 Hi. Hello. How are you? Good. I know who knows who's allowed to answer me. How many people are here for their first dialogue? What a third. So those of you who've been here before, I apologize. I'm going to talk about some of the things that I've said. My name is Melinda Joseph and I am one of four people who runs the family and I am starting a company myself. Much kind of four. Since then, primarily what we do, or at the core of what we do, is making things. We make theater. We make music. I have to say, I would say all of it again except two and you have to guess right. And nobody's here. And from the beginning along, one of the things that I think is unique to the family is that not only we make art with artists, but we're also interested in the context and the world that the art is in. And so from the very beginning, we've been hosting, making new work, developing it, producing it, sometimes touring it, and also hosting dialogues. That began, I would say, well, that began in 1994 as a kind of pause button. Like, wait a minute. This is happening. Do we need for this to be happening? Does anybody know that this is happening? Those kinds of things. So we hosted a series called Money Talks where we actually started to learn about how the economy was. I could go on. But suffice it to say that in 2005, correct? In 2005, yes, I went to the World Social Forum in Brazil. And it pretty much changed my life because I realized that so many of the things that we were asking questions about, like, this is actually happening, if we know this was happening, there are hundreds and millions of people who are actually art and addressing those things that were happening. And we're doing so creatively and so remarkably that what started to change in our dialogues was that we started to invite speakers who were actually not only said, yes, this is happening, but this is also happening. And so it's been a marvelous process to recognize the incredible energy and creativity and power that's already out there in the world that most of us don't even know about are building another world. And so this series, which was curated by Manasen, who we just need to applaud because she has brought, she has brought to get brought to the Family Dialogue some of the most creative people I have met in a really long time. I sometimes think that, you know, like lots of dialogues around the world, around the city especially, the celebrities who come and speak about such and such a subject, et cetera. I like to think that these actually are the celebrities. And in fact, in 2001 or 2000, Naomi Klein came and spoke about our first dialogue. So a celebrity was made out of that dialogue. So it won't take you any longer. I will say that there is a program, correct Kate? The program is still in the people's... Yes. If you don't have a... If you don't have a... What is this? Smartphone. Smartphone. Then... If you don't have a smartphone, then we're going to send out an e-mail tomorrow to thank you for coming and we will send you a link to it. Okay, that's it for me. Hi, can you all hear me? The mood down. Okay. If I ever talk to you often, let me know and I'll use the mic. Okay. My name is Lisa D'Amour and I'm so happy to be here tonight with my panelists here. And how I'd like to begin is actually have each of us introduce ourselves and talk just a little bit about our work. Even though I know you probably know a little bit about us already. My name is Lisa and I'm a playwright and interdisciplinary artist. I work in the worlds of both regional theater, theaters that are rehearsed and performed inside with audience on one side and a play happening on the other. And then I also work in the world of interdisciplinary collaboration and type-specific work. So with my company, Pearl D'Amour, my collaborator, Katie Pearl is the director and I'm Lisa D'Amour who put our last names together to form a company. And our next piece is actually going to happen and Pearl D'Amour is in a meadow at Longwood Botanical Gardens which is just outside of Philadelphia. I'm a native of Louisiana and I do a lot of work in dorms which is my home to home. So I'm really glad to be here and maybe we could start with Chantal to talk a little bit about your work and maybe a little bit about how your life has led you to take on a higher level of shoes. Yes, and I'll try the approach too and if I'm not loud enough I'll use the microphone. So my name is Chantal and I'm a playwright, translator originally from Montreal but I've been living in New York for almost 15 years. I'm involved with two long-term projects that are particularly relevant to the conversation tonight. One is called The Arctic Cycle. It's a series of eight plays that examined the impact of climate change on the eight countries of the Arctic. So the first play was performed last year in Cambridge, Massachusetts called SILA and it's set in the Canadian Arctic and the second play called Forward is set in Norway and it's still in development I've been developing it over the past two years. I was in Norway in January working on it with a theater company there and it's going to be presented at Kansas State University in February of next year. And I started this project several years ago after going to Alaska and sort of encountering first-hand the effect of climate change especially with the glaciers. This was just slightly after Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth came out and I so the climate change conversation was becoming a lot more mainstream and there are some places in Alaska where the glaciers the lines where the glaciers is to be is very well marked so you can walk the distance between where the edge of the glacier was 100 years ago, 50 years ago up to where it is today and it's a very visual experience a lot more than just reading the data or looking at a graph. So after that experience I started thinking about maybe bringing to people who were not able to have that same experience and taste of what it's like to really see and feel the changes. And then the second project I'm involved with is an extension of the first one because as I started thinking about climate change from an artistic point of view I wondered who else was doing the same thing and I could find very many people in my immediate environment so I created this blog called Artists in Climate Change and where I'm trying to gather artists from all disciplines and all regions of the world who are addressing climate change in their work and then I created the Facebook group and so it's sort of this big network of artists who can now communicate with each other and share what they're doing. I'll give it a try too without the mic. My name is Michael DeLeon Guerrero. I am currently the national coordinator of an alliance called Climate Justice Alliance which is about 41 organizations from other countries working, doing environmental justice work but also addressing the issue of the climate and economic crisis. My background is actually, it's interesting because I started in art. Art was actually what I originally studied music really and then visual arts I studied at the University of California Berkeley and also were shown while in Mexico City and so I've always had a really kind of a real interest in the intersection between art and politics and the role of art and music in social movements and when I came back to Mexico City this was during the time of the course of intervention in Central America by the United States Alliance active in the Central American intervention movement and when I came back to the United States got involved in community organizing and went through a training program that placed me in Albuquerque in Mexico where pretty much I've been for the last 30 years since then and it was right at the time when a lot of these issues were starting to surface around was then being kind of a racism and the fact that we were working in a number of communities that were experiencing toxic poisoning we were seeing high rates of asthma and cancers and finding things like workers that were working in high tech electronics industries that were literally dumping their hands and chemicals like trichloride and all these different things that were causing severe health effects so we did a lot of work with those communities at the time both with private industries and also military toxic nuclear issues all kinds of things and so for me the environment and getting involved in environmental issues was more about the people that was my entry point and experiencing and working with those communities that were really directly impacted and suffering ultimately were really economic decisions and so that led us to another trajectory that was at the time that got us into economic development and because we realized that environmental issues are the consequences of economic decisions and more and more that led us into global issues because then we were seeing the role of corporations and the role that they were playing in trying to be regulated and cut back on environmental regulations and what those impacts were on communities so that got us involved then and got me involved personally in what became known as the global justice team that was really sparked in a lot of ways first by the North American trade agreement and later by the battle in Seattle so I got active in a process where I actually ended up being Melanie for the first time through the World Social Forum and actually I looked at that process too and we organized things like U.S. social forums I brought together social movements to talk about how we're going to change our economy and change our world and ultimately the future and then that led me into the ramble climate because that's where we're seeing now how the environment and economics are starting now to come together where we're experiencing crises in both our climate and our environment and the economy and so that's what the organization I work for now focuses on that and we actually rebuild our communities in a way that sustains life and also heals the climate and so that's the focus of the work that we're doing now and then lastly it's become more of a personal role my family is from the island of Guam which is in Micronesia and that's in the northwestern region of the Pacific 2000 islands spread over the area of the size of the United States the largest of which is Guam and so I had the opportunity recently to actually visit another of the islands that are already at risk because of climate change and dealing with the effects of that so we have a lot to lose in terms of our culture, our history our land and our people so it's going to be a very personal issue for this one my name is Papa Salom I am from Bolivia but I'm coming now from Thailand because I think between the last three years the executive director of Focus on Global South an activist think-tank organization that is based in Bangkok but has offices also in India and in the Philippines before that I was the ambassador of Bolivia to the United Nations and chief negotiator on climate change for Bolivia so how did I get involved I would say I was always a social activist but with the environment I would say my first relation was with the water war and with climate when we came into the government was how to respond to this issue to this negotiation I think of the most interesting things was to organize the People's World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010 in Bolivia and to follow up that experience has led me to many conclusions that I will share with you today just one last thing when it comes to art my I'm the son maybe I should have presented it that way I'm the son of a muralist a social muralist very famous if you speak about CK Rus in Mexico for Bolivia my father is a muralist like that so through art we have always been linked to social activists it's really inspiring to see the three of these things on stage but to hear about these networks that you've created that are beyond this room and one of the things that I've been asked to start off our conversation is to see if we can put together like a five minute crash course on a prevailing discourse around climate change so we'll see if we can do it, maybe I'll start my watch but there's just there's a lot of ideas around what the climate change crisis is and then there's a lot of misinformation as well too and I'm wondering if maybe we could start with Pablo and Michael to just talk about some of the main stream ideas that are being put forward out there as encounters what do you think? well the issue of climate change from the perspective of the negotiations and now this year is going to be the year of climate because there's going to be a big conference in Paris and they are going to meet up an agreement for the next decade until 2030 so what has happened? it is it is the story of a person that has obesity or goes to the doctor and the doctor tells that person you should stop eating and reduce what you're eating or otherwise you're going to have a heart attack but he comes months later and says how I am, but you have to increase your weight instead of decreasing you're gaining more weight you're going to have a heart attack and he responds but now instead of eating 900 curbs I'm eating 7 so I'm better so this is the climate negotiations so we are getting worse to put it in technical numbers we should have began to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally last year if we want to be in a situation where we can control what's going to happen with the environment but the current pledges of the US and China and the EU that are going to be put on the table in Paris show us that emissions will continue to increase until 2030 so to put numbers globally 2012 we had 52 53 gigatons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gas and the different reports are saying we're going to do a great job we're going to be in 59 gigatons of CO2 equivalent of 2030 and you know we should be by 2035 we should be by the end of 2020 in 44 but we're going to be in 57 now there is a machine gun but we're doing 5 because we're reducing so the situation is dramatic from a global perspective it's that you can do a great thing here and there but if globally we're not able to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions the impact, the restification, the result will be worse than worse so this is the situation we're going to find an agreement in Paris that's going to be worse than the one that we had in Cancun and in Cancun I was there in the negotiation and we as Bolivia said we don't accept this agreement so we voted against the 192 countries and why we voted against because the agreement was saying the follow from now on everybody will do whatever they can so it's based on voluntary pledges and we said we're going to burn a plant we have to have an agreement that has a target we have to reduce until 44 until 2020 and then we have to agree how we're going to reduce the effort between each of the countries in order to reach that target some will have to be more some are more responsible some have less capacity then it will be true but we have a target where you can put whatever you want on the table that's your contribution voluntary contribution and then we see at the UN hey what is the final number and the final number is attractive so nobody wants to speak about the numbers I have a follow up question for you could you give us your perspective on what you're saying how are you in this place I think there's a lot of dialogue and discourse and also I just also want to appreciate Paolo being there because the role of Paolo and Bolivia and his role in Bolivia in the United Nations and in those negotiations is really critical and he mentioned Cancun but also in the wake of Copenhagen where basically negotiations were undermined unfortunately by President Obama literally at the last moment from really reaching a concrete agreement for commitments to conditions and that's where the voluntary concept there was also introduced and it was Bolivia at that moment that said no we're going to convene our own Sunday which they did a year later in Cochabamba where the water wars took place there was a whole agreement basically of social movements that came out of that Cochabamba forwards that I think they're really still a very inspirational document for us to look at and adhere to and then there's just contradictions in terms of the behavior and what our elected leaders are saying and when you see the development of infrastructure that's already being planned out whether it's oil and gas pipelines that are going to traverse North America where there's deep sea oil drilling that's going to take place in the Gulf Coast or going to take place in the Arctic and the corporation that is lining up and they're ready to move in now and are already moving in to build more infrastructure to dig out heavier and dirtier types of energy fracking now this is taking place throughout the continent in another very form of energy tar sands where they're basically just stripping the earth in Canada and all the infrastructure associated with that so all the heavy machinery that they're bringing in from Korea and building these massive highways that are moving that machinery up to Canada to strip the land and pipe it down down to the Gulf Coast to these refineries that are now dealing with more dirty crude and explosions and accidents and spills that are happening more and more often this is the reality that we're dealing with which is a total contradiction to what they're saying that things are getting better when the reality is that it's not and then what they're looking to as solutions they're really not solutions at all fracking what you're saying is a clean form of energy clean coal which is a total oxymoron where all it is is that they're injecting the pollutants into the ground and expecting that they're going to stay there nuclear energy is also viewed as a clean option and the incineration of waste is sort of a clean energy option which and organizations have worked to ban waste incineration for the last 20 years successfully and now that's being viewed as a real alternative so it is it's a total contradiction and it's a way for corporations to find loopholes and governments allowing them to continue to do what they're doing business as usual meanwhile the situation keeps getting worse and worse and we're getting farther and farther away from where it really should be to address the problem great so what I'm hearing is that the discourse that we often get is we're working hard in making progress that the reality is don't trust that don't trust it I have two quick follow-up questions is that the coach of AMBA agreement is that something that we have read that have access to and how do we how do we there is a website yeah just search for the people's for the conference and you will get to it great I just want to make sure that we have the credit and I was wondering I have a question for you I'm almost afraid to ask this do you have an example of collaboration on a more global level level that has worked yes well yes the Montreal agreement to solve the crisis of the Oslo mayor has worked there was the whole in the Oslo mayor was increasing because of the use of different sprays, gases chemicals that are used for refrigeration and there was an agreement between countries they agreed to reduce the consumption and production of those kinds of gases that were affecting the solar the Oslo mayor and it has worked and it hasn't and in reality at the beginning in 1992 when the when the agreement was signed the agreement of climate change in reality it followed the same example so the idea was okay we did this with the Oslo mayor we can do it with greenhouse gases so they did an agreement that if you look at it it's very similar to the other but it has not worked at all why that is the issue that we have to discuss, I don't want to take more time it has to do with the Oslo mayor that you can isolate in certain refrigerators but when you speak about greenhouse gas emissions you're speaking about your car you're speaking about your shoes because they use also fossil fuels you're speaking about trains that use about forestry it's everywhere the economy is linked to the issue of this kind of greenhouse gas emissions so you cannot use the same approach that can be used for your solar for climate because this time the issue is not an environmental issue due to a gas in reality the gas is not the cause the gas is the effect of an economic system and what you have to do address is the economic system if you don't change here the gases will not change by itself and that is something that I would say is now almost agreed by everybody but the negotiations will follow the traditional path that leads to nowhere it definitely seems like you know allowing that some kind of perception to allow people to really understand the actions if you both had in your part in terms of realizing oh I can't tackle this in the position of a traditional play I've got covered a new structure within which to write so I can represent multiple perspectives and so I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about that maybe about some success stories of seeing people learn from different art forms or different aesthetics in the course of your work yeah so the first that's part of the Arctic Psycho is called SILA like I said and it's set in the Canadian Arctic and I started so I did a lot of reading before to write the play and I had a vague idea of what I wanted to talk about this was a time where there was a lot of talk about the opening of the North West Passage which is in northern Canada a maritime route that would allow boats to go from Asia to Europe faster than having to go through the Panama Canal if that passage becomes ice-free in the summer and so my idea was was that if that opens up it's going to create a lot of changes for the Inuit communities who live in that region because there's going to be good and bad, there's going to be a lot more environmental risks and a lot of disruption to their traditional ways of living but also there's going to be economic benefits for populations who have almost no economy to speak of very few jobs it's a very depressed region because they that territory in Canada which is called Nunavut became its own territory in 1999 so the government is still young they're very much relying on federal subsidies and they need to as we keep moving forward they need to develop an economy that's going to have a lot of resources so I thought I'll probably write a play about an indigenous character who's either fighting the opening of the passage or trying to make it happen in a way where it's not too disruptive and then I went on this trip to Bath and Island and I realized that this was so much more complicated than I first conceptualized it and that there were many many interests sort of intersecting and that if I took, if I observed, if I talked about only one piece of the pie I was doing the service of the people in the region because if you isolate one piece of the pie it's easy to have an opinion about it but it's not you have to look at the whole it's not, you can have you can be very radical about the environment if you don't understand what the economic problems are or you can be very radical about the science if you don't look at the culture and so I had to come that trip I had to completely rethink how I was going to write this play and I decided that in order to do justice to that story it needed to have multiple voices and it needed to have enough voices that I didn't feel like I was taking a side and that I wasn't inviting the audience to take a side but I wanted to do and say here look at all this complexity and then make your own opinion and find out more about one side of the other if you're interested but what's most compelling is the complexity and the way we write plays the way I learned to write plays the traditional narrative model which comes from Aristotle is to have a character a main character who goes through a journey of learning or transformation and goes through obstacles to a point where something is resolved and the other characters around that main character are usually in support of or in opposition to the main ideas that are being discussed and I was watching a presentation online not long ago and this woman was talking about values in our the western philosophy how that came from the ancient Greek and how even if the details have changed the main concept for the past 2000 years has remained the same which is it's a hierarchical world view so it started with the Greek gods there was a bunch of them controlling what was happening on earth and then that changed to one god but it's still somebody at the top controlling and now we have this capitalist system which is very much a reflection of the same thing which again is somebody at the top controlling the rest and if that's how we write plays or how we do art we're encouraging the same values you know we're reinforcing those same values something I found out also that was interesting was that perspective in the visual arts appeared at the same time as this western philosophy with the ancient Greeks so they were the first ones who started to explore it and then it blossomed during the Renaissance but perspective is in fact a single observer and reality is for that observer so it presupposes that there's an objective reality and that the person who observes it's like the world is arranged for god what you see is arranged for one person and that's that same pyramid model so I think I'm trying to and I don't have the answer but I'm trying to I'm searching in my plays from a playwright's point of view because there are people who devise plays and who create the work in a very different way and they get to a very different result but with a scripted play like what kind of structure can I come up with which takes us out of this hierarchical model and promotes values that are more the kind of values that we need this collaboration and creativity and this model of the world that's more organic you know that's organized like biological systems are organized where there's no I mean there's nothing in our body that says to the organs okay you have to do this it's like all interconnected and somehow it works I think that's the kind of society we need to move towards you know where there's all these centers that are communicating and collaborating with each other but there's not so much it's too complex now there can't be one person at the top who's determining everything so that's my search it's very interesting because it's much easier to conceive of a body with a brain that's telling us what to do and to think about it so a lot of what we're talking about is how to embrace the complexity of what's going on and I'm also hearing a lot about agency and economics and I'm so curious both about I'm from Louisiana I'm from New Orleans I have many family members that have made their living in the oil industry and in South Louisiana we are so many people I know adore the culture because of our Gulf Coast ecosystem and yet many of us are find ourselves trapped into working for the oil industry which is part of what is destroying our coast so it's this really weird double mind I'm very curious about how we start to untangle the economics and the environment you know the only word that I can start thinking about is you know taking huge risks of self sacrifice and saying well I'm not going to do that job you know it makes great sense to me in theory but then when it turns into practice of people trying to raise their families it becomes a little emotional it seems like you encountered this in the village that you mentioned so I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how to untangle this economic environment and that may lead to a conversation about the agency the agency of humans and the agency of other earth which I know is something that you can bear in mind anyone want to well I think that was really fascinating in terms of the concept of the non-hire market and one of the things that we talk about in the work of the climate justice alliance is this idea of local living so we started this campaign that we consider a long term campaign about how do we actually transition our economy in a way that it rebuilds our communities that sustains life and heals the planet and it's really it's an economic agenda that's for things that are not really new so renewable energy public transportation localizing agricultural systems restoring ecosystems there's so many things that we can do to create work create livelihoods and if we build up those sectors at the same time we are sustaining life and healing the planet and at the same time we talk about that transition also having to be just in other words it has to be democratic we also have to change and transform our system so that they are democratic so we feel that part of that solution is that the more local that these systems are the more control people actually have and the more democratic they are so that's not saying that we are eliminating necessarily national governments but that more local control and empowerment of communities to be able to basically run our communities in ways that are sustainable those are ways that we can be healthy because right now we are very dependent on these big mega energy systems and agricultural systems that are basically where contributing to promoting the planet so that's a lot of that capability now is within our hands it's all within our reach to be able to view these things today the technologies are there and it's really just a matter of political development in some ways the issue of promoting house gases is very much linked to the fossil fuel but the different researchers have said is that we need to leave under the ground 80% of known fossil fuel in the surface 80% so in the climate negotiations they speak about reducing greenhouse gas emissions but they don't want to speak about limiting the extraction of fossil fuels how are you going to get to an answer if you don't address this issue now the question is why this issue is not being put on the table we all know that it has to do with fossil fuel but there is no commitment to say okay let's leave the construction of fossil fuel why is it it's because the huge investor and capital that exists in those known fossil fuel if we say we're going to save the planet and 80% of fossil fuels have to stay under the ground the Wall Street will collapse in one hour because much of the money that Wall Street is selling here and there is based on the assumption of the extraction of fossil fuel that needs to stay under the ground so of course this is why these powerful sectors of corporations and banks have captured government actually governments don't represent the need of the people I'm convinced of that after being in this high legislation they represent mainly the interests of those corporations and those corporations don't want to lose their money they want to make one money it's true that they are going to suffer but if they now accept something that would be correct their business would collapse now they use some tricks like they say but what's going to happen is to employ what you would say and the time in the U.S. where there was more employment I was surprised to read that it was during World War II and that Detroit had full employment and it was because employment was created not to trade but to produce at that time weapons tanks and so to address the huge crisis of the war now we are facing an even bigger crisis than World War II planetary crisis the states, governments could use all the resources as they did during World War II to create other kind of jobs jobs that were extraction of fossil fuels just for restoration of mother earth to restore our relation to restore the damaged planet so sources of employment are possible we have to think on a different way because until now employment has been very much associated to industrialization more attractive is and there is no way and they descended like there is a contradiction between trade unions that are defending employment and environmentalists that are putting only on the environment but in reality we can have this issue of employment and have full employment and then we change the direction of what the employment is going to be so I think that unless we move change totally the table around us we are not going to solve this issue and of course the resources are there it is possible to do one final relation to your question about mother earth because climate change is an issue that deals with the economy that deals with politics democracy if we don't recover our democracy that has been captured I don't think how we are going to address climate change but we also have to change the relation nature because the nature in the current system is treated as an object as a thing as natural resources as something that we use in order to make more money it's a very anthropocentric view we are in the center of the center the rest exists only for our benefit and for the benefit of capture so this relation with nature is another key aspect that very few speak about it but if we don't move the change also at this level we are not going to be able to address climate change I wonder it seems like you know sort of a miracle moment of epiphany that there needs to be some sort of collective oh shit oh shit we've gone too far we have to change our ways and that might come like a global stage and I'm wondering have any of you seen a micro version of that a small community that realized we've gone too far the way we're extracting fossil fuels or if this industry is not working we're going to change our way and our economy is based on free technology I'm just trying to think of any micro example I could serve as an example for a larger world someone said yes I'm here do you say that now okay we'll save it you can tell us a story do you know what I'm saying I don't have an example of how I have a community that does have to stop but after they have argued spots too far are the opposite direction I feel like I know examples of communities that have always to redo the land but not the opposite of someone that reversed their ways I don't care when it comes for example communities that struggle against mining extractives because they are suffering the consequences the pollution and they see that their kids are dying because of that pollution and they say okay we have to close that mine or close that activity yes they are and I think that is one of the approaches the difficulty is that what you said in this case it's not only about doing that at the local level but to be able to do it in a way that has a planetary scale that is I would say the challenge yeah similar to that there are communities that are resistant and that know that things have gone too far and the direct effects of that and so they are organized to change that there are places where governments are they are doing different things like renewable energies, Germany is doing a lot of work in terms of transition to renewables, there are cities even in the United States like Austin, Texas they are setting much higher transition to renewable energy I think there are places where people are starting to say yeah things have gone too far but I think there have been a ton of ocean moments that just keep happening when California now is basically got a year of water left and at the same time you've got Texas that 8 inches in the month of May alone enough water fell on Texas to cover the state in 8 inches of water and there is Katrina and Rita and there is a super storm standing so there are tons of them just within the United States and we are seeing these ocean moments and again it comes down to the political will and also ideology and corporate profits which are behind a lot of the anti basically rhetoric saying that climate change is not being caused by humans and so I think that's what we're up against I think it's more political economic struggle around these things and preventing our governments our leaders and political leaders to actually take the steps and I think the majority of people are clear are necessary for us to have and you know I think why I ask that question is I have a lot of people feel overwhelmed and I'm sure you all do too by this issue and so I'm curious if there are examples in your organizing or policy about what an individual can do whether it's on their blog or with some of your collaborators if you've been able to develop strategies towards action or towards dealing with some of the misinformation at state building and I think that's one thing that goes on which is really a way of keeping us all in it's always a struggle for me to try to figure out what it is to play and what's the next step after that how can I invite people to do things and so I didn't I love to play but I'm not self producing it it's been produced by other dealers who have come up with their own strategies and there was a lot of talk backs with scientists and policy makers and you know kind of like who points the audience in different directions and in one case there were also local environmental organizations who have set up tables in the lobby and explained to people what they do so if people wanted to join they could get information right there I don't in any way try to educate people because I don't think it's a well festival I don't have the knowledge and I don't think it's my place to do that but I certainly try to present stories that will then make people want to go find information and get involved there's this woman I met recently social scientist at the University of Oregon her name is Carrie Nordgard and she wrote this book called Living in Denial and it was her dissertation which she published it was a study she did in Norway where she where you know people are very educated very aware of climate change but there's a resistance to talk about it so it's not so much denial as it doesn't exist but just it's a little too overwhelming and people don't want to talk about it and what she discovered was that meaningful engagement was their antidote to that so of course any individual is not going to change the laws of the country but if you can engage in something at your level that makes a difference at your level then I think it changes the concept and we feel this helpless when you talk to your organizing or policy mission that has helped you to complete action or kind of like clearing up the story I feel like it's on that narrative it's not my problem it's her problem well I think there's actually a lot of things that are going to happen I think you know so people are resisting in a lot of ways and they're doing a lot of great things I mean there's the whole blockade that was just happening in Seattle because they have a lot of drilling equipment that's going to be staging around there in Seattle for starting to build an Arctic how many of you are at the People's Climate March last year I thought that was a really inspiring moment to demonstrate that there is a popular movement growing in the United States around climate and the result of that was that I think it also opened the eyes of a little leadership you know the ban on fracking nuclear in New York took place shortly after that because I think the policy here even in the city of New York with the result of organizing that had been going on for years by groups in the state and the city and the People's Climate March created this impulse I think for political leaders to start with leadership and so I think it also inspired other people not just here in the United States but in other parts of the world as well so I think we're seeing more and more just people organizing themselves and I know Pablo can speak to a lot of different examples in other parts of Asia and other parts of the world as well but that's ultimately what it's going to take it's going to take popular movement to be able to make our leaders accountable but we're seeing it in different places and then there are examples of people just doing different things in their own communities we work in our lines the groups that are doing things in Richmond, California they live in the shadow of one of the largest Chevron refineries and yet they're organizing these coalitions with solar cooperatives with local urban agricultural groups and other organizations to basically change the economy of that city that's going to be a long-term fight but yet they're doing a lot of really great things they just won an election last year where they swept the city council and the mayor's office even though Chevron paid millions of dollars for the opposing candidates the popular slate won there so there's just so many things that we're starting to see that have also been going on for a long time coalitions are happening between indigenous people and white communities that haven't happened before so there's just a lot of potential and so there's anything I think there's for people it's just to get active finding that place that's meaningful for you in terms of where you can make a difference and it can be within your own community that that can happen to start putting pressure on political leadership and showing different ways that we can move forward and do you feel that any even local do you feel that is your opinion that the best action to take even if it's a micro level very local level has to do with changing the opinion of our leadership it seems like the main goal here has to do with whether it's a city stake or that's the main obstacle I think it's changing it's changing policy it's also getting good leadership so that's part of the challenge also supporting good leadership supporting good leadership people that are accountable to the community and not to problems that's part of the struggle and it's also demonstrating that there are all of our alternatives and it can happen at different levels too it doesn't have to be necessarily even your city council there are so many ways school rules there are ways to engage politics that are even closer to home and more immediate that can have an impact even on this question getting your school districts great piece of doing an interesting campaign in two school districts in North Carolina to get them to transition 100% to local energies which face the transition of local agriculture systems getting more public transportation provided for a city things like that start to make a difference and be kind of a beacon of hope for bigger things for us to be able to do the reality is in the United States getting a new deal program is going to hit right now it's going to be tough so we have to find a place where we can demonstrate scale and impact and also change national politics and just to add to this you said something about hope which I think is very important I think we have to be careful about not just being against something but being for something I think it's a lot easier and rewarding to organize about something positive than to organize about something negative so all the ways in which we can have small impacts that are if we organize towards making something happen that creates something new I think it's very positive and more empowering than maybe when we always try to knock down the wall even though that's also part of it but I think sometimes it may be easier to knock down the wall with positive actions than just with resisting actions speaking of positive actions could you talk a little bit Pablo about the law of the rights of mother earth some of us take out that I don't well yes this the law is based on the declaration of the rights of mother earth that was drafted in this people's book conference that took place in Cochabamba and then months later was adopted there were some changes but not as anything as the law of Bolivia the idea of this law is in a way a revolution like what happened when Copernico and Galileo said the earth is not the center of the universe because what the law is saying is humans are not the center we are part of nature so we need to recognize that if we are only part of nature part of mother earth we have rights mother earth have rights and we need to build a legal system for the rights of humans and also the rights of nature in order that we have to restore the balance in our system so our goal and we did it was to bring that to the UN and to begin a movement like the civil rights movement here our movement for rights of human to both we think that we are in a moment like that we get rights but this time for mother earth, for nature it's just the beginning I would say in the case of Bolivia we have the law now we are fighting in Bolivia one of the reasons that another government is because I want to I want to implement that law and if you want to implement that law and you want to really follow what it says you cannot at the same time promote an economic model based on extractive because that is in contradiction so the situation in Bolivia and also in Ecuador because Ecuador has this also in its constitution is that it's a process that happened in Bolivia and Ecuador the cultural indigenous people gets rid of neoliberal governments puts in place new governments with new ideas these new ideas are adopted at constitutional level legal level but then those governments are trapped in the logic of power they want to stay in the government and in order to stay in the government they need to find ways to get money faster and sooner because the next election is in three years and how can you get the money is through extractivism it's the fastest way through industry through technology it's a process so we will have in the case of Bolivia and Ecuador a flashback and now there is a struggle how are we going to implement that I'm going back to the beginning one of the ideas is that we need to move now from legal recognition I'm sure that if we had this kind of change there are two possibilities we can and I understand your approach to the optimist but I prefer to be realistic this story has two endings and what ending is with life, not only humans in a much different way that we have ever seen but if we are going to succeed we have to change the formation with mother earth and do you remember you said that the law of the rights of mother earth began at this conference and do you remember the moment when that idea began to stir at that conference I'm curious about the process already we agreed that the conference was going to have that because we put it in the title that's a good analogy so he said it's the people's world conference on climate change and the rights of mother earth so when we invited who was going to come near that there was going to be something in relation to the rights of mother earth I must say that the idea and I can share with you we are publishing a book with a chapter on the rights of mother earth where did it came from and not from the indigenous people in Ecuador or in Virginia you will find the concept of rights of nature in Thomas Berge here in the US and the ecology in Europe and rights of mother earth is the convergence of different trends the ecology what the ethics of Thomas Berge is the first one to speak about the rights of nature you have the other trend comes from the scientific world that begins to speak and say look the earth is a living organism it is not just a planet there is those that say it has a spirit so I would say the rights of mother earth come from all of that and the opportunity of course and of course the tradition of indigenous people with mother earth but in indigenous people culture in the Indian region the concept of rights doesn't exist the concept of rights comes from outside what exists is the biggest respect that you can imagine the nature and the mother earth so the mix of all of this was what made possible that first the constitution in Ecuador had an inclusion of rights of nature and then you really had the law on rights of mother earth what's the difference between mother earth and nature for indigenous people there is a difference we would say nature is an invention to separate humans from nature we are part of the mother earth everything is part of mother earth nature as a concept is an invention I think it's stand back anthropocentricity here we are there is the rest I saw you nodding your head well I remember years ago we were in the southwest we were organizing networks of communities that were dealing with environmental justice issues and there were a number of communities from the mother earth nation that were dealing with the effects of mining radiation and so we have our meetings and we have to have translation we have to translate in Spanish and we have a number of them and we found out that there is no translation for the word environment because it's just they had a hard time explaining you know they just knew that there was something different in the world that they lived in seeing the effects on their cattle and on the land but just that whole concept about what the environment was was something that there was a world so translating that meeting has a real challenge the perspective the one perspective so what what new vocabulary what new aesthetics what do we need in order to start from a different perspective than any moment when you start to think about what do we need in order to start talking about this in a new way well I have observed some changes in the art world at large which makes especially with artists who address climate change issues which make me hopeful one of them speaks directly to what you were just talking about which is that artists are there's definitely an effort to reposition the human species as being part of a bigger whole as opposed to being separate from it I see that in a lot of art work there's also also a trend to take art out of traditional venues and to make it more accessible to people so to involve communities there's a a certain type of art that is made directly in response to certain community needs but there's also somewhere the artists try to bring the art in some way to make it more accessible so people who would not normally go to a museum or go to the events show or go to a theater can encounter the art term in a different way I think there's a way to communicate that's much more doing it in that way these are trends that you're noticing as you've been having a style on your blog yes oh yeah the use of new technologies and that's very interesting because it leads to things that could not have happened before for example and that have a very direct impact sometimes on the climate change science so for example I don't know if many of you saw the movie Chasing Ice the documentary Chasing Ice Chasing Ice it features James Baylock who's a photographer and James Baylock has always been a nature photographer and what he did he got interested in glaciers and he rigged still cameras to take one picture per hour of daylight and then he installed those cameras near glaciers he started in Alaska I think but they're kind of all over the world now and then after a year so there's a microchip there's a whole apparatus and after a year he went back to retrieve the pictures that have been taken and then he creates these time-lapse copies where you see you actually see the glacier moving with the seasons but also retrieving much faster than people expected and what he calls it he's creating a memory of the land and this directly affects climate science because scientists they can take measurement but they cannot observe this phenomena in real time so the human technology the art and the science is merging there are also artists who are creating what they call environmental remedial art so they're creating pieces that are art pieces but that are meant to help an ecosystem recover from certain damage so sometimes there's one person he creates these sculptures that are put at the bottom of the ocean to help reefs coral reefs heal so the reefs have somewhere to attach and then can be punished there's also another there's a duo two artists who are working together who are creating these braided sort of branch structures that are put in a national park I think it's in the big west about the erosion and some problems that they're having there so there's definitely there's there's a lot of reasons in that way to be comfortable I find I didn't know the name of the visual artist who does the vegetable gardens in the front your people's front yards do you know what I'm talking about I saw a presentation his whole art project was encouraging people in suburban neighborhoods small vegetable gardens with their backyards and having to water their plants to move their vegetable gardens to their front yard so that you're actually watering and it's controversial in some of these neighborhoods because it looks messy and unsightly but this whole project is kind of transformed so it's interesting to think about aesthetics and action are there any artworks that have been a part of your organization or are there any artworks that have been a part of your organization I know a bunch of marches of course are taking place well we're actually doing this project this summer and we're doing a project called the summer of the hour that's one of the follow-ups to the march that our organization is doing but it's actually a quilt project that we're doing that's going to travel the three tributaries from the center of the country and it's going to pass from community to community where communities are organizing for this just transition and they're going to develop a section of the quilt that's going to be constructed in the Gulf Coast for the commemoration of Hurricane Katrina on August 29 so it's both a symbol of the visual symbol of the work that's going on for a just transition and at the same time a symbol of solidarity for the peoples of the Gulf Coast that's one of the ways that we're looking at it we're also looking at different ways we can promote music, hip-hop and things like that I just think there's a lot of work to be done around stories that promote values reciprocity and commemence and community and also fairness and justice and I think that's still something that's very much engrained in the U.S. society even if you watch like Old Weston's they're still in those story lines like overcoming big ranchers even though you get like the rugged individualism usually it's about fighting some bigger power that's oppressing like a community in some way so I do think that's still part of the narrative within the United States that also has to be promoted that sense of justice and fairness and overcoming power to take the control of your lives so things like that I think are important in terms of developing the stories and those narratives the many ways that people are being resilient that we're the resisting and also being the being at all it's also a place to create a conversation that is a way the politics in the way there's a theater company in upstate New York who she told me the woman who runs the theater company told me that their community was dealing with fracking and because of that they couldn't talk about trying to change because there were people who were letting the company use their land and then people who were against it so it was very polarized so what she did because it's a lot of farmland is she created this big theater project about the weather because everybody talks about the weather so she created a space where there could be a conversation where people could get together and talk to each other without you know and then maybe some of the stuff would come in here and there but the frame was made as such so a conversation could happen while otherwise if she had progressed climate change directly it would have been too polarized and it would have been a little bit of a fight I'm also thinking about I mean I I love the thought of these plays and projects and I start to think about audience and the number of audience that they look to reach and then I think about maybe people to be too hard to go see art may not be drawn to a march and one thing that I feel in Louisiana that has at least started to I think reach a broader audience is just simply different organizations that deal with our coastal erosion issue which the Louisiana coast is washing away and for a number of reasons having to do with trying to control the Mississippi River having to do with oil drilling through the wetlands and a lot of the maps that we see by in that map now it looks like there's a lot more land at the base of Louisiana than there really is because the maps haven't been drawn or the maps have not been republished and so now I find a lot of news stories and environmental action groups are actually showing the actual map which is completely starting when you see how little land is left in and I feel like sometimes just thinking of quick snapshots quick visuals that can reach many people to start snapping them to just awareness because I feel like it's so easy not to be aware or just to hear a word like climate change and glaze over so that's one thing I feel so easy more and more I only have a few minutes before we start taking some questions from the audience so I am going to ask what comes to mind when you think about the story or the climate and this may also be a moment or two to say something that you haven't said yet that you think we should all know in order to move forward. I think it starts with this the planet is fine the planet will survive it doesn't leave us which really has to stay because it's the survival of the species so what we're fighting for is keeping an environment where we can continue to thrive so I think the story of the planet means addressing what it is with us in our own in how we view ourselves in the world in the world we think we have there's something that went astray and I think if we can like re-center then we can have a chance to destroy the planet. That's the optimist. I disagree a little because I think that is the anthropocentricity that we have to get out because it's thinking on us but what about the life that we are destroying it's not only about human the species that not in the future but we already have extermination the planet will continue it's true but it will not continue with the kind of life and when I think about life I don't mean the only human life that exists and this life the conditions for this took around 4,000 million years to happen so life didn't exist from the beginning and risk is not only us humans it's life as we know it I think it will continue life but it will be different we are entering an extinction not only of the humans but of life I think that what we have to do is not only for the sake of humans that's why I think we have to change our perspective and we have to think from the perspective from the other perspective and I think it's difficult because we all have been part of that way but I think we need to do it if we want to address each other but here in Africa I got the opportunity to travel through my leisure and spent some time in Guam and there's for Guam for many years I've had this big problem I'm not this ground treason that was brought in on military transport and basically that population just exploded on the island more recently there's been an infestation of what's called the rhinoceros beetle and the rhinoceros beetle and eats them from the inside out and within the last couple of years from the time I went two years before to actually we went again in December there are huge areas of Guam where the coconut trees are just dead and and then we found out that there are seven species of coral that are on the endangered species the first time ever in its history because of the acidification of the oceans they're happening because of climate change so the balance of the island and the irony by the way the remedy for the rhinoceros beetle is birds which were completely wiped out by the snakes so it's almost like this vicious cycle now where the island is becoming out of balance and more and more it's becoming out of balance because those things that kept it in balance are disappearing more and more and then traveling to an island like the module which is basically it's a natural so when you're landing on the island it's like water on this side and water on that side there's one road back and forth and you think about how for centuries people have managed to live on almost very tiny islands and the economy that was brought in and the military that was brought in there was a whole new culture and economy that was imposed on the island and it's now in a lot of ways it's a slump it's very poor no jobs there's no economy and people survive if I was brought in so most of the islands in that region have two weeks worth of food brought in by ships and planes that includes even Hawaii and it includes Guam and so to me it was just the stark reality of how these islands were just a microcosm of what's happening everywhere that things are becoming out of balance and people have found a way for many generations to be able to live in that balance of harmony with their arrival to good nature and all of that now is starting to disappear and we're seeing signs everywhere so to me the beauty in those places how that's disappeared and so for me the restoring to me is about that balance how do we restore that balance and then find ways to restore that because it's true we can't survive, we can't be separated from our environment and from nature we are part of that so yeah, we'll go on but we won't be on it but it exists around this it seems like a kind of perspective showed from when we went when the world was flat when suddenly everyone readjust and reorient and what is the thing that is going to allow us to reorient to see us as part of this system instead of helping others we now have time for exactly two questions from the audience Melanie has her hand so we'll wait and see if there's any so why do we do Melanie and no it's pretty good let's do these two we can start with you sir what's your name? my name is Michael I actually this is one of those terrible moments where I'm not sure this is a question but I wanted to weigh in on the about what's good maybe there's a question that's inherent in New York City I think it's important for all of us to realize that over the last five years New York City has actually reduced its carbon emissions so we are a success story and we have done that not by accident and not because of the recession but in a very deliberate way because of the deployment plans in the oil and that is still continuing we actually have a very progressive city council right now that is very invested in energy efficiency I just really wanted to make that point because it's something that just in New York we should really understand and we should be attentive to and then one other thing is that solar has been the fastest growing industry in the US in the last three years it has outstripped every other industry and I also think that life is just important to take an answer I'm really sorry that I used it on a test question but I just thought it definitely would be sad what might have to do with solar energy and your opinion on that how do you see it work or change do you think it's a drop in the bucket or more significant? No definitely one of the key issues is to move from dirty energy to renewable energy and solar energy is definitely one of the key sources they are very successful experiences especially in Germany and we have to keep moving now it's not that I don't want to recognize how important it is but sometimes we think that it's possible to address climate change only by changing from dirty energy to renewable energy and that is not true that is one part of the issue the issue of consumption for example Europe has reduced greenhouse gas emissions but studies show that the amount of carbon dioxide that they consume but now it's being produced in other countries like China is almost the same or more than what it was at the beginning so you can reduce the consumption of renewable energy but if you don't reduce your patterns of consumption of product you are outsourcing emissions outside so now we are only focusing on the emissions that I have in my city or local community but what are the emissions that we are creating abroad and this is a problem so we have to address that issue so if we don't address all of these levels we can get trapped in that emissions that we are doing good while we are promoting investments of coal in other parts like Sweden I was in a debate with the Minister of Environment which recognized we are reducing but we are investing now the state of company in a new coal plant in Butterfalen in Germany so this time we have to look at all these aspects because the loophole at the end what happens is that because there is this issue okay what are the global emissions have they declined or not they keep increasing so what is happening that even though we have such a successful story in New York or such a successful story in Germany how come globally we are getting worse worse and worse and I think it is also important to highlight that we are getting worse because otherwise we believe that we are getting worse I mean we are doing more important to look at but no one is in trouble it is not important I understand that you are in Texas and last month I was participating in the Al Gore climate leaders reality leadership training core and I found it to be an incredible experience and I wondered what you all maybe a year sort of question how do you all react to that kind of pain and just for y'all don't know maybe y'all do know Al Gore is doing this leadership climate reality leadership training program for people around the world and has gotten sort of an army of about 7000 people now he trains he trains you it's him and he does it and that's really quite an amazing thing he spends the whole day with you it's a three day training he really does the training one day, the whole day with you it's a real compelling amazing day and they are working toward June 18th there is going to be this live live earth concert globally these simultaneous concerts in June 18th leading to the road to Paris campaign that's coming up to the meetings that you all mentioned and I just wonder he didn't come up today but in a way he and the community that he is creating is doing the kind of reaction that you were looking for whether there has been a community that has created a reaction to a situation like this Michael, what is your organization that you do with Al Gore? we have actually worked with Al Gore in his campaign I'm familiar with the concerts that are coming up in the road to Paris and that's one of the folks that organizes with that I'm not familiar with the training he mentioned I don't know if that was my criticism of the Iowa campaign they were all a lot it was very white the next training he's going to be in Miami and I just assume it's going to be much more diverse but the Iowa City was I mean I've written about it already it was just a business in terms of deserts thank you so much I have a question about environmental rights and I'm gay and I do art that sort of does peace advocacy so as a gay man I think my gay rights had to be possible but then when you think about my art and the fact that the talks about peace I feel like it is a little more controversial because to be a peace activist is technically legal in America and then when I think about animal rights to protect animal rights even though we protect animals we're not legal in America and then when I think about plant rights I wonder what rights do plants have when homesanto is happening and owning plant life and then when I think about water I'm wondering what kind of rights do we have when California is in drought and people in Detroit who live in the city don't have that so when you break down natural elements that are not human that we as humans have a right to where is our relationship to these rights and how are we fighting for these rights that are of nature of the environment one of the things we used to talk about in the environmental justice movement is that you can't separate them out these issues are all kind of and that's I think it's a problem in the United States generally just the fragmentation of all the different issues and how the beauty is separate and how we're all working on them separately yet we don't have a movement really that brings all of them together and sees them as interconnected and I think that was part of why we thought the people's climate parks crisis was important because we needed to recognize that we needed to expand beyond just the traditional environmentalist climate justice activists even the environmental justice movement that's why you saw more labor unions that's why you saw gay rights activists I mean women's organizations we had to expand and be a movement really that's needed in the United States not just about climate but about social justice and rights in general so I think you're absolutely right I mean those are they seem like contradictions because we don't actually have a perspective in terms of how we're all working May I say something I don't know because it's different to speak about environmental rights and rights of nature the right to an environment is a human right and many constitution in the world have it is the right of humans to a healthy environment but when we enter the other side that is the rights of nature is the right the river to be free of pollution is the right of the sea to not be genetically modified so in the rights of mother earth or rights of nature approach the ban on GMOs is not because it's unhealthy humans it's because you're violating the rights of nature so so many ask us but does that mean that I cannot cut a tree or that I cannot eat a fish one thing is to eat a fish or to cut a tree another thing is to dismantle an entire forest or exterminate an entire species of fish so in the rights of nature approach the relation with nature means that there are certain limits and certain vital cycles that we have to preserve not only for us but for the earth system as a whole I'm breaking in a quick question and not only than you and then we'll start it's really quick and perhaps it's a little personal but I'm I'm curious to know what each of you what are some of the choices each of you as individuals makes in your life to reduce your consumption to do your part personally for example because 30% of that is something personal it's something personal it's something personal but that is something personal you have to do but there are many others in terms of transportation in terms of how often the case of your phone or are you going to be trying to be the last fashion or not so yeah it's definitely it's a matter of what you do but also how do you create that don't promote that you buy the next gadget that is on the street because otherwise it would be impossible to succeed if we have an economy that wants you to consume and consume more yeah it's it's not the transportation it's it's very easy it's getting better and you have like the train now that goes from Mount Perkins and all that that's one challenge it's being created around waste is probably the most immediate thing that we can definitely do in terms of waste generation and recycling and it's actually been shocking to me to see how much plastic and paper and all of that one family goes through it's amazing the other thing that I think is important is also learning to be resourceful is making things last and that was one of the big things that I saw a few people that always struck me to see like cars from the 1950s and the conditioners and longers from the 1930s that are still functioning because they also take care of those kind of resources and make them last and I think that's something also for us everything is made so disposable disposable you know even like you know the iPhone charger is like that plastic it comes up rather than a few months because I know you've got to pay $30 in six months to get another one so I think it's learning and teaching ourselves to be more resourceful in ways that we can be more self-sustainable as much as we can some of the stuff I do is very intentional and some is by default because being an artist I live on very little money so I can't buy the new the new this and the new that so it becomes a it's actually a restriction that sometimes I'm happy to have because it keeps me it keeps me like it prevents me from even having the desire to go get the next thing yeah so I was teasing me recently about seeing pictures of me from five years ago where I haven't seen those I've been trying I've been really on a crusade to waste less food that's my thing I grew up in the south I grew up feeding a lot of people hosting a lot and I feel like when you're someone who loves to host you're always afraid that you're not going to have enough food so I've really been making that part to try and cook just enough I also live in a couple of blocks of my family my brother and my parents so we try to do a lot of food sharing and cooking for each other so those are some of the first points can I just ask one question? yes I will that's a great question but Pablo I wanted to bring it to you because I think that I mean we've done this series because of the relationship because if we're going to save the climate we have to change the happiness period we just do and so I'm wondering I mean I think does everybody in this room have a relationship to that thought? is there anybody that thinks that not right or is there anybody that would argue with that? no I just wanted to ask so Pablo I have a question it's so bad to think about changing the the way rights are considered it's such a miraculous radical point of view and really I think wanting someone like you to kind of talk about this my friend RJ is here I'm interested to hear about this and I'm wondering what is the relationship of these rights of sort of launching more and more idea what is the relationship of promoting this idea around the world to restructuring the economy like are there proposals around the way this has been proposed to because we have to we're not going to get rid of them unfortunately so do you understand my question? yes of course you can find many examples so for example when you build dams to build one dam a small dam in a river for electricity is one thing but if you build ten dams you're going to affect the life of the river in such a way that the river is going to die so that means that the issue of rights has to do with the economy the economy cannot develop in a way that will affect the vital cycles of nature in this case of the river or of the forest I come now from Thailand and I'm producing a short video on the story of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia it was an empire that hosted 1 million people it lasted for 300-400 years and it collapsed why did it collapse? it has the most greatest canals and hydrologic system but they began to cut too much the trees the deforestation spread so at some point they were unable to control the plants and the plants began to destroy their hydrologic system and therefore they weren't able to have enough water for their agriculture and that meant that people had to leave the city so enough experiences are in many parts of the world of what are the limits for a certain economy for certain kind of projects to be developed I think that is a key component that most of the time in different kind of projects and planning of problems is not taken into account and just one last thing in relation to what you said I think that we all begin to agree that capitalism is too at this time of change but the key question is how to overcome capitalism? because it's more easy to identify than to get out of the logic of capitalism that's why I asked that question and it wasn't competing in that radical idea that holds a radical influence that won't have a lockdown to answer that question that's why the problem is we have to overcome the logic of capitalism now I thought because I come from the left and Bolivia were very radical that we were going to nationalize for example our industries so we were going to take back the control over them but even though they are not owned now by a private company they are state they are public they behave like private companies because they are still under the logic of capitalism that is the logic to make business in order to have more profit so it's clear that it's not only that you have to take control the society has to take control over production we have to transform some of them because otherwise it can happen what happens in the case of Bolivia we begin to be addicted more addicted even to extractive industries so now it's Bolivia oil it's not anymore owned by private companies but you don't get out of that logic of extracting in order to make a profit to get out of that logic requires a different kind of democracy the solution for this economic problem is a democratic issue it's not a rule of economy only a very violent society that is very participative will be able to shape an economy that goes out of the logic of capitalism it is not through only state measures that are needed that you will overcome capitalism it has been shown that it's more complex than that it's a vibrant and participatory part it seems crucial I'm beginning to even get to get skeptical of some of the advertising campaigns that I see for Korean energy and these catchwords are very general that can make you feel very self-satisfied about some of the things that you do do you know what I mean? I'm just how to get specific about what is actually working rather than what is just abandoning you know feels just crucially connected to the being hypnotized by capitalism as well so how do we get out of this? that will be the next discussion the last first question we've talked a little bit about hope if there is one last thing you can give us about what you do maybe what makes you wake up energized to deal with this issue I can say one thing one thing that gives me hope is colleagues of mine that I see that are creating works of art that are participatory and deal directly with environmental issues that are personal to them but that are being that they are staying true to a very radical and experimental aesthetic and the two that I will point to is a dance piece called Shore by Emily Johnson who lives in Minneapolis but is a native of Alaska and it was just produced by New York Live Arts it included a performance but also a whole series of community actions and a series of storytelling all connected to local environmental issues here in New York so for every city that she goes to and the other is a piece called Cry You One which is created by some of my colleagues in New Orleans Art Spot Productions in Montevizaro which is about, they created it and performed it on the levy in St. Bernard Parish South of New Orleans it was very much a dressing the performance was a procession down the levy where you could see a value that was once alive but now in many ways is dead and the saltwater intrusion has killed all the trees so you actually saw the performance and the effects of this environmental disaster but when they produced the play and other cities they adapted to the problems and so I'm seeing this more and more in the experimental performing arts community of using ambitious forms to talk about these problems out in New Orleans No, of course not I'm an optimist but I prefer to call things by their name Why am I an optimist? because when I look back in my country and 20 years ago everything was being privatized to speak against neoliberalism what are you saying? you're a joke you're speaking that you're going to change the situation and do it and it was possible and it was possible to recover those resources that were privatized and back those public services to have a law that speaks about rights of Mother Earth now is everything on the good track? No, but I prefer to say it very clearly because that means ok, the next stage is if you are able to deal with it not only we have to deal with it now with our contradictions but we say one thing and if it isn't before we're going to do it I believe in humanity and I have seen people really come together and when they really grab an idea they move and they can change everything so I believe really that I have a hard time answering the question not because it's hard to find just so many there's definitely more people who just comes here and you were saying that I know they work with that are doing really inspiring things and I see that all over but sometimes it's just a matter of you know you just outside and you stop and you just take a breath and you will find something that will inspire you kids are playing you're laughing you know the stage that you see in terms of just the happening now there's just so many things in the world that if we just stop we just appreciate that give inspiration and go down yeah, it's really interesting I believe we're hardwired for survival and so we have it within us to face the biggest challenge and one of our most useful tools is creativity and I see it in the art world and I see it outside of the art world too with startup companies and people who are creating vertical gardens or now these windmills that have no blades it seems like the bigger the problem the more the our creativity is called into play and whenever I see people being creative that gives me a lot of hope creativity stop and notice people's power outdoor experimental theater there are more of those