 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. As many tuning in already know, ECPN is a sub-community within AIC that develops content directed specifically towards emerging conservators, and this podcast series is no different, but we do hope that the content that we create here will be of interest to conservators at all stages of their career. AIC has taken a necessary and important step by joining other international organizations and publicly recognizing the urgent threat of climate change, not just to cultural heritage, but to all sectors of life. We're so glad that they took this first step, but it can be difficult for the rest of us to know where we should begin, which is why we're creating this podcast, to empower ourselves and each other to recognize agency and to begin taking action. Yeah, so we're going to be building ambition by featuring a diverse group of speakers who are taking action across various sectors of our field. We're going to be talking with our guest speakers about how they're enacting change, and that ranges from forming coalitions to changing daily lab practices to tailoring graduate training to disaster planning and response. Some of our speakers are putting climate justice at the very center of their careers, and then there are others like Natalia and I, who are practicing conservation professionals for whom climate change action is not in our job description, but we'd still like to be doing something about it. Yeah, exactly. This is a really complicated topic that both Emma and I and our guest speakers feel like we could talk about endlessly, but we're not going to. We're beginning with this four-part exploratory series to determine our audience's interest and to see how we can integrate this new platform into AIC and ECPN's already very established digital presence. We're also trying podcasting to increase accessibility to our programming. Transcriptions of these episodes will be available on AIC's YouTube channel via YouTube closed captioning if you have a hearing impairment. This podcast platform will also allow you all to listen to what you're interested in on your own time. We recognize that we are also dealing with a global pandemic crisis on top of the climate crisis at the current moment, and we do want to avoid adding additional stress to what we know is a really stressful time for everybody. Yeah, and a silver lining to this situation that we're in is that both individually and collectively, we've been presented with perhaps what's the greatest opportunity in recent human history for us to define a new version of normal. Yeah, we'd also like to note that our webinar programming is definitely not going away. We're trying something new this season, but we do anticipate that webinars will continue to be a valuable part of ECPN's future programming. Exactly. ECPN and AIC are communities and we want it to feel like one. We are always available to talk to anyone about how you're dealing in this current situation or about how you're processing this content. Yeah, this is also an experiment for ECPN, and while we always value your feedback and your engagement in our programming, because this is a new platform for us and we do want to keep refining it to better support you, your feedback and engagement is especially vital now and throughout this series. Yeah, so our email is in the episode notes as our links to the other branches of AIC, including the emergency and sustainability committees that are addressing the climate crisis in their own capacity. In each episode, we'll also include resources related to the content so you can explore it in more depth on your own time. These episodes will be released in early to mid-May, so make sure to keep an eye on Facebook and our member community for updates from us and from our communications team. Yes, and subscribe on your favorite podcast app. We will be streaming on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Hear and Anchor. If you subscribe, then you'll be among the first to know when these episodes drop. We are so excited to jump into this conversation with you. We sincerely believe that everyone should be a part of this conversation because everyone's voice matters and it's affecting all of us. Yeah, and just to close out, we want to make sure that everyone's staying safe and well, and we want to wish you all a very happy Earth Day.