 Most people know him as doing a lot of extreme environmentalism work to inspire positive change to the whole of the nation. He's well-known throughout the world. He has numerous followers and he has a lot of content out there that just, I think, inspires people to want to be better humans and connect with the environment. After graduating from university I moved out to San Diego and I started a marketing company after a little while and I set a goal of being a millionaire by the time I was 30. That was a really big focus of mine and I was on that path. I was successful in the business realm that I was working on. I had a lot of friends. I was loved. I belonged. In so many ways life was going exactly how I hoped. I made it out of Ashland and had new friends and really had just a sense of meaning in life. Then something happened and I realized that I wanted to really totally transform my life. I realized that I, at the age of 25, couldn't go on this way for the next, who knows, maybe five decades or so. What happened was I simply started to watch a lot of documentaries and read a lot of books. I learned that the way that I was living was causing an incredible amount of destruction. The reason that this American dream is ultimately the world's nightmare, that everything that I was doing was a part of systems of exploitation and oppression and that down to it was the food that I was eating, the car that I was driving, the gas that I was pumping into the car, the stuff that I was buying, the trash that I was creating, living in San Diego at the time, even the water that I was drinking was coming from the Colorado River which was running dry. So even every time I filled up my cup at the tap, I was a part of destruction. I was a part of these oppressive and exploitative systems. I realized that my life was a hypocrisy because I didn't believe in causing destruction. I didn't believe in harming the people, the planet and the plants and animals that we share this home with, but that's what I was doing. And so at that time, I could have felt total just hopelessness and helplessness and there definitely was some of that. I'm sure all of us have felt some of that before, but at the same time as I was experiencing that, I was also feeling empowerment and excitement because these documentaries that I was watching and these books that I was reading, they didn't just tell me the problems that existed. They also shared solutions. They were also sharing that other ways are possible. And so I decided at that time that I was going to take my life back one step at a time from the corporations who had sold me on these ideas, from the government that had its particular agendas, from the societal norms and constructs and take my life back and be living in a way that's actually in harmony with the Earth. And to a lot of people that almost sounds kind of like cliché, living in harmony, but I knew that it's possible. It doesn't have to be this way just because this is the way that the mainstream society is living. So what I decided to do was just one step at a time transform my life. And so I made a list of over 100 positive changes that I wanted to make and I put that up in my kitchen and I taped a pen on a string next to that list that was right there in my kitchen and I made a goal of just making one positive change per week and checking that off. And I put that right there where everybody would see it, everybody who was coming over to my house. It was right by the front door in the kitchen. So that that would also help to keep me accountable and take others along on this journey of trying to live in a more sustainable way, a more harmonious way. And so I started with small things. At the time I was going to Walmart and filling up my shopping cart every month or so with all of my food and all of my goods. And so I started with small things like not getting all of my stuff in plastic bags at the store and carrying a reusable bag or like riding my bike a little bit more and driving the car less or starting to buy local food, like going to the local farmers market or the local food co-op. I started to look at everything that was in my garbage can and figure out, okay, how can I do things in ways that don't create garbage and do things that are reusable instead. I started to connect with my community and find ways that I could meet my needs by connecting with the people right in my community rather than being dependent upon corporations that were based elsewhere. I looked at where I was spending my money and started to put that money into the local community. I looked at the way that my transactions were happening. So every time I was using a credit card, I was supporting these big banks. So switching over to using cash, learning that my money in Chase Bank was a part of these very exploitative, destructive systems, like fossil fuel infrastructure projects. So I took my money out of the bank, big banks and moved it to a local credit union, for example. So I was consistently just one step at a time taking my life back, unraveling all of the webs of consumerism that I had been so deeply woven into, and as I was breaking each of those strands, making new ones, ways in which I could live that were more equitable, more just, more sustainable or regenerative. So I had a lot of really small changes to start, and then I started to also make some much larger changes as well. So for example, after about a year, I wanted to see if I could exist without my car and another way of trying to break free from fossil fuels. And so what I did to try it out is I just simply parked my car in the driveway for a month to kind of pretend I didn't have one and see how it went. It went well, so I got rid of my car. And afterwards I was thinking, okay, do I still exist? I padded my chest. I was like, all right, you can exist without a car. Because prior to that, where I grew up, there was only one reason you would be an adult riding a bicycle. Unless you were wearing the fancy bicycle elastic clothes. If you were just wearing regular old street clothes and you were an adult riding a bicycle, it meant you got a DUI. And that was the only reason that you would be riding a bike. So I was up against all of these societal structures and these societal norms of the way that you're supposed to do things. For example, I was wearing old spice deodorant at the time and I started to think, why am I wearing old spice deodorant? Well, it's because they have millions of dollars and they have put it in my mind that I need to wear this in order to be an acceptable member of society. So I said, well, I'm wondering if millions of years of evolution of humans has actually got it more figured out than old spice. So I threw out my old spice. I think you might be able to see that in this picture. There it is. Got rid of all the toxic things that I was putting on my body and it's been 10 years. You're welcome to share a hug with me and see what 10 years without deodorant smells like. I think you might be pleased, but you can decide that for yourself. And so a lot of this is just about, again, breaking free from these societal structures and societal norms. Is it even wrong to smell a little bit? We're animals. Smelling a little bit is okay. Barefoot, for example. I still have my socks on, but that was another thing. Asking the question, who knows better, Nike, or millions of years of our feet evolving in connection with the earth? So a lot of this was just about taking this back, breaking free from the societal structure and these societal norms. A couple other pictures I have here. This was breaking free from the plastic packaged foods and starting to buy less processed packaged foods and going to the local farmer's market, supporting local food growers and such. And so after about two years, I had made about 100 positive changes. So for me, I just made about one positive change per week. For two years, that's about 100 changes. So imagine if tomorrow you woke up and you were doing 100 things differently than the way you are today. You'd probably be like, who am I? Your clothes might be different. Some of the people that you're spending time with might be different. The food that you're eating, maybe the smells around you, the things that you're watching, what your social media feed looks like. And it might be kind of shocking. If you did that overnight, you might not be able to handle it mentally. But by taking it sort of one step at a time, I was able to do it gradually but also pretty rapidly. And so at that time, I was reflecting on my life. I was becoming the change that I wish to see in the world. I still had my hypocrisies. There was still a lot that I was working on. There was still ways in which I was a part of the oppressive and exploitative systems. There was still ways in which I was a part of injustice and destruction. But at that time, I felt like I maybe brought my life down from a level 10 hypocrite to maybe a level 5 hypocrite. So I still had those hypocrisies and I still had work to do. But at that point, I felt like I could start taking this message of living in a more harmonious way out to the people. And so that's when I started my activism about 10 years. Not to tell anybody that there's a right way or a wrong way or that we have to do things a certain way, but just that another way is possible. So my first activism campaign was to bike across what we call the United States or Turtle Island from what we call San Francisco to Vermont. And the idea was to bike across the country on a bicycle made out of bamboo with a trailer covered in solar panels and to try to have no negative environmental impact. So paying attention to every little thing that I was doing, living out sustainability to the extreme, and bringing people along on this 4,700 mile fossil fuel-free adventure. And so at that time, you know, I didn't have a following. Certainly nobody would have been coming out to, not many people have been coming out to a room to hear me. I was just getting started. And I had a Facebook profile, not a page. It was before pages, I think, even where it was before Instagram and the TikTok. And I did have a, I made a website. And so what I did is as I was traveling across the country, I wrote every day and shared this message of sustainable living and, you know, connecting with the earth. And then what I did is I just rode my bike up to the newspapers as I was traveling through rural towns and I would just ride my bike up, I would knock on the door, go in, and I'd say, hey, I'm traveling across the country on a bamboo bike with solar panels on the trailer, live in sustainability to the extreme. And every time they were like, oh, great. Thank you for bringing us a story. Now we have something to write about. And so I was able to start reaching people all across the country with starting with just local newspapers and local news stations. And as the trip continued, I was able to reach more people as I got into the bigger cities. And as the news started to see that I, that the other news had done stories, it became easier and easier as I was building some credibility. And so over the next 10 years or so, that's what I've continued doing, is projects that are designed to create self-reflection and critical thought, getting us to think about the way our society is designed, the way these structures are designed to understand them more and then to see that there's solutions, there's other ways of doing them. So this project here, this is called the Food Waste Fiasco. And everything that you see in this picture is from grocery store dumpsters. So what I would do is I would arrive in a city. I would go to the local grocery store dumpsters with a volunteer who had a car. We would go around to the dumpsters, fill it up with the perfectly good food that we found and take it to a public park where we had let people know a couple days in advance or so that we'd be there and call the media and let them know to come out. So this is from about a day's worth of dumpster diving in San Diego, California. This is Burlington, Vermont. This is Detroit, Michigan. And when I got to Detroit, I arrived there just the night before. This was 2014. And in Detroit, I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to find a lot of food. There's a lot of food insecurity there. And I just wasn't sure if I'd be able to find enough food. Also, I knew that Discovery Channel and USA Today and Detroit Free Press would be waiting at the park where I said I would be. This was at like 8 a.m. So I had like until 5 p.m. or so, I think so, about nine hours. And this took two hours of dumpster diving. And we had to stop because the vehicle that we had was full to the top. So we had a whole day to spare to bring this to the park in Detroit. And this is another one. This is Cleveland, Ohio. And this was about seven dumpsters that I had visited. And it was about 90 degrees that day in the middle of the summer. So a lot of the food was already spoiled. This was just the good stuff that we took out from the dumpsters. Another one of my projects was traveling to a far off place with no money and having to travel home on the kindness of others. So I landed in Panama with just the clothes in my back and passport. And the idea of this is that if you watched a lot of the mainstream media, a lot of us live in fear because the media says that we should fear our next door neighbors in Mexico and fear many of our global neighbors. And I just didn't believe that. So I wanted to show a different narrative. So by landing there and having to travel home on the kindness of others, it was 37 days of traveling. When I got home, the only words that I could really just sometimes mutter and sometimes exclaim were simply, people are good. And the narrative that the mainstream media puts, I don't know exactly what it's like over here, but growing up in Northern Wisconsin, it was like when they talked about Mexico or Mexicans, it was almost always negative. But the truth, of course, is that the people there are incredible people, just like we have so many of around here. And there's no need to be living in fear. Another one of my projects in 2016 in New York City, I took some inspiration from the documentary, Super Size Me, where he only ate McDonald's for 30 days. I saw how well that campaign worked at getting people to think about the fast food industry and the food that we're putting into our body. And so I decided I was going to spend a month living like the average person, eating and shopping and consuming like the average person does. But with one big exception, I had to wear every single piece of trash that I created. So I had a specially designed suit that could hold the weight because the average person in the United States creates about four and a half pounds of trash per day. So if I made trash like the average person, that would be 135 pounds in a month. So I had a specially designed suit that could distribute the weight and these clear pockets so that I could put it throughout my body. And at the end of the month, the entire month, I would be grocery shopping, going out to eat, riding the public transportation in New York City, walking on the streets, just living the average life. By the end of the month, I was wearing 87 pounds of garbage. And everywhere that I went, I was simply a walking billboard for some of the truth behind our consumerism. The idea that when we say we're throwing something away, our systems are designed so that we don't have to think about how much our trash adds up and where it goes. And so the idea of this is to show the truth, how much it adds up. And another note on that is that a lot of us think there is in a way. We send things to a landfill, but a landfill is just another name for organized littering. It's just us digging a hole in the earth and filling it with garbage. It's just a societally acceptable form of filling our earth with trash. And then when I lived in San Diego, this is the house that I lived in in the bottom. It was a 50 square foot tiny house. When I lived in Orlando, I built this tiny house out of secondhand materials. It was twice as big at least. It was 100 square feet. And so a lot of my activism has just been experimentations in simple living. Experimentations in trying to live again in a way that's more in harmony with the earth, which I found a lot of that comes through simple living. One of my inspirations in Mahatma Gandhi says, live simply so that others may simply live. Here in what we call the United States, we have just 5% of the world's population, but we consume 25% of the world's resources. Although this is portrayed as normal, this form of consumerism, the truth is that it's actually incredibly extreme. 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's resources, that by definition is extreme. So what I do with a lot of my activism is I go to the other end of the extreme. In this, you know, often like sort of polarized media sources, what I try to do is find ways that are going to grab attention. So, you know, I would potentially like to live in a house bigger than this, but it's experimenting and simplicity, seeing how simple I can live and doing in a way that's going to reach people who aren't generally thinking about these sorts of things. And in 2020, I got my life down to owning just 44 possessions. So every single thing that I owned fit into this little backpack, with nothing else stored anywhere. And so this was just another experiment in living simply and by living simply, spending my time less in the monetary system and more focused on just my basic connection to the earth. And then in 2019, I set out to answer a question that I had had sort of since the beginning of realizing the truth behind a lot of our systems. At the center of so much of this destruction is our food system, which is one reason I was so excited to take part in the food sovereignty class today. I see food sovereignty as one of the most powerful things we can do to take our dignity back, to take our connection with the earth back. And so in 2011, when I first woke up, I had the question, is it possible to break free from the global industrial food system? Is it possible to completely break free from the packaging and the processed foods and from the long-distance ship foods and all of the destruction of this food system? And so in 2018, I decided to do that, to see if I could grow and forage 100% of my food for an entire year. And so I didn't own any land, and what I did is I talked to people who had front yards and asked if they would be interested in me turning their front yards into gardens and in exchange for me using their land, they could eat all the food they wanted from the garden and after I left, after two years, the garden would be theirs to keep. So this was the first yard, as you can see, it's just a lawn and there what's under the lawn is sand because Florida used to be under the ocean not that long ago. So that's what I was starting with and this is what that was transformed into. So this is about two years later and during that year I grew about 100 different foods in my garden and I foraged about 200 different foods from all over the place, from parks, from the forests, the lakes and the rivers, abandoned lots, just food and medicine growing freely and abundantly all around us. And on one of the last days of this project, I was standing in the middle of the garden and I realized that I was standing about a foot above the sidewalk whereas when I started, I was at the level of the sidewalk and all of that was carbon that would have gone to the landfill. It was wood chips, it was food waste that would have been thrown away. So not only was I able to grow and forage all of my food but I was able to regenerate this little piece of land and to see what could be done in a relatively short period of time. It was a beautiful experience. Whoops! So during all of this, you know, I was really excited to be exploring sustainability, to really trying to live in integrity and to show that in another way as possible and I was reaching a lot of people through the media, reaching a lot of people through social media and a few years in, I started to get a fair number of comments from on social media and it would say things like, you know, you need to acknowledge your privilege or you can only do this because you're a white man or because you have a U.S. passport or because of your physical able body and at first I was pretty resistant to this idea of privilege because like I said, I grew up poor, I grew up Jewish, I grew up without a dad so compared to the small group of people that I was around, I was on the lesser privilege side so when they said that I was like me, privilege, I don't know about that. And so I was resistant to it at first and then enough people kept saying it and my eyes kept being opened to the fact that I have certain advantages and that people come from many different walks of life and it wasn't until actually 2017 I was giving a talk in Washington, D.C. and someone approached me, she introduced herself as Nevada little wolf and she is from this area, she's from Leech Lake I believe. She's Anishinaabe and she came up to me with a little bit of hesitation and she says to me, you need to acknowledge your privilege. It was after a talk kind of like this where I didn't acknowledge it at all and I was like okay, let's talk about this and we ended up talking for about an hour and she really was able to share it with me in a way that I was able to start to understand and I had started to reflect on that and so all of this activism that I was just showing I started to be able to much more understand where a lot of people were coming from. So for example, when I was dumpster diving to raise awareness about food waste I was down in south side Chicago in Inglewood and a couple of guys I was telling about it Inglewood is a primarily black community and there's a lot of food insecurity there and I was telling them like you could come out dumpster diving with me they weren't sure about it at all but they decided to come out we were in the north side of Chicago and we were in the dumpster and they shared with me that as two black men standing in the dumpster with me they were worried that if the police came that they could be shot for being in the dumpster in the dark behind the store and I didn't have to worry about that maybe I would have gotten ticketed or maybe arrested but I certainly didn't have to worry about my life or traveling down through Central America with no money well I had a US passport that's an incredible privilege when people said try this as a you know Guatemalan woman fleeing from injustice yeah I could do that because of the privilege that I had or biking across the country you know as a woman like putting yourself in places where you could potentially be raped as a man as a white man I had to worry about that a whole lot less and there were just so many ways in which I was learning about my privilege and how not acknowledging that doesn't tell the full story and so whereas at first that became something where it was like yeah it makes sense now to me as someone in the environmental movement I see how not understanding that can not only be neutral but in the reality it can actually do a disservice because when we don't understand like speaking as a white person if I don't understand how I'm speaking from my own perspective and it doesn't represent other people's perspective how that can be not only just inaccessible but people can see it and they can just be like well that's not something for me that's a different thing or even worse if what I'm doing doesn't speak their truth at all and I'm sharing these solutions but the solutions don't represent their experience and so often people with privilege they might have great intentions but a lot of the times when we don't understand our privilege and where we're coming from we can be doing more harm than good especially when we're working in communities that we're not familiar with so it's been a journey of starting to understand and reflect and acknowledge that and I think it's a really important thing to do if you want to learn more about that I write about that extensively on my website at robingreenfield.org and there's a lot of great resources there and another thing that I kind of came to realize so in 2016 or 2017 from the very beginning I focused on sustainability but sustainability is about humans too this is about living in a way where we all have access to basic human resources and that includes food that includes water and fresh air so we're talking about just the absolute most basic human resources and that's what I and the most basic human rights and that's what I was awakened to from the very beginning sustainability is where I focused because that's where I felt comfortable that's where I felt the most knowledge and experience to be able to work with and in about 2016 I started to really want to be able to learn from other perspectives besides the white perspective what I believed at that time because this is what I had been shown was that the environmental movement was sort of started and led by white people that was the narrative that I had seen around Earth Day and some of the books that sort of like racial carcings like Silent Spring like the whole narrative it was always uplifting white voices and so I was like there was part of me that was like there's got to be more and I looked and I really tried but I wasn't able to get far enough through the whitewashing to see that there was so much more and then in 2020 when there was a huge uprising in the black liberation movement I started to start see what I was looking for before which is colleagues black and indigenous colleagues who are doing this work for humans and for our plants and animal relatives and for the earth and I started to read more books for example in indigenous people's history of the United States black women's history of the United States and I started to see a lot of examples and what I quickly well what I started to see is that the environmental movement wasn't started by white people it was just taken over by white people and that the media the mainstream media mostly focused on white heroes that's what I had seen but as I started to educate myself I realized the environmental movement goes back not just hundreds of years but thousands of years to people living in right relationship with the earth and then the more modern environmental movement was mostly founded by black communities and indigenous communities who were dealing with the oppressive and exploitative systems the ones that were placing their communities and placing destructive infrastructure and having to basically fight for their human rights that was the beginning of the environmental movement and so to not acknowledge that in the environmental movement is not really sharing the full picture it's not really truth it's not equity and so through listening more and educating myself a lot more I started to see the much bigger picture of the environmental movement and another big part of that was just addressing my racial bias growing up in a white community in northern Wisconsin as Winona LaDuke calls it the deep north I was exposed even though my parents were pretty loving people with minimal bias I grew up around this dominator culture and so a lot of it had been dominated into me and so the last years a lot of it has just been doing the very basic work of overcoming all of the indoctrinations of this dominator society through reading books, through listening and that's the biggest part is through listening and I started to just learn about so many more perspectives and started to see that the environmental movement that I had been in was just one viewpoint of it like one frame of reference so I started to learn a lot more about environmental justice and racial justice and intersectionality a really excellent book for learning about that is the intersectional environmentalist that was really huge and starting to see the intersection with environment and humans because of course it's all connected and so some of the non-profits that I have been learning from a lot and supporting through the work I've got here Indigenous Environmental Network Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems Teo Spaya Winyanmaka Indigenous Seed Keepers Network Rising Hearts Out of the Earth Winona's Hempfire and Animals Are Loved by Hamanukwe right here and so one of the things that Hamanukwe and I have connected over when I started to learn all of this I saw that the best thing that I could do with my platform and with my resources was to create equity was to use the platform that I have to share the platform that I have voices who could share their messages and who could share the message with their people through this platform in a way where they they were seen and they were heard and empowered them and helped to build their own movements have more people start to support the organizations and then also equally importantly I only know so much and it's hard to know everything so what's a better strategy than using my platform and directing people to the people on the front lines who are a part of the community who know exactly what resources are needed who know the strategies for healing their land and healing the people and so as much as possible through these activism campaigns what I try to do is bring people in through this interesting and extreme activism and then plug people in to the resources on the front to the activists and to the communities especially indigenous and black led initiatives and communities that know what to do to regenerate our earth that have the skills in it that have the culture ingrained into them of living connected with the earth and to me that makes a whole lot of sense so just want to share a little bit I'm again very grateful to be here on Anishinaabe land to be invited out here to share with all of you tonight I've learned a lot from numerous people in this room and I'm excited to learn more tonight with the panel and just want to share a lot of gratitude for all the work that you know everybody here in Anishinaabe land is doing to be living in harmony with the earth to heal the earth to heal our communities in this society that we live in there's a lot of polarization and separation but I think one of the most powerful things that we can do is come together and simply take care of one another heal one another heal our connections with the earth because that seems to be the last thing that these corporations want is a bunch of people who can actually take care of one another a bunch of people who can actually harvest their food from the land a bunch of people who actually have the skills and the resources to meet their basic needs and to care for each other and love one another and that's one of the greatest lessons that I've gotten you know growing up here in the Northwoods and over the last years getting to connect with a lot more of the Anishinaabe community is just a basic desire to take care of one another to take care of the earth and so I'm grateful for you all you know living this life and letting me play a small role and to be a part of it and I'm excited to hear from the students during our during our panel and so the last thing that I want to share before opening it up to some questions well there's so many things that I'd like to share but the last little closing note is again a lot of us feel you know a lot of us in this room are doing a lot already we're doing work to heal the earth and heal humanity and some of us are just getting started we're all on our path but most of us probably feel overwhelmed at times you know with just the level of oppression and exploitation and things to like where do we put our time and energy and this whole system is designed to keep us too busy just paying the rent and paying the bills to be able to actually be doing this work and so a lot of people wonder like is it even worth it like you know I'm just one human being can I even make a difference and my basic belief is that life matters I really believe that my life matters I really believe that the life of every person in this room matters I believe the life of all the plants and the animals that we share this home with matters and if I can live in a way that actually doesn't cause destruction but actually improves quality of life for the people and for the plants and animals around me to me that's a life worth living because I believe the life matters and I don't know what's going to happen in the next hundred years or five hundred years or thousand years but I do know that today life matters and that I can live in a way that improves the quality of the world around me rather than steals rather than pillages and I know that I want to live joy I want to be loved I want to have a sense of belonging but I can do that I can receive those basic human needs in a way that provides for others by living in service by contributing rather than through buying into societal norms of taking in order to meet our basic needs so for me just waking up with that basic core belief that life matters and that if we can simply live in a way that respects and values and provides dignity to life then that's meaningful that's beautiful and if we can do more and we can reach more people wonderful but if we can just take care of the people around us play our role to live in a state of integrity then to me that's a beautiful life worth living