 Hello, hello everybody and welcome to this very exciting event about the book All We Can Save at the book here in front of me. My name is Kate Orff and I'm a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture Planning Preservation, and I had the distinct honor of welcoming one of our co-editor of this amazing book, Catherine Wilkinson, and some other fellow contributors, Kate Marvel, Janie Babishi, to this event tonight. I'm really excited to just kind of have an informal sharing session, learn more about the event and then sort of learn more about the book and kind of talk about the future of this amazing effort that has turned really into a project, the All We Can Save project. So I wanted to give a very brief introduction of our panelists and these co-authors, starting with the co-editor, Catherine Wilkinson, whose energy is astounding and always sort of inspiring. Catherine has been a pleasure to get to know you a little bit during this process. So here's her bio. Catherine Wilkinson is an author, strategist and teacher working to heal the planet we call home. Her writings include the Drawdown Review, New York Times bestseller, Drawdown, and Between God and Green. She holds, I thought, very interestingly a PhD in Geography and Environment from the University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar, among other degrees. And so Catherine, it's amazing to have you. And I know your fearless co-editor, Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, is someone who is so powerful in this space. And we're all kind of rooting for both of you in this incredible initiative that you have started. So we are also joined today by Kate Marvel, who is a climate scientist and writer living in New York City. She is a doctorate in astrophysics. And interestingly, she wrote in her bio and she knows birth is the best place in the entire universe. Kate is also a teacher at Columbia University. We also have Janie Babishi, who leads New York City's efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change. She's previously worked in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Hauru, Hawaii, and her essay in the book very beautifully leaves together stories of these three places. So I'm so excited that we're having this event now. And today, when we were scheduling it, it was like, let's push it towards after inauguration. And no one could have imagined the sort of chain of events that happened in between that moment when we thought to convene this group and the inauguration yesterday. So it's very exciting to be gathered. It feels like a breath of fresh air, a moment really to think, to be positive, and to sort of imagine a more expansive way. Exactly has all we can save does about our future together on the earth, on the planet, and think big about infrastructure and how we can work together. So the structure and flow of this evening is Catherine will be giving a very, very thick introduction to the book and the concepts, followed by the three of us, our contributors, and then we'll have a question and answer session towards the end. So if you have questions, you can type them into the Q&A box. So without any further ado, Catherine, I invite you to share your vision and your work on all we can save with all of us. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kate. It's really good to be with you all, even though I can't see you. I can feel the group that is gathered tonight. Kate, you're very kind. I feel like I was a little obnoxious as an editor, so I'm glad that didn't tarnish my reputation too much. And I'm also really glad to be having this conversation after the inauguration and really what feels like a new day for climate action solutions justice in in this country. It was quite there were so many remarkable things that happened yesterday, but I thought it was quite astounding that in the inaugural address, the planet itself was quoted. That was a, I think quite a remarkable first. I want to begin with the words that actually open the book, All We Can Save. It's a closing stanza of a poem by Adrienne Rich called Natural Resources. She writes, my heart is moved by all I cannot save. So much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who age after age perversely with no extraordinary power reconstitute the world. And that stanza of that poem, as you have probably gathered really unlocked the title that this book came to claim as its own. 41 essays, 17 poems and original art in this collection. So it was very hard to to find a title that was adequately expansive. It didn't fall into either of those classic traps and I think fundamental failings of climate communication, which is either utter doom and gloom, or polyana optimism. The title where we landed All We Can Save. We felt has an honesty about where we are without losing a gaze towards what is still possible. And of course the shift from that line in Adrienne Rich's poem. All I cannot save to all that we still can. And to get there right to get to all we can save. It's going to take linking arms and it's going to take what we named in the subtitle of the book, which is truth, courage and solutions. All three of the pieces by both Kate's and one Janie really bring all three of those things in spades so I'm really excited for each of them to share a bit about their pieces and perspectives tonight. This book actually has its origins in a rage hike. I've been thinking for some time about the need for a collection like this, but like a lot of ideas they sort of sit on the shelf and get kicked around but they don't really go anywhere. And I Anna Elizabeth Johnson and I found ourselves kind of co facilitating around table on climate solutions during a summit at the Aspen Institute. The gathering sort of struck us a new in a lack of diversity of voices, or a side lining of more diverse voices. And at some point we strapped up our hiking boots and went on a rage hike. Along along the roaring fork river and kind of through these incredible Aspen trees. And we were grappling with the moment that we are in and the leadership crisis that is at the heart of the climate crisis. And the short changing that we see happening so much in the movement for women, a shortage of credit a shortage of funding a shortage of resources. There is less access to microphones platforms, you name it, in literally every sector where climate decision making is happening. There is not gender equal representation. And in some of those sectors very very far from gender equal representation. And I both firmly believe that if we're going to transform society, in large part this decade right science has made very clear that that is the task at hand. We have to take transformational leadership to do that work. And we believe that that is leadership that is both more characteristically feminine, and also more committedly feminist. So we've come to think about the work that we do together as celebrating shouting from the rafters, and, and ultimately supporting and nurturing a feminist climate Renaissance. It's worth noting right here at the beginning that that is not limited to any gender. It just so happens that we are seeing women bring to the movement in droves this upwelling of compassion care connection, community connection, creativity, collaboration, and deep commitment to justice. And the aim of this book is to support to accelerate the shift in in not only who is leading but how we lead in this critical moment for life on Earth. I'm not suggesting by any means that we need only women, but that we do need a full spectrum of climate leadership, and all of the diverse superpowers and ways of change making that that we can get. As we were working on the book, it became very clear that it wanted to be more than a book. So we have also launched kind of a sister nonprofit called the all we can save project, which will aim to do a few things to continue giving us to climate feminist ideas stories and perspectives, which is exactly what this book has tried to do. We hope that we will be able to raise many millions of dollars and actually invest in the work of feminist climate leaders. We're hoping that we can also nurture kind of next gen or new gen feminist climate leaders, whether that is inviting climate folks into a more justice centered and feminist perspective, whether it's inviting feminist into the climate space, and everything in between and beyond, and and to build community so not at all disconnected from from some of what we're doing tonight. All movements for social change depend on a relational strength in the movement and historically, I think we've really under invested in that in in the climate movement. And it's something that we're really keen to shift from things like all we can save circles, which some of you may have already participated in that started to unfold this fall and are expanding and really delightful ways are hoping that we can can really help build build community around this this work. And the work that we need to do together right to strengthen the we and all we can save. I think Kate, I will leave that there. That feels like enough context, and let's have Janie join the conversation to share a bit about her piece and and some of her insights. Thanks Catherine. That was really a beautiful framing. So my, my essay in the book is called a tale of three cities, and as Kate mentioned in my intro, I talk about my experience working on climate adaptation in New Orleans, Louisiana, Honolulu, Hawaii, and of course New York, and we've together some themes about working on climate adaptation, each of these coastal cities. I wanted to start my presentation off by showing you some warming stripes. I imagine that this audience is pretty familiar with what these stripes represent. They chronologically represent temperatures here showing the global scale the temperatures in the US and then locally here in New York, over a period of about 100 years, and the trend is clear. Our earth is warming, and that has consequences for our society and our communities. And we've seen those consequences in action. These are some images from the extreme weather we saw over the last year. We had one of the most active hurricane seasons on record, Atlantic hurricane seasons on record, devastating wildfires in the West. And one of the hottest years we've ever seen on record, only 200th of a degree cooler than 2016, which is the hottest year on record. And so as we work in the field of climate change to decarbonize our economy, we must also work to prepare for the impacts that we know we cannot avoid because of what the trends have been. And because of the fact that our action on climate is coming later than it needed to have avoided these impacts. So, I wanted to tell the story of what I've learned from working on adaptation in these three cities, like I said, I start with New Orleans. And, you know, I should mention that because the essay is based on my experiences in these cities, they are really in the same time. And I haven't necessarily followed the work in these cities, beyond these snapshots so I just want to be clear about what I'm able to represent here. And this picture that I have on the screen is an image of the infamous green dot map as it became known as over the years. It was a map that was shown at the mayor appointed bring New Orleans back commission meeting back in 2006. It was the first time New Orleans residents that were eager to hear about recovery and rebuilding in their city. We're hearing about the city's plans for how that recovery would unfold. And the green dots here represent neighborhoods that were low line neighborhoods. In many cases, long established African American neighborhoods that were designated and announced for the first time at this meeting as neighborhoods that would be returned to green space. So the implication was that people living in these neighborhoods would not be able to rebuild. And they would have to move. As you can imagine, this news was not well received, especially because there had been no community engagement done in advance of this map being presented. And so the mayor quickly realized the political fallout from this plan and changed course and declared a few weeks later that no community would be off limits. Instead, the US Army Corps ended up building a $14 billion complex levy system to protect every community in the city. I'll come back to that levy system in a second. But, you know, by, by changing course, I think questions still remained about whether these neighborhoods were safe to live in. And that question never really got resolved. A great geographer in New Orleans, Richard Campanella, who works at Tulane, ended up calling this the great footprint debate. And he juxtaposed the social stance from the scientific stance. The science said that some of these neighborhoods were not safe to live in over the long term and scientifically based on the projections that made sense to leave them. The social stance was that it was unfair to require communities that have had very established roots in these places to leave and what did it mean for their assets and their well being and the the fabric of their communities that they came so heavily to rely on. And that was never a result. And like I said, the levy system was built. Just recently, a few years ago, the Army Corps has said that the levy system will only protect from hurricane forced storm surge until 2023. And so there's still an open question about how to protect these communities in the long term. And I think that the story also gets just to the question about where are we going to be able to live in the long term and then which communities will we have to end up leaving. I then talked about my experience in Honolulu. I worked in Honolulu on a public private partnership to pursue multi sectoral solutions to climate change and disaster risk reduction. And we, I was also involved in a project to bring together different stakeholders in the tourism industry to figure out how to provide long term protections and adaptation solutions in Waikiki Beach. Waikiki Beach brings in about 42% of the state's tourism revenue $2 billion a year. So it's an incredibly important economic engine economically. It's also very, very susceptible to coastal erosion. This image that I'm showing here is a Google Earth image that highlights some of the natural streams and natural wetlands that used to exist in this area. Some of the areas shaded in green were actually tarot fields and tarot patches before the development that you can see here took place. And here the story is really about trying to chase an ever changing challenge and not knowing exactly how much time the solutions that we're pursuing will be able to buy. So, you know, there are some complexities in terms of the types of solutions that can protect Waikiki Beach and whether or not they will actually be able to preserve some of the recreational amenities that Waikiki Beach has come to be known for. For example, if you build breakwaters out in Waikiki Beach, it will actually have the impact of breaking the surf, which as you may all know, Waikiki Beach of course is known for. So there are some challenges in exactly the types of solutions, but then there are also challenges in both paying for those solutions. And like I said, understanding exactly how long those solutions will last and how much time those solutions will present the beach. Ultimately, those solutions can keep up with the rate of erosion that the beach is experiencing due to sea level rise, or if much more bolder actions must be taken to either preserve the beach or accept that the beach cannot be preserved. And so, you know, I think that the lesson that I learned in Honolulu is that adaptation is a process. There are some short term solutions, some short term investments being made and building some jetties that will keep the sand in place and keep it from eroding on the beach. We will see how long those solutions provide the beach. And then adaptation planners will continue to have to decide whether or not to make bigger and bolder investments to keep up with the rate of erosion, or, like I said, moving a different direction. And then that brings me to New York, where I currently live and work. This is a rendering of the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project. It's a project that will ultimately protect 110,000 residents, 28,000 of whom live in public housing in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This is a community that was really devastated by Hurricane Sandy, and the city received some catalyst money, I would call it, from the federal government that ultimately ceded the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project. Community engagement has been an incredibly important part of the story of this project. We're now about to build a project that was not just going to protect this community from future storm surge and sea level rise, but rather also create new amenities for this community. The community told us that they wanted to make sure that they had better waterfront access so we're replacing the rickety bridges that cross the FDR into the East River Park with universally accessible bridges, which will create a much more welcoming entrance into the park and will be more accommodating for wheelchairs and strollers. The community also said that currently the park has many amenities, fields and tracks and courts, but they're all fenced off and there aren't really those interstitial spaces where families can gather and have picnics and just be with each other outside. So we're making sure that we're building those kinds of spaces into the new park that will be built here. The flood protection will be at the water's edge. So when you're in the park you actually won't even see it the park will be built higher than it is now. And one of our goals for the project was to ensure that we don't wall ourselves off from the water that the flood protection is really integrated into the waterfront. So our goal here was, and I think the lesson here is that we can realize the potential of transforming our communities with investments that we're making in climate adaptation and really achieve multiple benefits and really achieve community different planning process that allow communities to thrive and be more vibrant in the face of climate change. So as I reflect on all of these experiences and think about the future of coastal cities. I think there are a couple of lessons that really stand out to me. One is that we really need to be mainstreaming the incorporation or consideration of future climate risks into everything we do. Image here is one that we use in New York City as we talk about our work of a multi layered strategy we've got coastal strategies at the waterfront edge we have 520 miles of coastline here in New York so those are important. But we're also accounting for future climate risks and buildings infrastructure, and then finally equipping our residents and businesses to make more informed decisions in the face of climate change. So this is the kind of strategy that I think all cities must employ we need to be thinking about climate risks and every land use decision and every housing development and every infrastructure decision. We also need to make sure that we're being driven by equity inclusion. The reason that the focus on systems like coastal infrastructure buildings and infrastructure is so that we don't have to burden residents with the responsibility or the expectation that they will bounce back after every disaster if we build more infrastructure systems, if we build more resilient systems we will be able to absorb the shock of those extreme events there rather than be relying on residents themselves to bounce back. And then, you know I think another important piece of this is just a question of how we pay for this work. The rock jetties that I talked about the adaptation solutions that they ended up implementing the required billions of dollars of federal dollars to flow after disasters. Honolulu in that case they ended up taxing coastal businesses and why key key in order to pay for the, the groins that they're building the rock jetties that they're building. You know I think there's a question about how we pay for it and and and when when the support from the federal government comes into play we really need to be able to access federal dollars in advance of a disaster to take this action that's inherently proactive, rather than in in reactively after a disaster. So I think I will leave it there and pass it off to the next presenter, but I look forward to the discussion. Thanks, Janie. The next Kate I will, I will be the next Kate up. And I will say, oh good Kate Marvel you're there too do you want to go next. Whichever yeah let me know. Okay, why don't you go. I'll go because I'll follow Janie and we were in the same section so I'll excellent and then you can end on a bigger zoomed out note. So, thanks Janie and I thought I would actually start with Catherine and Ayanna put together the book in these amazing sections and they have a part in the introduction that captures each of these sections in a poem. What she called like light brushstrokes and so the sections are route advocate reframe reshape persist feel nourish and rise but I thought, as Janie was speaking to kind of read this mini poem that Catherine Ayanna put together. The poems embedded in the contours of cities transport infrastructure capitalism coastlines and landscapes where human nature meet much to reconsider rend and Bert and remake. Great. And Catherine mentioned that she was a tough editor and that's mostly because I put in maybe 10 pages and 15 images and there are no images in this book so I thought to kind of take a leap and actually just read my text from the book. And throw it out there and it's about a seven minute segment. So bear with me it's called many the landscape and it's part of the reshape section. Downtown cropped in Maryland is typical of many middle class developments of the 1960s with its wide streets single family houses to car garages and of course a golf course. A frontier suburb on former farmland it was a pleasant considered and rather unremarkable setting. Also a local harbinger of global change car centric logic increasing automations standalone homes demanding large loads of electricity and sprawl accelerating habitat fragmentation. During my lifetime, our neighborhood pond stopped freezing up for ice skating in the winter became choked with algae in the summer and eventually dried up for two years straight, filling with bird and fish carcasses and alarming local residents. Fueled by subsidized gasoline and publicly funded road networks the carbon intensive backdrop of suburban sprawl has reached its zenith in the United States, and has been replicated around the world in various forms for the past decades. While planners and landscape architects were busy laying out suburbia, the world's ecosystems were being degraded polluted and torn apart. That fragmentation and toxic pollutants created the biodiversity crisis sprawling development which discouraged community life contributed to a social crisis and exploding greenhouse gas emissions precipitated the climate crisis. These three interrelated crises will define the planning and design professions for the next century to be a landscape architect today is to wake up each morning with sorrow and guilt. As well as a sense of mission. My goal as a design teacher and practicing landscape architect is to reimagine my profession as a form of collective gardening. At the same time, Frederick law homestead and Calvert folks to prominent early adopters of the term landscape architecture made their iconic mark with Central Park in New York, the salt marshes of Jamaica Bay on its outskirts were being used as New York City's trash. When bridges came much later shoreline gradients were concretized islands were impounded into straight land masses for two airports and sewage flowed freely for decades. The recent revitalization of Jamaica Bay shows how to mend and love landscapes moving forward. It was once thick with cord grass and teaming with shellfish and flounder, but the shellfish population collapsed during the 20th century from over harvesting and raw sewage. And in recent decades marshlands that once cushioned against extreme weather started to slough off into open water, so coming to pollution and rising sea levels. In the late 90s, the landscape was literally drowning local activists birders fishermen and conservationists band together to track and publicize the marshes imminent disappearance and habitat loss for hundreds of species. And local action converged at times prompted by yes lawsuits in response to this landscape emergency. New York City and New York State acted to address pollution and improve water quality. The US Army Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service embarked on an island building process that we use dredged boils to replenish starved marshlands, spraying on layers of sediment. Local volunteers began planting cord grass critical to salt marsh ecosystems and oyster gardening to receive the shellfish and mussels that stabilize the sand that together hold cord grass roots in place. I've learned four lessons from Jamaica Bay. Now a beloved living and recovering landscape that can inform our collective gardening and landscape architects climate action. One, visualize the invisible to foster ecosystems as infrastructure, three, create participatory processes and for scale it up. So I'm going to skip to the the scale it up section. And in the interim I have just examples of what I mean by those kind of four calls to action. So I'm going to go ahead and go ahead to conclude scale it up from individual oyster to functional reef to healthy Baylands to vast blue thriving ocean. The idea of scale is embedded in living landscapes. There are multiple scales of human action to from the gardening and garden at your doorstep to restored forest at the edge of town to regional watershed policy to national legislation and beyond. I'm going to read all of these scales to mend the earth. It's time to redesign the mighty Mississippi as a living river system reconnecting the river with its flood plain and coastal basins. The Dutch have implemented a room for the river program along the Rhine aimed at giving the river more space and ability to cope with high volumes of water. The river at National Park could take a similar approach to reverse the US Army Corps of Engineers practice of concretization and control and its unintended consequences. Iowa pig farmers Arkansas birdwatchers and Louisiana oyster men would all benefit from letting the river reconnect with its shoals in the upper watershed and from nourishing the Mississippi Delta with land building sediment. A recreational project like this could knit the center of our country together and reclaim the river as a recreational linear park rather than a waste canal. The Mississippi helped build this country, we need her help again in the climate crisis. Our nation's coastlines also call for bold aspiration. The National Flood Insurance Program provides funds to rebuild flooded properties exactly and where they are often putting people back in harm's way. Rather than being an instrument for equitable adaptation disaster response and managed retreat from rising rivers and seas, it exacerbates the income divide by giving payouts to already wealthy homeowners, sometimes even for vacation home. Because more, the flood insurance program is already over $20 billion in debt. In its place we need a federal buyout policy that enables families to choose proactively to move. Research has shown that many people want to and feel proud to leave their land and buyout programs and are willing to give it back to mother nature. It requires a fresh vision for an interconnected and publicly owned national American National Shoreway, which could be made possible by encouraging retreat funding equitable relocation and rebuilding protective shorelines as linear parks that maximize public access at the waters edge. Mending the fabric of the physical landscape at a local scale, as in Jamaica Bay or at a regional scale as the Mississippi River National Park would would show us a way forward. Stitching our nation's green blue infrastructure is the collective work of our time. Stitching ecological connections is good for vibrant and healthy healthy communities, animals with migratory lifelines food systems supported by living soils and the global global carbon cycle and climate. These things will also require tearing up and dismantling others equity equitably on building places in harm's way, depaving roads, blowing up dams ripping out concretized street channels jackhammering asphalt, and cutting down sterile sea walls that push risk downstream. Acts of design contend to the rights of the channel as river the clam and the muck and the climate my migrate to survive and thrive. It's time to get our hands in the mud in the mud. Let's actively love and mend our messy swampy dusty busted up landscapes. The tide pulls for darting crabs dark forest for scarlet tannagers dead trees for owls and bats thick grassy dunes for nesting plovers. Tending to and dwelling among our living landscapes can start small plastic pickups piling up logs for habitat, gardening with oysters and pulling invasive Ivy from that patch of tulip trees down the block. We face a global landscape emergency. Let's knit what we can back together. And that's the end of my, my passage. And I'll get over to Kate, Kate Marvel, and just say that one of the other amazing things that Ayanna and Catherine did with this book is interspersed poems and sketches and drawings and I was so incredibly excited to read lots of poems about mud and dirt. And there's so many. There's always a new, a new thing when you open up the book so Kate, I'll kick it to you. Hello, hi. So thank you so much, Kate. So I guess I'll start by introducing myself. I am a research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and I teach in the program and climate society at Columbia. So I think a lot about Okay, real quick. I don't think I don't see your camera. If you could just, there we go. Okay, all right, great. Okay, so did you, did you hear that though? Yes. All right, awesome. Okay. So, yeah, I think a lot about climate change. And I have a lot of feelings. And some of these feelings are informed by my background in astrophysics. Because when you study the entire universe, you learn very quickly that that other planets are garbage. Space looks pretty and it's really cool, but fundamentally it wants to kill you. So the fact that we live here on the only good planet, it fills me with wonder and gratitude. But being a scientist, there is another narrative that I hear. And that's a really reductive narrative that oh, science will save us. What we have to do is sit back and wait and await a techno utopia that's going to be given to us by billionaires or the free market or some nebulous thing called innovation. And kind of a subset of that science will save us narrative is something called geoengineering, which is the notion that while modifying the climate inadvertently has gone so well, we should just modify it deliberately. And I was thinking about geoengineering and it was making me sad and grumpy and afraid. So I wanted to talk in this essay about all of these feelings about the sense of wonder and hope and gratitude and thankfulness and also this fear and grumpiness about techno solutions. And then I love this planet and I think I love it in all of its complexity. So what I wanted to do in this essay was talk about the complexity of the planet as a cautionary tale, but also something that we should really celebrate. So I'm just going to read the first couple pages of this essay. And it's called a handful of dust. And it's a lot of dust on Amazon, because the trees wanted to. There's plenty of moisture in the oceans that surround the continent, but there is also a hidden reservoir on the land feeding an invisible river that flows upward to the sky. The water held in the soil is lifted up by the bodies of the trees and lost to the atmosphere through the surfaces of their leaves. The local sky plumps with moisture primed for the arrival of the seasonal rains driven by the annual back and forth march of the sun's rays. As Alex Hall puts it, the trees are co-conspiring with the sky to attract an earlier monsoon. One night in the future, a jet takes off from an obscure equatorial airstrip deep in the Amazon. It is an ordinary Gulf stream and unassuming workhorse for the world to wealthy. Today, though, there are no passengers aboard. It carries only secrets. After the jet, the pilot cannot see the forest below, only a blue sky interrupted by a white patchwork, alternately thick and wispy, that hides every hint of green and brown. But it is those forests and the people who live in them and the people far afield who may breathe in oxygen, they breathe out that the pilot is trying to save. The forests are dying, attacked on all sides by relentless demand for fossil fuels, beef, money. Humans start fires as the temperature warms every season becomes fire season. As the atmosphere is larded with carbon dioxide, the plants of the Amazon do not need to open the pores on their leaves quite so much to take in the gases they need. These shrunken pores expel less water into the atmosphere. The trees are losing their ability to summon the monsoon, slowly becoming decoupled from the surrounding air, a forest dissolving into dust. Miles above the ground, the jet jettisons its cargo, mineral sunscreen to be injected into the swirling air currents. The tiny particles will be smeared on the stratosphere, a protective aerosol shield that will block a little sunlight that would otherwise warm the planet. It is a hail mary, a desperate attempt to cool the planet by blocking the sun. They call it geoengineering, geo, the Greek for Earth, engineer from the Middle English for contrive, deceive, put to torture. It is not a good idea, but it has happened before. It is still dark when the plane returns to the airstrip, but in the darkness the lights of this jet and others returning from the same mission shine brightly. The next morning the sun rises in a blaze of brilliant red. It is the most beautiful sunrise anyone can remember. It lasts only a few minutes before the rains come again. The year is 1816 and there will be no summer. In New England and Canada, brutal mayfrosts kill the crops. A housewife notes in her diary simply, weather backward. The Indian Ocean monsoon usually triggered by warm summer temperatures is delayed by months. When it finally comes to the subcontinent, the torrential rains drown croplands and the people who work them, leaving pools of stagnant, filthy water. Polaris spreads as far as Moscow, harvests fail in northern Europe, fraying societies battered by the Napoleonic Wars. Switzerland. Switzerland is wracked by violence as desperate starving mobs converge on the cities. What history most remembers from the carnage spreading across the northern hemisphere that year is the aftermath of a bad vacation. In a villa on Lake Geneva, a group of bored English tourists challenge one another to write ghost stories. It is cold nearly every day of June and July has been rainy. The gloom dulled perhaps by heavy opium use and sexual tension inspires Lord Byron and his doctor and frenemy, John William Polidori, to create the outlines of the vampire tale that would become Dracula. But it is the novel written by the teenage girl trapped inside with these insufferable men that will become most known to posterity. The soggy, relentless weather gave birth to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and his tragic, violent, misunderstood monster. Is it any wonder that we scientists, tarred for eternity by this portrayal of hubris and vanity, are curious to understand the circumstances under which it came about? The culprit, suppressor of summer, bringer of rain, gothic muse is to be found on Sumbawa, one of the lesser Sunda islands, in what was then the Dutch East Indies and is now Indonesia. On the Snagar Peninsula, among cashew plantations and a few scattered small villages, you can see the remains of what was once a perfectly formed volcanic cone. In April of 1815, Mount Tambora erupted, blasting gas and dust high into the stratosphere and directly killing over 10,000 islanders. It was by far the most destructive explosion in human history. Few Europeans would have known of the eruption. Information traveled slowly in those early industrial times, and the news of an obscured volcano blowing up in an out of the way colony would not have been of general interest. But the violence of the event and its tropical location meant that its ejecta were very effectively injected into the upper atmosphere. From there, stratospheric winds took over, dispersing the fog of volcanic gas and dust to far off skies. Frankenstein was a scientist. The monster was nameless. It never existed, except as a metaphor for curiosity turned to hubris and then tragedy. The future with its sunscreen smearing jets and its desperate attempts to cool the planet is presumably imaginary for now. But today from the safety of our climate controlled offices, scientists can set off multiple Tamboras. A few lines of code and the volcano is doubled in size or moved halfway around the world. We can make it explode millions of years ago or in the next decade. We've built toy planets, climate models that live on supercomputers and we can manipulate them like malevolent gods. We can run experiments on the entire earth and repeat them over and over until we've learned something. By setting off volcanoes in these models, we now know the conditions under which they can cool the planet and what happens after they do. And we've learned another thing. Tambora was not unique. Plot the average temperature of the globe and the graph's rising line will be punctuated by the occasional sharp downward spike. Krakatoa in 1883, then the 20th century eruptions of Santa Maria, Agung, El Chuchon, and finally Pinatubo in 1991. Five explosions since Tambora, powerful enough to spray gas and dust far up into the stratosphere. The sun blocking effects were powerful. Pinatubo cooled the planet by an entire degree, but short lived. Eventually, the atmosphere cleansed itself and the protective shield of tiny particles disintegrated and fell to earth. Imagine, though, if volcanoes exploded like clockwork, one every few years, spewing a regular injection of gas and dust high into the stratosphere. Imagine controlled explosions that require no mountain, no cinder cone, no flow of lava onto farmlands below. Imagine in short, if we were the volcano. So I'll stop there and you'll have to read the rest of the essay to see if whether I think that's a good idea. Thank you. I was reading along to so it was extra special to hear your, your voice kind of echoing through Kate. I was going to start us off with baby one or two questions and I know there's a bunch of questions already in the, in the Q&A kind of section but one of the things I wanted to just talk about because we're here at least in the auspices in the virtual space but in the, at Columbia University and, you know, I was, I was wondering if maybe you could reflect on, I mean this book as a sort of a teaching tool or it has so many sort of generational lessons embedded in it. I know I'm teaching a seminar, looking at this book, reading this book in different forms. Columbia in itself is starting a climate school and I think still working through what that means and I think, you know, Kate I know you're involved in that in some way. So I guess I would love to hear a little bit more from reflections from from you all about like what, what does this mean now in terms of our next generation in terms of teaching and and it's it's it's it's hearing you speak Kate you know you're not referring to you know graphs and charts I used to, we used to be pointing at you know, carbon dioxide charts and all of a sudden this book comes out and and takes a completely different approach that is more holistic and and and sort of dwells within the sort of mind and the soul so could you talk a little bit about about that notion of how you see it working in in educational space or lessons to learn here. Kate Catherine maybe you can take that one first. I'm happy to jump in. I actually have the very unexpected and delightful opportunity to teach the book in an undergraduate seminar in the fall so I guess probably the first course that got to use all we can save because it didn't come out until late September but I had access to the book. And I taught it actually technically in a religious studies department. So the course was called the call of climate. These were mostly not environmental studies majors or, you know, environmental arts and humanities folks there were there were but there was a very last minute issue with a professor who suddenly couldn't teach this last semester so there were a bunch of kids who ended up in this class that hadn't really chosen it, which was quite interesting actually. And there were some wonderful things that happened. And one of the young women in the class, when we had our first week of reading the book and she read the began which kind of in not too many pages maps out the the intersection of climate and gender equality, among other things. And she said while I was reading the began of the book, I was shaking, because I felt so empowered. And what happened over the course of the semester is that I just watched all of these young people go from kind of hanging on the sidelines, right, for the most part of the climate movement kind of thinking like, well that's definitely a thing that's not my issue, but like, it's not my issue, or I don't know how to engage with that I don't know what the meaning of my voice would be in this space. And to sort of build a relationship with climate justice and with what it means to work towards a livable future. And to realize that yes this is about science, and yes this is about policy, and it's about engineering, but it's also about psychology and it's about the arts, and it's that there are so many ways in to working on climate in some way or another and that really whatever your superpowers are, we need them. We need all of them in the movement. And so I'm particularly excited about this book being not just a tool for kind of topical learning and engagement. It's also kind of a vocational exploration piece of the book because you all and other contributors share parts of your stories, right, and the journeys that you've been on and in some cases the dead ends that have been taken right there's there's kind of an intimacy about the work that you don't often get in in climate content so I'm really excited for it to be hopefully picked up in all sorts of disciplines, because I think there is relevance and resonance in in virtually every one of them. But also that it may create these openings right and create opportunities for imagination that hopefully welcome people in to you know to the to the movement that that we're trying to build. Yeah, Kate Marvel did you want to talk. I mean, I guess it might be interesting to hear you reflect a little bit on, you know, I believe you teach him climate and society. That's correct. Any reflections there on on how this kind of book or philosophy kind of impacts how you teach So I know that Catherine and Ayanna share this opinion that the divide between what is art and what is science is is very silly. And we spend so much time and effort sorting people into categories you are a technical person you are a social science person you are an arts person and those categories are really really arbitrary. And so, you know what I what I take from this is that really it's important to break down those barriers. But also, I think it's incumbent on us as kind of more senior people to try to shape the world that our students are going to graduate into. I see in the wider world. There is an incredible hunger for scientists who can communicate people who can take the science and help other people use it will tell stories with it. And there's so many students who want to do that. So there's a huge supply and there's a huge demand and somehow there's a mismatch between those. And I would like to do more to try to get rid of that bottleneck. I also see that every day. I mean it's interesting, you know, you mentioned like the way we're shaping the world that that we're, you know, making making this bridge with our students and and and telling story and and Janie and your your piece I was really struck by your your personal story too because I think, you know you're an amazing example of somebody who's, I don't want to say job description but didn't exist. You know, maybe even 10 years ago the fact that you're sort of, you know, leading at a city scale adaptation community engagement. This is kind of a whole new sort of sets of skills that somehow you've managed to combine so I guess I'd be also interested in hearing from you because your, your talk also stressed on stressed community engagement and communication of some of these issues if you know what are what are what are do you think some of the qualities that kind of contributed to into some degree like defining your own path and and sort of being able to sort of chart this path of like a resilience expert resilience officer if you will and in a governmental context. Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think I was drawn to the field of resilience before we even really called it that. And I think what drew me to it was, was the fact that it was so incredibly interdisciplinary so you know I felt like we were sort of sitting spaces were often siloed between, you know, social policy economic policy and environmental policy and often the most impactful solutions really existed in the intersection of all three, and disasters at first and then a more long climate change gave me a lens to actually sort of sit in that intersection and and and think about policy more holistically which is what attracted me to it but I think it really that experience really builds on Kate's point about breaking down silos between and thinking about the work of addressing and confronting the climate crisis really requires holistic and cross disciplinary solutions and so we need to bring together people of all different skill sets or all different superpowers as Catherine says. And I think you know just to reflect on your previous question I'm not a teacher but I and haven't taught the book but but I think I've had my own teachable moments that that have been spurred by the book. And I just want to share one because it was so interesting for me and I continue to reflect on it even though it happened, you know, about six weeks ago so I was on one of these kinds of panels with another co author Sarah Miller who wrote a great essay in the book about talking to real estate agents in Miami as if she was going to buy a home and asking the question about sea level rising facts and really not ever getting a very straight answer. And it led to this conversation on the panel where, you know, she said, Well, if I've had a chief resilience officer at a party I wouldn't think they're a bad person but like, essentially, sort of alluding to the fact that the work of resilience was potentially or adaptation was potentially getting in the way of the work of decarbonization right like if we, if we put too much faith in the work of resilience if we put too much stock in it, then are we really convincing ourselves that we don't have to take these kinds of climate action. And it was such an interesting moment for me from, I never heard that that that perception before and so like, even that conversation really made me step back and reflect and think, Well, am I doing the work that needs to be done. And, you know, and obviously it was more nuanced than that but but but it really has led to these conversations that I typically have not encountered in my in the course of my career and my in my day to day work and I just, they're thought provoking, you know, they're they're making me better at communicating with my work and and I hope will effective eventually make me more effective at doing my work. So I just wanted to share that that tidbit because I, I feel like I've just had my own experiences of learning from the process of this book, beyond writing the essay, but actually just sharing the experiences with the other other authors. Great. And you know, I do feel like the other silo. Heather McGee has a great quote in the boat book maybe Catherine you remember it but I was trying to, but it's something about climate and democracy is the answer to both I mean I also, what do you recall the full quote. She says that that climate and inequality are the great challenges of our time I'm paraphrasing slightly and more and more democracy is the answer to both, which feels very apt. Feels very apt right now. Yeah. And so, you know, I know actually, I think we should. Yeah, shall I there are three questions that I think that they all go really really well together. So I want to mention that we have a little girl named Naomi who's on the call. And she'd like to know how girls can save the planet and I think that she asked that question right as Catherine was mentioning that finding your superpower is the most important thing like anyone can do their work but there are a couple of questions. In addition to Naomi's that I want to combine. And Shivani says, I didn't study climate sustainability while I was in college and now that I want to be a part of the movement in some way. I don't know how to fight. I don't feel like I have a path. How do you recommend someone wanting to switch paths begin their path. How do you find your superpower, but I want to combine that with another question from Krista who says specifically for Janie but I think that the whole group could answer this. I think that community engagement is is critical to successful adaption. What, what was the most effective community engagement activity vehicle method that you and your colleagues use to ensure community buy in an equity. Just on the lines of democracy there I think that those kind of like how do we engage as a community how do we find our paths. These are pretty major questions. I'm really going for the big fish tonight I will say all in one. All in one. I can jump in with a couple of thoughts on on the first two but I don't think I'm going to have the entire answers by any stretch of the imagination. But I think the first thing I will say is that girls are saving the planet. I mean, the leadership of girls and very young women has totally transformed the climate movement in the last two, three years. And what I love about the way that they are doing the work is that it is incredibly collaborative. So I would say the best thing to do is to find another girl and another girl and another girl who all are either already engaged in this work or want to be because there's like a welcoming in that folks are doing that I think is incredibly inspiring and incredibly necessary. And, and they are, they are bringing their kind of skills and talents and passions to the movement, right, if they're great artists they're making art if they're great speakers they're speaking if they're not education they're you know cajoling schools into into teaching climate science and solutions. So, I think, don't try to go it alone is maybe the way to sum that up. And similarly I think on finding your way in. I learned that I studied, I did studied religious I majored in religious studies as an undergrad. So I also was not, you know, like sanctioned climate expert at 22. I did end up deciding to go to grad school so that I could learn more deeply and do some, some research in the field but I think being an interdisciplinary in is a really helpful and awesome thing in this space. I mean Kate was talking about some of those dynamics we need people who can help sort of turn the kaleidoscope. And so I would say, don't sort of think that you have to abandon the area that you've been really interested in passionate about, but think about kind of where that might piece into the movement. And, again, I'll sort of speak from experience that before I ever had a job in climate, I was organizing, right and involved in student activism, and that can be a great way to learn to get connected with folks who do kind of do their day jobs in the space in one way or another so I think also don't feel like you have to pay your rent by working on climate change to get to get started. But but joining joining a group or a campaign or a project within the movement can be a really good way, good way to start. I mean, do you want to jump in at all on that last one I think we're actually going to try to close at 745 so maybe we could make a sort of a final final thought hoping to to wrap in some of that last question. Thank you to I mean just building up with captain's point you know I think that if I reflect over my different experiences and climate adaptation the thread has been that my job is to bring people together people who often don't come from the same perspective or even speak the same language. And so, you know, I, I think it's just really important to say and acknowledge that facilitation and conveying people and actually getting to actionable outcomes is a skill, right and and and I also, you know, as a cultural policy major in college, there were no options to to study climate change adaptation or sustainability often I get inquiries from students who are trying to make a decision about what kind of grad school program to pursue and whether or not it's helpful to have a climate change degree and I actually have no idea. You know, I, and most of my hiring I can say that I'm not looking at candidates with climate change degrees, because a lot of those degree programs are quite new. But to the point about community engagement. I will say there is no recipe unfortunately, and I think we're still learning a lot about how to engage communities effectively in this work. Community engagement itself is not sort of the only way that we ensure equity in the work. We rely a lot on data, making sure that we are making informed decisions about where to invest and how to invest before we invest. And then, and then of course we want to make sure people's voices are at the table. I do a lot of listening, I think that's really important. And we're, you know, trying to create spaces where we can really be visionary and imaginative as we're confronting the climate crisis. Like I said, I think that the adaptation plan is dream is to be able to realize multiple benefits and not just focus the conversation on what will make this community safe. I think it's really limiting to just talk about safety, and there's a certain certain resignation to that. So we're trying to be more expansive than that and keep more possibilities on the table. Kate any words of reflection on the bundle of questions that was presented for the little girl to engagement and beyond. Sure. So I talked a lot about climate models and how I have a toy planet on my computer that I can do unspeakable things to. But the thing about climate change is that it's not happening on my computer. It's happening here and it's happening in the world that we build for it. And what that means is that every story is a climate story. And climate touches every aspect of life. So whatever you love, whatever you want to do, if you do it well, and you do it with an eye toward making the world better. Because five year olds grow up and five year olds become somebody's ancestor. And I want to leave a better world for you. And I want you to be able to be a better ancestor and leave a better world for your kids. All right, thank you so much my co co conspirators new friends I suppose through this through this process and just again Catherine and Ayanna who's here somewhere. I really just thanks for this gift of bringing us all together to me. You know, I in terms of my own experience I was one of these people who was made of my own major tried through something called eco feminism pulled together anthropology environmental science sculpture. And this was really, you know, a book that I did know existed and somehow would have been quite, you know, what would have been such a grounding experience for me at that time and so I can only hope that others. You know, coming up into school and and sort of encountering the world and their role in it that it can provide some some more moments of wisdom and inspiration it is a book that is inspiring and grounded and thank you guys all so much for participating tonight. So, thank you so much. And we'll see thank you for hosting us Kate. You bet. Thank you. Bye everybody.