 So much for joining us this afternoon. My name is Anya Wright. I am a youth activist in the state of Maine and I'm really excited to be your host this afternoon. Welcome to the first ever Future Focus webinar. We're so excited to have Anna Siegel here today. Future Focus is a new webinar series that is being brought to you by Maine Audubon, Maine Climate Action Now, Maine Youth for Justice, the Maine Environmental Education Association, Maine Environmental Changemakers, and Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. And we all came together to start a youth-led monthly webinar series highlighting youth climate justice activists and their stories from across. So each, sorry, got muted for a second. Each one-hour session will focus on a different individual and the intersectional leadership work that they are doing in their community and beyond. And so we're so excited to have Anna as our first panelist. And please sign up for our future webinars. We have Amara Afiji on December 1st talking about using it to mobilize. And then we also have Sirohi Kumar coming on January to talk about climate emergency declarations. And so with that, I will pass it over to Anna to get started. Again, thank you all for being here. We're going to ask everyone to stay muted and to keep your videos off while Anna is speaking. And then we'll have some time after Anna's done her discussion and question and answer. And we'll let you all turn on your sound then. So sit tight. Anna, we're excited to have you. And I will pass it over to you. Awesome. Thanks, Anya. So as you guys know, my name is Anna Siegel. I'm a 14-year-old climate activist. And I'm currently a freshman at Weanfleet High School. I am the co-organizing director of Main Strikes, a core member of the statewide coalition, Maine Youth for Climate Justice, part of the Sierra Club Maine Political Team, and a member of the Emergency Management Working Group on the Maine Climate Council. I'm honored and excited to be speaking here now, especially because Maine Audubon is co-sponsoring this speaker series. I have so many amazing memories from the land that Audubon conserves. And a common refrain from when I was younger was, can we go to the Audubon? I was waiting girly until I was old enough to volunteer at the Scarborough Marsh Audubon Center, but then the pandemic hit. Along with being unable to volunteer, I couldn't attend the Hog Island Audubon camp for young birders off the coast of Maine. This familiar recounting of opportunities lost to COVID-19 also exposes my perspective on climate action. I first became interested in the climate crisis because of the ecological effect on wildlife. And I also come to the climate movement from a point of privilege. My home has never been flooded. My family's livelihood is not directly tied to a climate-impacted economy, such as tourism from skiing or lockstone. And I've never missed school because of bad air quality. As I'll describe later, I fell under activism with a blind enthusiasm and what you may call naivety, but now I'm conscious of the balancing act of using my privilege to fight for what's right and to make space on this platform for everyone's voice. One of the craziest things about my activism experience, which I'll spend most of this time explaining, is that people assume that I wanna be a professional organizer or a politician. And that sounds cool, but in truth, my dream is to become a conservation or mythologist. I spend my weekends on the ocean, in the woods or walking around, bundled on layers to find and photograph these little winged beauties, such as this Prothonitary Warbler in Hinkley Park. Prothonitary warblers are pretty rare, and so it was one of my first cautious outings amid the lockdown to go see it this spring. However, activism started as a hobby that has virtually immersed me in my time. So climate does often take precedent over birds. As mentioned, I started activism with an ecological viewpoint. I cared about animals and animals only. In sixth grade, I knew about the sixth mass extinction we are currently living in. I knew about the cutting down of the trees in the rainforest. I thought that I knew all there was to this, this being climate change, and that I was ready to wade into this world of policy and coalitions and everything that being part of a movement is. Sixth grade me believed that the solution to the climate crisis was electric cars, composting and reducing plastic. My very first action related to climate was a petition launch party where we gathered at City Hall in Portland to get signatures for a petition around emissions reductions that we submitted to the main department of environmental protection. I was incredibly nervous, but had encouraged to speak about birds by my teacher at the time, 350 main volunteers and lifelong activist, Lee Chisholm. I have a very distinct memory of the speaker before me talking about environmental racism. And I thought, what does that have to do with any of this? Why aren't we talking about devastation in the rainforest? Why are people involved? I wonder what I would tell my sixth grade self now. There's no way I could compress the years of learning about intersectionality, cross-issue activism and tokenization that have gained through experience and research into a tangible conversation with a younger self. However, I might be able to explain it here. It was the October 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that made me realize that climate crisis wasn't something happening to a polar bear in the Arctic or a tiger in Asia. It is immediate, urgent, and something that harmed a group I hadn't considered, people. And not people in a few decades, not future generations, people right now. That report, October 2018 report, was the report which stated that we have 12 years to put the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions or else we'll cross a threshold that we cannot return from. It is now 10 years. And once I drew an imaginary line in my head of climate effects from animals to people, it exploded from there. More dots became connected. Adverse drought conditions on subsistence farmers in Central America, that spread climate migration. How air quality is worse and is consistently hotter in low-income and black neighborhoods, that's environmental racism. How half of the world's population, women, are often not included in climate discussions, that's part of gender inequality and more. All of this formulated into the concept of climate justice, where social equity and climate action go hand in hand. So in our theoretical timeline, this is seventh grade, Anna. I had grasped climate justice, but still wasn't sure of my own politics and where I stood on a personal level. It was only when I embarrassed myself in a discussion with some other organizers when I must have named the wrong candidate to support an important election, that I hit the books or Google on electoralism, what neoliberal men, capitalism, and all the terms I didn't understand that the activists I looked up to like to throw around. In a short order, I became a die-hard Bernie Sanders fan spouting off about leftism, systems of oppression and how we must tax the rich. That brings us to current me. I'm very grateful that I'm talking here. I was once speaking on another webinar and I sent them my draft, which said something along the lines of, to truly solve the climate crisis, lead to dismantle capitalism and all the systems which enable it. They didn't want me to even say the word capitalism. And believe me, my parents don't want to hear it from me anymore either. So what brought me from someone who declined plastic straws to a raging leftist? I would never say I'm done learning. Saying that now we're here, my present self doesn't mean I'm done here. I haven't read the theory or studied up on leftist icons such as Angela Davis and Malcolm X. I developed my radical stance from listening to those around me in the news in the current moment. It involves some self-education, but that's only part of it. For a long time, I was directly engaged in the national youth climate movement as the state lead for Maine with US youth climate strike. I started in March, 2019 and Maine strikes left US YCS a few months ago. There were a lot of ups and downs with the youth climate movement on the national stage, positives and negatives. It was only when being part of a national organization began to actively detract from the organizing experience here in Maine did we decide to leave. But before then, there was lots of benefits. The first of which was being in that space as a middle schooler and the rest of the organization largely had late high school to college activists. That gave me a crash course in tons of skills. I had to learn quickly. I learned how to manage press and traditional media, a passion I still hold. I learned how to be a confident public speaker much different from when I first spoke at City Hall when I was so scared and to be unafraid to ask questions to those who are more experienced. It was also a great base to operate from. Whenever I needed help or was unsure of what next steps to take I could turn to national organizers at US YCS or ask other state leads what they were doing for their local campaigns. I also became friends with other organizers and still talk to the old Ohio youth climate strike kids. Also, national organizing means national level opportunities including the chance to attend a youth climate convening in Iowa, August 2019. Along with cramming for the September 20th strikes we had workshops, brainstormed policy and demands and had lots of summer camp style fun. I met so many amazing activists including Jamie Merglin, Gia Berea and more. And then there were the downsides of organizing nationally. To be honest, it was incredibly stressful. Imagine high school but elevated to a national organization because many youth organizers went to college or were taking exams or needed a mental health break. There was a lot of turnover. That means we had to do a lot of elections and voting periods to elect new leaders in the organization. My guess is that everyone here on this webinar including myself are feeling very stressed about the November 3rd election. While that stress happened every other month to elect new leaders in US YCS albeit on a smaller scale of course because we weren't voting on the present in the United States. Sometimes there would be directives and those would be rolled back and replaced with new ideas. It was a constant state of flux and sorting it out was an absorbing all-encompassing endeavor. Being national was also less individualized. Often courses of action were recommended to us, Maine that were done successfully in states like Minnesota, Wisconsin or New York. But Maine isn't any of those places. By leaving US YCS, Maine Strikes and Maine Youth for Climate Justice organizers and I could focus on the campaigns that work right here in the namesake state in the place we are fighting to protect. More local activism has almost none of the issues that national had while retaining most of the benefits. That said, if I was given the opportunity to organize nationally again such as with the Sunrise Movement or another organization I would take it. It was fast paced and exciting and I believe I would now know how to handle its pitfalls better. In the past my main role as an activist, locally here in Maine, not on that national stage has been directing climate strikes across the state in accordance with global climate strikes. Although I've been an activist in sixth grade I wasn't actively organizing until right before the March 15th global climate strike. That was when I was thrown into the role of the Maine State lead for US Youth Climate Strikes in late February, barely a month before the strike. That strike was more of a general call for action, a declaration of sorts. The youth are here and we are angry. Those initial rallies stated that we wouldn't and refused to be silenced. That strike had around 1,500 youth involved across the state. The next one was April 23rd, the Youth Day of Action in Augusta. This was Maine Youth for Climate Justice's first official action as an integrated coalition. A couple hundred youth came to Augusta to lobby the legislators in demand that youth be involved in the Maine Climate Council because youth should be involved in every level of government. That is how I came to serve on the community resilience, public health and emergency management working group. And my facilitator on your right is on the council itself. After an inactive summer of organizing the next strike, September 20th was an explosion of energy. Over 2,000 people showed up at City Hall in Portland. In 1,500 more across the state, this picture is from Norway, Maine, asking for one thing, that the cities of Portland and South Portland declare a climate emergency. The climate emergency resolutions for the two cities passed left then two months later. The last in-person strike we held apart from the Earth Day webinars and virtual actions was March 3rd. On March 3rd, we endorsed Bernie Sanders for president and handed out climate justice scorecards on the presidential candidates to potential voters in various cities. Embarrassingly, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klawisher dropped out of the race a few days before that strike. So we need to explain to every single person that no, we couldn't reprint 200 scorecards in time. They still had Pete and Amy on them. These climate strikes are more than just gathering a bunch of kids together and chanting. All of Maine strike's events are driven with intention, which means they are centered around a specific demand such as divestment, climate emergency or a certain piece of legislation. They also work to instigate climate action in local areas and develop our teams. They also provide certain frames of reference. You can tell from how I've been talking that activists tend to talk in terms of dates and numbers. Did we do this before or after September 20th? What was the fact of March 3rd? The last strike was April 23rd. That's how it always is. And often those numbers can get jumbled up. But of course, because of COVID-19, we have not been holding strikes statewide. Though some of our individual teams have done safe actions with low numbers. As exhilarating as climate strikes are, leading thousands of students in songs and rallying cries, I honestly prefer the quiet and steady satisfaction of climate emergency campaigns. Climate emergency is when a governing body, such as a college, municipality, state or country, officially recognizes the climate crisis as it is and commits to immediate and effective action. Depending on the resolution itself, the exact context can change. But here in Maine, the municipalities who pass a declaration typically commit to 100% net zero by 2030. Through youth and adult ally effort, five cities have passed climate emergency in Maine with many more in process and on their way. Just talking about climate emergency makes me really excited. As you can see here, these are headlines from different newspapers. Well, they're all from the Portland Press Hub but from the different towns. So we have the SACO students who declared climate emergency. Then we have the Brunswick. And then this was from, one of them was from December when we announced our intent for the state to do so. And then also for Portland. And so climate emergency makes me excited because now just talking about it, I'm thinking of how I have to see who can add public comment when the bank or city council votes on their resolution, touch base with the GARMA students to submit their resolution to our council meeting and ask them how fast what they need. I'm thinking of all these different campaigns. Each city or town takes a different process to declare a climate emergency from getting the Portland mayor to promise to do so under pressure from youth on camera to older activists educating middle schoolers on how local government works in SACO. Climate emergency looks a little different in other places. For example, in New York City, the resolution they passed about climate emergency banned all new fossil fuel infrastructure instead of asking the city to be 100% net zero by 2030. The reason for this, in Maine, we wouldn't do something like that except we don't really have fossil fuel infrastructure because there's not really fracking or drilling for oil in Maine. So instead of asking them to commit to these bold reduction goals. Even though I love climate emergency work, unfortunately we can't always do the work that we love. More and more I've become wrapped up in electoralism which is the strategy of trying to elect certain candidates to get what you want done politically. I've always denounced that as ineffective activism because I don't believe we can rely on putting so-so candidates in positions of power and hope they will actually care about the communities they trot on to get to their position. However, somehow I've become the go-to person in Maine Youth for Climate Justice when it comes to candidates and purely political efforts. I don't really mind, but it's quite odd. I didn't intend to be in this position. It really started with Bernie Ferber. I pushed Maine Youth for Climate Justice in main strikes to endorse him and ended up facilitating that vote. When Bernie dropped out of the race, I pretty much lost faith in national electoral politics. I declared the system broken and associated from the endless news about Biden and Trump, Biden and Trump, the infinite cycle. Then Maine Youth for Climate Justice endorsed Betsy's suite for US Senate and I got excited all over again. I thought, well, if Bernie couldn't win, at least we can create a more progressive Senate. When Betsy inevitably lost because of the out-of-state money Sarah could even receive from the start, I decided I'd had enough with electoralism, period. Never again, not my kind of activism. That didn't last very long. A sign in my town, Yarmouth, caught my eye. It said, Heather Abbott, her state representative. And there were more, Art Bell, Jennifer White. It occurred to me that the national battles that we are seeing in the news are also played out on a local scale. I had grown up seeing these signs but I always associated them more with the seasons than politics. In the fall, as the leaves fell down, the signs went up. They were gone by the time of the first snow, not this year, I don't know if you guys saw but it's gonna snow on Friday, which is insane. But this year I did some research. This was the year ballotpedia.com became my best friend and I discovered that local candidates are incredibly important. When Heather Abbott lost her primary, it didn't crush me the way Bernie and Betsy losing did. That's because I led a project for NYCJ who re-endorsed candidates across the state. So now I phone bank for candidates in Arizona and Vermont, wrote letters to the editor for every candidate we endorsed here in Maine and have become the impromptu youth spokesperson on Sarah Gideon. And I don't believe in or even like electoralism. I get a lot of questions about Joe Biden and Sarah Gideon. On an organization level, neither Maine Strikes or NYCJ will be endorsing them at this point because we previously endorsed candidates for both races. Personally, I don't feel comfortable directly advocating for either of them without critique. I understand that Donald Trump and Susan Collins are much worse, of course, but it is a sort of lesser of two evil situation that doesn't feel like democracy. Settle for Biden and vote blue no matter who rhetoric is incredibly harmful to the communities and individuals who are harmed and have been harmed by these candidates and the two-party system. That isn't to say, I'm not just as scared for the election as all of you are. Despite my hesitations, I will be tax banking and I have been tax banking for the Biden campaign. I have been speaking a little bit with the youth for Biden and Maine and more. I feel as though youth activists had to go around like old prophets with bells and gloomy hoods, hollering the end is near to get people to pay attention to us. Unfortunately, this only exacerbates the climate anxiety we already have. As I remarked on you the other day, anxiety practically comes in the youth activist starter pack. What we aren't able to do enough of is to envision a better future, the one we'd want to live in. I'd love to see some ideas in the chat. What is the world you want? Instead of the fear you flooded and divided world predicted, what would make the future bright and helpful? Drop what you think below from policy like the Green New Deal to something simple and wholesome like getting easily accessible, far and fresh food from a local market. Let's see some ideas. And if nobody has anything, it's okay too. Yeah, driving a lot of cars, transportation is a huge part of emissions, especially here in Maine. And but we also need more public transportation. Well, I understand why people may not have any ideas, especially because the news has been so dire recently and it's hard to envision a bright future when we've got the Supreme Court and we're on the risk about the election. But for me, if I had to pick a world, if I had to make a world, it would be where humans both respect and understand the natural world and wildlife but with the draw from it at the same time. We tighten up society into urban centers, leaving vast swaths of habitat for the earth to heal. A huge cause of ecological devastation is suburban sprawl. By rescinding from wild lands, the roads and development that chop up habitat and biomes into pieces would disappear. It has also been proven that denser cities which are rockable and have efficient and affordable public transportation, lower living costs and boost the overall well-being of the population. These urban centers would be green cities where farming occurs on the sides of buildings in a sustainable way, instead of big agriculture and monocropping that we have now. Light rail would connect these cities, eliminating the need for cars. Capitalism would be abolished and trade would be based on what real people need rather than gross domestic product, a system that would be similar to New Zealand's economic model of the global happiness index where economy is based not off of a number, but how people are feeling how they're doing what they need and if they can thrive. Without corporations and power, corruption and government would dwindle. Biodiversity would be revived as habitats preserved and large tracks to the ocean and land are set aside to be untouched. Increasing biodiversity would restore natural equilibrium of food webs in animal physiology. As for people, everyone would be given basic human rights to water, air, food and housing, as well as freedom of speech, gender expression, sexual orientation, the right to choose education, accessible voting and essential happiness. While no society is perfect enough to eliminate prejudice and hatred in my perfect society, principles of social justice would be taught to children at a young age so they can learn to appreciate everyone within the context of our painful history. This sounds idealistic, but that's the point of a vision. It's a dream to work towards. I get constantly told that my generation has the responsibility to fix prior mistakes. So why not try to reach a dream? If it's our job to create a better world, why is it better at the limit? Why can't it be the best world possible? That's why I get frustrated when the Green New Deal is written off as too ambitious or as the Green Dream, as Nancy Pelosi called it. Professional public speaker and former politician Les Brown once said, shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars. So my vision for the future is multifaceted but still hinges on ecology in the animal perspective. As you all demonstrated, everyone has a different answer on what a perfect world looks like. And that's okay. No one organization can steer us onto the right path. As there is no right path and no organization's mission statement can encapsulate everything. Only everyone working together, raising their voice about various issues, reminding others of people that are underrepresented can reach that perfect world. It may be messy, arduous, and unsatisfyingly inefficient, but it's that kind of grassroots activism and gritty fight that is the core of democracy or what democracy should be. So now that I've talked at you for a sufficient amount of time, Anya here will ask me some questions and then we can both talk at you. As Anya and I are chatting, feel free to drop any questions you may have in the chat or when we're done, you can also unmute and directly ask. This could be about me personally, such as was I ever scared of public speaking or what is school like, about activism or politics or even about birds. Really anything. Part of the intention behind this webinar was to make it more personal and familiar instead of like an uptight business sort of thing, which is why this is a regular Zoom meeting instead of a Zoom webinar format where I can't see you and you can't speak. That's also why we are here in my bedroom. So ask away in the chat or speak up and Anya will start with some of our own questions to give you all some time to think. Thanks so much, Anna. Thanks so much for all your words and it's so fun. Anna and I have worked together for like almost two years now doing activism work, but it's not often that like we really share our real true like long in-depth stories with each other. And so, Anna, it's been a treat to just like sit and listen to you and hear more about how you got interested in activism and how you got involved. So thank you. And yeah, everyone feel free to start popping some questions in the chat if you want. Anna and I are gonna talk for like 10 minutes and then we'll just open up the floor for questions. But Anna, I'm curious. A lot of your talk was maybe a way of looking at climate action in a way that's different than sort of the traditional like conservation or big green organization or I guess how like environmentalism has looked in the past. And so I'm curious. I mean, you talked about your journey going from recycling to a more radical justice activist, but I'm wondering if you have any advice for folks or thoughts about how to, I guess like start that journey or start that understanding and that could be like if you have folks that you liked or webinars that you think are good, but just yeah. Yeah, definitely. I'd say apply your passion to the wider context of the world. For me, obviously it's birds. I'm looking out at my window. I'm seeing pine siskins. I'm seeing tufted tetanus. I'm seeing chickadees. And I did that for a while. And then when I was on these walks of all these birders, they'd be talking, they've seen many, many seasons of migration. They talk about how migration wasn't the same. They talk about how there's no boreal force anymore, how we aren't seeing the same numbers of diversity, how we're getting mid-Atlantic species because Maine is now warm enough that species from more southern states are coming here. And that really got me thinking when I was a little bit younger and wondering is this normal? Like is this just things to shift year to year or is this then reading about this and learning as part of this trend. So applying your passions, you could be really into gardening. You could be really into public health. And applying your passions and seeing how that fits into the way of the world because when it comes to public health, we're seeing Lyme disease marching in domain or seeing worse air quality. Actually, coronaviruses are more easily spread in the kind of world that climate change is creating. We're gonna be seeing more pandemics because of climate change. So that's just an example of it's never fun to do things you don't wanna do. So if you have something that you love doing and you want to get into activism and you don't know how, use the thing you love to get into it. And then as for books, I, Jamie Marvland just wrote a book called Youth to Power. It's specifically for youth activists, but I think it also was great lessons for adult allies. And I'd say anything by Bill McKibben is amazing. Thanks. Yeah, I like that thought of following your passions and following what you love. I think a lot about how like climate change affects all of us in some way. And figuring that out for ourselves is a really good way into climate activism. For me, it was a lot about like my love for the outdoors and being outside and realizing that those things were changing and going to change. And so yeah, thanks for that answer. Also, I haven't read Jamie Marvland's book yet, but it's on my list. So there's a question in the chat and it is about, it's probably a question that you get a lot, but how should folks get more, how should people learn about main strikes so that they can participate and let their friends know? Yeah, so as I said, we are currently doing climate strikes, but we will be in the future, hopefully when we can gather and people will start doing some safe strikes. And you can find out when they're happening, it's at climate strike ME on Instagram and Facebook. We post a lot of our events. Also, Main Youth for Climate Justice has a newsletter, which you can join by emailing mainyouth for, I'm putting this in the chat, Justice, and beyond the global climate strikes, we do other sorts of actions and they're all of demand space, so there could be actions to have a talented quite a client emergency and things like that. So all those updates come from there. Thanks, Anna. We had a question from Jess in the chat. Jess, would you be able to ask your question? Yeah, sure. Thank you, Anya, and thank you, Anna, for this great time with you and your sharing. This is really awesome. So my question for you, Anna, is why is it important that youth be involved and listen to and sort of what is the added value that the youth voice brings? And so sort of looking for like an articulation of what you see that being, so that just sort of like to change the frame and think about creating movements and systems that allow for that to amplify it and sort of support it. Yeah, so often the argument is that youth need to be engaged because it's their future they're growing up in. I don't always use that argument because it's not the future, it's the present. We're seeing these effects now with the thousands of acres burned in Oregon. We're seeing everything now with client migration already being stirred. So it's not just that we're in the future that we're gonna be growing up in this. It's that youth have to add a perspective of long ranging issues. And so you see these politicians, they're thinking in two years, they're thinking in four years, they may be thinking in eight years. That's how long their terms are. But youth are thinking about, we're thinking about college, we're thinking about 30 years, we're thinking about our lives way, way ahead than these politicians might be. So youth have that long ranging perspective and that's really why we need to be engaged in government. But also why we need to be engaged politically is that I believe that every kid going up in this world has almost a responsibility to learn about these things by being the news, by talking to your parents, by talking to your friends. I encourage every kid in school to learn something about politics because we need to know what we're dealing with and what we have to do. And it's people often say, oh, but I can't vote yet, like how can I help? But if you educate yourself, then you're able to do other things because I've been doing all this and I can't vote. And so I think that it goes beyond voting, especially if you're doing non electoral work. So yeah. Thanks for that question, Jess. I think we can just transition into opening it up to the group. And if people want to turn on their videos, you're welcome to. Lisa, I saw that there was a question from you in the chat and I don't know if you can turn on your audio, but you're welcome to ask it. I can't be seen very well, but there we are. Hi, Anna. Hi, Ani. So Anna, my question in the chat was, how did your education support you in your activism? Yeah, I love talking about this. So I went to friend schools from middle school. I went there from fourth grade to eighth grade. And I'm currently a weekly high school, but I haven't been there for a long, also been half online. But so in friend school, when it really started, it was, there was a lot of individual support. So as I mentioned, my teacher, Lee Chisholm, really got me into this without him. I don't think I ever would be here. I've always believed that I would be an activist in some sense, just because it's kind of, I'm very opinionated person. It's kind of how I'm geared. So I feel like I would be doing activism somewhere, maybe about gender equality, or LGBTQ rights, but maybe if Lee had never been in my life, I never would be where I am today, which is crazy to think about. So that was a huge source of individual support. But education overall, friend school is very nature-based and community-based, which I think was a perfect way to bring together these ideas of environmentalism and social justice, which creates climate justice. Because at friend school, we talk about integrity and community and equality and all these ideas of how we need to be working together. But then we'd also be outdoors all the time and you can't fight for something and let's see if a connection to it. So by getting all of us outside and getting us on these field trips, being outdoors, that really helps foster, I think I noticed all the younger kids were super, like they were these third graders, being like, we want to go into climate strike. And it's because friend school would take these kids outdoors. So that's super, super important. And it's part of what the main Environmental Education Association does. And then also, in terms of the administration, friend school was very relaxed with me in the sense that I went to school three or four days a week at some points, not COVID related. Even before then, I was going to lots of meetings in Augusta for the main climate council to do talks like these in person, to do training sessions. And it led to a lot of miss school time, especially in Augusta, so far away from me. And they were really calm about that. And I don't think, I can't think of another school that would just let me leave to go talk to legislatures. Like that's amazing. And my current education at Wayne Fleet, I'd say that they really foster dialogue around current events. They give a lot of space for that and they give a lot of space for healthy debate and discourse. But I haven't been there that long, so I can't comment too much about how that's fostered activism. Thanks, Anna and Lisa. David, I'm seeing your question next and I'm wondering if you wanna ask it out loud or I can also read it, but I'm not hearing David unmute it. Okay, go ahead. Should I start the video or ask it out loud? You can ask it out loud, that would be great. Well, it's kind of a too complicated to question in a way. The, what strikes me so often is that people are not satisfied with enough. And that's because we're brought up in a capitalist culture in which, which is built upon a desire that there is no end to what you should accumulate. In other words, it's a culture of excess and what do we need to do? And what could we do to try to change our culture so that it became a more balanced and satisfied way of living? That is an excellent question. And I'm so excited if one of older and I'm taking college courses about this and I can apply, like Lisa was saying, I can apply my education much more directly to these things by taking economics courses and taking courses in environmental policy. But from what I know now, it's really putting more emphasis on equity over equality. There is definitely not a quality in the United States today where many people believe there is because there is the potential for all sorts of people to be enough. There's the potential people to be enough, these opportunities, but they aren't for people to have these same things and to be able to get along in the same way. But there needs to be more focus on equity rather than equality because equality means everyone has the same thing. Equity means everyone gets what they needs. And that's what this is all about. We want everyone to be able to thrive in their own unique and individual way because when it comes down to the United States and the world at large, everyone is unique individual, finding their own way through life has their own historical baggage and context that they had to deal with and without the idea of equity that we cannot get through. And the good visual representation equity, which you may have seen is there's a fence and there's people's 30 different heights and equality, they're all given one box to stand on and one person can see and the other two can't. Equity is where first person doesn't need a box, second person needs one box and the third person needs two boxes and then they're all able to see over the fence. And so that's really what it comes down to is the idea of gearing an economic system towards what people need, what they need to have, how they can thrive and how they can live their best lives rather than what are we importing? What are we exporting? What are the numbers? How, what is the wavy line on the stock market look like? That shouldn't matter. That wavy line shouldn't matter. The fact that matters more than real lives is the problem. And again, I'm excited for when I can give a more specific answer about economic systems when I have taken those kinds of courses and I can do more self-education. Thanks, Anna. Juanita, I'm seeing a question from you in the chat wondering if you wanna ask it out loud. Sure, thank you, Anya. Anna, it's nice to meet you and I hope to see you at Hog Island next year. I just live up the road from Hog Island. But I was wondering, is the group that you're working with, working with the indigenous population who are the real masters or not masters, but the real knowers of how to value life, land and people? And they've been here for over 15,000 years so they have some experience. Yeah, that's an excellent point. As I was saying earlier in response to one question from Jess that you have the long-range perspective. Well, indigenous people of Maine often have the belief of seven generations so even a longer-ranging perspective. And yeah, so we collaborated with indigenous youth, indigenous people, especially the Wabanaki people a few times over with, we hosted a webinar with the Senate candidates including Betsy Sweet, Tiffany Bond and Lisa Savage and brought forward some questions from the indigenous community. And we partnered with them as a coalition to work on an effort and direct action to give Wabanaki people sovereignty. The state of Maine has not granted Wabanaki people sovereignty, which still makes my blood boil every time I talk about it. It's crazy to think that the Wabanaki people have been here as he said, over 15,000 years in the Don and then we're essentially almost driven out in a way and now live in Vermont's Northern Kingdom have not been given sovereignty. And I don't know if you've recently heard but a company in Bangor ended up thousands of gallons of chemical were being leaked into the Posenska River which the Posenska tribe can often relies on. So yes, we were working with the Wabanaki people to get sovereignty. That was an action plan for April. Obviously it didn't happen. We are waiting for the legislature to open again and waiting to hear from them if they will continue that fight and if they are, then we will definitely partner with them again. But we'd always love to work with them more. It can just be hard to make those connections. Thanks, Anna. There's another question in the chat from Amelia and Ollie. And the question is, how can I help even though I'm seven years old? What things can I learn about? This is a good question because I feel like I'd say my only advice applies about finding what we're interested in and looking into it. I'd say don't pressure yourself to feel like it's great to get involved and don't feel like you need to know everything earlier. I was saying that I was really only thought about composting things and plastic straws and polar bears instead of people and environmental racism in the intersectionality of all this. And I talked about it like that was a bad thing. And it was great that I learned more and understood more about what climate justice means. But that's where I was at the time. At that time, I was about composting and I was about plastic straws. And that's where I needed to be because I couldn't have understood all those things at this time. So don't feel any pressure to feel like you need to know all these things and to know everything about politics. It's just amazing that seven years old, you're listening to me and you've sat for almost an hour and listen, I honestly hate sitting on webinars. I would not sit in on this webinar if I wasn't speaking, to be honest. So that's amazing. And that's just a great first step. So if where you're at is composting and milk straws, that's great. If you want to become more involved, oh wait, what grade is seven years old? I feel old right now. I'm only 14, but like I don't know. I heard second grade. Second grade, okay. I was gonna, yeah, no, that's too good. I was gonna recommend something. But yeah, just to see what interests you if you're really into animals as well, read about animals and how they're doing and be at the end function at where you can be. So I don't know if that made any sense. No, I think that's a great answer, Anna. And I think something that you and I talk about a lot is that everybody's needed in addressing climate change. And so it doesn't really matter how old you are or how young you are, but as long as you're passionate about solving climate change and learning more, that's really what's important. So I think what Anna is saying about finding your passion and figuring out what really matters to you and then learning as much as you can is such a great way to go forward with it. And yeah, we're running a little low on time. And I just wanted to ask you one more sort of like discussion question and then maybe we could wrap up. And I'm seeing a couple other questions in the chat and I don't think that we're gonna have time to get to all of them unfortunately. But my question is like, what's next? What's next for you after the elections over? What do you think that main strikes and that you will be doing? Yeah, so this is a question that we have as well. Honestly, we are gonna, the week after the election we're planning a big reorientation call. What happened? Where are we going from here and what do we wanna focus on? I'd say just before that what I can think of is that we're gonna be working on a digressment bill because there, I don't know if I have time to explain this, it's a little complicated. But if you're interested in doing some research, there's an organization called MainPERS, Main, the P-E-R-S, all caps, which holds their retirement funds of public employees and teachers. And a huge amount of that money is invested in fossil fuels and banks that donate to fossil fuel corporations. And so one of our allies who we endorsed going into the main legislature, hopefully it all goes well in this election, going through the main legislature is gonna pose a bill to divest MainPERS. So we want to be working on that. We also wanna continue client emergency efforts. I just wanna do a little plug here. Anyone can do client emergency, anyone. It would be if you are interested as an adult ally in trying to do client emergency in your town, getting your town to promise to be 100% renewable by 2030, reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to help you work on it. What I do is I do one-on-one calls with individual people for client emergency. And that's a big part of my work. So definitely, if you're excited about that. So divestment, client emergency, depending on the results of the election, there might be some direct action striking, kind of make sure they vote to kind of properly don't, like that kind of thing. If things don't go in the direction that we hope, making sure that people are being heard and that there isn't corruption going on. Hopefully it doesn't come to that. And I'd say developing our teams. We have teams in Bangor, Portland, Bates College. We'd like to develop more around the state. If you have students interested, if you have kids interested, definitely let us know. We'd love to get more youth involved. And as on your scene earlier, we'd like to have anyone, some of our teams do education. Some of our teams are reading client emergency efforts. It's a spectrum. Some of the people involved are hand posters and some people involved are reading working groups. So anyone can be part of it. That was a very long way to answer the question Anya, but we really don't exactly know what we're doing because of the election. So. That's okay. I think a lot of people feel the same. And obviously there's just so much work to be done. And so also it makes sense that there's a billion different projects that you're working on. So, and I just wanna thank you again so much for taking the time to speak with us this evening. I'm gonna drop in the chat a link to sign up for future, for future focus talks in the future. Our next talk is on December 1st at 430 with Amara Fiji. And our next, our talk after that is in January with Sarohi Kumar. And they're both really fantastic youth activists working in the state of Maine. And the way that we're gonna do this series is that the next webinar is gonna be hosted by Anna. So it'll be Anna and Amara and you won't see me. But we're just so excited to have you here. We hope you'll come back next month. And thank you all and have a great night. And thank you, Anna. Thank you all. Also, this is being recorded. So it'll be viewable on Facebook and other in the future focus website. So, thank you.