 Welcome. I think we before we officially start we need to hold for a few seconds to make sure to that we're going to have the live stream started and also there are a few people that are still coming into this call so let's wait another maybe another minute and then I'll I will tell you once we're live and then we can keep oh I've just been told that we were live so hello and welcome. Thank you for being here. My name is Chantal Bilodeau. I am the co curator of the green rooms. And this is the first session on the second day of the green rooms which is produced by English theater at the National Art Center and presented by folder in collaboration with the Canada Council for the arts, the city of Kingston, the National Theater School and how realm theater comments. And I'm very happy to have you here, both all of you who are on the skull and also people who are watching us on the live stream. Before we start, I would like to acknowledge that mission control for this event is located in Kingston, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee and the Huron Wandaat. Kingston is covered by treaty 57 and the territory was acquired in 1783 in Crawford's purchases. And now it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Jennifer Atkinson. Jennifer is a senior lecturer in environmental humanities at the University of Washington both out, and she's going to talk to us about climate anxiety. While we she's presenting please feel free to use the chat to comment along the way. So here's to you Jennifer. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen for everyone to put this in presentation mode. And I apologize I'm going to be working off of two screens here so I've got a PowerPoint on one and notes and zoom on the other so I might be looking sideways part of the time. If that's a little bit irritating, feel free to just minimize me or focus on the slides. So thank you again my name is Jennifer Atkinson and I was asked to come and talk to everybody based off of a seminar that I've been teaching on eco grief and climate anxiety at the University of Washington for the past three or four years. I'm joining you today actually from Santa Barbara, and I want to acknowledge that I'm on the occupied land of the Chumash people. I'm really grateful to everybody for joining in these incredibly turbulent times. Jennifer you're muted. Oh, I'm sorry about that. Can everyone hear me now. Yes. Okay, okay, sorry about that. Did, did you hear any of my introduction or was I muted the whole time. We caught most of it. Yeah, just after your land acknowledgement. Okay, okay, I was expressing my gratitude to everybody for joining in these troubled times. I also think that many of us see this as a moment of really historic opportunity and insight that is laying bare in very visceral ways the intersection of our climate crisis are the racial disparities of the COVID pandemic and state violence against black people. And I think the connection between these three forms of structural violence is expressed most powerfully in that image of suffocation, which is both literal and metaphorical right it's a symbol of a lived reality. I found up in the words, I can't breathe right the last words, George Floyd spoke as he was suffocated by the police in Minneapolis. It's the experience of those whose lungs shut down from COVID-19. Every day experience of marginalized people, mostly black, brown, indigenous, and poor people who cannot breathe or thrive in their polluted communities or under the oppressive violence of climate change. And these are intimately connected the the same black communities that are targets for police harassment. And violence are dying at the highest rates from COVID-19 death rates in black communities is three to six times higher than in white communities in the US black workers are also disproportionately impacted because they make up the majority of essential workers, which puts them at risk. And now we have a whole series of scientific reports showing that the coronavirus patients are more likely to die if they live in areas with high air pollution. And of course those are neighborhoods where people of color live. Black people are 75% more likely than white people to live near oil and gas facilities within the US. Nearly one in three black people live within 30 miles of a coal fired power plant, and their asthma rates are astronomical. And all of that compromises a person's ability to survive COVID-19. And so before turning to my discussion of climate grief, I wanted to share this reminder that this is our work. Abolition is core to climate justice, climate justice is racial justice, and fighting the climate crisis requires us to dismantle white supremacy. And while my own research focus is on mental health impacts of climate injustice, all three of these forms of structural violence intersect really at the core of that issue. Okay, so if you logged on today, I'm sure that you already know the climate situation is very bad. Earlier this year, this was just back in February, Antarctica hit the highest temperature ever recorded on the continent, 65 degrees Fahrenheit, I'm joining you from the US behind the times a bit. Ocean acidification is getting worse by the year. The UN report said that one million species may be pushed to extinction in coming decades. And just since the 1970s populations of vertebrate wildlife have declined by 60% on average worldwide that's 60. The Arctic Ocean is expected to become essentially ice free during the summers by 2050. Weather, this is something that we're seeing in lifetime, there will be more frequent and more disastrous weather events like floods and mega fires and hurricanes and coming years. And people of color and poor communities are always hit hardest and give it the least resources for recovery. So we need to be careful to not use the term natural disaster, which makes it seem like the harm or loss of life was a pure act of nature. Right, no one's responsible and there's no way to prevent or mitigate that harm. The wildfire flames, or the wind and water from a hurricane do involve natural elements but that's not where the disaster lies. A disaster is what happens when those elements collide with social structures that have left certain people vulnerable and that failed to support them in preparation or in the aftermath. While wealthy communities have the resources to insulate themselves or evacuate and withstand the impact. So there's nothing natural about those disparities, they're deeply social and political. And then of course, and this is way too long ago, probably to even remember now but before COVID-19 took over the news this last winter, the biggest story of 2020 was the fires raging across Australia. Before that the Amazon was burning. So, all of this attention to the physical impacts is incredibly important, but exclusively focusing on external damage overlooks the landscape of damage that we are carrying inside of us. Moving through an age defined by so much destruction of life is bound to mark us by invisible traumas. And this is the question that I've been wrestling with in recent years. What kind of emotional and psychological toll are we experiencing from absorbing this relentless and heartbreaking loss. But one of the problems is we don't live in a culture that openly mourns these kinds of losses, and that makes it hard to fully process their personal impact, or even to recognize that they exist, because most of us don't have a language to talk about it. That is starting to change in recent years terms like climate anxiety, eco grief and climate despair have crept into our vocabulary. And it's not just climate activists who've adopted this language. The American Psychological Association put out a major report in 2017 documenting this mental health crisis. Climate psychology has become a new field as therapists are seeing more and more patients with eco anxiety and depression. And researchers like Steven running have mapped our responses to environmental loss on to the classic five stages of grief. There are a lot of different models out there and the process is not necessarily linear. I'm sure everybody has gone through these stages at some point right and you can go back and forth between denial anger depression. So, what I want to do is give examples of four different groups that are experiencing climate grief and then a few insights that we might take from each of them. The first group are students and young people, and this is the group I know best they're the reason that I got interested in this topic. I've taught at the University of Washington for the past 11 years, and every year I've seen more and more despair among undergraduates. On this slide, these are just some quotes from the first day of a class I taught this last fall students tell me that they don't want to have kids because they could grow up in an apocalyptic future. Some of them have trouble sleeping at night with their minds playing scenarios of water wars and climate refugees and mass extinction. They feel anger towards the previous generation that handed them this mess, which can include their own parents. And since COVID-19 this resentment is expressing itself in some new ways. Jamie Margolin is an 18 year old Colombian American climate justice activist. She's the founder of the International Youth Movement Zero Hour. And right after lockdown she wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post saying, look, for years we've heard the same excuse that we can't make dramatic and quick changes. It would be too disruptive. The economic impacts would be too severe that we need to be incremental. But the coronavirus has just completely blown that cover. We can make immediate changes when people understand that emergency threatens them personally. And this is where that sense of generational injustice comes in. Margolin notes that quote, the way the coronavirus disproportionately affects older people is the exact way the climate crisis disproportionately affects young people. The COVID fatality rate of course is significantly higher for people over 65, but when it comes to the climate crisis, most of those statistics are flipped. It's young people that are going to suffer the most. And by the way, I just want to note that in response to the coronavirus Margolin is clear that she takes her responsibility very, very seriously. She's following all the official precautions to protect those who are most vulnerable and urging everyone around her to do so as well. But her generation is very aware of the hypocrisy that this exposes. So here's what she writes to our leaders quote, my generation is giving up our youth, our schooling, our fun and our freedom so that you can see next year. When this is over, you may have to keep giving something up so that we can live or so that we can see next century. In the second group, I would highlight our scientists environmental scientists suffer some of the highest rates of the eco depression and despair, which is not surprising. Since they're documenting the disappearance of our natural world up close. If coral reefs or rainforest or some species of wildlife is your life's work, then watching it die can be traumatizing. And Wilkinson is one of the senior writers of the book drawdown, and she once said there is no way for me not to have a broken heart on those days. But coping with this is especially hard for scientists because their field so prioritizes objectivity and dispassionate discourse. There was a kind of stigma around discussing subjective or emotional responses. So many scientists actually worry about compromising their professional credibility by appearing too emotional. Then a third category of impacted groups are all of the communities on the front lines of this crisis who are directly impacted this isn't just something that they read about in the news. There is now an extensive body of research, including a major study from the APA linking climate disruption to chronic anxiety and depression, post traumatic stress, substance abuse, suicide or suicidal thoughts, sleep disorders, and a lot more. And not surprisingly, again, poor communities as well as black indigenous and communities of color are suffering the heaviest impacts, and therefore the most dramatic emotional toll from climate assaults. These groups already have inadequate access to affordable shelter and healthcare, reliable emergency services or even drinking water. So it's infinitely more challenging to recover from or survive climate disasters and displacement. And Hurricane Katrina is one of the most extensively studied disasters to date. The APA reports show that one in six people impacted met the diagnosis for PTSD and suicide or suicidal thoughts more than doubled for displaced people in New Orleans. And we see that playing out again and again with every subsequent hurricane. Then you can go to the opposite side of the world where reports of a mental health crisis are coming out of Australia in the wake of the recent bushfires. And just a decade before that Australia had suffered through the longest drought since Europeans settled the continent, which devastated farmers crops and livelihoods. The studies of that disaster showed a spike in substance abuse in chronic depression and domestic violence as well as, you know, other mental health impacts for farmers. Or if you head to the Arctic, indigenous people are talking about how the warming climate is wiping out traditional hunting and cultural practices and keeping them from traveling to ancestral sites because the landscape is melting beneath them. Among those communities, suicide has gone up as well. People say that their cultural identity is being devastated. I think this quote here from an Inuit woman captures that cultural and spiritual erasure where she says Inuit are people of the ice. If there is no more sea ice, how can we be people or how can we be people of the sea ice. And in fact all indigenous communities with cultural or identity based roots in the natural world are at very high risk of experiencing trauma from environmental loss in their homelands. So questions about colonialism and racism are fundamental to this mental health issue. And then the final group that is suffering from climate anxiety is everybody, whether we're consciously aware of it or not. Even if you've never fled a wildfire or lost your crops to drought, everybody's daily life is changing in a thousand subtle ways. And we've all lived through these slow moving changes like the loss of bees and songbirds in our backyard or dying trees along the road could be fishing trips where you come back with less every year. All of that can add up to a deep sense of loss. And this is what philosopher Glenn Albrecht has named Solastalgia. He's playing with that concept of nostalgia, which is a longing for, you know, a time or a place that you can't go back to. But with Solastalgia that that happens while you're still at home. It's the trauma and helplessness of watching your surroundings become unfamiliar. So he defines this as the condition or combines this condition as a homesickness experienced without ever leaving home. And I think this is a really powerful concept because it gives us a way to talk about some of the invisible aspects of environmental experience that are so fundamental to our identity and memory and sense of self. Even in our age of screens when more and more experience has become virtual, there are still really powerful ways that we relate to the physical world through our bodies and our senses. Whether that's the constant background sound of a river or frogs and crickets at night could be the way that you experience weather and temperature or the smell of air during different seasons. Those sensory aspects are integral to everyday experience. Apologies for the disruption. And I'll get a text message if something goes wrong again here. So what I just in in in looking at those four groups, I wanted to give a snapshot of some different ways that eco anxiety and grief are experienced. I want to shift a little bit now and say a few words about how we typically think about grief and how we might reframe it in more empowering ways. This is a topic that I've been exploring in my podcast facing it, which was just launched a month ago. You can find it on any podcast apps out there or also on my website. And in a nutshell, facing it is looking at how grief might actually be a valuable resource for us in the fight for climate justice. So I'm going to read a two minute excerpt from one of the episodes that episodes that introduces this idea. When I first launched my seminar on eco anxiety. I was every bit as distressed as my students and looking for ways to extinguish my grief for all the suffering, but something unexpected happened along the way. I had always thought of grief as a bad thing, a dark state to avoid or overcome as quickly as possible. I thought that feeling grief was like succumbing to a preventable illness, or that once it took hold, I might fall into a bottomless hole of despair. But in time it dawned on me that maybe we were seeking solutions to the wrong problem. We all wanted to fix the way we felt so we could go back to feeling happy, but grief isn't something to be fixed, because it's not dysfunctional. It's a healthy and necessary process we have to undergo to heal. In fact, grief can be a tremendous source of wisdom as we move into an uncertain climate future. I know this may sound controversial in a moment when environmentalists are urging us to focus on hope, but the two are not mutually exclusive. And for many people, grief may be an even more powerful force for transformation. First, grief isn't just one of many options for accepting loss. Grief is the process of accepting loss. I get why many people working towards sustainability want to sidestep emotional issues and push the public straight into action. The situation is urgent and dwelling on our feelings can seem like an extravagance as the fires close in. But the problem is, when we tried to jump straight to the final step without first processing the emotional toll of all this lost beauty and life, we're bypassing the very insights that motivate us to fight for hope in the first place. Ignoring ecological grief is like trying to rush through any great loss, a job, a home, someone you love, without pausing to acknowledge that what you're leaving behind. In all of those cases, we're not just losing something we once had. We're also losing the future that many of us had counted on. We can't act creatively and honestly in this new reality if we believe we're still living in the old one. And most of us are stuck in a pre-climate change fantasy realm, clinging to delusions that our world in coming years will still be the world we imagined growing up. Denial isn't just a description for those who reject the science. It describes university professors like me and scientists who devote their lives to studying climate change and activists fighting to keep things from getting worse. We understand the problem intellectually, but we don't live as though we do. We accept the facts, but we haven't felt our way through what those facts mean, how our lives, how all lives will be undone in some way. We're like the person who knows a loved one is dead, but hasn't let that reality penetrate to their core, where it will reorganize all the ways they relate to the past and future and determine all they will have to let go of. So if you just rejoined in the middle of that, I was reading an excerpt from my podcast, Facing It, which is towards this issue of climate change and anxiety. And as the podcast progresses, I'm also really trying to push beyond just reframing grief as something that's not bad. So also consider ways that it's actively good. And there are three reasons that I would make that claim. I'm sorry, Jennifer, can you bring the microphone closer to you? Yeah, yeah. And I can try to speak louder as well. Yeah, that's good. Thank you. Sure thing. So the first point is that is that grief arises from deep attachment and connection. It's a sign of love for our world. You will not grieve for something that you don't love. Grief can also be a way of affirming our connection and empathy with other species and recognizing that our identities and well-being are entwined with other lives. So we shouldn't think of grief and love as opposites, but actually as two sides of the same point. And Seattle artist Chris Jordan has written that when we try to be cheerful and suppress our grief for the world, we're also suppressing our love for it. And I think this is at this point for a moment because I think it offers some important insight for the ongoing debate in climate circles over how we motivate people to act. This is a perennial question, right? What's the most effective affect in getting people to respond? Is it fear? Is it hope? Is it anger? Is it guilt? If you look at environmental communication in recent years, there's been an overwhelming focus on hope as the key to political action. I'm going to make sure the volume is up a lot enough here. But a lot of scholars point out that hope can actually be a way of deferring action onto the future or onto other people. And hope can let us off the hook by luring us into a false sense of comfort that everything will turn out in the end. And I do want to be clear. I'm not saying that pessimism is a strategy. And, you know, of course, hope is incredibly complex and it's much more nuanced than I have times at school right now. What we mean by that term is a whole seminar unto itself. There's active hope. There's critical hope. What I'm referring to here is the easy version of hope that can quickly become, I hope someone else fixes this. And that's what Derek Jensen's referring to in his quote. We need to remember that hope is not the end game and be disciplined in asking ourselves, what is it that we really want? And for me, getting people to act is infinitely more important than getting them to feel hopeful. Greta Thunberg put this really eloquently in her speech where she said, she doesn't want us to have hope. She wants that our actions result in hope. And Emily Johnson is a climate activist who also warns about getting tangled up in psychological distractions that are just about feeling good rather than committing ourselves to acting on behalf of justice and our obligations to each other. So she says that even in a hopeless state, we still have the chance to make a space for hope to act in such a way that hope might exist for others who come after us. So this is where I come back to grief, right? Because grief is by definition a function of love, while hope is not. You can feel hope without love, right? I hope there's a parking space open. I hope my team wins the game or I hope my battery doesn't go out. You cannot feel grief without love. That's what grief is. And I think that love is far, far more powerful in motivating us to fight than any other affect. There is just no limit to the lengths that we will go to protect what we love, even when we don't have hope, right? When someone you love is terminally ill, you don't stop acting on their behalf just because the situation seems hopeless. You do whatever you can, the odds be downed. Okay, the second positive aspect of eco grief is that it breaks down boundaries that we've created between ourselves and other species, as well as other humans. In our culture, obviously there's a hierarchy of lives that matter and lives that don't. Some deaths receive elaborate mourning rituals and public tributes while others are trivialized and ignored. The marginalized groups know very well how this absence of public grief dehumanizes them, which is why Black Lives Matter and people seeking justice for murdered Indigenous women and LGBTQ activists all use public protests and visuals to demand that those deaths aren't made invisible. And then when we refuse to shield ourselves from the pain of other species death, we take part in what scholars call resistant mourning, which consciously chooses to hold onto feelings of pain and grief to spur a sense of responsibility for those losses. I'm going to skip forward here. I'm going to pause the makeup for some time. Then third, Indigenous scholars argue that grief can be a valuable lens for deepening the discussions of climate colonialism. Ron Reed is a traditional fisherman and also the cultural biologist for the Kark tribe in California, close to where I grew up. And he published a fascinating study on the emotional impacts of declining salmon in the Klamath River, which has devastated his people's way of life based on fishing. He writes that for Indigenous people in North America, quote, land, plants and animals are considered sacred relatives, and thus their loss becomes a source of grief. So what happens then when we recognize and center those emotions as part of the ongoing experience of colonialism, and we frame collective grief as its own index of environmental injustice. He writes, quote, because the dominant non-native society does not recognize the deep emotional ties we describe between humans and the natural world, Kark grief and other emotions related to their loss is invisible. And that invisibility and lack of legitimacy just compounds the harm done to Indigenous people. This is what's referred to as disenfranchised grief, a loss that's experienced but can't be openly acknowledged or publicly mourned. Okay, so keeping this context in mind, I want to wrap up by highlighting some strategies that I typically share for managing climate despair. I don't have time in this short session to cover all of them, but I do discuss four main strategies in my podcast. That particular episode is, it's only about 20 minutes long. And for today, I'm just going to focus on the final one. Number four, take action. Action is the best antidote to grief. There's nothing that's more therapeutic. And I say that it's action that gives rise to hope rather than, you know, it's not the other way around. This always gives rise to the question, what type of action is most effective? There's no single response to that, which feels both daunting and liberating. One thing that makes the climate crisis unique is that it is truly all-encompassing. What's happening up in the atmosphere is only a symptom of something much, much more complex brewing down below. Our economy, our consumer way of life, agricultural and food, it's about the books that we read our children, the way we design cities and buildings, the stories and images and art we put out into the world. Sarah Jacquette Ray has said, in the climate battle, the front lines are everywhere. And that's both a challenge and an opportunity because it means there are endless ways that we can engage. Every person alive will be impacted and there's a protagonist in this story so we can all contribute using whatever tools we have. And I'll skip forward in those just to get to the arts. For those of you joining today, I imagine that the most effective intervention you can make is through the arts. And I just can't overstate how important it is that we get away from the habit of leaving climate discussions up to scientists and policymakers. For decades, those fields have dominated this discussion and the result of that compartmentalization really has been disastrous. It's left a majority of the people on the sidelines of the conversation and has massively delayed our ability to build the critical mass we need for genuine political transformation. I think that storytelling is arguably the most important resource that the arts and the humanities have to offer, because narrative is the oldest way that humans have of making sense of the world and our place in it. And of course many of the dominant narratives in our culture have destructive plot lines. We're living by narratives of controlling and consuming nature narratives of human entitlement and exceptionalism as a species. And when we never encounter alternative narratives we become trapped by a sense of inevitability about those structures. While the arts of imagination I really think are the ultimate tool for helping us to envision alternatives. And I just want to quickly click over to this page that I created on the environmental humanities. If you go to my website it's under resources here and then click on environmental humanities. And this is something I set up so that artists or writers or educators are free to use if you're running workshops or teaching or you just want to learn more yourself about the intersections of the humanities and the environment. In this particular section on environmental arts I draw on examples of how different art forms specifically engage climate grief and despair. So there are examples from music, from the visual arts, from poetry and performance, and from ritual and other performance practices. And each of these is paired with discussion prompts and further readings. Then there's activities below that help tie everything together. And plus there's a little bit of theory here that we might use as a framework to think through how the arts represent and make visible these invisible dimensions of the climate story. And this part is using Rob Nixon's theory of slow violence. So you're welcome to draw on that if you'd like. There's also a section on storytelling. I think all of you know the general public response to your medium better than I do, but I hope that I can really embolden you by saying that I work with a lot of students and colleagues in the sciences and STEM fields. And they are so hungry to explore climate issues through arts and humanities, because they feel just as deeply about these issues as anyone, but they're working in a professional culture that doesn't really make the space to express their passion and their humanity. So I've just found a lot of openness from folks in the sciences to partner with the arts, especially maybe over the last five years I feel like there's been a real sea change. They know that after 30 years of clobbering the public over the head with with hockey stick graphs graphs and the data data centered approach to to climate change that approach just hasn't worked. And that it's it's the arts that will help us really mobilize the public and help us envision what a more just and sustainable world could look like. Okay, so I'm going to wrap up here. I think the last thing that I want to say. Before we go to breakout rooms is that I think getting engaged in climate solutions helps build solidarity. And one of the main reasons that people feel hopeless and depressed in the face of this threat is that they think they're alone in their concern. And when we feel isolated, we're not likely to act. So cognitive psychologists emphasize how important it is to imagine ourselves as part of a team. And this also counteracts the pervasive concern that any action we take is going to be too insignificant to matter right why even bother my students hit this wall all the time that they feel helpless because their impact is so dwarfed by the scale of the crisis. But if we see ourselves working collectively, rather than individually, we can recognize that all contributions sync up with a larger network of change. And this is what Adrian Marie Brown calls emergent strategy, a movement that spirals out from all kinds of small local actions, and connections to create more complex systems. As economist Donna tell a meadows makes a similar point when she reminds us to think in terms of leverage points, where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything. This is something that I love from Rebecca Solnit's book, Hope in the Dark. And in the 1960s, the women's strike for peace was the first organized anti nuclear movement in the US. And when they were interviewed participants said that they felt like their efforts had achieved nothing at the time, but in fact they ultimately contributed to major victories like the ban on above ground nuclear testing. This is an excerpt this will be the last thing that I will share with you because I know we need to move to breakout rooms here. The woman from the woman from the woman from WSP told of how foolish and futile she had felt standing in the rain one morning, protesting at the Kennedy White House. She heard Dr. Benjamin Spock, who had become one of the most high profile activists on the issue, say that the turning point for him was spotting a small group of women standing in the rain, protesting at the White House. If they were so passionately committed, he thought he should give the issue more consideration himself. So I think this is a reminder that social change is hard to measure. But that should be reason for hope rather than discouragement, because every time we have a conversation or share a book, or inspire somebody through through our work, those actions may get multiplied by a larger network that we have never even met. So close with this quote from Margaret Mead it's a line I've always loved. She says, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. So, as you move to your breakout rooms, there are a few discussion prompts and these will also appear in the chat room so that you can consult them. You're going to be broken up into groups of four. Please don't limit yourself to these prompts. I'm sure there are many things that emerge for you that you might want to discuss in those breakout rooms. I'm going to be floating around between the different rooms just to listen in or if there's anything else that I can contribute or comment on, I'd be happy to do so. But the real kind of question here I think the main one is just what is your main dark emotion in response to climate change, and perhaps how does that manifest itself in your work. Okay, so I'll stop sharing here and I think our facilitators are now going to take us to the breakout rooms. Danse, hi everyone. My name is Clayton Thomas Mueller. I come from Pugetwagon Cree Nation Treaty Six Territory, but I live here in the city of Winnipeg in Treaty One Territory. And I've been a part of the curation team of the green rooms for the last while here and similar to a lot of you, took part in Black Lives Matter Solidarity protests the other day. And of course, and consistently, you know, trying to adjust to a new world with this pandemic crisis. As many of you have made the connection already, you know, the connection between racism, systemic racism, white supremacy and patriarchy and, you know, the current landscape we as human beings are facing. You know, these systems of oppression have contributed to many significant problems, murdering and missing indigenous women and girls, you know, the epidemic of native brown and black people being killed by police departments everywhere. And of course, you know, this existential threat of climate change, you know, now more than ever, it's so important for people involved in the arts community to get up and to make those connections and to make expressions through your form that help people connect the dots. You know, quite often information is static and sometimes it's important to curate things for people so that they can, you know, make the changes that they need to make. So I look forward to spending some time with you in the green room and yeah, we can do this. My name is Ian Garrett. I'm director of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts at Think Tank on the intersection of sustainable development and arts and culture and associate professor of ecological design for performance at York University. It's been my pleasure to be on the curatorial team for the green rooms and to contribute to the NAC cycle and theater and climate change at this time of critical mass and excitement around reimagining the way that civilization society will work and perform in a sustainable future. My name is Kendra Fanconi. I'm here today in Wexham, seashell traditional lands also known as Roberts Creek, British Columbia. I'm part of the curatorial team of the green room during this time of COVID pause that I hope is an opportunity for a green revolution. My name is Sonali McDermid and I am a climate scientist at New York University's Department of Environmental Studies based in New York City. And I am humbled and privileged to serve on the curatorial team of the green rooms during this unprecedented time of change. And I think artistic events like the green rooms gives us the ability to re-envision and re-imagine the world that we would like to see. And so I hope the next few days provides you some inspiration, some room to discuss and process everything that's happened and that's happening both currently and in the long term. And provides for you a way to think about creative solutions to communicate and represent these really critical pressing issues and also have some fun. Stay safe and be well wherever you are and I look forward to seeing you at the green rooms. Alright, I'm a professor in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I have been part of the NAC green rooms curatorial team and I'm really looking forward to working with all of you. Hi, I'm Sophie Traub and I'm calling in from Oregon by way of Toronto, Ontario. I have been the associate curator of the green rooms during this time of enormous transition. When innovating ways of gathering remotely and meaningfully to centre a conversation about climate justice and to explore its interconnectedness with racial justice and with Indigenous resurgence is so important. Hello everyone. I'm sorry this was such a short time. I hope you had enough time to have a few interesting discussions. We can't really go over because we have another session starting directly after this one. So, I want to say thank you. Is Jennifer back? Is she here? I am. Okay, hi. I want to say really thank you Jennifer. This was a wonderful very thought provoking presentation. Thank you everyone for attending everyone who is in this room and everyone who is watching us on the live stream. Coming up in just a few minutes at four o'clock Eastern time is a panel titled How Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis and with artists Kendra Fankoni, Anthony Simpson Pike and Ken Schwartz, and it will be moderated by Kevin Matthew Wong. Yeah, so thank you so much. We hope you can join us for the next one. We have a series of panel throughout the day and then please come back. If you're still up at 10pm Eastern time tonight please come back for the dance party. We'd love to see you move and I will end this call now and we'll see you on the next one. Thank you. Thank you, Chantal.