 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Shobita Parthasarathy. I'm Professor of Public Policy and the Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, known as STPP, here at the Ford School of Public Policy. STPP is an interdisciplinary university-wide program dedicated to training students, conducting cutting edge research, and informing the public and policymakers on issues at the intersection of technology, science, equity, society, and public policy. One of the few pandemics over linings is that we have a large and international audience joining us today, welcome. And so for those of you interested in learning more about our STPP program, you can do so at our website, which is stpp.fordschool.umich.edu. Before I introduce today's speakers, I wanna make a couple of announcements. Tomorrow at noon, the Ford School is hosting a conversation with Diane Grunich, former California Public Utility Commissioner, and Monica Gadinger, Director of the Institute for Science, Society, and Policy at the University of Ottawa, and the discussion is focusing on energy regulation in North America. If you're interested in attending, you can register at the link in the chat. Second, along with the University of Michigan Science, Technology, and Society program, the STPP program is organizing an international interdisciplinary panel series in May and June. It'll be on Fridays, Fridays at noon in May and June, focused on science, technology, and the carceral state. It's called Behind Walls Beyond Disciplines, Science, Technology, and the Carceral State. It was originally conceived as a conference to be held last year, but we postponed it due to the pandemic, and we've now reconceived it as a series of panels. We're currently finalizing the schedule, and we will send out a registration link in the next few weeks, so look out for that. And now for today's event. We are hosting a very important conversation, I think, about environmental sustainability, social justice, and public policy, featuring Professor Darshan Karwat and Professor Toni Reaves. Professor Karwat is an assistant professor at the School for the Future of Innovation and Society at Arizona State University. He studied aerospace engineering, specializing in gas dynamics and combustion, and sustainability ethics right here at the University of Michigan. He then worked as a AAAS fellow in Washington, D.C. First at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the Innovation Team, where he worked on climate change resilience and low-cost air pollution sensors, and then at the U.S. Department of Energy in the Water Power Technologies Office, where he helped design and run the Wave Energy Prize. Welcome back, at least virtually, to Michigan. Hi, great to be back. Professor Karwat. Yeah. Professor Toni Reaves is assistant professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability and a faculty affiliate in the STPP program. He's a multidisciplinary scholar with a background in engineering, social science, and public administration. His research seeks to connect the areas of technological advancement, public policy processes, and social equity. He extends environmental justice scholarship to focus on energy justice, and he's currently exploring disparities in residential energy generation, consumption, and affordability, focusing on the production and persistence of inequality by race, class, and place. And so you can see how these two talking is going to be very interesting today. They will both talk to one another for about 30 minutes, and then we will open the floor for questions. Please submit your questions through the Q&A function. Professor Karwat, Professor Reaves, take it away. All right. Thank you so much, Shavita, for those introductions, and thank you again, Dasha, for joining us. Really looking forward to this conversation as we kind of go back and forth about how our research and interest overlap and just how we can talk about today's topic of this intersection between sustainability, social justice, and public policy. It's really interesting because we last saw each other just over a year ago, right before the world changed when I was visiting Tempe in January of 2020, which seems so, so, so long ago. And I think what's interesting and how I think we could kick this topic off is as we're coming up on a year of the COVID-19 pandemic and all the issues that I think are so relevant to today's topic and that have become a lot more salient because of the crisis. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about how the pandemic has impacted the direction of your work over the last year and what you focused on. Yeah, yeah. Well, again, thank you so much for the invite. It's so lovely to see you, Tony. Thank you, Molly and Shavita, for organizing all of this. It's fabulous to at some level reconnect with the place that I care so much about. So thank you for that. I would say in some ways, what's happened over the last year has affected my work and in some ways it hasn't. And it's affected just how I think about the kinds of things that I care about, really. I mean, I guess, I don't know about you, like as I have progressed in age, and I'm not like that old, but as I've gotten older, I just feel like I'm less sure about things and just have more and more questions. And the last year has really made me think differently about what justice means in the first place. So just one example, I live in Arizona and Navajo Nation is a big part of Arizona. Indigenous issues are a big part of what happens in this state and in many ways, Arizona is kind of like ground zero for a lot of the important issues in the US, right? Like native rights, immigration, climate change, all of that. But there's a long legacy of injustice and inequity as it relates to indigenous folks, not only in Arizona, but widely. And that legacy is long. And at some level, it's like the longer the legacy is, it's like, I wonder the extent to which it increases the work that needs to be done to address that like the longstanding injustice, right? So, let's just say a couple of hundred years of injustice. If you look at issues in Navajo Nation, poor infrastructure quality, right? There's like poor drinking water, right? We also knew that there's poor educational infrastructure. Now because of the pandemic with the transition to learning online, that raised questions about how folks on Navajo Nation are gonna go to school, right? So like the lack of infrastructure, lack of internet has now affected education in a new way. So like when I think about that, and I'm not any kind of expert or like super knowledgeable about the issues in Navajo Nation, but like just sort of stepping back and like, well, you already have this legacy of injustice. Now there is another injustice. And then you're like piling on top of even more, right? Like it's just like layers and layers and layers. And I don't know what to think about that scale, like injustice at that scale, you know, both sort of a temporal scale, but also from like a spectrum of the kinds of injustices that are overlapping and like dynamic with each other. And so it just sort of makes me think about what it means to address injustice. Like injustice is just shapeshifting all the time, right? And like what we consider an injustice today might not be an injustice tomorrow or what we think we may have made progress. And then like circumstances change is like, holy crap, like there's another issue to deal with. And so it actually made me think about MLK's quote, like, you know, the moral of the universe is long and it bends towards justice. And I'm like, I don't know. Like it's kind of seems like a squiggly line that goes in different kinds of directions. And so I just have questions about that. Like what does it mean? Like, especially because when you try to like break down the problem and try to address it, it just is incommensurate with the scale at which the injustice is actually there, you know? So that's sort of one response to your question. I mean, like all the engineering and social science work that we've been doing, I think that's like plugging along in the, at the intersection of environmental justice and climate justice, energy justice and engineering and science. But I don't know, or I'm thinking differently about what it means to work on issues of injustice or justice. And all of that said, I guess I've also, so I'm an aerospace engineer by training. I think Dr. Parthasthi mentioned that. And I feel like the work that I've been focusing on oftentimes has been in response to some kind of problem in the world. You know, like it's just like sort of like a negative, like a response to something that's negative, right? Like you see people being mistreated or something. And so you wanna respond to that. And it can be tiring, especially like because those injustices keep changing. And so it just sort of made me think about like why I got into engineering in the first place. And I got into it because I love like rockets and stars and space and all of that. And so I've been trying to also like carve out some part of my time and thinking just to like think about like why I love engineering in the first place. So thinking about deep space and stuff like that. So how about you? Yeah, I think, as you were talking, I was thinking about our friends in sociology might talk about concentrated disadvantage, right? These issues that are concentrated on certain populations or certain places. And I've heard some public health friends refer to this as a syndemic and not a pandemic because you have the intersection of racial injustice, a health crisis, a economic crisis, now moving into an education crisis with kids learning at home like you were talking about. And so it is kind of this moment where we're looking at all these disparate issues that people may study individually, but now saying like what happens when this comes to a head with climate change continuing to be ever present in our minds, we think about what happened in Texas. I think kind of like you, research may not have changed or shift as much because we were kind of already in the space of looking at these intersections like technology, policy and inequality. But I think the microscope and when it might be difficult for us to explain what we do to friends or family, now we can say like, hey, this is what happens when we make decisions about our energy system and they're not equitable or when we make decisions in public health to roll out vaccines or slowly roll out economic assistance, what happens to people who are already on the verge of struggle or different challenges. And so there's a policy response to this, there's some technology responses to this, but if none of those responses are centered on equity and justice, then the same people who are always disadvantaged will continue to be disadvantaged. So thinking along those same terms, Darshan, we've heard terminology like slow violence that's been used to describe climate change, poor environmental governance and how that's impacting communities around the world. At ASU, you run the re-engineered group and interdisciplinary group that kind of embeds peace, social justice, environmental protection in the field of engineering. I think it'll be interesting for our guests today to kind of hear you talk about why and how these siloed areas of research and action are integrated in your work. Yeah. I mean, I guess that sort of the origin story really is at the University of Michigan where I was a student organizer and activist trying to get the university to do different kinds of things related to environmental protection and social justice, all alongside me being a graduate student, combustion chemistry and aerospace engineering at Michigan. And I'm really grateful to my PhD advisor, Professor Woodridge, who's still at the University of Michigan for creating a space in which I could think about engineering in a multidimensional kind of way. It wasn't just what unfolded in the lab, but it's like why we were doing things in the first place. And how do we think about justifying technological investments? And how do we think about engineering responses to climate change and the extent to which those responses reflect the unique nature of climate change or whether engineers working on these problems simply think about climate change as another technological problem that they can just turn the technological crank. All right, carbon is the problem, solar energy. It's just like essentially using the same kind of thinking that they've used. And I guess I don't know, when I look out at the world, there's just so much potential for wonderful, important work to be done. There's this notion of undone science. David Hess and Frickl, I guess, have talked about this notion of undone science. And that translates to technological development, engineering, and so on. And it's like, well, what are ways in which we can actually address these longstanding challenges in society, particularly given the centrality of technological systems in society today? How we organize ourselves? How we communicate policies, so on? And I get emailed once, twice a week from total cold emails from people, engineers who I don't know, saying, hey, I didn't study engineering to get a desk job in some cubicle designing some small widget as part of some subsystem that's part of some system that I'm not really going to have any kind of stake in. I came into engineering to do something else. And so you're an engineer, so I'm sure you've had similar thoughts. I think you have, on the one hand, this undone work. And then, on the other hand, you have folks who want to do this kind of work, but don't see how they can do it because our financial, economic policy structures aren't set up in ways to actually marry the two. And so I think fundamentally what we need to do is reimagine and create new kinds of cultures that are supported by new kinds of structures to get more engineers and scientists of all ilk to address these undone challenges. Because I think deeply, again, working with engineers at ASU, just interacting with students, they care about human rights. They care about social justice. They care about all of these issues. And so I think it behooves us to figure out ways to make that happen. And so my lab is sort of structured around trying to create these cross-fertilization efforts. So I have a post-doctoral fellow working with me who's an engineer turn sociologist. I have somebody who's a cultural pedagogy expert and cares about participation, the notion of participation and what it means, particularly in the context of energy and energy transitions. I have an undergraduate student in mechanical engineering. So I'm trying to create a space in which different kinds of people who can work with each other can unfold. And I think going back to this question of why I think this is important, I really think that it's the world that we want to live in, like a just, verdant, peaceful world. MacArthur Foundation uses those terms. Let's just go with just, verdant, peaceful world. That world needs to be built, like literally physically built. We can't, it's hard for me at least to imagine a world 20 years from now with the same kind of infrastructure that we have and it being a just, verdant, peaceful world. We actually have to design and build things differently that organizes society differently, that creates new kinds of economic incentives, those structures that allows us to build the world that we want to live in or be on that trajectory. And so that's what we're trying to do is really think about reimagining what engineering is for, creating those kinds of structures, basically thinking about research differently, teaching differently. And in the end, it's about impact. If I cannot demonstrate the impact of my work on a particular group of people, or like, then it's not worth doing, that's all, you know? Something you mentioned that made me think about, in the contents of sustainability, right? You have this Venn diagram of the environment, the economy and here in this talk, we've kind of pulled out the social equity, social justice piece, but that's supposed to be a very integral part of sustainability. And when you were talking about designing infrastructure of the future and how it needs to look different, I don't know if you've been involved heavily with any of the kind of biomemory movement where we try to take examples from nature and think about how our future can actually resemble nature and how it works. I just don't know if that's come up in your work or if you- It comes up in conversations so many times I have a really good friend, Hannah Breitz in sustainability, who's a political scientist and sustainability professor, and she's like, dude, you would really love that. You would really- That's the way we think about it, yeah. Now that you've said it, I gotta make something happen. You gotta do it. And I know there's an institute or program there at ASU because we met them when we were visiting, but I do think about that as a way to begin to kind of bridge the original Venn diagram and make sure it actually worked, right? Because we have examples in nature that we can look at and how it functions and no longer need to pay a paradise and put up a parking lot, right? We can definitely think about this differently. And that's actually how I went from engineering to public administration because I was looking at green infrastructure and the disparities and nice green infrastructure that was put in the suburbs and just more and more asphalt and concrete being put and into the urban core of Kansas City, Missouri. And yeah, and so I was like, well, who's making the decisions to decide who gets green infrastructure and who doesn't? And so you have this idea of, as engineers, we're not necessarily connected to the policy world as much as I think needs to happen. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really important point because oftentimes when we talk about connection to the public policy, we've talked about science engagement, like science and public policy, but we haven't really talked a whole lot about engineering and public policy and the ways in which engineers who are like completely, they're trained completely differently. They're like the economic corporate structures under which they work are oftentimes very different than scientists. And I think engineers ought to recognize more the agency that they have. And it's hard, it's hard, but there has to be some sort of recognition or reflection on the agency that engineers feel like they have to make the difference in the world that they feel needs to be made. Because oftentimes, again, you end up working for some company and you are just one cog in a large machine of engineers. And I had an internship at GE Aviation when I was an undergrad. And I saw engineers as far as I could see in a cubicle farm in a basement and like walking through that cubicle farm, like I saw the biggest group of grumpy old men in my life, right? They're like, and again, I doubt that they got into engineering because that's what they thought they were gonna do. They come in wanting to change the world, like wanting to work on sustainability, wanting to reimagine our relationship to technology, but the opportunities that we afford them just don't really align. But I like that you've made this distinction between engineers and public policy and scientists and public policy because I don't think engineers are involved to the extent that they should be. Yeah, no, I think that's a really great connection that it's missing and it's happy to hear that you are making that connection in your research group. So thinking about moving from being grumpy at work into being inspired, right? Across the country right now. If we look at some of the executive orders that the Biden administration signed as soon as they came into office and just how we're thinking about research on climate change and sustainability and action on adaptation and mitigation. In your work, you look at community-based approaches to action, I think is another key point of, there's kind of a top-down driven action, but there's also the bottom-up action that takes into account local knowledge. So what are some ways you think that the current administration, if you were called tomorrow to come and be a senior advisor, can be effective in meeting our goals for just transition, climate change, adaptation and mitigation based on how you've kind of done your work? Yeah, that's a great question. I guess I have sort of, I guess three responses to that. The first is around really thinking about the different ways in which questions of justice or just transitions, environmental justice are characterized depending on where you are in society. I think the second question has to do with time and the amount of effort necessary. And the third is, I think sort of around thinking about ways to frame these issues that bring more people under the umbrella of these issues. So I can spend a couple of minutes just talking about each one of those. So like first I mentioned, recognizing how differently these problems are characterized depending on where you are. Environmental justice is an issue because people on the ground have made an issue, right? Over many, many decades, all of these different threads of political action, whether it's civil rights or occupational health or whatever, they've come together to sort of create this tapestry that we call environmental justice. And that is founded at some level fundamentally on this notion of rebalancing political power in society. Now that's what the demand is from the ground, right? When you look at the definition of environmental justice from the federal standpoint, like the top most level that you can get, the way in which the federal government thinks about environmental justice is like a canyon wide away definition, right? It's about fair treatment or disproportionate burdens. It's not about like if we think about Bunyan Bryant's definition of environmental justice, which is around like thriving futures essentially, right? So on the one hand, you have disproportionate impact right at the federal level and fair treatment of all folks. And the other from the ground is like, no, we want like a thriving future for ourselves, right? And I think that folks who work in the federal government, I was there and I know how dedicated they are to doing the best job that they can. But I think like recognizing that fundamental gap, that big gap between how people on the ground think about these issues and how the government has characterized these issues is an important starting place. The second is around time and resources. If you look back at the executive orders, there's like one particular section of it called the justice 40 initiative. I'm sure you're aware of it, right? Like how can we mobilize 40% of certain investments to benefit communities that we care of, something like that, right? If you trace back the roots of where that came from, it seems like it came from New York state, right? They started with this number 40% and they've tried to develop policy around that. You watch the videos of the discussions that happen around the 40% and what do you hear? You hear overworked government employees. They have 10,000 jobs to do and now here's another thing that they have to focus on, right? And I have heard the exact same thing with folks within another federal agency that I have very close ties to and friends in. They're like, we care about these issues. I have 10 jobs that I need to do and now there's this like, I have to care about environmental justice. And it's not that they don't care about environmental justice or energy justice, but it's on top of all of the things that they already were far behind on, right? And so I think that that's something to bear in mind that, you know, this notion of we talk about overburdened folks in society, right? Like, you know, the high levels of air pollution, exposure, you know, so on and so forth. And I felt like the people who we are tasking to address those issues themselves are burdened in very different kinds of ways in ways that can make the ideas that they come up with either ineffective or they just don't have the mental resources to design things in new ways, right? And oftentimes the idea jar that they're reaching into is empty, right? They haven't really had the time to think about like, oh, what would we do if, you know? So that idea jar is empty and it's for people like you and me, whatever to fill that idea jar and like get them to do different kinds of things, right? That's the second. And then the last thing is, I think the politics of framing these issues can be divisive. And I guess what I wanna say about like, what I mean by that is people might very quickly characterize notions of environmental justice as something of the left, right? But if we look at what's happening in West Virginia and Kentucky with just transitions, right? They're not issues of the left. It's everybody's issue, right? Basically poor people are screwed. Like that's what happens, right? And depending on what your racial characteristics are, it looks different, right? But how do we frame these issues in ways where people who would like, who would not frame these issues in a way where people don't automatically raise walls when they hear the terms? Because in the end, oftentimes these issues are affecting their communities too. So I think that, you know, I've been trying to think about how to frame these issues in ways that sort of expand the umbrella that allows people to see the commonalities between their plights, right? I think fundamentally like the biggest challenge I see in America is that we can't see ourselves in a relationship with people who are not like us. And oftentimes we have more in common with our challenges that is going unrecognized. And so, you know, if we think about, again, about environmental justice, energy justice, just transitions, those issues might be unfolding in different parts of the country, but like share huge overlaps. And how do we frame the work that we do in ways that like touch on, you know, like across the political spectrum? Yeah. Oh man, you get on a lot of gyms there. I'm even thinking about, you know, how do we re-engineer, re-imagine government, right? And how we address these challenges, you know? And like you say, everything right now is just stacking on or trying to undo anything from the previous administration. Yeah. And like you say, the long-term, you know, government workers are like, you know, whoa, you know, they're shell shocked because it's like going back and forth. But even on your third point is, you know, the scale of community, right? Community can be defined in so many various scales. You have your local neighborhood or your state as a community or the country as a community and something like climate change needs a global community, right? And so, you know, that scale is really important to how we address these challenges as well. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, those points are... So I wanted to... What I wanted to say is the class that I'm teaching this semester is around trying to address environmental justice issues in a way that moves beyond the politics of divide, directly addressing the executive order. And I feel like we need to give students more and more opportunities to like start doing stuff, right, learn by doing, send the ideas out into the world, right? And see what happens. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the real world... What's happening in the world outside of, you know, academia I think is really an opportunity for, you know, us as professors to really, you know, say to our students like, you know, this is a real policy that was just passed or this is a real initiative that, you know, our government is actually trying to implement. You know, how can we think through that and are there ways that students can engage, whether it's in writing op-eds or, you know, participating in public comments? I think, yeah, having clear opportunities for students to engage right now and letting them know that they can, I think is really important. So we're getting close to, we're gonna open it up for questions from the audience. But another interesting thing that you're doing in your work is that you co-founded the Constellation Prize. And I've seen your emails about it, asking for nominations and things. So can you tell us a little bit about what this is, the motivation for creating this award and the influence that you hope it will have? Yeah. I just feel like we can tell much better stories about what engineering can be for in the world. And we need to do a better job at creating networks of like-minded people who care about deploying engineering for the purpose of environmental protection, social justice, human rights and peace. And the award is simply an attempt at trying to highlight the work that we feel is happening but is going unrecognized, such that it might inspire others to say, oh, I can do that too. And so through the prize, we're essentially just trying to create a community of practice and network and tell better stories about what is possible such that if we know what is possible, then hopefully we create structures to better support that work in ways that hopefully, I think in the end, change economic structures that allow people to make a living wage doing that kind of engineering work. So it's just an attempt at that because, I think there's a sort of cultural signals that you can have all the way to economic signals. And so we're trying to like re-engineered is basically trying to work in that spectrum of like cultural change to economic change to do the kind of engineering work that I think needs to happen in the world. Yeah, that's really great. So, but I look at some of the questions that we're getting from the audience. And so as we were talking right before, we came on about vaccinations and what that means for the future. And so as you think about the disparities that we've seen or inequalities that we've seen exacerbated by COVID, whether it's racial inequality, social economic inequality. And this idea that as soon as we're everybody's vaccinated or we have enough of the population vaccinated that we can get back to quote, normal. And your idea of the prize, you know, really pushing economic and social change. You know, how do we disrupt this idea of going back to normal? Our unsustainable will pass. You know, have you thought any about that or are you talking about that with your students? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I'll just tell you a couple of feelings that I have. I mean, the world is, it's kind of like a complex adaptive system, right? It's always like, you know, new equilibria that are formed. This is what the world was like and there's like some forcing function that changes the world into another, you know, equilibrium of sorts. If we think about it from an ecological perspective. And I just have a feeling like what's happening right now is actually gonna have a much longer shadow than we think it's gonna have in ways that are gonna be unexpected. I mean, like everything real estate is changing. It's changing city budgets, which could change social services. I'm like, it's just sort of cascading. So, you know, I don't know what a new normal or a new equilibrium looks like. I think we're sort of still in the beginning phases of what the long-term restructuring of the world or at least the United States looks like. That's just a feeling I have. It could be completely wronged. Yeah, right, right. I'm trying to think about, you know, and yeah, will we play it by ear? Or will we actually plan to, you know, do something different? And thinking about that, you know, if the idea or if the ideal is a just, a more just world, you know, how do we ensure that kind of engineering and technology plays a role into that rather than, you know, just kind of allowing just the engineering and technology to define. Right. What's a public good or just how do we kind of frame it? Well, I mean, I think I'm curious to know how you feel about how like I brought up this idea of the idea jar, like what do we have ready? What have we thought through, right? You know, maybe you've read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, maybe not, but like, you know, to the extent that you buy into her thesis, there's a lot of intellectual labor that can be done during times of normalcy that, you know, moments of change can allow us to sort of propose what alternative visions of the future could be. And I don't know the extent to which people who care about issues of social justice and environmental justice, whatever, have said, this is the policy idea, right? Like here's, here's, we've thought about it. We spent five years thinking about it, right? Here's the packet, experiment with it, right? I think that we do a really good job at critiquing and sort of like always asking questions, but like as an engineer, like you have to make decisions, right? Like this is what we should do, right? And then see what happens. And I think that we could personally, I think that I would love to see more just try this, try that, try that kinds of ideas. I mean, it's kind of happening with like universal basic income and stuff like that after like a long slog of promoting those ideas, but yeah, I think like, is the, are we keeping the ideas are full, right? Yeah. And I think there's some tension too between, you know, kind of known science and trying things out, right? And there's a fine line between when that can be done and when that can't be done, right? Think about fear and concern about the vaccine, right? Like, oh, there's not enough science to know if it works. And so, you know, that is very risky. There are, you know, a lot of concerns about experimenting on underrepresented disadvantaged populations. And so like real concerns about science and testing things out on people, but, you know, there are some cases like you'd be in a universal basic income or, you know, other poverty alleviation programs that, you know, we can test out as pilots, right? And then have some information and data that we can say how we scale this up. And I don't, like you said, I don't know if we do that enough and I think those opportunities are definitely there. Yeah. So are there any other kind of structures or institutions or infrastructures that you kind of seen at small scale that we should, you know, immediately if we have a big stimulus package that comes out, you know, anything you think you've seen kind of pilot it that should be done at scale to reach some of these objectives? I mean, one group that I'm particularly inspired by is Community Engineering Corps. They are an offshoot of engineers without borders but they're different in a few ways. I mean, first of all, it's U.S. focus, but importantly, it engages practicing engineers and professional engineers and deploys their services in communities that may lack access to those kinds of services, right? Whether it's like poor drinking water infrastructure or, you know, downtown needs to be reconceived and rebuilt to energy structures and so on. And I feel like ways in which we can continue to invest in ideas like Community Engineering Corps is one thing. I mean, again, like I'm very, very inspired by the work that they do. I think one question that I have and I'm curious to know what you think about this. Oftentimes when we think about environmental justice challenges and like communities have raised, like sort of raised the flags of, hey, you know, poor air quality around this industrial facility, something needs to happen. Oftentimes there's been a lot of investment in ways that affect only that community, right? So if I think about it from the perspective of community-based research and work and engineers and scientists doing that work, you could spend $5 million addressing the technical needs of a community around a petrochemical refinery in Norco, Louisiana, right? But if you go 10 miles down the road, I guarantee you there's another community around another petrochemical refinery asking the same questions, right? And 20 miles down the road again. So I've been wondering how like maybe even you think about understanding what the commonalities are between the challenges that a lot of EJ communities might be facing and invest the limited resources that tend to be invested in those issues in ways that have the largest impact across the community-based similar issues, right? Because again, we're working, hopefully not in the future, working with limited resources, right? But let's just say we're given a billion dollars, right? How do you do that work in a way that affects the most communities? Because you could easily spend a billion dollars remediating one brownfield site and it really has like sort of no structural impact, right? So what do you think about that? Yeah, I think that's such a great question. And you see that even talking or making connections between different environmental justice groups and then realizing like, oh, we had the same problem and being able to learn from another group that was able to address some issue, a landfill or some other site in their community. And so there's even a lack of opportunity for groups to connect to learn about best practices and what works. We have the Michigan Advisory Council Environmental Justice here. And those are some of the conversations we're having, right? We have people on the Advisory Council from different communities. They're bringing in issues. We have academics who are saying like, how do we do some statewide assessment of what are the environmental justice issues across the state? And then thinking about how we inform the environmental agency on making rules and laws that can actually address this in more than one community. And so it is about looking at kind of past examples of what worked, looking at what didn't work because that's definitely another side of that, right? But it's just about, I think sharing information. How do those messages get out, right? When you see a news article about something happening in a black rural community in Mississippi and realizing that that's very similar to an urban community in Detroit. Or like you said, what's happening in West Virginia, which might be similar to something that's happening on a Navajo Nation. And so really trying to, like you said, find those similarities. And sometimes the corporations that are doing the harm, they might go by a different name, but it's the same company just operating in a different place, right? And so being able to track that down as well. Yeah, that's, yeah, I think, I don't know if there's a space or a place that kind of hosts all of that, right? How do we, so I know there's a group called the Energy Justice, I wanna say initiative, but that might be wrong, but they're tracking like incinerators. And so they have a list of best practices on how to mobilize around shutting down an incinerator in your community. And so taking that one issue, but showing examples of what other communities have done to address that issue in their community and more opportunities like that, I think would be important. Yeah. We got a question here about experiential learning, practicums and project learning, seem way more relevant or very relevant now. Do you feel that universities have a responsibility to steer students to work on sustainability projects that serve communities in need? Absolutely. I think it's a one word answer. I mean, it sort of makes us think about what the role of the university and society is and universities mobilize resources in ways that ought to be leveraged for impacting the communities that we're a part of. Yeah. So yes, absolutely. And I think, we're both at public universities. And I think, definitely a mission of the public university is to be a part of the community, to serve the community and thinking about how to do that, do that authentically is key. And there could be some balance between some of these theoretical hypothetical experiences and issues, but there are real issues that we need real solutions to now, right? So what better place? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, in the end, especially as you're an engineer and I've trained in engineering, we care about design, right? And oftentimes the learning that we do comes from empiricism, right? Like thermodynamics came about because of the steam engine, not the other way around, right? And I think that there's perhaps important theoretical insights that we can gain into the nature of problems by actually just working on the problems. Yeah. Okay, so that's really interesting because I'm looking at the next question here. And it kind of talks about engineering technology is really based in this idea of understanding hard quantitative data. And so some people may shy away from social justice because that's considered some of those soft skills or I may not have done a lot of qualitative work or dealt with communities. You know, how can we, you know, assuage those fears and how can we push people to know that those things need to be totally integrated? Yeah. So I've been, I sort of conceptualize this idea called activist engineering when I was in grad school. And as I've thought about what it means to be an activist engineer, it sort of made me think about three questions that I've sort of modified from the science for the people movement. But basically it's like, why am I or why are we engineers? For whose benefit do we work? And what's the full measure of our moral and social responsibility? And as actors in society, whether we like it or not, we work for someone or some entity, right? Either indirectly or directly. And I think that as soon as we, as technically trained professionals who are supposed to be objective, whatever that means, right? We know that that's not the case, right? Like our work serves interests and we can figure out ways in which to serve the interests that we care about. So I think that it's perhaps easier to, it can be easier, I should say. It can be easier to get technically trained professionals to reflect on the political environments that they find themselves in. And as long as they recognize that the space that they're in is some political environment that's been defined by business leaders or lawyers or whoever, right? I think once you recognize that, it allows you to then say, well, does it have to be that way? Oftentimes we don't train engineers in that way to recognize them as political actors, right? And I think that, again, once you see it, then perhaps it opens up other possibilities of aligning your work in the way that you want it to be. Yeah. And thinking of that alignment, Darshan, have you had any experience or any thoughts about, take the big greens and the environmental justice groups and some of the tension between the thoughts on how we address climate change? Have you had any thoughts about that or any interactions with that tension? Oh, gosh. I've thought about it a little bit, but not to the extent that I feel like I can just give a nice answer to your question. You would probably agree that big green characterizes the issues in a very different way than environmental justice community characterizes the issues, and then it's a battle of values. And whose values went out, right? Yeah, and I think that kind of align with what you were saying about corporations, right? That's their way to, the design to engineer our way out of climate change can definitely be at the detriment of other communities, right? Because it's who are you trying to protect? Because I think that scale of how we define community varies across designs. So yeah, okay, let's see. We got, I saw one question from a current PhD engineering student, and I think you could have a good response to this about, if you aren't necessarily traditional engineering, how would you define that? What advice do you have for someone trying to think about what type of department they should go to after engineering school if they wanna do more of a kind of integrated approach to engineering? Always a tough question. I mean, I think I'll give a slightly parallel or like adjacent response to that. I think that unfortunately, if that's the kind of person you are, the world isn't set up for you to very quickly be successful. And it's gonna require you to do more work. You have to do more work, right? So if you really care about applying remote sensing techniques from satellites to do blah, blah, blah, right? You might not be able to find opportunities in ways that align with how you want to leverage your technological skills. It might be also that you have to learn other kinds of skills, right? Like as you brought up, like qualitative social science research, right? And then like figure out ways in which that changes your technological development or whatever, right? It just requires a little bit more work. Now, I don't mean for that to sound like disheartening or anything. It's just like, again, the structures that support that particular person who wants to do that kind of work just don't exist at the scale that the demand is for that. And if they wanna actually reach out to me directly, they should and we can sort of further that conversation because I'd love to figure out ways to, I don't wanna ever, if somebody comes knocking the door, it's like, open door, yep, come on in. Let's figure, we'll figure it out rather than say, I don't have the time or resources for that. So I would just encourage that person to reach out to me and you can get my email, I can maybe even just put it in the chat here. Just send me and we'll work it out. Yeah, thank you, thank you for offering that, Dash. And I think that's great because that is one of the challenges of, you finish your PhD and you're like, okay, is there a home for me if I'm not, if I look at my advisor and I might not be just like my advisor. Yeah, thanks for offering that. So we're coming up on time. And I think when I wrap up with one question that I think kind of ties in everything we've been talking about today, this intersection between sustainability, social justice and public policy. And that's around the issue of trust, because various examples of legitimate distrust of science, legitimate distrust of engineers, legitimate distrust of policymakers. And a lot of it is because of the injustice that is assigned to the decisions made by these different groups. And so how have you thought about you and your work and your group thought about building trust between engineers, scientists, technologists, public policymakers and the community, the community that many of us are really working hard to do the right thing for. But because of our label now, we're associated with those that kind of. Yeah, that's a great question. And honestly, it's just, it's always a work in progress. Trust takes a long time to build and it often takes a second to destroy too. And I think that at least what I have been learning and I've been essentially learning by doing. So we have a grant called Project Confluence and I'll just make a quick plug for Project Confluence in a second. But we're designing a research program that explores collaboration and the ways in which collaboration changes engineering and science, right? Collaboration with community-based organizations. How does that change what engineering and science can be done? And as we have designed that project, basically one approach that we take up very simply is if you have a question about whether the community groups that you want to participate with or engage with, whether they might want to know or be involved, just ask them. Be like, hey, we're gonna do this. Are you interested? And if they give you the thumbs like, no, not interested, go ahead, then great, right? But I think like just constantly asking more. Hey, do you want to be involved? Hey, do you want to be involved? Hey, do you want to be involved? That is the sort of like the essence of one approach that we've taken is just open yourself up to rejection and open yourself up or just ask if you have that feeling in you, like, oh, I wonder if they might wonder about this and just ask them. That's it, right? I think that you sort of raise a very big question about trust, right? There's sort of the micro trust and the macro trust. And I think that it's even just given the way in which the Biden administration is working through these environmental justice questions, it's entirely reasonable to imagine these EJ endeavors at some level failing, right? Like because it's done in a way that doesn't address the question that you raise around this longstanding mistrust. So yeah, I think sort of trust is sort of a micro thing all the way to a macro thing and how you inject yourself in that, I don't, you know, it's just, yeah. That's a great question. We could continue this conversation for hours and now and I hope that we continue to do follow up on this. I want to turn it back over to Shaleetha, but thank you so much, Darshan, for this engaging conversation. Thank everyone for their questions that kept this conversation going. And I know I enjoyed myself. Thank you. Now it's so great to see you, I love. This is like really the first conversation that we've had and we need to have more. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Well, thank you very much to both of you. I think that was a really enlightening conversation and spoke to a lot of our students who are really interested, I think, in the intersections that you guys were talking about. So in the absence of, you know, a large crowd, you'll have mine. But thank you so much for spending part of your Monday with us and take care. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Bye. Bye.