 tonight. We're really thrilled to have this wonderful group with us to celebrate our first day. It's a very special evening for us with a really great array of perspectives on the ecology, on our environment, and a hopeful sort of look at what kind of impact we can make on the time ahead while still understanding the seriousness of what we're facing in today's world. And I want to give special thanks to my very long time and very close friend, Karen Takakian, who is going to moderate tonight's panel. We have been buddies for probably close to 25 years. Karen, just she's a dynamo. She has been board chair for a great piece for many years. We've worked with that organization for a very long time. I really respect all the work that she's done. She's a great thinker, and I know you're going to enjoy her and all of the other PMOs that we have here tonight. I talked a little bit with folks in the audience as we were kind of warming up to get started. I might know we've got some long-term Mechanics Institute members here tonight. We've got folks who have been here a few times, and we have people here who are here for the very first time. So if you do have a chance to take the tour that Alyssa was mentioning right afterwards, I think you'll just love our building and all the programs that we have to offer. Take a look at the library, take a look at the chess room, and all the love for you, and become more involved in whatever capacity you're with us here tonight. So I don't want to take any more time except to say thank you, and I'm going to pass the baton to my colleague, Laura, who's going to really need a list of some of these for this evening's event. Thank you. We're very pleased to have everyone here for our conversation on the future of sustainable communities in the Bay Area with environmental activists and innovators who are at the forefront of this field. We'll be discussing and addressing new directions of alternative energy, design concepts and production, and resources for diverse communities. Before we begin, I'd like to invite Quinman to come up and give us the land acknowledgment. Thank you, Laura. My name is Quinman Messenger, and through my lineage, I represent the Yaqui chemical combinations. On behalf of my ancestors and all my relations, may we also face the thank and acknowledge the legacy stewards of this land, the Romitush Alay. In celebration of their contributions and their update, I encourage everyone here today to learn deeply about the legacy of the Romitush and to do your part in participating in the UNICAN land tax program. Before I continue on with the government, I'd like to maybe ask all of us and invite all of us to just take a quick moment to center ourselves in the room, ground ourselves a bit. It should be comfortable on the ground. There we go, yes. And maybe just close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Think about how you got here. Did you drive? Where did the materials for that vehicle come from? Who made that road? Where did the materials for that road come from? If you walked the clothes on your body, the shoes you're wearing, these have all come from somewhere. Take a moment to acknowledge those who might be invisible to supporting the happiness that the film that we all have here. I would also like to give thanks to our shared mother, Mother Earth, for the boundless life you continue to provide in the film. It is through honoring you that I have come to better know my own path and role as a steward of equity and practitioner of design justice. Thank you for the vision you have given me and the vision you have given each of us if we choose to see it. In honor of this planet we call home, I ask everyone here today to reflect on your own role in an ecosystem that you inhabit. And if you continue to ask yourself, what is it that I am and should be responsible for? Do we still know what we're talking about? May we always remember that we are not apart from nature. We are a part of it. Thank you. So this is Earth Day. Earth Day coming up is also Earth Quake Day. The Earth in all is expressions. So in terms of a dedication and the expressions of the Earth and also how we express the Earth, I am very pleased and honored to welcome Eileen Casanero from the San Mateo Poetloria to give a dedication on our birthday program. Thank you all for joining us tonight. Last year, I co-edited the Anthology of Earth Human at the Edge of Time poems on climate change in the United States with Dr. Lisa E. Lorna and NCA5 chapter E, Dr. Jeremy S. Hoffman. We released the book in September as a companion to the fifth National Climate Assessment, which is a congressionally mandated annual report on climate change, risks, impacts, and responses to the U.S. NCA5, which was released in November, was groundbreaking for many reasons, but mainly because it is the most inclusive and equitable NCA report to date. Among others, it assessed the vulnerability of indigenous, BIPOC, and LGBTQ communities. It also looked at climate solutions through a social equity lens and featured work by artists to advance the national conversation around climate change. Art anthology, Dear Human at the Edge of Time, features poems by over 70 scientists and poets. We presented it at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting last year, and just the other day, UC Berkeley hosted a conference Dear Human at Future's Edge as a way of expanding conversations around climate futures through science and creativity. We also partnered with Poets for Science in developing the Dear Human Interactive Migrosite. I think you can see the postcards around you. Please visit DearHuman.coetsforscience.org to share your voice or write your thoughts on the back of the postcard and upload it using the QR code. This is all to say that alongside the language and methodology of climate science, we also need the language of poets, which is one of witness and community. My own poem in the anthology was prompted by an article in The Journal of Nature about grill. It talks about how connected we are to each other and how much the world has changed, the fact what matters most is saving what is here and now. Here be dragons, petitions, bank crustaceans, Dear Humans, and a book of remembrance. The camel is here, loud as thunder, wild and wiser, like a nobility of beasts. Catch the light where X marks the spot, and if anyone asks, this poem is a map that lapses nearly. Seas clearly to sea dragons, spinning snout-snout, and pods of cetaceans, fueled by crowds of pink crustaceans. The shape of the Arctic is less solid now, fading into swathes of milky blue, and above us dying stars consuming their weight in gas and dust. We are a frog mass of wheat and limbs, like whale food or swollen coastlines. Do me a kindness and repeat this worship of humans, their book of remembrance, a cadence of heartbeats, one in a thousand a minute, short winged and foraging for flowers, which bloomed much earlier. If I could, I would gather the shimmer of this wonder of stars, stop the world from burning, the seas from rising, eat a tabloid, or a reliance of stewards. Remember what it means to love you. Thank you so much. This is gorgeous, and I hope everyone will go to Dear Humans' site and also compose something to contribute to this wonderful website and to our vision of the world. So today, we're going to have four or two presentations with each speaker, and then we'll bring everyone back for a conversation, moderated by Eryna Tepaki and your audience. So I'd first like to introduce Cleveland Messenger, founder and director of Just Design. As a design, justice, and equity student, Cleveland's leadership and creativity identity is rooted in his African American, Native American, and Jewish heritage. He channels and honors these legacies through design, justice, and awareness and healing modality that is at the core of his practice, engaging communities and projects with a sensitivity and a focus towards healthy living, social, and environment empowerment and legacy cultivation. With over 15 years' experience working with underserved communities, Cleveland Design believes that design is a tool for social and environmental transformation. So please welcome Cleveland Messenger. It's me again. Great to be here with you all. And as was mentioned earlier, I come from a pretty dynamic background. So in thinking about my ancestors here, let's make sure that this is working. Uh-oh. There we go. We can imagine the next slide. Keep imagining. Oh, there's a laser. So while we're waiting here, it's great to see the breadth of faces in the room. I've been in conversations with Mechanics Institutes for the past few months now. It's really honored to be welcomed into the legacy of this place given how long a Mechanics Institute has been here and also in supporting the core mission of the common folk and making sure that we have resources to live a life in fulfillment. So with that, I'm a good messenger. These are my elders. So my grandmother Ethel May and Leroy were two black folk from parts of Mississippi who raised my dad's family during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Below is my mom's parents, my grandmother Judith, who was a Russian Jew who immigrated to the States in love with the waves of the Lakota, was adopted into the Lakota Nation and facilitated my own adoption when I was 13 years old. And my grandfather Jesus was a war vet, but first and foremost, he was an indigenous Yaqui Indian, so an indigenous Mexican. So I represent a wide swath of different perspectives and experiences. And because of this, we were always in conversations about justice but also injustice and what our families face broadly through our experiences. But from my conversations with all of my elders who were activists in their home right, it was really conversations around understanding and acknowledging that we are all human and that that is something that we all undoubtedly share in common. So this is very much where social justice plays a key role in my perspective. This is a great quote that my grandmother Judith shared with us as we were growing up. We grew up on the land in northern New Mexico at the Tecocha Institute, which was founded by my grandmother 50 years ago as an artist in the Spiritual Retreat Center. And from a very young age, she was always reminding us that we are all children of the same mother being mother earth. On the land we have the Swat Lodge, which we rebuild every two to three years through traditional techniques that we have learned through our adoption into the Lakota tribe. I have the honor and privilege of acting as a firekeeper and a waterman during our Swat ceremonies. And when you are in the sweat and the hot stones come from the fire and the water is poured on them and the drumming and the singing and the sage is with you, you can't help but be very aware of your place in the world and what that might mean for you. But also it gets very hot and it can be very intense and that is with reason. It is with putting us in touch with the suffering of others and the suffering of our shared mother. It brings about an opportunity to really acknowledge what your goal is going to be. And in this way this is where the health and well-being is for all places you will and in my personal perspectives in design and being an advocate for environmental justice. So what does that mean for my practice? I was just designed four or five years ago and we are a collaborative platform really with a focus on sort of broadening the awareness of what projects can and should be responsible for. We have three ways of working. Just design which is focused primarily on the built environments, architecture primarily, but also with an integration of sustainability. And then we have Just Collaborate which is a network of trusted leaders, experts and thinkers from various fields that we pull in in a very focused way from project to project and Just Act is our emerging non-profit arms underneath the need that we continue to face working on projects in underserved communities that lack resources to be realized. So Just Act will hopefully become a catalyst to help in that way. So just a few more slides here. One of the ways that we approach our work is being very conscientious of these sort of structures and the systems that we are working within. There are usually silent and invisible, sometimes very apparent ways of control that might be operating in an environment. So by helping to elevate awareness and understanding of these contexts we can start to open access and create new pathways for understanding with the communities and clients we work with and this is really an eye on providing tools and facilitating agency for the people that we are working with. My operations director always is chasing me for saying this but our goal is to not be needed anymore. We are really here to help work hand in hand with communities and partners to equip them with the tools to do the work that we believe needs to be done. So how does that show up? We've worked very closely with the East Palo Alto community here locally. We helped to realize the youth art and music center with the EPA community and this group here in particular was very formative in my own trajectory within architecture and because of these experiences I actually broke off and started my own practice but it was also because we realized we believed in a future where an underserved community could have the healthiest building not just for themselves but for the community at large. This project is completely net zero actually net positive energy there's energy going back into the grid there's water reclamation that's happening on the site which actually allowed the project to bypass a moratorium in place of development relative to water rights we were able to prove that this project was actually supplying and gathering more water than it needed and lastly this is a youth art music center so it's with an eye on supporting the future leaders of the world and giving them a scaffold to empower their own leadership. We've also worked very closely with communities relative to cultivating legacy so we're currently working with the San Diego community to develop a new civil rights center on a community college campus so this is one of the groups that we met with these folks right here are the descendants of the original founders of the school this fellow over here will talk about a little bit more later he's my partner and this lady here you can't see in the foreground has become a very close friend of ours and is sort of the cultural bearer of the community but my heart and wholeheartedly my spirit goes out to thanking this group for helping us design and realize a new future for this facility one in which the voices and lessons of the past are present in the current to give us a new landscape for the future and then lastly here relative to the East Palo Alto community this work is the core focus of this work also is to support the next generation so through our engagement with these students this was to design a new digital learning center on their campus we simply just asked them before we started the community engagement where do you want to do this session like where do you feel comfortable and they said let's go outside let's get under a tree so when we asked that question it kind of gave us pause a digital learning center for eSports gaming which that existing on a middle school campus is a bit of a question like eSports tends to be very dark and shut off from the world predominant be males and men and lots of Cheetos it's like the most unhealthy environment in many cases but this was a thought of it living on a middle school campus so we really worked closely with this group the community and the campus itself to realize what a new sort of digital learning center might be and integrating and inviting nature to be present within the spaces the core guards and using new methods of managing light control through highly sophisticated sort of systems but also very analog with like rooms and cables for students to sort of shape their environment first and foremost the building of the scene as a steward and a teacher or a mother bird so just lastly here you will see on the tables the black experience in design I encourage everyone to take some time to flip through some pages and have a read this was a canon of knowledge that was assembled by these incredible humans right here after the Floyd murder and it focuses and centers black voices from a wide range of design perspectives and I continued to draw inspiration from it daily and always find something new I'd like to thank Gregory Fisher my partner in all things just for continuing to believe in what we are doing I would also like to thank this sexy guy right here friends you have been a champion for years in state one not just my love for the color purple but for being so you and just owning it and loving it and showing us all that is possible and lastly many thanks to my family and the support system that I have that my wife continues to show up in every way she can support me in this endeavor and the legacy that we are responsible for our beautiful daughter Kaia so with that the future can be just thank you for putting us in that inspiration our next guest speaker is Laura Lobeco who is with Mitzun landscape architecture Laura is a designer at Mitzun working on a park design affordable housing and resilience projects in the Bay Area she has a background in business and consulting and a master's in landscape architecture from the University of Southern California where she focused on urban ecosystems and biodiversity considerations in the site design so please welcome Laura Lobeco Hello, thank you I have tea because I have a cold that won't go away not contagious don't worry but I just gave you some water if anyone gets sick later I have no idea why on another note so I'm going to talk a little bit similar to the agency with everything this is exciting to see all the threads going through I have a background in business development and consulting so I came into landscape architecture later and to see the awakening of how much I learn about land and the disconnect of how are we going to be sustainable in a planet where no one learns the stuff and wants to go back to school when they don't children are learning it now there's just a lot to be desired so talking about signs of life question does anyone know what these are images of hey there you go that's a sad pause right this is our planet and we don't recognize the majority of what we're consisted of so this is a project I did in grad school and we started looking at oceans and the more that we looked at them you know you hear in climate sustainability oh we have to save our oceans we don't even recognize them how are we going to save them and not about guilt it's just a recognition of hey it'd be nice to learn a lot about that so we learn more than anyone needs to know casually not really I won't get into the details of what we learned but we broke out the oceans and discovered the difference between how does water behave in the Pacific how does water behave in the Atlantic and what does that mean and then at the bottom we looked at what are the extremes the blue along the bottom it's just the extremes of ocean behavior by different metrics like salinity, acidity when you start to break out the characteristics and you started to realize oh so what I can hear affects the ocean in this way so to the question how can we be sustainable without understanding that our world how our world is sustained so as we said I work with this team just in architecture firm we have three opposites part of me while I stare at the screen because as we said the quick shift in we have several disciplines we're quite collaborative we just won an award last year with AIA for design and I will say since I'm new and I don't have the interest in winning you over I will say it's amazing how collaborative it is and I do think that architecture is historically very eco-driven and this is quite about the design and about the interests of the well-being of people and the planet lots of awards I'm going to show you a couple that I won some awards and then I'm going to just throw it again in my own personal life so here we go talking about the life in water another one does anyone know what water stuff they live in does anyone know what water stuff they live in do you know what it was like before your building was there so again looking at what's here what's literally the meat in my feet and how what that is and how what I do when you really sit there and think about it like oh there it is it's underneath me so this is the building we designed it's called Casa Alamde it just won an AIA code award for this information about it everyone, so you're welcome to play around it's beautiful the mission, Shirley you'll see it if you drive by it's incredibly sustainable there's a lot of electricity there's great sustainable behavior but underneath it we did research and looked at what happened before we built there and this is actually an illustration of the water stuff that was there before there's some creeps so we actually excavated if you look at I will point number nine underneath there is a building that was put in since the mission area the strict area excavated and put in gravel and more permeable soil so that instead of just living with what we had we went back to what was already there dug it out and it's actually performing amazing for flooding because it makes it so that the water can go back to where it wants to go anyway so different examples life on land does anyone know who this is there's so many cute faces right now this is the saltwater harness mount it lives in it's in the bay and I think there are two different types but we're looking at the one that's up in the space where I've been rich since we're doing some work up there so we're down here at the bottom up there above the bridges is Richland and this little guy lives in this chaos country we got the workshop on our primary we got a bay we got a landfill we got some waste processing facilities and we've got a water processing facility and in the middle of it all are these creatures that we don't even see right beneath our feet and around us we even made a diagram looking at all the different creatures we live in right here behind the scenes you can't quite see the silhouette but there are a little signs there and again the more that we uncovered as we look at all these waves of how this whole project is about the sea level rise in the middle of all this chaos you want to make sure that humans animalize don't drown and it's a historically quite complicated neighborhood the neighbors are obviously incredibly so we have this levy design we work with the US Army Corps to make this levy which is within space and it's a very oscillating type of design where in places where you have a lot of space you can make a wide space for how to do that and on the other side you can make a wide space for parks, for amenities for walking this is the final design of the first phase it's with FFDRA it's a big report the pink line is the insertion of a levy but if you can see all the briefings and the addition of habitat the idea that these places can coexist is quite complex because you can't just go in and say hang on a mouse we have to do construction for ten years can you hang on? and just show nobody a deal and just burn and say go eat somewhere else you've got plenty of space you can go to Oakland so the complexity of how to construct something without totally disrupting the things you're trying to protect and the neighborhoods you're trying to protect is quite difficult in the end people look like this, it's actually funded just to repeat more funding from the US Army Corps and many others and again we've got this slope on the left and the right there's a ton of amazing collaborative outreach with the community extensive extensive a whole other story for a different day and then there's the life in us so back to me does anyone recognize the fall weather? you want any? we're friends now so this is a soldier field and they like to eat apes but they seem to prefer apes on native plates so this is the story of my garden on the right it's sort of like a chaos garden so on the right on the left is what it used to look like on a good day and on the right was the day that my landlord decided that he would hire a handyman to clean up and he stirred it up everything but he left the little aeonium but the things that everyone has that are very typical but all of the native plants he doesn't know and how could he know? it's not his job to know it's not his job to represent all of society and all their own to recognize the things that exist but these are the things that I see and I know that in my house there's plugs that are processing the soil you've got soldier fields taking care of the bugs and then you've got to pollinate your friendly plants like buckwheat that make the bees look crazy but the threat is that we expect to be sustainable but someone's going to go in and tear up their lawn someone's going to go in and tear up the thing that they don't really like we're going to pour out water and not know what happens after a visa we're going to throw out trash and not really know what happens when it goes to that day we're going to drive past it because I'm not going to move it there and that's okay and what do we see what can we know what animals what creatures what species can we know because the people who lived here before us they knew those names because it was their family and it's our family and if you break something and you don't care about it there's no tears if someone heard something you love it changes everything so guilt isn't always a big motivator and I think we're appealing to our consciousness and our conscientiousness alright our next guest speaker is Dustin Moldany Dustin is a professor in the environmental studies department at San Jose State University one of the first six interdisciplinary environmental study programs in the United States which is founded as a result of the first Earth Day in 1970 Dustin's work focuses on the social and environmental dimensions of commodity chains and production systems where he studies questions about emerging technologies socio-ecological change and environmental justice the areas of expertise Dustin works on include solar energy commodity chains and some of this is synthesized in his book Innovation, Sustainability and Environmental Justice which is available in that so please welcome Dustin Moldany well please to be with you today to celebrate Earth Day because they famous on our campus at San Jose State in our department that you mentioned they buried a car and then they bought a brand new car while a branded car rolled it to campus and then next year they exhumed it crushed it into a square with a hope that it would be a cornerstone of public transit facility in San Jose which they still don't have so we have a long ways to go but we're making a lot of progress I didn't see any rivers on fire in the headlines for 54 years we're doing something a little better we're breathing cleaner air on my ride up in California and it's all the beautiful new electric trains aren't there so we're not going to be skiing legally on our public transit so this is all great news 34 of the last 41 days California has cruise over 100% renewable energy that's a big change in the middle of the day and we still haven't turned off the natural gas power plants that we offer but that's a tremendous shift in our energy system but this shift is going to pose challenges for us because we're moving from a subterranean energy regime where we poke holes in the ground and we dig tunnels to pull up those energy resources that are very dense and very rich to a very good use energy system where we have these collectors on the surface of the earth that we need to collect the sun rays and collect the wind we've got to get a little geothermal so this is our challenge it's wonderful to have 100% renewable energy on the ridge in the middle of the day and we'll have it for a longer period hopefully as we move forward but the way we are building these solar facilities on the landscape today are going to pose challenges because look at these landscapes that we have particularly because the land that we're seeking for solar energy development is often land that is in conservation by default and that has no other use historically these are landscapes that are managed often by the Bureau of Land Management places like that and we as species I think have a bad opinion about deserts often we didn't say things that we don't like are deserts we kind of repeat these ways of thinking about landscapes that were historically hostile or unproductive but now we're seeing a difference and now we have new resources that might emerge and I want to push us to think about better ways of building a solar powered society so here's one of the challenges this is a project in desert center California this is a picture taken in 2010 when it was under 2011 when it was under construction and as you can see it is a pretty intensive land exchange that's occurring here you can see desert washes in the background there and they're sending big raiding trucks out here this is a 10 square mile project that at the end of the day will have 9 million solar panels and it will be the largest projects in California still is today and the current family will be a little bit bigger so these pressures have led people who've been thinking about the desert for a long time and how important it is and how beautiful it is and how many animals live there to feel a lot of pressure because we've had millions of acres being sought after by solar and energy initiatives that want access to cheap transmission that's the story we hear today about the transmission lines of society and unfortunately it turned out that a lot of our public lands are opening spaces with a lot of access to transmissions that are very attractive so I want to do two solar development so I want us to think about how can we live with solar power in ways that's more compatible are there ways that we can live with an energy system that we can co-habitate with other animals, other species and other species and such this I would argue is not a sustainable way of building an ecosystem that you want animals to move across you are potentially trapping animals across the Gears Big Horn Sheep an animal that lives in mountain areas, down in valley areas and migrates across the landscape being isolated because we're building larger and larger facilities that are fragmented and habitat we want to be started to build systems that look like this we're worried about our city being too hot maybe we could bring our power closer to low here's the parking garage, the parking structure solar candies in France they have a law that requires every parking lot to now be covered with solar panels let's do this in California we need more power closer to our city we need more shade as our cities get warmer building cities that are sustainable that are able to both generate amazing technologies the only technology you can live under that generates electricity if you could find me another technology you can live under that generates electricity nothing you know we are building bigger and bigger warehouses unfortunately this is not a common scene if you just drop by like an airport or something zoom out on your Google Maps LAX, Phoenix, Lost Age you'll see empty rooftops everywhere and we should be thinking about these as resources especially if we're squandering other resources in our effort to build as cheaply as possible this is an EPA we actually have been thinking about this for a while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this is a program called Repowering America's Land where they've identified many many acres more or many times over the amount of electricity states that we would need for solar power in things like brownfield super fun sites like sea contamination abandoned landfills and for California California on a typical day using 30 gigawatts of power or something like that they found on the border 400 gigawatts worth of land available that fit these characteristics and I'm not including abandoned agriculture agricultural land and sea damage and salt we have a lot of states available we just need to build these systems and connect these things so here's some more ideas I think that lead us to these win-win scenarios we call them in the paper we wrote Techno-Ecological Synergies how do we develop these technologies in a synergistic way with the ecology so saving water with total day aqueducts most of all eggs that are covering some water volume maybe it's a waste water treatment facility that's got some palms bringing pollinators back into our our solar farms might be another way and just a sidebar land change from solar development is a leading cause of pollinator loss in the American West for the last couple of years partly because of the important habitat that's lost in the American West so agri-roll eggs facing those solar panels up just a little bit let some agriculture grow these are really win-win scenarios three yards to leave us with here to think about what are the principles that should guide where we think about developing solar we can use solar to restore landscapes we have we can put these on landscapes that might be invasive grasses or things like that and do grassland restoration we've seen actually that you can increase the carbon in the soils below another win-win scenario Reclamation this is a picture of a solar farm that's built on an abandoned mine that's no longer used doesn't have the same habitat quality than work that's pretty compacted and things like that another win-win scenario and here you see a solar farm on a super fun site that's got contaminated brown water underneath they're using some on-site pumps to clean that water but at the same time they're using that facility to generate electricity so we have a lot of opportunities we just need to think about where we put these solar facilities to make that benefit both our climate objectives to solve our climate change challenge but also to think about biodiversity and if that's our challenge we now to some extent reduce many of our problems to be just about climate and we've lost the other connections to the world that we really need for addable land to share with other species our species can't even be like that so full of animal known cats if you have other strategies I'll be over there thank you very much now we're going to bring everyone together to be in conversation with our moderator so I'd like to introduce Karen Topakian Karen is the founder of Topak and Communications is a writer, speaker communications consultant facilitator and social change activist Karen worked for more than 40 years in the non-profit sector including as the executive director of the Agape Foundation fund for non-violent social change and also as a anti-nuclear campaigner at Greenpeace and some of her clients include the San Francisco Green Film Festival the Women's Building the National Immigration Law Center the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum California Rural Legal Assistance just to name a few so please welcome Karen Topakian and our guest speakers back to the front thank you all we've been carefully instructed how to sit in these chairs so we don't tip over hence the kind of tentative way we're sitting here and if one of us tips over Alyssa said she would catch us I'm not sure what she does right now but I got you and she will catch us I am so delighted to be here at the Mechanics Institute with you all I've been a member for many years and I'm a member because of Kathy Bella who told me about the Mechanics Institute and introduced me to the place and then I became a member and a donor and have attended many events here and used to spend and still do a lot of hours writing and working in the library so I'm so grateful to be part of the panel here since I attended so many events here in the past and I'm more than excited to be with these three people whom I've only met on Zoom up until today and now I'm even more impressed by them and I have lots of ideas and thoughts and I'm sure you do too I would like to say my brain is full but it isn't yet because I have more things I want to know so I'm going to stop by asking a few questions and then you all as you're sitting here if you think of questions you want to ask there'll be an opportunity to do so so please start thinking about them now so my first question is it is to all three of you and you can not answer in any order you prefer what should we be excited about in your field what's the thing that really grabs your gut that's so exciting in the field you're in right now and whoever wants to go first can do so oh sorry I ended with those ideas that people are experimenting with and I just see a lot of people thinking about these things for many many years people were not engaged in these all and this is all about how to build a big field how to get things out on the ground and now people are starting to experiment with what those things look like yet now the challenge is getting the utilities and the solar developers and the public to actually want to think about there's a lot of things that have happened good a lot more Dustin you I'm feeling great for landscape specifically for landscape specifically I think it's exciting for landscape specifically I think it's exciting just to see that we are starting to have influence because a lot of times the built environment has been architecture driven and I will say the architects over here are so adorable because they're like what should we do we want to be first so that we can think about the environmental impact and the soil impact and the community impact and it's much more cohesive and so when you're doing community outreach and whatnot and you're thinking about you know habitat corridors it's just a much more beautiful and sustainable outcome so I think it's exciting to see the landscape has more important influence nice it's an interesting question relative to sort of the architecture sphere I'm not sure many of you have looked at photos of how architecture used to be done three or four years ago maybe even less than that it's just like these shiny rear houses of only white men like men who were drawing desks just drawing all day long and my question is always like well if those are the voices and the people designing it what about the other voices that should be in that room and I'm seeing that shift happening more and more now in the industry it's interesting though because at the same time there's also these posing forces within a sort of DEI sphere in design there's also de-investment that's happening now but I'm excited to see that there are other folks like me who look like me doing this work and partnering also it's kind of a scale thing too we've got these big monolithic design groups who have long term significant legacy but then small minority owned businesses are trying to find a way in and I'm seeing more and more openness and availability to partner so that we can scale these efforts so that's something to go super excited about that's wonderful and I should have said this before we started when we first started working on this together one of my strong beliefs was this is not a doom and gloom opportunity it's not a time for us to sit here and say ring our hands and there's nothing that can be done these people are showing us there are things to be done they have done them there's more to do to help us address the issue of climate change in an innovative and ecologically sound way so I hope that that comes forward in the whole presentations and the questions and answers so that's why I'm not going to ask what's the worst thing that's ever happened that's not going to be inspiring and engaging for us but I am going to ask how do we make sustainable design normative how do we make that be the default setting not the extra setting is it education, is it policy change, is it losing the rule when it happens what will get us to have sustainable design considered normative I have a few opinions go for it design is a reflection of the asker of the design and I can go out and tell you what would be an incredibly sustainable design but you have to want to pay me to do it because I have to, you know, eat and so for example the north richman work we did it's gorgeous, amazing, it's so sustainable it's so thoughtful we didn't do that design I mean we did it but it came out of 50 plus years of extensive community work where the oppressed fought the oppressors over and over and they died and they were poisons, I mean it's not like a love story you know Taylor's not going to say about it so I think I want to say sustainable design is the future but I think it comes from the community fighting and asking for it and not always from the designer I'm not saying there isn't that in it but I think it's really important to recognize that we've heard and that is whoever is putting out a bid and wanting to sign that's not my final dark answer I just think it's important to realize and maybe to rip off of that because I think it's kind of interesting and I'm just curious if both of you have maybe encountered this in your lineup work but I think the normative part of it or maybe integrating it into the ways in which it can and maybe should be done is there needs to be a degree of accountability I think a lot of times people sort of talk the talk but when they are asked to walk the talk it's a very different situation especially in like you know sort of institutional thinking whether it's museums or schools or things that have been around for a long time and kind of had this history of doing things a certain way so that's something that our group has really been striving to do is to work with teams to establish accountability frameworks so that and those frameworks can shift throughout the evolution of a project we might have equity indicators or we might have belonging indicators we might have regenerative indicators but it starts to establish a framework to keep your ambition and intention sort of in check and I'm seeing more and more that by implementing that it's not something that just gets like quote unquote valued engineered that's when something is too expensive and you can't afford it so you just don't do it usually what happens is landscape gets chopped in half which is you know as we know our B friends and our ecologies that we need to respect but then it's also the other sort of features or qualities of the building that might really reach out and invite somebody in or be involved in a way to start to integrate just the zoning requirements of your community you got to get your keys where do you say I want this and then they require accountability yeah I think and you know thinking about the specifically the solar deployment piece and like how do we get sustainable renewable energy right renewable energy in some ways means exploding that category of solar power because I think I say that solar power gets the green halo effect that is when you say oh this technology it has a green halo and what does that mean because it's one characteristic of being low carbon all the characteristics of it are great so we need to start differentiating but this is no longer alternative energy this is mainstream energy it's 100% of the energy we're empowering the afternoons with this energy so now we have to really it's hard work to be critical and say this is good this is bad but we need to start differentiating good from bad and sometimes that means talking to the community because again some people live in the landscape some people are aware of the ecosystems some people have been out there airing into the room and understand like how complex this ecosystem is and you need to listen to them because often these decisions are being made by people who actually don't know or view that system as unproductive and not working for humans which is I think part of the paradigm we have to move away from our very anthropocentric way of dealing with climate change which is just build all this technology and it will substitute for the energy we have to something that's more integrative and more holistic and thinking about all the dimensions of challenges that we're facing yeah I love that and something else that came to mind is that I don't think all of these sort of strategies and ideas that we're talking about are exclusive to our fields it's a shift in mindset right so like I already talked about the garden as of two years ago when my daughter was born my mother-in-law started our first garden and I'd always dreamed of feeding the family out of the garden but now we don't buy the majority of our food from the grocery store and it's like it's just that small thing that made me start to realize oh what are the other things that have kind of just fallen into the norm of dealing so I just wanted to put that out there so that some of what we're saying is like it's a sale thing again it's like I think we all have tools and resources that we can draw from it's just a matter of being able to sort of see them or get out of our own way one of the things that resonates with me is what you just said about it's no longer alternative energy so maybe what we should do is target fossil fuel-based energy with the negative connotation and that green energy which for me would be solar, land and geothermal probably that those should be the standard and the others should be the nominal and actually in my perspective gone completely but let's label them for what they are they're the damaging energy versus the regenerative energy and it makes me think about the ways in which we conduct our own lives and how we make choices in our own lives and how society makes its choices so that leads me to the next question which is where do you see the most potential for change in your work is it through your clients is it through people the demand in the community is it through policy makers where's the most potential for change I'll just go on my the desert story here again which is that when you bring people out to the desert first you ask people about the desert bring people out the desert areas to appreciate what is there the geology, the rocks people are inspired to say oh this is actually an important place that we shouldn't be sacrificing because we have an energy consumption problem and we want solar to be as cheap as possible so I think that I'm hopeful that as we can show people what we can potentially lose if we don't do this correctly that they will see that things are very valuable and we're in a little bit of a knowledge deficit I would say an appreciation for these systems that people are not familiar with and I think there's cultural, historical values on deserts and things like that but every time I talk to someone who's been out there their world has been shifted as they understood that and that has a lot of potential great question one of the things that immediately comes to mind to me is sort of thinking about how knowledge and tradition has was and is maintained traditionally it was through story it was sort of the cultural bears of communities would share about the history of the place and their experience and as we continue to advance through technology I think storytelling is an actual vital component to these conversations I think that what you brought up earlier about labeling is quite interesting and Dustin this might be a longer conversation for you and I later but you know I how do I say this what are the stories around solar that we have become accustomed to right but then what are the other stories that are happening behind the scenes that you might not see or know and how relevant are those stories to its future and I'm also reflecting on architecture it's like we're using green mixes and concrete we're making concrete healthier well yes also mining the earth and pulling all these things there's other ways of doing it so it's sometimes like what are the stories that we're carrying and maybe taking stock of that and being mindful of sort of the implications that they can have without questioning them so maybe there's something there I guess I would say that the thing that's an interesting part of all that I am curious to see what happens is the value of labor in Japanese car in factories if anyone saw a problem on the line they were entitled to pull the string pull the cord and say something's wrong and everyone stops and fixes it and in landscape and land management department of forestry makes the choice and God help you if you want to say anything and so it goes down from there or in other ways you know the city says we're going to build a thing and the developers are doing it and whatever but when you touch the land the person who touches the land is the least valuable and the most impactful and they do have this wealth of knowledge you know they'll say don't put that there it's never going to live but you're like oh it's going to live so I don't have a prediction but I think it is I see it brewing and I'm curious to see how it all culminates because I think the voice of the land comes from the voice of the laborer and I'd like to see what happens I think a very good perspective on that because especially since a move to a just transition would involve labor having a voice whatever kind of labor that is in the voice in this I'm going to skip ahead to a question about do we need to change hearts minds and behaviors or is it systems that need changing or all of that and if you felt like you already answered that I think it's a yes and I think it's definitely both but I'm more interested in the systemic side of things just as a result of my own sort of history and where my ancestors and people come from knowing positions of power and ways sort of influence and guide that sort of thinking is something that I'm very interested in but I'm also I'm interested in sort of justice at speed right just like the pursuit of justice and this is not to undermine any of what has gone on before me I would not be sitting here without what has been done before but I'm also well aware of the energetic like contribution that goes into these efforts and movements I'm interested in how and it's not speed with velocity it's like it's almost like justice of acupuncture right like how can we find new meridians and pathways within systems where we can come in and find something to reestablish balance right like that's something that I'm very interested in because I think that we're facing new needs now right like 150-200 years ago well the climate was already changing because we had gone past a critical mass it just wasn't able to be spoken about globally in that sort of way we now are facing day-to-day both of you spoke to it and what you shared and it's at an elevated rate where it's happening faster so how can we scale these pursuits of systemic change to be more tactical with a broader sort of impact and I'm also probably imagining my acupuncture session on Saturday right now so it's probably coming from then that's what it's all about anyone else want to speak to it can I have a I'll speak to the system I mean I just said we've got to commit to people that some rants are worth saving for the end of the day we're talking about a utility that's delivering electricity in the day and trying to do that as cheap as possible and that's where we can start to reimagine a cheap to whom who's benefiting from this but is it really as cheap as the sticker price instead of when we start to consider it all the other aspects so systemic change is really critically important in thinking about our future of electricity because I mean just what we played out in the last few years here in California when we built the disassembly of the incentives for rooftop solar in the state that means the less incentives we have to put on our rooftop tier in the day area and and all the other places that are also sunny that means we're going to have to get more and more electricity from us and just to give an example in California we've got about 20 gigawatts of utility sale solar we've got also about 17 gigawatts of utility sale solar Texas has about 20 gigawatts of utility sale solar and 2 gigawatts of rooftop solar so that's a system that's an electricity system that's designed very differently based on the incentive structures and power structures and all of that and it profits different benefactors in that system as well but I think system change is especially if I'm going to have utilities you know, I can convince you all to change your mind about the utilities to this big power of editing in the room and that's just a gorilla in the states that I work in so that leads me to what I think will probably be our final question before we talk to the audience which is what can individuals do and what groups can they join if they find any of this interesting engaging, they want to know more they want to become more active they want to understand it better what do you advocate individuals do we might not be thinking about building a building or setting up our solar power sorry I can name some organizations so if people are interested in thinking about or concerned about what they've seen desert and solar is an organization called basin and range watch that's been doing a lot of work on on their board they're very good if you're interested in how to get more rooftop solar back into the urban area there are things working on that I just on the point yesterday with folks with great alternatives who run the low income solar program for rooftop commercial I'm not going to talk about rooftop residential in California that's another great organization and every one of you are either part of a utility or a community choice aggregator and community choice aggregators are increasingly the ones who are contracting for these removal projects and unfortunately there are the ones who are because they're being squeezed by PG and utility and trying to keep prices low and every one that are going out in Nevada and buying solar from us here in San Francisco Matt isn't necessarily going to help us turn on our natural gas pipeline so tell your CCA to buy locally buy their power locally stop buying projects that are far away because that's not going to help us get to our climate objectives to lock in natural gas pipelines there you go I would say sit on a park bench with nowhere to go and watch what happens slow down is such a hard thing to do if you're willing to sit here I feel like you're good at park benches already we're all I mean there's a library in the building we just didn't read it right but I would for real see what happens and go there several times to the same place and watch it change I did fire research wildfire research and seeing a wildfire and then go back in a year and look how it changed and then go back in a year and look how it changed and see the progression of time in front of you because it will awaken the part of you regardless it will feed you whether or not you can change anything it will feed you so sit on park benches that's what they're for I would also say if you live in a neighborhood where you have the privilege of having land get together with your neighbors and do a challenge where you can change some of the land that you own to be more fun in a way that's healthy for the environment you can clean the water a little bit more you can do something with solar but join your neighbors and make it a community event and then also use your voice because y'all community meetings are still boring and so if you are willing to sit there and do it your voice will be heard and that changes a lot more than just writing your local politicians and everything if you actually just go and put in the time it really does change the code which enables me to do a lot more there's a lot of times where the sidewalk has to be this wide and there has to be this much and so I can't put in a permeable pavement I can't put in banding because your code requires it so the more that you can go that's not what you'd say why you sit on the park bench what a quote, thank you nice, I'm going to rip off with the voice because I think it's great I think our up and coming generations have a difficult task at hand because they keep getting inundated with the thing that's next but the same co-club part it's the burger that's reached back to take the egg from the past to the future that's what I mean I'm going to pass judgment here but it's also just knowing that we are in a space of storytelling that each one of you has a unique story and experience and history that the upcoming generations must hear to know how things have changed for me, I'm speaking from my own personal experience when my father talked to me about how his black community evolved and changed over the course of his time being there where he used to be vibrant and old life and energy and culture but through migration and policy and redlining and all these things that started to dissipate and fall away and now the community has opened locks with buildings that are falling apart on one side of the tracks and on the other side of the tracks it's big, beautiful homes the marks and traces are still there but when my dad shared the stories with me I was better I was more equipped to understand my place in that story so I think everyone here has a unique responsibility and opportunity to share about your experience with the young ones and I mean, I can still consider myself young so I want to hear your stories too that's wonderful, so we have some concrete and then we have some esoteric and we have an opportunity to sit on a park bench which we don't think we'll have, I have to say and I'm going to take that one seriously right near Dolores Park I should sit there more often great benches a lot of lovely native flowers by Lincoln Dragway there's no bench but there's plenty of dogs so I want to ask the audience to do a little homework and I'm going to ask audience members to think of an action they feel inspired to take as a result of what you've heard today and share it with someone sitting near you and then we're going to ask if anyone wants to share what they are thinking with the group so we'll just take a few minutes and then we'll open it up for questions so, I don't know, two minutes for people to think of what they would want to do with an action that you might be inspired by what they've heard so, I'm going to start with me so I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I