 Hello, and welcome to Conservator's Combating Climate Change, a new podcast series by the American Institute for Conservation's Emerging Conservation Professionals Network. I'm Emma Hartman, and I'm Natalia Swanson, and we're so excited to be hosting this series that we hope will inform, empower, and inspire action in conservation and collections care professionals at every stage of their career. This podcast is generously supported by the Department of Art Conservation at the University of Delaware in honor of Bruno Pouillot, an amazing mentor, educator, and human. We're so grateful to the University of Delaware for the opportunity to celebrate Bruno's legacy and to the entire AIC and ECPN community for supporting us in this new venture. For our final episode of the season, we're welcoming Marie Derachet to the program. Marie is the incoming ECPN Digital Platforms Co-Officer and Emma's successor. She'll be joining me as the co-host for season two. Emma's been an incredible podcasting partner in this first season, and it's hard for me to envision continuing this without her, but she has promised to come back and join the conversation occasionally, so we're not entirely losing her valuable insights. Also, Emma is beginning her academic training to become a conservator at New York University this fall, and so while I'm very sad to be losing her as a co-host, I'm thrilled and sincerely grateful that we've had this shared experience. Also, Marie is a brilliant and impassioned colleague and friend, and so I'm elated that she is joining us in this venture. Natalia, thank you for those kind words, and I am really looking forward to hear what you and Marie accomplish in the next season of this podcast. We've decided to close out the season by sharing reflections of what we've learned and taken away as producers and co-hosts of this podcast, and then what Marie has learned as a listener. Oh my gosh, well, thanks for that very warm welcome, guys. I am so excited to be joining this team, and I'm really excited about this podcast. I could just kind of share as a listener. I was looking back at all of the episodes, and I realized that this podcast aired back in April when we were already well into this unprecedented global pandemic that we're experiencing, and I thought back to how I was feeling at that time when I first started listening, and it was really stressful then. It's still stressful now, but it's just it's been so uncertain for everyone, and I think we've all been feeling a lot of fear and feeling really out of control. And also at that time, somewhat now as well, we went into a quarantine and we found ourselves giving up a lot of personal freedoms and socialization. And at the same time, starting to listen and be a part of this conversation about climate change sort of gave me a sense of empowerment and hope during this time. Because even though climate change is also very complex, stressful, and can even be a little scary, I feel like what we've been learning and so many different people you guys have brought in to speak, we're getting this great consensus scientifically, socially and economically worldwide. And so it's exciting to be a part of that that collective change. Yeah, we're really excited to have you join in this conversation, Marie. I was when I was looking back at the beginning of the season, I was, you know, I really have this mentality that the way that we are going to fight climate change was to reduce energy and resource consumption. And obviously that is necessary moving forward. But I feel like looking back now, what I understand is that really the changing climate is a consequence of an unsustainable societal framework where production decisions are motivated by profit and consumption is largely based on our personal kind of present needs and wants. And so the fight against climate change really begins with us as individuals to realize this interconnectedness of the environment and culture and economy. And it's challenging in terms of the situation we're in with COVID. But I think also there is, you know, kind of this interesting opportunity as well, because we are all really reconsidering what's what our normal life is. And so with that opportunity, we can also, you know, kind of take time and make space to consider our decision making. Is this decision based on an awareness of my individual impact or coming from a place of empathy and equity and just, you know, that's, I guess, one of the biggest things I took away from the season is just what is motivating these decisions? Am I thinking about it through the lens of sustainability? Natalia, you're so right. And I've been thinking about this interconnectedness in relation to some of the issues that we face as a professional field. I think we constantly are thinking about issues as separate from each other. But we face a lot of economic, social, environmental problems in conservation and in the cultural heritage community as a whole. And I think one of the things that I'll take away from this series is that if we consider these problems as really inextricably linked as they totally are and we've sort of discovered that over the process of this series and we center sustainability in a broad sense as a practice and as a guiding principle, we can work more effectively towards change. And I think the more bridges that we build between intersecting issues and the more people we bring into this conversation, the better and the more impactful our actions can be. Totally. Yeah. I feel like this, the, you know, intersection or I guess interconnectedness, you know, it makes these conversations even more difficult. And I think we really came to terms with that in some sense when we were talking with Kate Fugit in the last episode because there are, right, there's so many levels of like systemic disparity and structural problems, you know, in terms of economics. These problems that we're talking about, they're not going away, like consumerism isn't going away. But that doesn't mean that we can't enact personal change in being more conscientious. And, you know, I say this in really in full recognition that it's a lot to handle as an individual. I mean, it's intimidating on a personal level because I think it takes a lot of work. But personally, I'd rather take this truth and reality head on than continue to ignore the problem and feel helpless because that's really where I was when I was starting off this podcast. Yeah, exactly. I hear you, Natalia. I think I entered this project really feeling powerless about the climate crisis and particularly about our field's ability to make any kind of impact. And while I still definitely believe that only really sweeping global changes on a societal level will help us avoid the worst of the climate crisis, it was really empowering to speak with four people who have seriously considered the ways that we as conservators and as cultural heritage professionals more broadly have real agency. I think our series has also really further convinced me that bringing issues about the climate crisis to the forefront of our profession and integrating climate and sustainability considerations into our daily decision making is really critical. And that's not only because climate change affects and will continue to affect our ability to achieve professional goals in our missions, but also because nothing is going to change unless this issue enters our daily consensus in a really real way. Yeah, I mean, it's really impacted how I see my role as an institutional conservator and really the capacity of our field and the broader museum sector in addressing the crisis. You know, I know that we share the sentiment that museums really should be in service of their community, but I feel like through the conversations we've had, it's really solidified that as caretakers of cultural heritage, we need to look at our work through a social lens. And there are so many options to do this, right? Like we can honor different narratives in object-centered projects. We can facilitate knowledge sharing and collection care through community partnerships either, you know, like we were talking about with Francis, either through indigenous communities or our local museum communities. You know, whatever form it takes, it's really just being conscientious of the people behind the cultural property that we're taking care of and bringing empathy and equity to the projects kind of regardless of what we're doing. We have agency to look at this through the lens of whose cultural heritage are we preserving and why are we doing it. Wow, okay. Amen to that. Yeah, it's all, you know, it's all about honoring each other and our collective histories and our unique, you know, different histories and the shared planet we live on. And yeah, I guess just echoing some of what you guys are talking about, you know, we think of preservation like conservation is a global community. Like we're, it's a small community and we are interconnected with professionals all over the world. And I also think it's interesting that climate change, you know, decisions about climate change, similarly to like conservation decisions, these are gonna impact our understanding of history long into the future. And so both are kind of on this like long-term timeline that needs to be sustainable for, you know, many years to come. Like we're dreaming of something that's way farther than in our lifetime. We're trying to preserve an object for that long. And again, just to speak a little bit to echo what both of you said about the sort of the individual sense of responsibility and agency, you know, COVID-19 and I say this from a place of privilege so that, you know, I haven't been sick myself, no one in my family has been sick. I haven't lost my job during this time. These are all realities that so many are experiencing. But I have slowed down. I have, you know, given up seeing friends. I've been quite isolated. And during this time, it's been a time for reflection just on the state of the world. And also, you know, thinking about the ways that I work and how I spend my time and sort of my role in the world. It's given me this sense of agency that I do have. You know, thinking about it, you know, if I wear a mask to protect others when I go to public, you know, when I go out in public or you can think about your choice to like drive a car or fly less to reduce your carbon footprint. Like these individual choices do matter. And while I'm just one person, like if I wasn't here anymore, like that would be one less person, you know, increasing the amount of carbon in the environment. And so I guess just thinking of these individual choices and also like when I go back, when things do eventually go back to normal, like how I'm going to be different, like how we're all going to be different from this and thinking about what I want that to look like. Yeah. Yeah, it was really well said, Marie. I feel like a lot of us have spent an incredible amount of time reflecting on the state of the world. And I think in part, breaking of habits and breaking of norms, it forces us into the state of reflection. And, you know, COVID is, you know, kind of really intense crisis that we're dealing with currently. But I was about to say that it's temporary. I hope it's temporary. I'm pretty sure it's going to be temporary. It's going to end. And so we have the, you know, really the capacity and to put ourselves in the position of what are we going to do next? Like what are we taking through with us? You know, post COVID. And I feel like what this is really, you know, where it really clicked for me is when I was researching intersectional environmentalism for the climate justice episode. And I've really gone to the weeds about like how racial and gender and economic equalities exacerbate the effects of the changing climate and also COVID, right? Like all of these things are interconnected. I mean, I was just reading this morning about the link between, the statistical link between COVID deaths and other diseases from long-term exposure to find particulate matter, right? Like from air pollution, like all of these issues are connected. And so for those of us who do have privilege or do have platforms to have these discussions, we have to bring attention to that interconnectedness. And I think really through this podcast, my definition of climate activists has shifted too because I feel like we have to be in a position where we're able to have these difficult conversations. We cannot continue the trend of separating the conversation of environmentalism and civil justice. Like they're one and of the same conversation. And so we have, we're at an interesting position to do that because we work in a cultural heritage sector. We work with so many different, well, we work with the physical, a lot of different communities. And hopefully we work with a lot of those communities themselves, but I think it does really present a lot of opportunities for presenting these difficult and challenging conversations about ongoing overlapping and interconnected crisis with, okay, so what can we do about it? Like what opportunity do we have to facilitate a discussion on topic or to enact some type of change? And I think that that's what I'm really excited about for next season is, who is taking that action? Like internationally, who is moving this conversation forward? Who is doing community oriented and socially conscientious conservation practice? Like I wanna talk to those people. We already have been talking to a few of our guests about this topic, but I am really interested to see where this we broaden the realm of environmentalism. And I think of collection care too. Yeah, thank you, Natalia. I am so looking forward to listening next season. I'm really excited to see where this conversation takes you. To our listeners, we'd also really love to hear from you what you've learned this season or any changes you've implemented in your life or new considerations since listening to this series. Yeah, please reach out to us at ecpn.aic.digitalplatforms.gmail.com. If you have an idea for a future podcast episode or have someone you think we should get in contact with. So all again for joining us for these conversations, we're really so grateful for all of your support. We hope that you are and that you stay well. Until next time.