 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Meet the Experts. I'm Katie Wolfson with the UCAR Center for Science Education here at the National Center for Amospheric Research. And I'm so excited to welcome all of you to this month's Meet the Experts. We have this program as a monthly Q&A with experts who work in climate, weather, and earth system science. And we have two amazing experts for you to talk to today, experts in climate action. So I will introduce them in just a moment, but I want everyone to make sure that you know that this event is also part of the Worldwide Teaching on Climate and Justice. And we have a little welcome video. This event has events happening worldwide over the last two weeks. So we're just one of those events. Here's a little welcome video from the Teach-In. Welcome to the Worldwide Teaching on Climate and Justice. You are joining tens of thousands of students at hundreds of schools across the planet in learning and thinking about the work each of you can do. Now, head in your future to repair the climate and lead a just transition to a clean energy future. Your Worldwide Teaching will mobilize the power of educators and students and empower a generation of fighting to stabilize the climate and advance climate and justice. We all need to get comfortable talking about climate all the time. The teaching helps us do that. The Worldwide Teaching is equal to organizing events on campus or community on or around March 29, 2023. The key to a successful teaching is relying on homegrown talent, not outside experts. We all need to step up. The biggest threat to your future is thinking that somehow someone else is going to stop global warming. This is the great work of our generation. We hope this teaching will help you find your own pathway to repairing the climate. And before we go any further, we also wanted to start out with a land acknowledgement this evening. So we've lived on this planet we call Earth, a living spirit indigenous peoples call Mother Earth, the provider of all life. We've had a relationship for thousands of years from the top of the continent to the ends of South America and from coast to coast, most often in a nomadic way. We must recognize these peoples who came before. The National Center for Atmospheric Research honors the past, present and future generations of indigenous peoples who have lived here for millennia and who hold this place sacred for perpetuity. Now we're coming together virtually this evening. And so we have folks connecting from all over, from here in Colorado where we are at NCAR today, to Wisconsin, to Washington, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and all the way to Nairobi, Kenya. So we are so excited. We encourage you all to look up what indigenous land you are on today. If you don't already know, there's a link in the chat that we just dropped where you can look that up if you're interested. And I'm just so excited that everyone is coming together for this conversation this evening, really looking forward to hearing from our experts today. Before I bring them on, just a few more housekeeping things. I wanna make sure everybody knows that closed captioning is available that you can also type in the chat if you need any support with anything or if you have a question or a comment for our speakers. So throughout the program, feel free to type in that chat. We'll be keeping an eye on it and let us know. All right. So without further ado, I am thrilled to introduce our two experts today. We have Phoebe Dominguez who is a high school youth climate activist and a 350 Colorado executive board member here in Colorado. And we also have Maya Bovenel who is a student environmental justice advocate and freshman at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Thank you so much for joining us, Phoebe and Maya. Thank you. Well, welcome, welcome. So I gave really short introductions, but you both are doing amazing work and amazing things. So I wanted to kind of turn it over to the two of you of letting our audience know today a little bit more about you. So can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and the work that you do in climate work? Yeah. So my name is Phoebe Dominguez. Like Katie said, I use they've been brands and I am based in Denver. I live on Cheyenne, Ute, Arapahoe and land here in where I am based. Yeah, that's the indigenous land that I am on. I am a board member on the 350 Colorado executive board, one of the largest climate organizations in Colorado. And then I also run their youth action committee. I have been involved in countless events just like this, mostly local. I do a lot of legislative work as well as working with youth to build community and create spaces for those youth to come together and make space for ourselves and to get allies to help make space for us at tables where we normally aren't included. Awesome. I'm Maya. I am currently located in Hanover, New Hampshire at Dartmouth College. And Hanover is on the lands of the Abeneke people in a land originally known as Indakina, which is sort of a region in the North. What is that known as New Hampshire, Vermont, Western Maine and Southern Quebec. And just wanted to acknowledge that indigenous people are the original stewards of this land that we now live on. And a lot of this land is unceded traditional indigenous land and it's our responsibility now to work with indigenous people who continue to live on this land to continue stewarding the land and make sure that it is here for future generations. So very excited to be on this panel tonight. I as a student at Dartmouth am on several different or like in several different groups of climate action here on campus. So I am an intern with the Sustainability Office and I work to kind of right now we're working on this on revamping Dartmouth sustainability goals. And I'm also organizing with a group called Fossil Free Research to essentially look at the impact of the fossil fuel industry on the quality of research that comes out of institutions and universities. So I'm excited to join you all today. Wonderful. And so I think it's important to acknowledge that everyone comes to climate work from different backgrounds through different paths that they find to doing the work that they do. And I'm curious to find out from the two of you if you could share a bit about how you got started in climate work. Absolutely. I can go first. So basically I got started back in about 2018. I think it was early 2018. And if some of you remember Freda Thunberg was starting to take climate action by striking school and saying like we as youth need to come together and take action in a way that's going to make the world listen. Unfortunately, that means that we sometimes have to sacrifice sacrifices in our own lives. And Freda Thunberg saw striking school as an action that could really bring together youth in a way that grabs the attention of the global community. So inspired by Greta Thunberg and also by a feeling of needing to take action to counter the climate crisis. I started striking school and I was a sophomore in high school at this point. A lot of the times that looks like just going out on my own on Pearl Street in Boulder and talking to people as they passed by. Sometimes I would bring a friend and sometimes I encountered other people who would join me on the street. And although as an individual, sometimes it felt kind of isolating and as if I were the only one in Colorado taking action. It was definitely not the case. Soon as I began meeting people, having conversations as I was taking this action, it really sparked this feeling of that I'm not alone. And that's what kind of sparked me into climate action. It couldn't end there though, because I felt like, yes, this was raising awareness. Yes, this was making connections with other people taking climate action in the region. But I definitely felt like I needed to do something beyond that. And for me, that looked like joining basically making connections with people at my school who were also interested in taking climate action. So I got involved with the school's environmental club and also with a group called Earth Guardians that essentially supports youth activism across the world and empowers youth to take action in meaningful ways within their own communities. So with the environmental club at my school, we started just like learning about what kind of environmental issues affected our community. And it turns out that there was a fracking site that was going to be the biggest fracking site in the state of Colorado if it were approved that was proposed only three miles away from Iowa High School. And that took us, we had learned a little bit about fracking and soon we started learning more about it and just about the negative health impacts, the negative climate impacts. And we decided to organize to take action against this big fracking site. And so essentially by collaborating with the Lookout Alliance, which was a group of, a nonprofit group of other activists from the community standing up against this fracking site, we started going to county commissioner meetings and organizing a campaign to counter this immediate threat to our community. And really organizing for this specific issue was very empowering. So that's sort of what sparked me into this movement and it's kind of spiraled sense that I will pass it on to Phoebe. Yes, thank you for that Maya. Yeah, your story is so great and I love hearing about it. Personally, so I started climate activism when I was 12. I just turned 12 and it was January, I think of 2020. So you know what's coming up. And I, like Maya, started doing school strikes for climate in front of the, in front of, I did it in front of the Colorado State Capitol. Every week on Fridays, I would stand in front of the Capitol with my sign, getting honked at, getting told off by legislators and people walking by, being told that I was an inspiration and that people felt sorry for me along the way. I did that for a couple months and worked with so many amazing people or met so many people. I met many people who were very mean to me and many people who were very kind to me. And then COVID hit. I kind of didn't know what to do. I kind of took a break from activism or protesting because it was online and I didn't really know what to do and I was 12. So then I decided to volunteer with an organization. I found 350 Colorado, a kind of organization that had a pillar of action and had big community, big community. It was a very big organization and they had community meetings almost all the time and had so many people. I started volunteering with them, going to committees and slowly getting more and more out of my shell, being more noticed that this 12 year old was in these committee meetings with mainly retirees. So I kind of volunteered with them for a couple of months learning my way, navigating how to navigate volunteering when I was the only youth in the room or the only person under like 30 in the room and while navigating COVID and online, everything. I was asked to speak at my first event. I was told to share my story and what I thought about climate change and I had no idea what to do. I was a 12 year olds who had been volunteering for a couple of weeks or I think it was a month at that time and people wanted to hear my story. I told them and I started public speaking. I over the past couple of years I've done lots of public speaking but that was one of the biggest things that I did at the beginning was I started public speaking. I soon in I think October of 2020 or 2021 I started back at doing more protests. I didn't continue or resume Fridays for Future but I did other protests and I kind of realized that there was no space that was for youth to gather with 350 Colorado. I wanted bigger sense of community because I felt like I was the only person in that room who I could even remotely relate to besides having climate problems, like having problems with what our climate is right now and wanting to fix it. That was the only thing that I knew and often I was seen as less because of my age. I worked with some other amazing, I worked with some amazing volunteers and some amazing adults who helped me along the way and I founded the 350 Colorado Youth Action Committee. Yeah, and the rest is history. Amazing, so you both have gone through kind of started or kind of inspired to take action by some of these climate strikes that you were getting involved with, it sounds like and it kind of grew from there in terms of your involvement in the spaces that you started occupying. You've both gone through some big transitions in life. Phoebe, you were alluding to the COVID pandemic that we've all been going through in that big transition but what has kind of changed for you since you started your climate work, especially in the last year and we actually had the two of you on a panel with us for the teach in last year. If some of the folks remember who are on today might have joined us last year for that as well. So I'm curious to learn from the two of you kind of what are some of those transitions that you've seen in your life and how has that impacted your climate work? Yeah, I think that transition has been a big thing for the world these past couple of years and I think also for myself as well, like you said, I just started high school, I'm a freshman this year and I was homeschooled before and I was able to go to public high school and me being homeschooled, I was able to have more time to do climate activism and that was really nice. And I had more flexibility with my schedule and I don't have that anymore. And I think that kind of our entire world just got more burnt out. Our COVID kind of had a big impact specifically on people who were in school and on everyone else because we were doing everything online and capacity for climate work was limited and if you're on Zoom all day already doing school and you're trying to do climate activism after your brain is just fried. And I think that some ways that was a good thing, right? Like Zoom was great for creating that community of lots of people like this. Like we have so many people in so many different places having a community around that we see lots of people but that also brings disconnect because we're online and we don't have human interaction that's not on the screen at this moment. And I think that for me, it's my transition for like going into a role that was less climate like legislative-based and less like activism-based, that's not a work-based. But having when I started the Youth Action Committee a lot of my work transitioned to be around community and creating those spaces and around mental health with climate anxiety and kind of transitioning to new lines of interest and new lines of work as I grow older and become a young adult and a teenager. And I think that my entire activism career has just been filled with transition because that's what's like at this age, right? You're constantly changing and you're constantly learning new things. And I think that climate activism is one of those things that constantly changing. And my role in the climate movement has changed so much. And I think that, yeah, transition is just such a big part of our world now and a part of my life. Absolutely. And I think, so Phoebe and I have had several conversations about this in the past. And something that Phoebe said one time that really marked me was, the way that you're involved in climate activism is going to change because the reality is that this is a long haul issue. Climate change isn't going to be solved overnight as much as my younger self might've thought it could be. I remember thinking at one point when I first started getting involved, it's like, why hasn't anyone solved this? And yes, of course, it's easy to say that and it's easy to be like, okay, we have solutions, we have an issue, let's just put them together and get over with this. But the reality is it's way more complicated than that. And so it's important to recognize that even though this is an urgent issue and it demands urgent action, bold action, innovative action, creative action, it also is an issue that's going to take collaboration and time. And that means that we need to find ways that are sustainable for us to stay involved. And that means that climate action is going to change for what it looks like in your life because your life is going to change and with it, at least I know for me and Phoebe, we've both felt that the way that we're involved with this movement has changed and grown with us. And I think that can be a really beautiful thing. It's both with an internal factor of what's going on in your own life and then also with the external factors of what's going on in the world. I do think that online action, which has been facilitated in a lot of ways by Zoom and what we've learned throughout COVID, I think that that is a huge benefit to organizing for the climate movement because I've been able to plug into coalitions of youth working like across the world. And it's just so inspiring a lot of the time to hear what people are doing in different regions. It can feel really lonely again if you feel isolated in the space that you're in and nobody else is taking action. But as soon as you plug into a call, like I've been on Earth Guardian calls that they have a world wide committee where people can plug in. And every time after I go to that kind of meeting, I'm like, wait, everybody around the world is feeling this issue in different ways. And all it takes is finding the people in your own community who also feel the need to take that action, getting together, making community and taking action together. So I think that it's been a journey so far seeing how climate action has changed throughout my life. And I'm sure it will continue to be. Yeah, and I think you're kind of both hitting on one of those key things, right? On community, right? Finding community or building community and how that can energize and help us feel less alone with this huge issue, right? Cause not one person's gonna solve this. And so Phoebe, you mentioned before that you were kind of working on youth community. Can you share us a bit more about your work in building community in the climate movement? Yeah, definitely. I think that one big thing or like one thing that I've kept with me, my entire like activism career, I mean, besides the beginning when I was completely unsure of what to do is that your, like Maya said, I told this to her and I told this to so many people that the way that you are involved in the climate movement is going to change and evolve and that's okay. It's not going to be stagnant and the people that you're working with are experiencing the same thing. And I think that with specifically youth community and youth action, a lot of us feel a lot of climate anxiety and climate like heaviness. Like it feels like it's all up to us and it's our future and it's doomsday all the time and the world is going to end and we're all gonna die and our future is gonna be horrible. That is not reality and it's not a great way to think of kind of activism and to think of the climate problem. Yes, it's urgent and it's our future and we need to be taking action and we need to recognize our feelings and recognize all of the work that we're putting in and all of the things that are on us. Like all of the problems and all of those things that are so uncertain, but it's not gonna be doomsday and the people around you in the climate movement, if you're with great people, which hopefully you are because you should pick your community that you're in well and you should pick it in a way you should decide what community you're in and how you wanna be involved and how you are doing activism by how it makes you feel. You shouldn't be doing work that you feel drained and completely depressed and horrified at the end of a meeting or at the end of an action. You should feel regenerated and hopefully have some joy and then also have some of those feelings of fear and depression because that's just the way that the climate movement is. And so a lot of my work has been kind of trying to create a community for youth that feels that way that we're making progress and we're making action happen and we're also realizing that we can enjoy ourselves and do productive things at the same time and creating that community by working with people that agree with that and have that same mindset and even teaching that mindset and telling people about that mindset is going to be very big and has been very big in my climate activism work. Yeah, and I think that hopefully other people feel this but I think that when you pick the right people around you and you pick a community well and you figure out how you wanna be involved at that moment you feel joy from that and you are enjoying working with other people even though this is such a drastic and sometimes horrifying issue. And Maya for you, how has that been connecting finding your community since going to college? Yeah, so I think that finding your community is something that's not always easy. I know that when I first got here onto campus as a freshman I was like overwhelmed by everything that I meant to transition to a new place, a new community where I didn't know anyone at all much less the climate action niche of campus and I definitely spent the entirety of fall term kind of reckoning with or just like trying to figure out who I want to be here on campus and figure out friends just figure out even who to eat with, you know? So I think that was in itself going back to transitions for a moment like it definitely took a lot of my energy to just figure out what my place was on campus and at the end of fall term I reflected back and I was like, you know what? I feel like I found some good people I found some good friends I found some activities that I'm excited to be involved with but one thing that I feel is missing is climate action and so I made that conscious decision I was like, okay well I know that I need to get involved and I know there's work to be done at this large institution and so I'm going to start just putting out feelers and start talking about climate action and climate just like how we're affected by climate change and by bringing that into my everyday life and just talking about it with people around me I started to hear that a lot of those feelings are echoed and I was directed also by other people toward communities of action here on campus so by getting involved with the sustainability office I was able to start getting to know other people who were involved in climate action on campus and I think that, you know with finding community you have to find what is what you're passionate about and by finding what drives you in climate action is going to bring together other people who are passionate about similar things. One thing I definitely want to emphasize is also the critical component of intersecting different social justice movements within the climate movement because environmental degradation and honestly like just climate change is something that disproportionately affects low income people, people of color and people who are disadvantaged by a whole number of like systemic issues and so it's also a really interesting and exciting opportunity to intersect work with other advocacy groups and advocate for a better world while centering those people who are most disproportionately affected and so getting involved here at Dartmouth has looked like getting involved with the student union and the student workers union which they just shared a picture of a second ago and getting inspired by different social movements and I think that by intersecting the work between a lot of different issues we can build a movement that is going to take into account those who are most affected and ultimately lead to solutions that center the community and the cultural context in a way that will lead to the most effective results in solving those issues so, yeah. I think that what you said about like how it's such an intersectional issue is such a true statement and like finding that you work with and who you want to work with that's such a true like part of it it's like what are you passionate about and what does that intersect with because people are passionate about everything and so like finding people that share passions or have different passions than you to work with is such a great and I think like beautiful thing even though it's hard to find a community that you resonate with and that has intersection in it and where you're doing that work and so I think that you're so real for saying that and how like it's just such a true statement. I'll throw a question out to our audience today if anybody wants to share in the chat where are some places that you found community and the work that you do? We would love to hear on terms of where are you finding community and also want to invite anyone who has questions for Maya and Phoebe to please feel free to type those in the chat. We would love to hear your questions that you have about their experience or about the climate movement or any of the organizations they're involved with please feel free to type those in the chat but I'm curious to know where our folks have found community and while we're waiting for folks to type that in the chat I wanna find out from the two of you that the climate change and climate movement and all the work to be done can be really overwhelming and so I'm curious if the two of you also feel overwhelmed by that and any tips that you have for dealing with that overwhelm? Yeah, 100% I am overwhelmed like probably 90% of the time. Burnout and overwhelm and anxiety coming from climate activism and just activism in general is such a real thing and such a big feeling. It's also something that I feel like isn't talked about enough in spaces where you have something really important that you're working on and I think that something that goes into that is capacity like how much capacity do you have to be involved with what you're doing? How much do you wanna be involved? How little do you wanna be involved in kind of evaluating your own availability and capacity? Whether that's like physical capacity of like how much time do I have and also emotional capacity, like how much brain space, how much energy and how much like emotion do I have available to me to use or am I comfortable or safe to use? And so I think like evaluating those two things like emotional capacity and physical capacity can really help with that. I also, I think struggle with staying with those boundaries and realizing my capacity and figuring out how much time and how much energy and how much emotion am I willing to put into an issue because I'm so passionate about climate justice. And I just get so roped in all the time. And so I think when I'm feeling burnt out or am burnt out and overwhelmed, something that I find has been really helpful for me when all else fails and I'm overwhelmed and burnt out, which is more often than not. And something that really helps me is kind of working, like I said, working with a community that I enjoy working with, continuing to work on what I'm passionate about, making sure that this is what I wanna be working on. And then another thing on my checklist that's very like professional, I guess, is making sure that I'm something that I struggle with as like a youth activist is that this is my future, right? This is my generation that's gonna face the biggest problems and biggest impacts from climate change. And so I've invested a lot of time and energy to get to that future, to make sure that that future is good. And instead of spending time now living my life besides working on climate change, I've spent most of it working on climate change. And most of my time and energy right now and in the past couple of years doing that. And I think that recently, like sometime, I don't know exactly when, but I kind of realized that it's okay to have a capacity for things. It's okay to not have any more energy and it is okay to do other things. It's okay to enjoy things that have nothing related to climate activism. And you should spend your time doing the things that you enjoy that regenerate you instead of degenerate you. And like doing the little things that you can in meetings or when you're doing climate activism to make sure that you're putting yourself and your emotional wellbeing and health first helps me kind of get out of burnout and also help me when I'm in burnout and also help me when I'm not in it to try and stay out of it. Yeah, yeah, oh my gosh, I completely, I resonate with a lot of what you were just saying, Phoebe, and specifically just about the burnout piece. I think that one analogy that was coming to my head as we were talking is I Nordic ski. And so basically Nordic skiing, I oftentimes think about this when going up a hill because it's exhausting. I like skate skiing, you're on these skinny little skis and you just basically have to like duck, duck walk yourself up hills sometimes. And whenever I'm in that position, I'm basically thinking like just keep going, just keep moving, even if you're slow in that moment when you've been on the hill for a long time, as long as you're still moving forward, you're getting further than you would be if you take a big break and just stop and like yes, that does feel good, but then rather than just sprinting and then stopping, sprinting and stopping, just to keep going at a slow study pace. And ultimately I think that what you were talking about, Phoebe, in terms of needing to take into account your capacity really feeds into the ability to keep going in moments. I like it rather than doing that big sprint stop cycle. And essentially where I'm getting with this is that I think that it's important to know where to draw your limits, but it's also important to know how to spread your work opportunity and to delegate tasks to other people, to learn to trust the people that you work with, to take on work and to do it well. And I recently had a really great experience just last term organizing a student feedback forum on the sustainability goals at Dartmouth. And essentially we planned this night where a bunch of students came in like a pizza and we did a presentation on the sustainability draft goals and then we gave students an opportunity to get feedback on it. And it was very, like it was such a great experience to plan this because I had a team of other activists and other organizers to help me plan this event to be up there presenting with me and to celebrate with pizza afterwards. And it was really rewarding to be able to finish that event and not feel completely burnt out at the end, but instead feel energized and know that we were doing meaningful work. So I think delegation of roles is important, trusting your fellow organizers, knowing that even if you do need to take a break on climate activism that other people are out there also taking action. Again, this is an issue that is going to be that we're in for the long haul. So it's okay to take a break and it's important to definitely invest in all parts of what makes you happy and what makes you you while knowing that the work will end. Such wonderful wisdom. Thank you both for sharing that. We are getting coming to a close at the end of our panel tonight. I know there are so many more conversations to have but before we say goodbye today, I wanted to invite the two of you if there is any kind of final message or any final thoughts that you wanted to share with our audience before we say goodbye. Yeah, I think that something that I would that I always carry with me, right? Like I said at the beginning is don't be afraid to put yourself out there and find a community that you like and reject and don't be a part of community that you don't and that fine draining and that you need, you should put yourself forward and put something that you enjoy over something that you don't enjoy in the sake of action. Because like Maya said, it's the long haul and moving slowly and being able to keep that up is better than sprinting and wasting your time being in action that you don't like. Absolutely. I think what I want to leave people with is that no matter what it is that gets you excited about climate action, you know, whether it's this need to take action because it feels overwhelming or whether it's excitement about things that are going on in your community or frustration at things that are going on in your community. I think it's finding ways to get involved that make you happy. You know, like a movement takes or requires people of all capacities to get involved whether that's artists, whether that's researchers, whether that's community organizers, speakers, poets, really like people, musicians is another huge one. I think that what makes a movement effective and what makes a movement beautiful is the diversity of people inside of it. And so I think that just reflecting on what makes you happy and seeing how you can put that to work within the climate movement is essential for ensuring that you're taking meaningful and sustainable climate action. Thank you both so much. It was wonderful, wonderful talking to you both tonight. I'm so glad that you're able to take the time to share your stories, share your wisdom with all of us. Thank you so much. Before we say goodbye, I just want to let everyone know that we do have one more Meet the Experts coming up in May, on May 3rd, we will be talking to an expert in teamwork in STEM. So we hope that you'll check back on our website and join us for that in next month. But Maya and Phoebe, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you for sharing everything with everyone today. And thank you everyone in the audience for joining us. Thanks so much everybody. Bye. Thank you. Thank you.