to think that a lot of people know they're just not willing to change. They just don't want to give up their comforts, their air conditioning. There was a thread on the Austin Reddit about somebody who said, my air conditioning bill is so ridiculous right now. I'm going to move Austin and I keep it at 65. Why is that? Like because you keep it at 65. Yeah, straight up. That's crazy. Also, come on. We've all got to do our part with these little things. Anyway, oh, I could just go on and we're probably preaching to the converted somewhat with this, but you never know. And Brian, I just purchased a copy of your book. I've not had a chance to read it yet but I'm very much looking forward to it. Well, my publisher and I both thank you. Alan, can I jump in there? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I think Judith that there's definitely a real stall and I think one of the reasons is as you pointed out that people will have, they see this as something that will cost them. The solar punk idea of a fine Anthropocene is just really not out there yet. I've actually thought about making my next book and calling it Solar Punk University but the real advantages, I mean, just learning to have a warmer temperature, to not have your thermostat set to 65, but at 72, is a plus. I mean, I'm extremist in some ways. I shifted to a completely vegan diet a few years ago and I'm really happy with it. I think, I mean, I know I'm healthier. My, in fact, my current primary care physician told me to give him advice on dietary stuff which is pretty goofy, right? But I think we are afraid of loss. I mean, if not flying enough, that's gonna cut down travel straight up. In the U.S. where we have a stupid railroad system, that's gonna cut down our ability to drive much less getting away from the North America. I think, yeah, I think people don't wanna sacrifice and they don't wanna sacrifice for a goal they can't foresee right now. But to go back to your point and to Karen's point, I love this idea of a whole higher education unit focused on climate change. But we have now our classes, we have some majors, some minors, some graduate programs, but I'm waiting for within a university to have a whole college of climate change. I'm waiting for a standalone university of climate change. And in the meantime, we should just think about this as liberal arts. I mean, because if you wanna think about climate change, Judas shows us to bring in movies and culture and climate fiction so we can bring in literature, right? Alan, I'm sure will be able to have us talk about not just technology, but also about geology. If we're trying to think about political action, polyscience, sociology are there for you. And of course, to understand the basic science, we've got a stack of natural sciences for this. I mean, in many ways, thinking about the climate crisis has to be interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary. So we need to be all over this right now. Liz Yada also says something that's really, really important, the plan will still be here. In my book, I have a, except for one chapter, it's based, I base everything on the IPCC's median scenarios. We get some handle on climate change, but still it gets worse that the temperature maybe goes up say three degrees Celsius by 2100. But I have a chapter called best case and worst case scenarios. And the worst case scenario is the darkest thing I've ever committed to print. And that includes the possibility of humanity dying out. But of course, we do have the opportunity for the earth to continue to exist for other life forms and for evolution to keep going. Absolutely right. But I will argue that Liz, that it's not just an existential threat for humans. We are already affecting flora and fauna through humid cause climate change. And it's a domino effect. And I think probably the one that's really out there in the public mind, I would hope it is somewhat cause you see on the news is polar bears and their habitat being, habitats being destroyed. But there are so many others from minute creatures in the ocean to plants to, we're destroying. We are destroying other forms of life on the planet already. Like, no, like we're the asteroid, the asteroid that set out the last extinction. And of course, you know, no one really remembers the world of the trilobites. I mean, they had a great thing going on before the planet shifted around. And so there's a lot of history that's been lost down the wash. I kind of, this is great, but I kind of want to get back to again, like we talked a little bit about the potential for narrative to interest people, but can you both, and that's also why I wanted to ask Brian, cause I know Brian has an in-depth knowledge of film as well. Like what is also the things we can learn or the ways we can jettison. And maybe it's not because of film being about climate change. I mean, there's a lot of ones where it's just the setting and it's sort of sets the stage. So it doesn't always have to be the point of the movie to make an impact, right? But what can film do or what can narrative do? What was that? There was an incredibly bad Hugh Jackman movie. I mean, I kept falling, I don't normally fall asleep during movies, but man, I kept falling asleep. But climate change was the background. It was a kind of film noir taking place in Florida and the climate change had really taken off. It's not the focus on, I don't think. And mine is not meant to be comprehensive. I've selected films to focus on so, but I'm not sure which one that is. It was really dull, but they had some nice visuals of Florida underwater. I, Judith, have you looked into this Apple TV series, extrapolations? I've not seen it yet. I do mention it in the final chapter of my resource, but I've not seen it yet. Well, that encourages me to finish my blog post about it. I thought they did a couple of things that were interesting. One I thought was good and one I thought was pretty cynical in terms of storytelling on, because this is a huge complicated problem. There's actually a philosophical concept called the hyper-object involves in trying to think it through. And hyper-object is something you just really can't fully wrap your arms or your mind around because it keeps slopping over and flopping at other things around you. What extrapolations did that was good was they made it into a family story. A series of family relations of husbands and wives, parents and children are conflicting along these lines of what to do. Should we do geoengineering, yes or no? Should we migrate away from an endangered place, yes or no? What's the value of human health versus animal health and that kind of thing. But the cynical thing that I thought was absolutely hilarious and was bugging me when I was watching it and Aaron Boddy did a great article critiquing me so that all the characters except for in one episode are all wealthy Americans. And that's really dumb for a global story, right? Why do that? So I read an interview with a showrunner and she said, well, someone asked her about that. She said, well, we're doing a show for Apple TV. We thought their audience is mostly rich Americans so we'd focus on them. Thanks, that's cynical. I can see your point, but I think family stories is one key part. Judith, I have other ideas but I want you to take over, please. That movie that I mentioned Take Shelter is one that is very much centered around a family of three and the effects of the fathers and the husband's paranoia over climate change. But one thing I wanted to mention. Good movie. This is directly answering that, Alan. What I believe is so powerful about narrative film. Narrative film, by the way, is also known as feature film. Again, this is as opposed to documentary film. Narrative film allows a creativity to come into play that envisions solutions that otherwise we might never think of. I believe in the power of artists and their creativity to come up to imagine solutions that we otherwise might not imagine. So that's the optimist in me. But I just, as I was finishing this resource and writing the conclusion, I came across an article that was published in The Atlantic in 2014 and the author argued, it was in relation to the movie Interstellar. He argued that film is never going to get it right and that narrative film is a problem because the solutions to climate change are never going to be that dramatic. That it's based in science, in math, and it doesn't create a wonderful dramatic ending for a narrative film. I'm not so sure about that. I'm not sure I agree. I just, I think that perhaps our filmmakers haven't quite gotten there. And some have suggested, just like with geoengineering that you mentioned, some have suggested some, what could end up being some viable possibilities. But that's what, that's a criticism that is put out there in regard to more of the films that it's just the real solutions are just never going to be that dramatic. What about, did you include the road? Cormac McCarthy? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have a whole section on, and I hate to give this away with the road if you've not seen it, a whole section on cannibalism and depictions. That really, there's some filmmakers who said, here is, this is the worst of humanity that happens when we are faced with these challenges. And cannibalism is one of the worst taboos and if not all societies. And boy, that movie, who don't, if you're looking for a light film on a Friday night, that's not the one for you, or book based on McCarthy. Yeah, it's a great book. It's not a good film, but it's still, oh boy. Judith, I think that critic speaks for about 90% of Hollywood film and probably 90% of Bollywood film as well. But I think there are openings, there are ways of doing this that we've actually seen, not just from independent films, by the way, Take Shelter is brilliant. I saw that in the theater and it was just brilliant. Lucky you, I only saw it about three years ago. It's so cleverly balanced. I don't wanna spoil it, but I would think about, this is gonna be a weird direction which Alan will appreciate. I would think about the David Fincher movie about the Zodiac killer called Zodiac, which is, it's a very well done, interesting movie and they don't catch the killer. That's not a spoiler. I mean, it's a historical film. It's a docudrama basically and it's true. We don't, the Zodiac was never caught. But the movie just kind of staggers to an end as the investigation more or less disintegrates and different, they follow different paths and none bear out and it's done. But the movie does a fantastic job of reproducing the time period. There's some unbelievable reconstructions of San Francisco downtown, for example. And it gets the passions involved really, really clear. I would, if I could be faithful to the spirit of that article though, I would say computer games are a great way to be thinking about this in games in general because games are system creatures. So they let you simulate a system and they give you player agency to different forms. And also they can be fun, which is a good way to get people engaging with potentially dry stuff. But also they let you have the possibility of different futures open up. For example, there's a tabletop board game called CO2 which lets you simulate the production of CO2 in the world in the 70s and 80s. In the computer game world, there are a bunch of these. There's a satirical game from Moley Industries which lets you play an oil baron and you get punished if you don't do enough climate change. There's a game called, I'm sorry, I'm blanking the name of it which is about rebuilding the world after climate change devastates it. The Economist, the conservative economics magazine published a kind of choose your own adventurous style game where you're in charge of the global response to climate change. And you have to see it through for the next century. I think there's a lot that you can do with that. You know, and I love coming back to the topic of universities and education, Brian. You know, any way that you could harness gamification in pedagogy I think would be incredible in this capacity and simulations and virtual reality so that not only are you studying it but you're in a way embodying helping to come up with solutions and embodying living the effects of it without the danger, the physical danger like I felt whenever I was without heat and you know, five temperatures for five days. Oh, creativity, Karen, yeah. Yep, that's. So it sounds like, and I know this is part of Brian's teaching is I mean, we're discussing like understanding and using produced narrative but there's also the flip side. We're talking about students and learners creating and exploring these same digital creative tools to play out future scenarios. Any thoughts on how people interested in taking on that strategy can go about it? Well, of creating scenarios. Yeah, or just like teaching no matter using these games that you're talking about. Well, there, I mean, one of the quick ways is to grab a game and play it. And I'm not trying to be flip. It's just that it's a bit like the matrix, right? You have to actually do it rather than be shown it. And this gives you the, this gives you the chance to try to explore the different form of thinking that's involved. So you can really try to, you know, see how it changes your understanding. I'd also recommend games that are very creative. There's a wonderful game. I can put this in the chat called The Quiet Year. And we put this in, which is a, this is going to sound weird. It's a collaborative drawing game where every person takes place, every person is a person in a community after a great disaster has happened and they have one year to rebuild the community. And the play is mostly done by actually, by drawing on a shared huge sheet of paper, what you're doing, you know, you're working on building a bridge, you're trying to grow crops, you're trying to, you know, raid a nearby community for food or whatever you do. And it's all collective. There's a whole structure to how people get to argue with each other. My students loved this. They wouldn't stop playing it. They found it very emotionally powerful and moving. It's also modifiable. You can take and add parts to it as you go. I'm waiting to see more role-playing games in this field, which is a very different way of thinking about systems. But also I think just the sheer amount of play and creativity is vital, especially when you're tackling such an incredibly daunting subject. Alan, can I, that's such great points, Brian, and daunting, isn't that the word? To just point out, Una put, and we're so glad you're here, Una, as always, a great comment about here. Many non-industrialized countries are experiencing climate trauma, triggered by actions of the industrialized countries. The global South, those in poverty, rationally marginalized individuals are disproportionately affected by climate change. Climate change that, as Una alludes to, has been caused disproportionately by industrialized nations. It's a reason that I've embraced open education and that I have published this with an open license in press books because I very much believe in the power of open to be able to reach global audiences and to put out information that's accessible to all. Because again, we're back to that notion that we are all affected, but Una made such a great point that there are many who are disproportionately affected by this and open education for me is one way that I can try to do something about that. I agree, and that's a wonderful thing, especially since we have such an uneven, shall we say, distribution of knowledge. We have so much of the global South, which is locked out of the for-pay academic scholarship world. And Una points out that Chow up earlier, was talking about this, both in terms of global thinking, but also in terms of thinking about justice. Thank you, thank you. And Una, thanks for mentioning Chow, thank you. So I talked to some academics who say, well, this isn't going to hit me because we are protected for certain reasons. So they'll say, okay, Florida will go under water and this somehow makes everybody happy, but I live in Colorado or I live in central Pennsylvania, I'll be safe from that and it's not going to be too hot, not going to be too disastrous here, I'll be fine. Or if it's a wealthy institution, of course, those are overrepresented in these conversations. They'll say, well, we have money, we can pay for things to protect us and we have insurance and that kind of thing. So one of the points I like to bring up, and this is Chow, my first thought when you're talking about global was that among other impacts, we are going to have a refugee crisis, the likes of which humanity has never experienced before. As we have parts of the world that become unlivable due to excessively high wet bulb temperatures, also parts that are inundated by terrible, terrible storms. So you look, for example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, you take a look at Central America, you look at the Indian Ocean coastline, especially Bangladesh and India, you look at parts of Southeast Asia and think all of the scholars in this field are talking about millions or tens of millions of people on the move, which should reconfigure our politics right now since a few thousand immigrants from Central America and a few tens of thousands from North Africa and the Middle East through the US and Europe for a loop, right? So here's a question. If you're a university in, say, Northern, excuse me, Central Norway or in Switzerland or in Seattle and you think you're gonna be fine, okay, great. Is it your responsibility to house, physically house some of these immigrants or is it your responsibility to educate them, which might be online education because immigrants need all kinds of education in order to be able to survive and succeed. And by the way, I mean, I'm talking about Central America, I'm talking about Sub-Saharan Africa. For people in the United States here, wait for the climate immigrants to come out of the American Southeast and out of the Southwest. Yeah, sorry, Brian, sorry to interrupt, but we already have climate refugees in the US, which people often don't realize, not to make it again about the global North, but sometimes it does help to make people understand in the United States that we already have climate refugees. I highlighted one of my chapters, the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, which is just an incredible film that is set on a coastal island in Louisiana. And it's based on an actual island where over the past decade, the residents have been having to leave and be relocated because of the rising, rising waters there caused directly by human cause climate change. It's already happening in the US. And it's so easy for us to, I think, say, well, in India, yes, of course, the coast, and we're gonna try to do some, but it's already happening here. That doesn't lessen the seriousness of what is happening across the globe, particularly in the global South and how disenfranchised those populations are. I believe that the Louisiana government, as well as some federal funds are being utilized to assist those in Louisiana and want to minimize what they're going through, that they are able to get some assistance, I believe. Well, thank you. That's a great one to find, thank you so much. That reminds me when many years ago, we had the book reading club and you introduced me to the water knife. That's a novel by an author whose last name I had to teach myself, I would pronounce, Paolo Bacigalupi. Bacigalupi, I was gonna try it, I was close. He was a marvelous author and yeah, I read a couple of his novels, but do we think also about just the crisis of lack of drinking water? Like water? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you'll appreciate this, Ellen. I teach a class at Georgetown on the future of higher education. And so I built a matrix game for them, which a matrix game is a kind of like blend of tabletop and role-playing game. It's an interesting design, I'm happy to talk about it, but they got to play a university community. So one of them was university president, one represented all the humanities faculty, one represented all the students, one was college sports and so on. And every year they had to make decisions and do different things. And I had a stack of random events cards and one of them was global warming makes your water quality degraded and how they had to respond. And it was fascinating because they all scrambled. The students offered to build DIY water analysis and filtration kits. You have people saying, well, maybe we should make a big deal of this because of the suppressed enrollment. It got very, very interesting to see how it unfolded really quickly. But water, yeah, absolutely. Well, when do you decide if you're in a place where the water quality is terrible or there's simply not enough of it? Or conversely, there's far too much of it. When do you decide to move? I mean, if you're in Miami right now, you'd be foolish not to plan to relocate your institution either to another physical location like the Adirondacks perhaps, or move it entirely online. I'm saying that, just run your eyes along the coastlines of the world. Some of those places are going to be facing the same. If they stay in place, are they ready to spend a lot of money to import a lot of fresh water? I mean, this is a, and even if you do that, the minute saltwater infiltrates your groundwater, all of your trees, all those plants are going to die, right? And you're going to be replaced if you're lucky by new forms of life, right? So, you know, are you ready to do that to your campus, especially if you believe your campus grounds are beautiful and appealing? I mean, the more you look at this problem, the more levels there are to it. You know, Brian, speaking of locations like that, I read a recent article that argued that the city in the United States that is least likely to be affected by climate change or will be affected later than other locations is Duluth, Minnesota. There are apparently literally folks who are moving to Duluth because of that and it's having a renaissance. Now that I could not take the winter up there as climate change affects Austin and in spite of snowpocalypse I mentioned, of course we like everybody else have increasing higher temperatures more often and sooner. Maybe I will welcome Duluth, Minnesota at some point, but... Well, sure. And it'll be the winter will be less ferocious, right? I mean, I lived in Vermont for almost 20 years and people were growing wine in my community. You know, it was ice wine, a particular kind of grape, you know, designed for the Alps but they were growing it, right? No, I mean, Duluth, the whole Midwest, both the Canadian part and the American part have this wonderful advantage of a gigantic freshwater aquifer and they have soil, they have agriculture and they are not too hot. So yeah, this can definitely be a destination. Oh, I'm so Beatrice, I'm so glad to see you there Beatrice. You know, when a lot of people don't realize that if you look at the science and this is really rather horrifically but beautifully depicted in the book, Ministry of the Future, it only takes like four degrees Fahrenheit for the earth's average temperature to raise like four degrees and that will make it our planet uninhabitable. It's like that. So that, you know, like to the water that you were talking about, Brian, I mean, don't quote me on that science but it's something akin to that. But Brian, you know, you're talking about the water. It's, you know, these little changes that at what point do you say, oh my gosh, this is, I gotta get out of here because humans, you know, won't be that long before I simply can't exist here. It is, I do recommend the Book Ministry of the Future. It's, it particularly focuses on India and how India fills the effects really before many parts of the planet does and to just some horrible, horrible effects. It's a great read. It's, I mean, Robinson's a great novelist and this is a book trying to figure out how we could fight climate change. So it's ultimately very optimistic. And so it takes, it's a big book and it takes you in a vision through this all, you know, using different kinds of geoengineering, rearranging the financial structure, different political moves, some of which are shady, some of which are not, cultural changes. I mean, it's a rich book. It's possible to stop reading. Oh, I mean, that authors got parent knowledge of so many aspects of science, of culture, of society, of humanity, of the psyche, human motivations. It's, it is mind-boggling how she managed to write that. And we started with Waterworld and we ended up with Flooding Florida and then all over the place. I guess maybe for some, oh, I would wanna talk for hours but you people have things to do. But like, okay, like we know we have to do something. Like, and what are the things that we can and should be doing? Like SFNB has the answers, but like what are the, you know, the, I don't even wanna say a top list but where should people start making steps if they haven't already? I'm trying to tell my publisher this should be my next book, right? Is a how-to guide. And there are actually a few how-to guides. I recommend the book called Drawdown which is just a wonderful, beautiful book too, physically beautiful. Basically every two pages is something that we can do. And then at the end of the book, it ranks all of those things we can do by their impact. It's incredibly readable and I recommend it. But before I cut loose with a torrent of words, I would love to hear from my film colleague, Judith, what would you, or do you want me to cut loose? I'm happy with it. I mean, I don't have a lot to say on the subject, Brian. It's cliche. I believe education is the key. And globally, we have to ensure that we are giving our young people and beyond opportunities to explore their creativity to come up with solutions. Because I do think creativity is a huge part of where we're going to be able to find solutions, envision solutions that we have not come up with before, that coupled with science. We have to make sure that everyone has the opportunity for education in this manner. And it has to be across all levels of education from K through 12 to post-secondary to lifelong learning. You never know who is out there that has the key that we need for the solution to this crisis, this existential crisis. It's not easy, but Brian, go ahead. Oh, shoot, I agree. And that's one of the reasons why people under 30 are passionate about this is because they have been educated. They know this is a real deal and they want to take steps. So when I talk to educators, one of the things I point out to is, look, if you don't care about this, if you don't think this is a big deal, fine, but your students do. And to some extent, individual academic institutions exist to serve those students. So give them what they need, give them what they want. So we need more classes. But before I get to that point, I think it's important for every educator to work together at their institutions and in their professions to start planning and thinking hard now about what they can do and then take steps. And the steps are manifold. I mean, you think about, for example, a physical campus, right? Do you allow people to drive on your campus whose vehicles burn fossil fuels? Do you, for example, ban that from, or find it or disincentivize it? Do you switch your entire campus fleet to electric? Think about as well where you get your electrical power from. Most campuses outsource it to someplace else. I think UT Austin is one of the few that actually has its own power plant because Texas. But otherwise, I mean, think about where that comes from. Most people don't know. It is it come from people burning coal or fossil fuels? Then switch it. Berea College in Kentucky bought shares in a few hydro power stations so they could then switch their powers to that. Perfect, right? Or do you start generating your own power on campus? It depends on where you are. If you have enough wind for wind power, if you have enough sun and so on and so on. But then think about as well your buildings. And buildings generate CO2 in their lifespan. They do it by the construction process, especially the ones that rely heavily on concrete and cement, but also in their operations. Because as we were talking, Judith has mentioned before, the guy who is trying to keep his Austin home with polar levels of cold. Because of air conditioning, because of heating, because of electricity, because of water, all this stuff. So we know how to design buildings that are carbon neutral or even carbon negative, right? That managed to suck carbon down. So how do we change our buildings? Well, we should start doing that now. But there are a zillion ways the physical campus. In our teaching, do we teach more? Yes, how do we support that? How do we support students who are climate refugees or have climate trauma? That's an issue. In our research, how do we do interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary teaching? But beyond that, you think of the biggest possible picture. Humanity is struggling with something that's kind of like the Industrial Revolution happening in fast forward or even reversed on a top speed, right? Or it's something as big as say the struggle against fascism in the 1930s and the 40s. So we have to think, what is our commitment to that? What is our ethical responsibility? Do we actually think we can't contribute or we should not, because this is somebody else's problem. But also as we rethink all of this, as we rethink everything, our electric, our power systems, as we think our politics, as we rethink how we use food, as we rethink our physical presence on the earth, the whole species is rethinking that right now, which is why you can see ideas rippling across the world, things like degrowth economics, donor economics, zero growth economics. So what's the role of educators in thinking about this, to offer new ideas? Is the solar punk idea a good trope to follow, right? What kind of building strategies? What does this do to gender? What does it do to religion? When, for example, your Pope says climate change is a major concern. Or if say in India, the Ganges River starts to dry up, which it's doing, what happens to your belief? All these ideas educators can contribute by thinking through this, sharing this through research and through teaching. But I think this is something which is the biggest crisis facing us now. How can we not ask? How can we not take steps? In the chat, Charles Tran said, the young generation of students are more aware of their parents. Absolutely. And I think that parents can be aware. The light bulb just hasn't gone on, right? There's a poster I see a lot in climate protests which says, it's always a young person holding this. It says, you will die of old age. I will die of climate change. And I love that. It's powerful and it makes the hairs, the back of my neck go right up. And you think, all right, so there's that 25-year-old thinking that, right? Greta Thunberg, she's what, 21? If you look at the just top oil people in Europe, they're people who are college students, right? I mean, they've got this. Do we want to just let them go and do their thing and ignore them? Or do we want to work with them? And support them and provide them with resources? Exactly. Yeah. Wow, well said, Brian. All right. This was so good. I really want to thank you both for coming on here and engaging in this unstructured format. I think we need Judas T-shirt design for planets over profit. And out of that, we need to start acting that way and thinking about it all the time. And I just want to thank you both so much. And also, thank everybody out there in YouTube Land who've been listening in and chiming in the conversations. As soon as we stop broadcasting, the archive is instantly there. And so we're looking forward to having more of these in the future and looking for topics and conversations. So again, Brian and Judith, thank you very much. You're both generous and wonderful people and educators. And I'm just so thankful for you all. And I am going to play a little music to fade us out and we'll stop the broadcast and just wish everybody wherever your climate is, hope it's good, hope it's comfortable. And don't turn your AC down to 65. It's really not necessary. Thank you, Alan, for being a great host. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Thanks, Bobby. Thank you, Judith. On called Mystery Mammals. Mystery Music Archive and we'll just go out to a little bit of update music. And thank you, Chow and Karen and Paul and Beatrice and everybody else who's been part of it. So take care, everybody. Have a good day and OEG Live will be back sometime in the future. Definitely end of the month and we'll have more after that. Bye now. See you soon. Bye bye.